Question 2: Can You Turn It On and Off at Will?
When people ask me, “Can you turn it on and off at will?” I know they basically want to know if I go around all day seeing dead people.
The simple answer is yes, I can turn my abilities on and off at will, and no, I don’t go around seeing dead people in my non-working life.
But the simple yes and no here doesn’t paint a full picture or really explain what “it” is that we turn on and off, and that’s worth an explanation here.
In ordinary life we perceive with five senses – sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell – and some would argue for a “sixth sense” that includes things like our animal instincts and gut reactions. Psychics and mediums have all of these senses, too, of course, but we’ve also developed complementary inner senses for each of them. So in addition to regular sight, we have clairvoyance, or the ability to see clearly in the mind’s eye – the same place where you daydream. And then there’s clairaudience, to hear clearly in the mind’s ear – the same place where you hear an earworm of your favorite song. The other psychic senses include clairsentience (emotional feeling and touch), clairgustation (taste) and clairolfaction (smell). There’s also the psychic sense of knowing, like a mind-to-mind blending, called claircognizance. On top of that, there’s an inward and outward variant of each of these senses, so for example with clairvoyance, we might see an image in our mind’s eye, or we might see an image externally with our ordinary eyesight, like the concept of “seeing a ghost.”
So there are all these channels of perceptions we have, and in order to work at my very best for my clients, it’s my job to “attune” to each of these senses as strongly as possible when I work. This way, my abilities to perceive are being informed by every channel available to me. To do this, I engage in a meditative ritual of awareness exercises that brings my attention to each of these perceptive channels – kind of like tuning in radio dials to their clearest signal. Of course, each psychic and medium may naturally be more attuned to one channel than another – for example I am strongly clairvoyant and clairaudient. But, just as a guitarist wouldn’t tune only two of the six strings on their instrument and ignore the rest, a psychic or medium also you wouldn’t want to ignore any potential channels of perception available to them. Hence, rather than turning something on and off, it’s more like tuning in or tuning out based on where we put our attention.
This is what I need to do to work as a psychic. To work as a medium, however, requires an extra step, and those of us who work in the field refer to it as “raising our vibration,” with the belief being that while our spirits are incarnate on Earth, we have a heavier and slower moving energy than people who have shed their bodies and returned to the spirit world. So the idea is for communication to take place, the folks in spirit have to lower their vibration a bit while we in turn increase ours, and together we meet in the middle. Everyone does this a bit differently; for me this involves a meditative practice where I release all stress and heavy emotion, and attune into the highest spiritual vibration possible. Through this I become sensitive to the very first glimmer of presence from your loved ones in spirit, and direct my focus there. And once we’re in the groove – now, *that’s* when it becomes effortless.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. For example, the meditative rituals I just described – I’ve been doing them for decades, prior to every single session with my clients, regardless of whether I’m preparing for a one-on-one psychic reading or for a group demonstration in front of 500 people. But that doesn’t mean that in their absence, psychic and mediumistic experiences can’t also occur spontaneously – like when I’m hanging out with another medium-friend, having say, a beer and wings at a laid-back Irish pub – and then we’re suddenly aware that we’re in the presence of each other’s loved ones in spirit.
Still, for all practical purposes, it does take work to get to the place of being tuned in and at my very best for my clients. And that’s a good thing, because most of us wouldn’t want the radio on all day anyway, right?