Psychic Development - The basic first steps

The fact is, there are a few things you need to do in order to prepare yourself for developing your latent psychic and/or mediumistic abilities. These include:

Emotional clearance
Working through fear
Discipline of the mind
Building trust
Self belief
Acceptance of the duality of being (a spirit within a physical body)
Meditation

Emotional clearance is one of the most important things one must do in order that latent abilities can be free to develop. The average human existence includes the whole range of emotional experiences, from joyous to angry and sad and these experiences and the emotions they produce in us, affect us in many ways. After a painful or sad experience, we would commonly try to avoid such a situation again and anything which causes a memory of that situation to arise, also causes a flash of the emotions that went with the experience. As adults we tend to control our emotions rather than express them and the build up of years of these experiences and repressed emotions causes a ‘block’ to any development.

Working through fear goes hand in hand with emotional clearance. We fear going into situations we know will cause us to become upset. We fear the expression of our negative emotions. We fear that these emotions will take us over or that we will become uncontrolled. We fear actually feeling these emotions from decades ago. We think that by burying them we have ‘dealt’ with them and by bringing them up again we ‘won’t be able to cope’ and we feel we ‘can’t go through all that again’. By working through these natural fears, we take ourselves beyond our previous emotional boundaries and allow the emotional clearance to take place.

Discipline of the mind is essential to development of latent abilities and it is something that even the most experienced mediums battle with on occasion. Understanding the power of thought and meditation need the ability to be very disciplined in the mind in order to be successfully practiced.

The building of trust is probably the hardest thing of all to learn, but is absolutely essential to develop any ability of a spiritual nature. We must learn to trust our guides and doorkeepers, even if we are not aware of their presence and we must learn to trust ourselves too.

Self belief and self confidence is partner to trust and together, they help us build a relationship with our guides and doorkeepers and to accept their guidance, fully confident that together, we will work for spirit in whatever way they have planned for us. If we lack self belief and self confidence we doubt ourselves and our abilities and find it hard to accept that we are worthy of our guides help. Our guides can see this in us and this doubt will make it difficult for them to guide us. If we constantly doubt the signs and signals they give us, they will not be able to rely on us to deliver any spiritual guidance to a soul who may be in desperate need.

We live in a physical world, in a physical body and we think of everything in a largely physical way. We tend to think of spirits as ‘dead people’ and something separate to ‘us’ as living people. We need to become aware and accept the we, ourselves, have a spirit within us and it is this that continues after the physical body wears out.

Meditation helps us learn to discipline the mind and raises our vibrational frequency so that communication with spirit can take place. It is a discipline all on its own and must be practised in order for the necessary quieting of the mind to be achieved.

Please be aware that these things are done together rather than one after the other. It is not necessary to do one first, then the next and so on, but just to make life more difficult, we do them all at the same time!

EMOTIONAL CLEARANCE

One of the things that really defines us as humans, is our ability to feel emotions. Without emotions, we would be like robots. Everything we do and say is born of emotion. As children we soon learn the power of an emotional response, any parent knows how powerful a persuader a tantrum can be. As we grow up everything that happens to us triggers an emotional response in us and this emotion governs how we will react in a similar situation in the future. This is especially true of negative emotions such as fear or anger.

In the Mediterranean region, people express their emotions far more freely than we do in the UK. This is far more healthy for our emotional selves than our habit of repressing our emotions. This is where we feel a strong emotion but don’t express it, we ‘keep it inside’. Most people who do this feel that they are overcoming their emotions by doing this and that to express their feelings, is to give in to them. Control is the keyword here. People want to have control over their lives in so many ways we are unable to do this. In our ‘civilised’ society it has become ‘not nice’ to express ones emotions and men especially are brought up to believe that ‘real men’ are not emotional beings.

Emotions are, like thoughts and everything else in the world, made of energy. They can even be seen on a brain scanner. When we repress our emotions, this negative energy is taken within and doesn’t simply go away, it becomes a part of our energy field. After years of repressing emotions, this energy has built up to become a significant part of our energy field, a significant part of ‘us’. This negative energy very effectively blocks any attempt to advance psychically.

In order to develop psychically and/or mediumistic abilities, we must become a sort of conduit between the spirit world and the physical world, through which the information can flow. To become this conduit requires us to be clear of any emotional detritus. The negative energy of years of repressed emotions blocks this conduit so that no information can flow through. We must take steps to clear this blockage so that we can start our development clear of any negativity within our energy field.

