My story as a kinda-intuitive kid — whose intense longing for magic tuned her psychic channels over time — and how consciousness science flips the script on how extrasensory perception truly happens.
When I was very little, my mom was going through an intense period of spiritual discovery. I remember her joining a group that performed distance healings: they would send healing energy as a collective to people struggling with distressing diagnoses or intractable symptoms.
The process involved the group leader sharing nothing more than the name or a photo of the person in need of healing. The group would then begin a process of sharing their psychic impressions of the person, reading them and their situation to discern what their illness was, and the psychological or spiritual root cause of their ailment.
Though I was very young, barely more than four or five, I remember my mom — an outspoken woman with a huge personality — sharing her many “mind blown” moments with friends and family, as her own psychic abilities blossomed.
This was a massive paradigm shift in her world, and it became the basis for how she parented me.
All of this, in turn, led to spiritual and New Age books and workshops; crystals filling our house; Reiki and other forms of energy healing became a regular thing at home. Eventually, my mom began running a free spiritual healing clinic out of our living room in her spare time, and continued to do so for many years.
Based on all she was reading and learning, of course, children were supposed to bepsychically sensitive and open from the get-go!
Mom seemed to practically expect my sister and I to report communications with spirits, astral travels, and decoding auras from the moment we said our first words. This was meant to be our natural state, our human potential.
Yes, we were a little intuitive, a lot sensitive, and we definitely didn’t fit your classic definition of “normal”.
But…
While I adored the magical atmosphere that my mom’s journey brought to our lives, I was frustrated.
Based on everything I was being exposed to, I imagined psychic abilities to look like the spectacular magic I saw in fantasy movies and cartoons: flashy, dramatic, and undeniable.
Something clearly wasn’t adding up between my own experience and those depictions, nor all of the cool, special, enchanted tales I was hearing about other people’s spiritual gifts.
I remember vividly holding a book in my hands — “Man, Visible and Invisible” by CW Leadbeater. This book had illustrations of the aura as seen by Leadbeater, a clairvoyant and prominent member of the Theosophical Society.
I was too young at the time to care about the deeper meaning of the book, but I was entranced by the illustration plates detailing the meaning of countless different hues when present in someone’s aura.
To give you an idea, here are some of the illustrations:
How incredible to imagine each of us radiating all of these colorful lights at all times!
I was especially entranced by the significance of each color, and the specificity of meaning encoded in each unique hue. What kind of world would it be, if we could see the truth of another living being’s state of mind, heart, health — and their essence as a soul — encoded in radiant color and form all around them? I yearned to be able to perceive energy fields this way.
But, bummer: I saw no auras.
I didn’t see any spirits in my bedroom, either; I didn’t know what the future held nor read other people’s minds; I wasn’t able to effect healing with my touch (though I learned the basics of Reiki at the time, and it seemed to feel good to recipients).
One thing I wanted dearly was to talk to animals, and I tried, as well as with plants. The thing was, I couldn’t verify my experiences either way. While they felt meaningful to me, I wasn’t sure if they weren’t just the product of my vivid imagination.
Bottomline, even though my mom’s spiritual teachers and peers emphatically maintained that children naturally have powerful spiritual and paranormal experiences from birth, which only shut down when adults tell them what they’re experiencing is not real — I didn’t think I matched the description, no matter how much I wanted to.
Luckily for me, this wasn’t where my love affair with the psychic realms ended.
Why I Couldn’t Produce Magic on Command: A Filter (or Funnel) of Consciousness
Consciousness scientist — such as Drs. Imants Barušs and Julia Mossbridge, in their book Transcendent Mind; or Dr. James Carpenter in his book First Sight — flip our common assumptions of how psychic or “anomalous” phenomena work right on their head.
Even though my woo-ish upbringing carried an expectation that we’re all psychic unless taught otherwise, our culture has been traditionally less generous about who gets to have paranormal gifts.
We often imagine a spiritually gifted individual as being able to access a realm of reality that others can’t — and we have many myths and tales from cultures all around the world, cementing the idea that these are privileged abilities. For instance, we may think about ESP as something that only some families have, and that you need to come from a lineage of witches or seers to embody extrasensory talents.
