Psychic Abilities

By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive.

— Matthew 13:14

As I was writing this book, an acquaintance asked me in passing what I was working on. When I told her, she looked at me with this glazed stare and asked me, "Why on earth would anyone want to develop psychic abilities?" For a second, her question took me aback, and then I realized that she probably had no idea how often she uses her own psychic abilities to help her in her everyday life.

Each one of us has psychic abilities to one degree or another, but because they're usually so subtle, we often don't realize that's what we're using. When Mrs. Olson first told me I had these gifts, I didn't have a clue what she was talking about until she was able to explain it in terms I could understand.

Have you ever realized the answer to a question when a picture popped into your head? Has a thought ever come into your head out of nowhere, and it was the guidance you were praying for? Have you ever sensed something about a person that wasn't based on anything you consciously knew but that later turned out to be true? Have you ever experienced a smell that reminded you of a deceased loved one? Every day at least one of our psychic abilities is helping us in some way.

The Four Psychic Gifts

There are four psychic abilities: clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, and clairgustance. Clairvoyance is the gift of seeing. We all have an invisible third eye located in the middle of our forehead, which is sometimes referred to as the psychic eye. It's with this third eye that a clairvoyant sees information in the form of pictures, visions, or images. When we see a ghost, a spirit guide, or a deceased loved one, that's also clairvoyance.

Clairaudience is the gift of hearing, which sounds simple enough, but it can become quite confusing. When a clairaudient receives information, it comes into his or her mind as thoughts. Since these thoughts don't sound any different than one's own thoughts, the clairaudient's job is to learn, through trial and error, to distinguish between personal thoughts and incoming psychic information.

There are a variety of sources that send thoughts to us and the sources have a lot to do with the path we're on. We could be receiving information from our spirit guides, a guardian angel, deceased loved ones, or earthbound spirits. Spirits do not have voices like we do. The way they communicate with each other and with us is that they project thoughts.

There's a great line in the Steven Spielberg movie Always that describes clairaudience. The character played by Richard Dreyfuss is killed in a plane crash, and Audrey Hepburn, who plays an angel, has to explain to him that he's now a spirit guide to another character in the movie. She tells him that the way to communicate with human beings is to send thoughts to them. She says something like, "They always think it's their own thoughts, but that doesn't matter because at least they get the message." This is how our spirit guides and deceased loved ones communicate to us. They send us thoughts to give us guidance. Our souls know where the information is coming from, but we don't become conscious of the true source until we start paying more attention.

Mental Telepathy

One of my favorite aspects of clairaudience is mental telepathy. This is hearing the thoughts of people who are either in your general vicinity or simply in your life. It's not uncommon for us to pick up the thoughts of people we are very connected to on a psychic level. My son, with whom I share a very strong psychic connection, can be making ribs for dinner in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I can be sitting in my office in Minneapolis thinking and smelling ribs. Or one of my best friends who lives in California can be fighting the urge to have a hot fudge sundae, and I'll get in my car and go get one. Often, thoughts will come into my mind so strongly and I won't know who or where they're coming from. Only in the last couple of years have I tried to find the sources of some of these powerful random thoughts, and it's been fun to find out just how connected I am to the people in my life.

How many times have you verbalized a thought only to have someone you're with say they were just thinking the same thing? Have you ever had the thought of someone pop into your head and then the phone rang and it was that person? Or have an image of a friend pop into your mind, and within a day or two, you run into him or her? These are simply thoughts that people are sending out. They're thinking of us, and we receive these thoughts on a psychic level without being aware of it. As we grow psychically and spiritually, we become more open to mental telepathy, and it makes life pretty fun.

Clairsentience

The next psychic gift, clairsentience, has to do with sensing. This is more of a body feeling or sensing than actually seeing visions with your third eye or psychically hearing thoughts or voices. If someone is clairsentient, he or she has psychic radar working all the time, psychically feeling the environment as he or she goes through the day. The blue lobster we have in our aquarium at home is a good illustration of a clairsentient. He has long tentacles that reach out in front of his body that scope out the environment as he moves throughout the tank. Clairsentients have this kind of sensing going on in their bodies. They can walk into a room or a meeting and sense the mood. I believe all psychics have this gift and use it their whole life. It's how we survive living in these sensitive bodies. We go into any situation in life and send out our "feelers" because we want to know what kind of environment we're stepping into. The downside to clairsentience is that we can become psychic sponges. We can soak up too much of the environment and carry it with us. I cover this in more detail in chapter 2, where I also give some suggestions for how to create necessary boundaries and distance.

Clairgustance

Clairgustance is the last psychic gift, and it's an odd one. It's the gift of smell. People with clairgustance have a psychic nose, which means they smell things that aren't physically present. For example, one day a client asked me about a used car she was thinking of purchasing. She wanted to know if I felt there was anything wrong with it. I got the strong smell of an overheated engine. Despite this indication of potential trouble, she purchased the car anyway, and as it turned out, she continually had a problem with the engine overheating.

The most common way...