This can often be a very traumatic experience. Very simply, it involves allowing your emotions to be expressed at the moment they are felt. This will prevent any further negativity from adding to the build up. To deal with the backlog can take a long time and involves bringing up all those past traumas and expressing the emotions they represent. One way to do this is to put yourself into the very situations that the fear of an emotional response, would normally prevent you from taking part in and this time, allowing any emotions that come up, to come out and be expressed fully.

Let me give you an example.

I have a friend who I shall call Jerry (not his real name). Jerry and I have known each other since the late 1970’s when we were neighbours and our parents worked together. My parents had 2 labradors and Jerry used to come around with his dog and he and I would take them all for long walks. We lived in a very rural environment and would walk through woods and across fields for hours. We had a lot in common and became good friends.

Jerry has 2 sisters, one older and one younger. Throughout his entire life, Jerry’s father has belittled him and told him he’s no good, useless, a let down etc etc etc. Jerry’s mother never once stood up for him and his sisters treated him like he was a weirdo. This family environment taught Jerry that he was different, odd and would never be accepted by the world in general. He became introverted and spent his spare time as a youngster, in the woods and fields, alone. We met when I was 15 and he was 18. My parents liked him immediately, they liked his eccentricity as our family is eccentric too!

Very soon, Jerry was spending every evening around at our house and only went home to eat and sleep. He often told us of the cold relationship he had with his family and how he just didn’t understand them. Jerry has never been able to hold down a steady job. He once got a job in a post office but left after a week as he couldn’t cope with the strict discipline. He became a Roman Catholic, went to theological college and decided he wanted to become a monk. He failed his degree though and lost interest in religion. He started painting and has sold quite a few paintings and one of his has been hung at the Royal Academy. He now lives in a shack in the wilds of Wales, working for the owner of a large estate. He does the garden and looks after the animals in exchange for free rent of the shack. He also does house sitting for wealthy folks when they go on holiday and sells the odd painting here and there. He has a hand to mouth existence and lives well below the breadline. He has no pension provision for his old age and has developed ceoliac disease and cannot eat anything containing gluten without terrible pain.

Recently his mother passed away from cancer. He has had to come back to his parents house with his sisters and clear out the house and arrange the funeral. He called me the other day and asked if we could get together for the afternoon. I went over and he told me all about what was happening with the arrangements. He told me that his sisters were going to view the body of his mother the next day but that he didn’t think he’d bother to go. I asked him why and he said because he thought it would be upsetting. I told him that’s the very reason he should go!

We went out for a few hours and walked in the country. Jerry has always been interested in all things of a spiritual nature and told me that he is convinced that he is being deliberately blocked from advancing his abilities. He wants to develop and often asks me for readings etc. I told him that his habit of repressing his emotions is what is blocking him and that to move forward he has to get rid of all the negativity that the past 40 years of repressing them has built up within him.

If he went to the funeral home with his sisters, and he felt upset, he should express that emotion freely. I assured him that both of his sisters would very probably be crying and the sharing of the emotion would go some way towards bridging the now very wide gap between him and them. At the end of our day together he declared that he would indeed accompany his sisters to see his mother’s body.

This is just the start for Jerry. He has a long way to go but he has taken the first step. Expressing negative emotions is always traumatic for those who are used to avoiding them. In order to develop psychically though, it is necessary to face them and the reasons for repressing them in the first place. In this way, we clear our energy field of the build up of negative energy and allow it to vibrate at a much higher frequency, which helps with spirit communication.

WORKING THROUGH FEAR

Fear is one of our strongest emotions and comes from the most ancient part of the brain - the amygdyla (sorry if I spelt it wrong). This is a tiny part of the brain and operates on a purely instinctive level. It governs the basic instincts that are necessary to sustain life and nothing else - food, water, shelter, safety, anger, reproduction and fear. It is the most basic and ancient part of our brains evolution and some animals only have an amygdyla and nothing more. When we feel fear it is from this organ that the chemical processes that cause that fear, come from. Of course we have evolved very sophisticated brains and we now have powers of reasoning with which we can analyse that fear and overcome it if we find it is not necessary to act on it in order to keep ourselves alive.