This isn’t wrong per se — abilities that transcend our physical senses and the bounds of our localized reality do seem to run in families. But the emerging story from science is a lot more inclusive:
These, and other researchers and authors in the fields of metaphysics and consciousness science, are gathering evidence that paints the total opposite picture: that perceiving, and even being able to impact reality beyond the constraints of space and time is our default. It’s a level at which we, and other living beings, are functioning at all times.
Psychic connectedness is the basis for existence.
The catch is, for many of us, the processes by which we connect to the psychic realm take place in the background of our unconscious, at such a fundamental level, that most of us don’t notice our ESP humming along merrily, doing its thing. This is akin to how most of us interact with our computers and devices only via their user interface — and never see or touch the code hidden “beneath” the interface that keeps our apps and operating systems running smoothly.
Furthermore, it appears our brains and bodies behave like both a filter and a receiver for our spirits, and for that “world behind the world” where our psychic activity is constantly taking place. Staying with the technology analogies, this parallels the way a radio device is both a receiver and a filter for radio waves, picking up the specific bandwidth it’s set up for.
(BTW, this filtering faculty is important: it allows us to have our earthly experience, which our souls deem meaningful and precious. Thanks to our brain’s filtering ability, we experience life “here and now”, as a single individual, separate from others. This, in turn, allows us to practice relationship in all its forms, and ultimately, how to love, which Spirit deems one of our most important spiritual lessons while being on Earth.)
To expand the analogy a bit, I like to visualize our state of consciousness like a funnel:
The wider you go up the funnel, the more access you have to realities outside your own felt core of identity.
The very widest part is where we have zero barriers that separate “self” from “other”. This is the state of ultimate Oneness with Source/God/the Higher Power.
The narrowest part is where we’re most merged with our individual, earthly experience.
In between these two extremes, there are countless realms and dimensions whose signature way of experiencing self-and-other vary wildly.
The difference between people who are visibly psychic — mediums, healers, clairvoyants, people who exhibit psychokinesis, prophets, channelers, remote viewers — and those who don’t seem to display such abilities, is that the explicit psychics have:
a) A more fluid barrier between the part of them that’s in contact with non-local reality, and their everyday state of awareness.
b) Some degree of agency in accessing the wider funnel-layers of consciousness experience. This is not always the case: not all psychics have mastery over their “phenomena”, but a great many exhibit intentional control over their skills.
The quality of fluidity can either be acquired through chance — sometimes traumatically, such as via a brain injury or psychological trauma—, through purposeful effort— such as meditation, which opens us up to the greater dimensions of Consciousness — or be innate, or a mix.
The quality of agency comes from getting a handle on one’s unique way of bridging everyday awareness with those inner channels through which we access non-local reality.
This means anyone can learn how to loosen the bounds of their awareness and make conscious their unconscious psychic processes. This is akin to moving up the funnel — allowing in more of those extended, subtle, non-physical realities to enter into the forefront of their mind.
Back to my childhood conundrum: while I wasn’t able to produce spectacular ESP on command (like many of us who grew up frustrated by not being one day summoned by a mythical creature or wise elder to attend some version of Magic School 🤓), I realized my situation wasn’t so different from how we learn to read the written word at a young age.
Most anyone can learn to read, but a rare few children simply teach themselves with little, if any, external assistance.
Those psychics, mediums, and healers who spontaneously express their gifts from a young age without conscious effort are like the kids who just one day know how to read, whereas the rest of us need to be shown how to do it.
Those of us who need to be taught are no less capable, nor any less truly psychic. We just need some external support to tease apart the unconscious flows of psychic energy and information, which are so well integrated into the rest of our senses and perception that they lie just outside of our day-to-day awareness.
But with interest, practice and patience, we can use these skills with fluency, just the same way we can become avid readers of books once we’ve mastered the ability.
