"Psychic abilities are not just reserved for those few select 'chosen ones.'"
Of the Ether Podcast, previously known as The Kind Witch Podcast
Episode 2
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Below you'll find a partial transcription of the episode.
Welcome to The Kind Witch Podcast where we helped the modern intuitive connect to their body, authentic self, the aether, and beyond. I'm your host Alyssa McDowell, The Kind Witch, Reiki Master and Founder of Kind Publishing Co. I'm so grateful you are here. If you like this episode, please be sure to subscribe to The Kind Witch Podcast, or share it with a friend. Let's go.
I am so excited for this episode today because we're talking about the psychic senses! You may also know these as psychic abilities, as clair senses, maybe psychic gifts, and we are going to get into all of it today. Developing it and discovering my psychic senses has been truly a ride. It is one of my favorite things to do. It constantly amazes me and I just love it so much. But there's a lot of misconceptions about what it means to be psychic, right? We have all these influences from pop culture from Theresa, Caputo, maybe Sylvia Browne… And typically in these instances, you're seeing psychic abilities used either to connect with passed loved ones or to predict the future, but that's not all they're there for.
I'll tell you right now that psychic abilities are not just reserved for those few select chosen ones. Anyone can hone and strengthen psychic abilities, if they so choose. Now, it's just like anyone can become a writer, right? But not everyone wants to write and that's fair, that's totally fine. But if this is of interest to you, know that you can develop your abilities, these senses for yourself. You can develop this gift, this ability, and do what you want with it. You can have fun with it!
So growing up psychics always kind of intrigued me—they amazed me. I was also (and I'm kind of still) fearful of having dead people show up in my space, but it was still something that really caught my interest early on, my entire life. Did I ever think that I could do that myself? No. Absolutely not. Did I want to? Yeah! Sure I did! And then while I was working on healing my chronic illness, my thyroid, and kind of stepped into spirituality, I discovered reiki. And I received reiki from someone virtually and the way she tapped into my energy body and was like, “Hey, you have this going on…” or “This is why this is happening in your life…” “This is why you show up this way.” “This is how you can course-correct…” and she hit the nail on the head every single time—about things that I not only hadn't admitted to anybody else, but I could barely admit to myself. And I was like, oh my goodness, I want to do that too! And reiki was really kind of the gateway to my psychic abilities because I could understand that anyone could learn and be attuned to reiki—and when you are attuned to reiki, it kind of helps you up-level in that way energetically to connect to yourself, first, and connect to the Divine. And so I received the reiki, a couple months later, I was like, “Yup! Sign me up. I need to be attuned to reiki!” And I was attuned to level 1 and level 2. And the next year I was attuned to level 3, which is the Holy Fire® Reiki Master level. And with each attunement my psychic abilities grew—with the attunement and, of course, I was practicing outside of that as well. But the reiki helps. So I've been doing this for a while! It's something that I work on practically every day and if I'm not working on it, I am actively paying attention to it. Writing things down, taking notes, meditating, doing all the things in order to connect to this part of myself. And you can do this too! You don't have to be attuned to reiki to start today. What we are going to do today, whether you have practiced your psychic abilities or not, we are going to dive into the different psychic senses, how they can show up, so you can recognize them for what they are. Because I will take a confident guess that you have been experiencing psychic senses in some capacity, but you just didn't understand that that's what it was—which is fine. But the more you can understand what you are experiencing, the easier it is to let it grow.
So first, as a disclaimer, know that psychic senses show up a little bit differently for everyone and it isn't kind of like a one-size-fits-all. Someone who experiences clairsentience will experience something that is completely different from another person who experiences clairsentience, but there is kind of like an umbrella to help you understand and recognize what it is. And also, there is some overlap in the psychic senses where I've seen some people define one way it shows up as one gift and I kind of defined it a different one. So know that there is some overlap. Again this isn't a one-size-fits-all, this is all meant for play and meant to connect to yourself and the divine. And really the labels don't matter. The labels just help our human brain understand, but it isn't this cumbersome, concrete set of rules.
So when we are talking about psychic senses, we are talking about our consciousness processing information that is not coming from our human body, which is very logical-base, and it's not coming from our ego, which is very often fear or us in protection mode. We are stepping away from those two things. We’re stepping away from our human, logical brain. we’re stepping away from our ego. And we are connecting to Spirit, to the universe, to God, to divine, whatever you want to call it—to your Spirit guides. So we're using senses that require a little bit more intention and awareness to tune in to. Because that information is there for us. It's all in the energy and the processing of it, but we have to tune into it. It's kind of…it's not like our human side where we know that we are touching a rough sweater because it's on our skin. Its the process of changing how we’re receiving energy, outside of those traditional physical senses. So hearing, seeing, touching, tasting, all those traditional human senses that come really naturally to us without effort.
All right, let's dig into it. The first sense we're going to discuss today is clairsentience, which means clear feeling. So with clairsentience you can feel the emotion, or energy, or even physical pain that isn't necessarily your own. This one by far is my strongest sense and it has been with me my entire life—even before I realized that it was a psychic ability. I have always been able to process the undercurrent energy that is around, process other people's energy within my body, mistaking it for my own (getting really confused). Anyway, as an example, let’s say we're tuning into our psychic gifts… We are going to use this example throughout the series, the example of seeing a house or experiencing a house psychically. So with clairsentience being the only sense you are experiencing, an example of this in the works would be, you know the house is cozy because you can feel the warmth of the lit fireplace. So you feel it, You're not seeing it, you're not hearing it, you're only feeling it.
So clairsentience can show up as not being able to watch horror movies because you feel exactly what the characters are feeling as if it's happening to you. I definitely experienced this one, even movie trailers really get under my skin, and I have the hardest time shaking the events out of my body because it feels like it's happening to me. And I remember being a kid and experiencing or watching scary content and would just wait in bed at night, waiting for it to happen to me. Like I could imagine every single thing…and it's really difficult to shake if you're not practiced and if you don't know what it is.
Another way to tell you are experiencing clairsentience is you may have trouble deciphering if what you're feeling is yours or someone else's—or you're just getting really strong emotional waves through your body and you don't know where the hell they're coming from. Like it feels like yours, because it's in your body, right? But you're like “Where the hell did this come from?” “Why am I feeling like this”? And you can't find the root-cause of it.
On the other side of the spectrum, you might start picking up hobbies that seem spontaneous or out of character—especially, if you're watching other people, doing those same hobbies with joy and excitement, maybe they're really successful. I spent a couple years convinced I was going to be a painter. I was convinced that I could make that my life's work. And after I learned about psychic abilities, I was like, oh, no wonder why it felt so abrasive and it never really stuck. And I didn't have fun doing it…because I was watching these creators, these painters who made this their life's work, and they absolutely loved it, but I was feeling their love for it—it wasn't mine. I thought it was, but it was theirs with their sentience.
You might have body twitches when you watch people dance. I experienced this one quite a lot like your body, like anticipates the next move before you even see it. You might get a gut feeling, like when someone proposes you go somewhere and you're like, eh— that kind of gave me a stomach ache that just doesn't feel right? Or you might get cold chills when Spirits are around. That's the way your body is letting you feel the energy.
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