Living in todays modern world we seldom come across situations where our fear is necessary to stay alive (thankfully) and consequently most of our fears are irrational. Take myself as an example. I'm terrified of spiders, like alot of women and men too although they'd sooner have their testicles removed with a blunt razor than admit it. I live in the UK and we don't have any indigenous spiders that can threaten our survival. I know that, but I don't care, they're ugly and hideous make my skin creep and if I see one streaking across my living room carpet, it dies!!! This is completely irrational and I still have my mothers cries ringing in my ears "it can't hurt you, it's more scared of you etc etc". Nothing anyone tells me will ever make me love sharing my life with spiders and I'd happily have my flat full of flies anyday. After all, Sainsbury's sell all manner of bug sprays!!!

This is an example of an irrational fear. There are others, thousands of them and they blight our lives to varying degrees, according to the frequency with which we come into contact with the object of our fears. As rational human beings, we seem to have a natural fear of the unknown and unexplained. Take fear of the dark for instance. It's not the darkness itself we fear, but the fact that we cannot see if an axe murderer or a two headed creature with blood stained fangs is hiding in the corner or not. In the paranormal world there are numerous other fears to face and if we wish to move forward in our experience and understanding of spirit, we will have to meet those fears and face them.

Switch on the TV these days and it's hard not see some paranormal show or other. They usually follow a similar pattern. A group of people (sometimes celebrities) go into a reputedly haunted building and try to experience something paranormal. They also usually involve people screaming and yelling because they've heard a noise, or seen a shadow or experienced something similarly vague. They usually chicken out and run for the safety of the 'crew room' leaving me feeling very irritated.
Lets get something sorted out right away. There is a difference between feeling afraid and being startled. Anyone can be startled but that doesn't mean you're afraid. When I paid my first night visit to Royal Victoria Country Park and saw the ghost of the cemetary guardian, I was startled, but not afraid. When I returned again and got an amazing white mist photograph, I was startled but not afraid. If someone creeps up behind me and blows a trumpet in my ear I'd probably wet myself but that's not fear.

People often say they're terrified of ghosts and spirits and I find this strange. Ghosts or spirits or whatevery you wish to call them are people, our loved ones, mothers, fathers, children. Are you scared of your family? All joking aside, if you can try to understand that we are dealing with people here who cannot communicate in the physical way that we can, it makes those noises and shadows and other phenomena easier to understand. Of course we do also encounter the spirits of people who aren't very friendly but they are still people.

When developing psychic abilities, you will open yourself up to the spirit world more, so you will experience more phenomena. You will actively seek the interaction of guides and helpers and this involves inviting spirits close to you. If you are feeling fear of having spirits near you, you cannot develop this ability for your guides will not reveal themselves to someone who fears them.
Some people have told me they fear finding out 'bad stuff' about themselves or others. People often think that being a medium or being psychic means you will always know when people are going to die and they fear finding this out. The fact is that as mediums, most of our work involves the past rather than the future. We communicate with spirits who have already passed and wish to make their presence known to us or their loved ones. I have heard of only one medium who claims to be able to tell when you're going to die and I must say I'm very skeptical about it. After all, how the hell can you prove her wrong?

I will admit that when you're down in the cellar of a derelict castle where you know people have suffered, it's easy to give in to fear. You have more than one factor involved, the dark, the possibility of ghosts, unexplained noises/lights/smells etc and all of these combined make the situation easy to fear. You have to try to keep in mind that you're dealing with people who are trying to communicate the best way they can and maybe asking for your help.

The only way to overcome these fears is to go through them and when you come out the other side, you will see the situation in a much clearer light. Have you ever heard the expression "feel the fear, then do it anyway"? This sums it up perfectly. Yes you're afraid, admit it. You want to be sick. You want to wet your pants. You want to run away. You want to cry. Ok so we've admitted we're scared shitless, now what? You go ahead and do it anyway. Once you find out the fear itself will not kill you and that you can sleep with the light off, or pick up a spider, or go down a dark cellar and listen to knocking and rapping from a soul trying find someone to help him into the light and live to tell the tale, the power the fear had over you will be greatly diminished. It takes courage, of course it does but the fear is a big block to advancement in this area of life.

I used to be terrified of the dark as a kid. I had to have a light on to go to sleep. My mother would creep in when she went to bed and switch off my nightlight. If I woke in the night wanting a pee, I would lay in bed and shout my head off till she woke up and came and switched it on, before I would go to the bathroom. I now work with a paranormal investigation group and we spend whole nights in pitch darkness and I can walk through a haunted wood and see a ghost and I'm not afraid.