Divergent Brains
(An aside: it feels important at this point to mention the neurodivergent experience as it relates to psychic abilities. This is because it’s part of my lived experience as both my own “wiring” and my professional and communal world. If you yourself don’t identify as neurodivergent, I hope you’ll still find this section thought-provoking).
I mention above that “fluidity” in experiencing a broader range of states of consciousness must relate, at least in part, to the unique way our brains are wired — the brain being a filter/ translation device for our individual consciousness and all.
We see evidence of this, for instance, in people who have suffered a traumatic brain injury or a lightning strike, and suddenly manifest extra-sensory faculties they didn’t use to have. Brain damage appears to open the floodgates for experiences higher up the funnel.
A well-known example is Elizabeth Krohn, who died after being struck by lightning and came back to life able to perceive global future events. A lesser known case is that of Thomaz Green Morton, who manifested mind-bending abilities to impose his will on physical objects after a lightning strike during childhood.
From my own line of work, and years of serving the neurodivergent community, there’s a humongous (!!!) overlap between a diagnosis of neurodivergence (whether formal or self-determined) and fluidity in our access to broader, or altered, states of consciousness. As a result, many of us feel as though the psychic realm is “right there”, integrated with everyday awareness, or barely under the surface of it.
When we don’t know the difference, we may come to believe that it’s our vivid imagination, unless some external feedback shows us that information which seems to arise from our own minds is, indeed, factual.
In the individuals I’ve had the chance to work with, or connect with at a deeper level as peers, friends and fellow community members, expanded, non-local perception very often shows up as continuous with sensory processing differences, high sensory sensitivities, and with emotional responsiveness, receptivity and intensity. It may also correlate with high creativity, and/or high intellectual complexity.
Here I’m referring to differently-wired individuals who identify with one or more of the following, (and bear in mind I’m using some pathology-biased language for lack of better handles):
Autism, ADHD, HSP, synesthesia, dyslexia, dyscalculia, sensory processing disorder, bipolar or schizotypal disorders, giftedness (beyond-average intellectual ability to perceive and process complex information, from any field or way of knowing, not determined by achievement or access to education) and more.
This is poignantly documented in the podcast The Telepathy Tapes, which I touched on in my Aquarius New Moon post.
But even when most of us don’t show such spectacular psychic feats as the non-speakers in the podcast do — enough of us in the neurodivergent community report similar experiences kind, if not in degree, that suggest that differently-wired brains compared to the neuronorm have access to energies, information and experiences beyond our immediate bodily boundaries.
Subtle and Gradual Progress
Still as a young girl, I didn’t want to give up on my interest in the possibility that there was so much more to us human beings than a purely materially-bound existence.
While I couldn’t see auras with my eyes, I noticed I could definitely feel energies, especially with my hands. I couldn’t have necessarily derived very easy-to-verbalize information from this kind of psychic sensing, especially not at first. With encouragement from my environment, and access to books on energy, I started to try to describe to myself what a person’s, object’s or place’s energy felt like.
Peaceful or chaotic? Sweet and soft, or sharp and harsh? Dense or light?
Slowly, gradually, I stopped needing to be in direct contact with something or someone to reach out my own awareness. I imagined it like a probe extending out of my own aura, allowing me to come into contact with the vibrations I wanted to explore, sense and describe.
I began to be able to articulate what some of what I was perceiving meant — for instance, when sensing a person’t energy. This vibration seemed to indicate they were sensitive and shy behind a tough facade. That vibration hinted at a very pragmatic worldview.
Whenever I got a chance to verify my impressions, they tended to be accurate. Encouraging!
Over time I started to associate colors with sensations too, which added another layer of meaning to my experiences.
Lucky for me, having this particular passion for the magic of extrasensory phenomena, I had some cool friends who wanted to explore this realm with me. One of my friends was a great partner to practice sensing and sending energies with. We meditated together at times too, and had some uncanny shared experiences of premonition.
Another friend was always up for telepathy games: we’d just sit facing each other for stretches at a time, taking turns sending and receiving images and words. We didn’t always get something, but once in a while one of us would be sending such a specific thing, and the other one got it exactly — and we’d dissolve in a fit of awestruck giggles.
