As a Psychic, Sometimes I Don’t Fit In
You Get Used To It
When I became a psychic at the age of 35, I was overjoyed. I had tried to be a psychic for at least five years after I gradually discovered that it was possible to learn the craft without having been born with it and having imaginary friends from an early age. The journey went this way and that, like any spiritual journey goes, and one day, it happened, and I became a channel.
What I did not realize is that everyone is born with the ability to be psychic. We just call it gut instinct. Besides, many times, those imaginary friends of children are discounted and eventually go away on their own. The two instances I’ve heard of psychics, from a young age, having their imaginary friends end up being their spiritual guides are James Van Praagh and Sylvia Browne.
But something else happened when I began to channel that I had not anticipated. Now, I was different, and it became harder to fit in with the rest of the world.
Some people did not approve of my being a psychic channel; most of them were family members. My husband, who has the biggest vote, was okay with it. With other people, it felt like I was the only writer in a room full of people who didn’t like to read. I learned from my family members’ reactions that telling others in my life I was a channel was not a particularly good thing to do, and so for a time I told nobody about it.
In those days, in the early 1990s, the internet had just been invented. They had not yet started calling it the internet. It was just the World Wide Web — WWW. There were no pictures at all. Streaming did not exist. YouTube did not exist. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google, none of that existed. There was only one way to talk to others on the WWW, and that was through bulletin boards. Remember “You’ve Got Mail” with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in 1998?
I became aware of a group of people who were questioning everything, as I was myself. SpiritWeb.org lasted from 1993 to 2003. In those days, nobody was making money from the World Wide Web. It was free. It had been intended from the start to be free. It was at SpiritWeb.org that I began meeting like-minded people. It was these people who helped me to feel like I was a part of a group and not so alone. In 2001, I made my own website, TalkingToSpirit.com. I have not updated it lately, but my stories are there.
It was during this period of time that no one other than my husband and my family, who had pretty much disowned me by that time, and the people I met on the World Wide Web, knew that I channeled.
Nobody at my work knew I was a psychic. I did not want to risk my job by revealing that information. The reception I’d gotten from most people other than my husband had not been terrific. I became wary about who I would reveal that information to. Sometimes, I would be talking to a complete stranger, and they would interrupt our conversation to demand why I had said what I had said. Sometimes, they were angry. Other times, puzzled. Either it was a proper name I had used as an example or a turn of phrase. And that is how Spirit speaks.
It was during this time that the Universe began to send other psychics in the flesh my way. I’ve always found it interesting how that works. But they began to come. The most important friend I met was at a Seth group in Berkeley. He was a psychotherapist who was interested in the Seth writings. The books I read as a teenager. Seth was an entity, a spiritual teacher who spoke through Jane Roberts in the 1960s. She was in a trance; her husband Robert took dictation, and so the books were written. When I first met my guide, he said his name was Seth. I asked him if he was the same Seth associated with Jane Roberts. He said yes, and 30 years later, we are still there together.
Thayer, my new friend, and I did not attend many of the Seth group meetings. The people there were certainly not interested in my channeling Seth. He and I began to meet once a week on our patio. I taught him to channel. It took one meeting. What could I say? What took me over five years took him all of 15 minutes. He was ready. I still had a lot of work to do. Gradually, as time passed, our group increased by just a few more people.
I talked with Seth alone in that first year. It was telepathic, though had begun channeling by working a Ouija board with no talking, just spelling out letters. Within ten days of my making contact with the Ouija board, our communication became first audible and then telepathic. Interestingly, it was February 12, 1993, when I first made contact. Ten days later, our communication became telepathic on Feb 22. What was funny about it is that 222 is a number that had begun appearing to me repeatedly five years prior when I began deliberately to learn how to channel.
I remember being very frightened as I saw 222 everywhere I looked. I telephoned my sister to ask her opinion. She telephoned me the next afternoon to tell me she had just seen 222 on the time and temperature sign in her bank’s parking lot. Now, I see it in the books I read. Not as often, just as a sweet reminder. 222 means you are on the right path.
At the time, though, this psychic thing of 222 appearing was frightening. I went to a local used bookstore to their metaphysical section and found the fattest book on the shelf. It was titled ESP by Colin Wilson. I opened it at random and read that everybody has ESP, and it is natural. Extra Sensory Perception. It was like I’d gotten the all-clear from the universe, and I continued my studies.
Now, I speak to many other entities in spirit: guides, teachers, personalities, authors, movie stars, and various dead people. How? I don’t know how. I just say in my mind, “Hi.” That’s all it takes. I understand them all. Whether, during their lifetimes, they spoke English or not, that is how they speak to me.
As an aside, as I write this piece, I flippantly asked Seth, “Are you dead?” He said, “No, I’m quite lively at the moment.” There is humor everywhere I turn. You wouldn’t think it, but everybody out there, up there, over there, under there, wherever they are, has a lovely sense of humor.
Who else have I talked to? The first person, other than my guide Seth, was Amadeus Mozart. It was a year after I had begun channeling. Seth had asked me for weeks if I wanted to talk to anyone else. I kept saying no. I’ve always been shy. The only other personage I’d talked to other than Seth had been my maternal grandmother. It was the first time I had talked to anybody who was “dead.”