Oh, and by the way. as far as spiders are concerned, a couple of years ago I went to stay with my mother who lives in Cornwall. We went out to an amusement park one day and noticed that they had an animal show going on, so as it was not the best of weather, we went in and sat down. The man doing the show brought out all sorts of creepy crawlies to show us and tell us about, from snakes, to iguanas and tarantulas as big as his hands. After the show he said we could handle to creatures and have our photo taken if we wished. My mother has never had a snake around her neck and said she’d love to do that, so she had her picture taken with a big python. I decided to be brave and hold a tarantula, a Chilean rose tarantula to be exact and I have the photo to prove it. It was a very liberating experience and one of the moments of greatest pride that I’ve ever felt in myself. I still fear them if they run across my carpet, but I can deal with them calmly and without having to kill them. Althouth I haven’t totally overcome my fear, I’ve faced it head on and experienced it and triumphed. There can be no greater expression of arachnaphobia than a giant tarantula crawling on your body and to go into that situation and come out the other side is a feeling that is impossible to describe.

DISCIPLINING THE MIND

This is something that doesn't occur to those wishing to pursue the development of any psychic abilities they might have, until they embark on that journey of development. Often it is at this stage that people cease to actually develop, due to the discipline necessary. Unfortunately it is a necessary skill to further development and one that needs regular, preferably daily practice, at least in the beginning.

There are several areas that need a disciplined mind, when endeavouring to develop psychically. These are meditation, visualisation, the fear factor and the ability to concentrate no matter what extraneous influences there may be in your environment. Meditation is key to development and this requires concentration for extended periods of time. Try this, picture an apple in your mind. Now hold this image for a full 5 minutes without letting any thoughts enter your mind. How long do you last before you find yourself thinking about tonights dinner, or that TV show you're looking forward to? Not easy is it? Well, it is hard to begin with but with practice it gets easier and you do reach a point when you can just 'switch off' on command. I meditate for between 40 minutes and 1 hour. Another thing you need to be able to do whilst concentrating like this, is to prevent yourself from falling asleep! Believe me when I say that this is much harder to do than keeping thoughts out! Many times I've 'come to' to find my head on my chest and a sever crick in my neck from having dozed off for 5 minutes.

Alot of meditation and circle work involves what are known as guided visualisations. This is where you are led through a scenario by the circle leader and you follow the verbal clues and visualise the scene in your mind. Often, with spiritual work, the images and interactions within these visualisations, can be strange and you need to be able to discipline your mind not to try to change anything within the visualisation.
The fear factor is another area where discipline is important. If you work in the field of paranormal investigations/haunted locations, then you will encounter times when you would naturally be afraid. You will need to be able to control this feeling and continue despite being in a situation that many would find disquieting. Others look to you for protection and wisdom in these situations and it is a great responsibility. Also, you cannot communicate with spirit if you are afraid yourself. You need to be able to put fear aside and maintain a calm and peaceful mindset so that you can communicate effectively. If you find yourself in a situation where you have encountered a hostile spirit, the energy of the fear emotion, will feed that spirit and make them stronger and more able to cause chaos and possible harm.

Alot of paranormal investigation work involves influences that are less than ideal to the psychic or medium. These are things such as large groups of people, noise (both from people and the environment), the weather (try communicating in the middle of a wood at midnight in January and you'll know what I mean), and all sorts of things over which you have no control. You'll need to be able to ignore all of this extraneous stuff and concentrate your mind and communicate effectively.
It can be very hard to continue to sit and meditate on the image of a flower for instance and not be able to stop thoughts creeping in. It can be very hard to walk into pitch black castle attic and listen to banging doors, unearthly moans and such and not let fear take you over. If you do persist and practice, your development will continue, albeit much slower than you'd like.
That's another discipline you'll need to propogate - patience!!!

BUILDING TRUST

Here we will be dealing with another of the essentials to developing your psychic abilities and, as with all of these essentials, this one is very difficult too. Difficult, but not impossible. It all depends upon your attitude really. If you are the type of person (like me) who finds it very difficult to trust, then this will be tough. If, on the other hand, you're the trusting type (hi Rich) then this could be a walk in the park.
Everyone knows what trust is and how it's supposed to work don't they? It's easy isn't it? You either do or you don't, simple! Well, no actually, not simple at all. In this field you must trust something you cannot see, hear or feel. You must have blind faith, for without that, you never will see, hear or feel it. It's a vicious circle - no belief, no proof - complete blind faith - proof.

So what is it you have to trust, what is this elusive, invisible thing that brings enlightenment? Well it's 2 things actually, yourself and your guides.