It became an open channel between us, where we’d spontaneously know what the other was thinking, to the point that we needed to be careful if we were planning a surprise. We took to chanting “chocolate, chocolate, chocolate” over and over in our mind to block the other from knowing anything we didn’t want her to know.
Psychic Senses and Abilities: the Noetic Signature
All that I’m sharing from my own story makes more sense to me now, as an adult, with the help of emerging science around how psychic functioning works. One further puzzle piece comes from consciousness researcher Dr. Helané Wahbeh, who shares an intriguing concept in her book, The Science of Channeling.
She describes how we each have a “noetic signature”, a unique fingerprint that determines how we experience our intuition, and any extrasensory or paranormal abilities we may exhibit.
For example, one person may hear voices that warn her of difficult or dangerous situations, helping her to avoid or mitigate them in advance.
Another person might receive images in dreams of events in the future.
Someone else might experience the physical and emotional sensations of others around them.
Yet another sits in meditation regularly to commune with ancestors and other spirits in the afterlife.
Putting this puzzle piece — the idea that we each have our own psychic fingerprint — together with some other established models in the world of psychic development, we could say that our noetic signature consists of: our strongest psychic senses ( also known as “clair” senses, or “meta-senses”; “meta” in this case meaning “beyond” our physical senses); our unique bent or creative way of connecting to the realms beyond the material (for instance, visualization, pure intention, dreaming, trance, and others); and our strongest psychic skills.
I’m defining skills as “what we do” with our psychic faculties, whether consciously or unconsciously.
For example, you may be someone who’s naturally great at healing with energy. This is a more complex process than solely perceiving with your psychic senses, though you’re likely using them to discern where energy is blocked or out of balance in someone’s aura and body. But we add to that the capacity to emit healing energy, a form of psychokinesis — the ability to cause change in physical matter in response to our intention.
Yet again, two people who both prove to be excellent energy healers will likely have their own way of tuning into another person’s energy, sensing the energy, and working with it to effect healing. This unique recipe is their noetic signature.
Some other examples of psychic skills are: astral projection (bringing our consciousness outside our physical body), mind-to-mind communication, meaningful dreams (that give us glimpses into realities, people, our own lives or other times), precognition (receiving impressions of future events), mediumship (communicating with spirits), and channeling (“downloading” information from non-local sources such as angels, spirit guides or other intelligences).
If we want to develop our innate intuitive capacities, it’s helpful to start by exploring these elements — our personal access points, skills and our strongest senses.
In doing so, we can consciously lean into those strengths and preferences, which builds trust in our psychic selves. In fact, my experience shows that the best environment to develop psychically is one of joy, play, awe, love and excitement: to build trust in this aspect of ourselves we need to create feedback loops that offer us “wins”, and to rejoice in what we’re good at first and foremost.
From there, we can challenge ourselves — if we so desire — to grow other senses and abilities.
My own trajectory in the psychic realms made it so that over time, I’ve been able to develop my skills to a professional level of control and reliability. I also love my psychic experience: my life is the richest, most connected and most ease-filled it’s ever been thanks to it.
While I certainly didn’t start out life as my mom and other spiritually-inclined adults imagined, already fully attuned to my spiritual gifts out of the womb, things actually got more and more interesting with time— and with practice, belief, trust, understanding my unique wiring, and most importantly, having others who were willing to “go there” together.
Without a doubt, my psychic perception turned out to be way, way more subtle — and way more integrated into my regular, physical perception than I thought it would be from movies, shows, fantasy stories, and striking accounts of the paranormal feats of rare individuals.
But hey, I’ve fulfilled one of my earliest goals: I can totally see auras now.
And I bet you could too.
Over to You
Are you connected with your psychic intuition or other uncanny abilities? What is it like for you? What has helped you on the way?
Or have you wanted to feel more connected, but got stopped by obstacles along the way?
Did you also have an intense longing for magic as a kid— or still?
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This is part of my current special time limited offers under the umbrella of (R)evolution season, which you can read more about here.
Specials also include:
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