The first time I talked to another being in Spirit, I had been trying to learn to play the piano. I never got very far with it, but it was soothing to me and helped me to write. Just pounding out what was in my heart — writing on the piano before I was writing on paper. In any case, I was playing the piano one day, and I felt a shift in the energy that was what I felt as channeling. You can actually feel it.
I knew what it was like to talk to my guide. It felt normal to me. It should be because we’d been doing it for a year. I could feel him as I played the piano. I don’t know how to explain it other than to imagine a spring breeze that ruffles your hair. You know when it changes, and a sweet breeze becomes a Santa Ana hot wind bringing waves of fire ahead of it. Anyway, I felt a shift in the energy, and I asked, “Who are you?” The voice said, “I am your music maestro.” I knew it was Mozart. I just knew.
After that, it was easy to talk to others in Spirit. Many times, I’ll be talking to somebody, and I can feel a shift in the energy around me. I don’t know who it is, but I do know it is somebody for the person in front of me. Sometimes, I say something other times, I keep my mouth shut. If Spirit really wants to say something to somebody and I don’t offer my services, they will find a way. That’s where butterflies, ladybugs, hawks, and sparrows come into play. Also, songs that bring back memories of the one who has passed come to folks. I had to learn I was not the most important egg in the carton. If word doesn’t get to a person one way, Spirit will find another way. Once I accepted that, I felt better.
Dreams are there for lots of purposes, mostly having to do with us trying to figure out and process what’s going on in our lives. There is another way for Spirit to talk to us, and that is through our dreams. It can be loved ones, co-workers, or your pets who have passed who end up in our dreams. If you aren’t aware of it during the dream (called lucid dreaming) you can wake in the morning and say, “Thanks. Thanks for visiting.”
Where once I felt that getting messages from the Great Beyond to loved ones still living wasn’t that important, I relaxed some. Now, I feel it is my life’s work to let people know they don’t have to be afraid of things that go bump in the night. Their journeys are their own. If I can help them awaken some of their own psychicness, I’m happy to do it. It really doesn’t take much.
Like Wayne Dyer said, “If you want to be psychic, go hang around with them. It is contagious”
Now, there is another group you can talk to as a psychic channel. Inanimate objects and other living beings. Channeling is like radio waves, and if you can hook up with one of them, you can talk to what is in your own sphere of reference. For instance, I have talked to my bird and one of my cats. Mostly, cats would not really give me the time of day; they are content with how things are, and I have never really had a conversation. However, the one time it happened, I heard our parakeet squawking up a storm. He lived in a round cage, and our smallest cat, still a kitty, liked to curl around the outside of the cage and sleep. Sometimes, while Mimi was asleep so close that her whiskers were in the cage itself, the birdie would get close and nibble on them while the cat slept. As I entered the kitchen, I figured that somehow, Mimi had gotten up to no good and was bothering the parakeet. I snatched her away from where she was sitting next to our squawking bird, held her up to my face, and admonished her. That’s when I heard, “But he was teasing me.”
Another time, I was eating a piece of fried chicken over our sink in the kitchen. It was a drumstick. It did not speak to me, but I got a vivid vision of what it was like to live as a chicken did, as this particular chicken did — the sorrow, the cramped quarters, the noise, white-feathered chickens everywhere. I felt for that chicken. I didn’t finish eating that chicken leg. In fact, it had to have been a good six months before I had another bite of chicken.
I understood then the prayers that hunters will say with whatever they have killed. It broke my heart.
Many times, when I water my plants out on our patio, I am careful that they all get a drink. Sometimes, I can almost feel their relief in getting some water. I am almost afraid to trim or throw away a plant that has died.
There is a huge amount of sensitivity going on.
And finally, as an experiment, during a channeling session out on our patio, someone proposed that we try talking to channeling an inanimate object. The consensus was that we talked to the chairs we were sitting in. I won’t do that again any time too soon. It was horrible. There were no words, it was just chaotic sounds, things rubbing and screeching against each other, sounds of metal, of stone, of elements. It was horrible. I was sitting in a plastic chair.
Finally, at the ripe old age of 68, I pretty much tell anybody I meet that I am a psychic unless I get a “feeling” that I should not. When I retired in 2014, I said to myself that I would no longer hide who I am. Now, when people ask, I say, “I am a writer and a psychic.” It either opens the doors for conversation or not.
For a time, I took money for readings. I began at $35 a reading. I never spoke to the people I read for. They either asked me a question or just asked for a reading. Seth did the rest. I typed, and he spoke. It would take me hours, generally, about 3 hours per reading. Sometimes more. Eventually, I raised my prices to $75 a reading. I got fewer requests, but people were more appreciative. I remember I got a truly backhanded compliment from one lady who complained about the reading, “I could have gotten the same thing from one of those other famous psychics.” I smiled, gave her money back, and never did another reading.
It was time to teach others to do the readings for themselves. That’s where I am today.
The Links:
James Van Praagh Sylvia Browne TalkingToSpirit (my website since 2001)