When you start out on the road to discovery and begin to build a relationship with your intuition and your guides, you will not be able to easily tell if something that has just come into your mind is a message or just your own wild imaginings. At first you will believe it's just your imagination and reject it, but the more this goes on, the harder it will be to ever trust it. Believe me, I know from painfull, bitter experience that is still to be fully exorcised!

I'll give you an example of a time I did trust and was very glad I did. I had decided one Sunday to take a short trip to a local country park and walk in the woods, just to try and absorb the energy of nature and calm my mind. I planned to walk along this particular path and started along it quite happily. About half way along I sat down on a seat and planned to sit for a few minutes and meditate with the sounds of the trees all around and the birds and so on, get the picture? Good. Almost as soon as I'd parked my arse on the seat into my mind came this very urgent feeling of wanting to leave the wood, right now. I continued to sit and the feeling stayed where it was. I thought "this is daft, I came here to sit and meditate amongst the trees and nature, and here I am wanting to leave, it's stupid, what's wrong with me"? However, I couldn't ignore the feeling and so, I got up and walked back the way I'd come. A couple of times I had to forcefully resist the urge to run! As I came out of the wood and started across the grassy parkland I turned and looked back at the woodland path and guess what I saw? A man was following me and looking me right in the eyes! As we looked at each other for that short moment, something passed between us, a knowing. There's only 1 path through that wood and if I'd stayed on the seat, he and I would have encountered each other. Needless to say as I saw him and realisation flooded through me, I gave thanks for the warning.

The thing is, that feeling, although strong, felt just like one of my own random thoughts and I could have ignored it. If it weren't for the fact that I was at the start of trying to develop my awareness, I might have ignored it and I dread to think what would have happened.
When you are trying to find your guides and build a working relationship with them, they will hear you speak to them and they do reply, but they do so in a very subtle way and you have to learn to listen and trust and act accordingly. Very very few people hear actual voices of their guides, when they speak to you they do so by placing thoughts or images or feelings into your mind and they can be very very subtle and feel just like your own imagination. Ocassionally they place a thought in your mind with such force that it 'feels' completely different to one of your own. The only way I can describe it is that it has a sort of 'edge' to it, it's sharp and slices into your mind like a knife and you hear it and take notice. It's very hard to describe but there's no mistaking it when it happens. They only do this when it's very important that you listen and obey, more often than not, its quiet and subtle.

As you show willingness to listen to them, they get to know that you will at least try to hear them and so they'll continue to communicate and it'll grow. If you continually ignore the thoughts, thinking it's just your imagination, they'll know you're not going to listen, so they give up trying. When you are giving a reading to someone, or doing a paranormal investigation, sometimes the images and thoughts and feelings that come in response to questions, seem daft or strange but you have to give what you get. Sometimes what seems daft to you, is just the proof someone needs.

For instance, I was asked by a friend to do some Psychometry for him. This is where you hold an object and get impressions and information that way. This friend wears his grandfather's ring and he gave it to me to hold. Now, I knew it was his grandfather's ring but the image I got seemed weird to me. This man I saw was holding something in his hand that looked like a needle. I tried to make sense of the image but it wouldn't go away or change so I told my friend what I was seeing. My friend was driving the car at the time and he almost swerved us off the road as he exclaimed "he was a diabetic"! That weird image was all he needed to know that his grandfather was still around and still loved him.

I sit in a circle with other mediums who are all at various stages of developing their abilities and sometimes the images or thoughts are so strange that you feel it's too silly to give out. The more you refuse to deliver their message, the less they will bother to communicate with you. I was once asked to give a message to one of the other mediums in the circle and all I could see was his face surrounded by green leaves, together with a feeling of ancient wisdom and paganism. I described this, along with an apology for it being so weird, only to be told by our circle leader that I had just described his chief spirit guide!

So to sum up, when developing your psychic abilities and you are beginning to find your guides, trust your intuition, those feelings and thoughts might just be communication from them.

SELF BELIEF

Of all the steps one must take to help ensure our success when endeavouring to develop our psychic abilities, this is the hardest of all. As if part 4 wasn’t hard enough, this is harder, for it entails us having belief in ourselves as spiritual beings, able to build and maintain the clear conduit necessary for communication with the spirit world to take place.

As I explained earlier, emotions are what drive us as human beings. They ensure our safety and enable us to interact fully with our world, our physical world. They are a double edged sword though, for some emotions will actively block our attempts to reach the spirit world and these are the ones that tend to be concerned with our ability to believe in ourselves, to be self confident and to trust in the process.

First of all, we must find out whether we are positive or negative in nature. Once we know that, we can move forward with our development. Imagine the following scenario: you’ve always fancied learning to water ski but never had the money. You have a small windfall and decide that now, finally, you can have your dream and book some lessons. After the first lesson however, it becomes painfully apparent that you are not a natural water skier and will need a lot of practice before becoming really proficient. How do you react to this knowledge? Do you look forward to the challenge and embrace every opportunity to fall down and get soaked as a valuable learning experience? Or do you get disheartened and accept that you’ll never be any good and simply give up and look for something else to devote your time and money too?

If you fall into the first category, great. If you fall into the second category, or if like 90% of the human race, you sometimes fall into the second category, read on.

Firstly, don’t think that you’re the only one having problems believing in yourself. You may not personally know someone with the same self critical and self deprecating habits, but be assured that millions of people are just like you, and me. Secondly, whilst beating yourself up for being no good, at least try to entertain the idea that something you did may be right, or good. It may be a little tiny piece of what you were trying to do, but it’s there, at least acknowledge it. The best way of illustrating this is to look back at an occasion where you tried to do something and gave up because you felt you were no good. Remember a time when you tried something, remember how bad you were at it, remember how that made you feel emotionally. Now look at it again and pick out one thing about that situation where what you did or said was absolutely correct. Take the water skiing scenario: you look back at your attempt to water ski and remember that you kept falling down, you couldn’t stay on your feet for more than 5 seconds. That made you feel terribly inadequate and you still feel bad about it today. Now when you look back at it a second time, you suddenly remember that your position in the water prior to trying to stand up, was perfect every time. You remember the instructor commenting on it and now you remember that you didn’t even have to try to learn how to do it.

Understand where am with this? When in a situation where we have to learn something new, we do tend to place enormous importance on our failures and forget our little successes. Where we fix our emotional reaction to this will make our attempts at developing psychic abilities either easy or difficult. The negative emotions such as feeling like a failure, feeling stupid, thinking you are useless and accepting defeat before you’ve even tried, will very effectively block our development. Believe me I know from painful tearful experience.

It’s easy to say, but we must place our attention on the positive side of each of our forays into psychic development. If you are trying to learn the tarot for instance and are practicing reading your friends, you may get most of it wrong. Instead of concentrating on what you got wrong, concentrate on how nearly right you were and you may have been totally right on one or two things. If you are trying to build a communication with your spirit guide and you are not aware of a loud voice in your ear responding to every question, don’t just accept that you don’t have a guide. Did you feel anything around your body? A subtle change in the energy around you for instance? Perhaps you felt a tickling sensation on your arm, or a sudden patch of heat on your knee? You may have suddenly got an image in your mind of something that bears no resemblance to anything you were previously thinking about. The way they respond, especially at first, will be subtle, very subtle and you have to learn how to notice their responses. Once you do begin to learn how to notice them responding to you, it gets much easier.

You see, it’s all down to your state of mind in the end. Negative emotions and accepting that you can’t do it, block you, whilst positive acceptance and willingness to learn and be open will enhance your awareness. It doesn’t happen overnight though and this positive acceptance that the process is taking its proper course must be maintained for a long time.

We all have moments where we falter in our self belief and feel critical of ourselves and our abilities. When we encounter someone who is further down the development road than we are, it is easy to become despondent and self critical. I know, I’ve done it and still do from time to time. It’s natural to be this way but we can bounce back from it and get back on to the path.

Not long ago I was asking a friend for advice on something to do with my communication with spirit. He was not being very forthcoming with his advice and I was trying very hard but getting nowhere fast. Despondency set in and I felt awful. It ruined my evening and I was convinced I was useless, etc etc etc. That night I went to bed and woke up an hour later after having a very vivid dream. After interpreting this dream it became obvious to me that my guide was telling me that be following strictly the advice of another, I would encounter some kind of problem in the future. This was a revelation to me and one that made me feel a hundred times better.

Often it is looking back on a situation like this that we see more clearly how right things were, rather than how wrong and we can use this to help us have the right mind set on our future endeavours. This will help us have a positive and accepting attitude which will help us when developing our psychic abilities.

ACCEPTANCE OF THE DUALITY OF BEING

When we think of spirits, we think of them as different from us, as something we ‘turn into’ when we die. The physical body dies and then we ‘become’ a spirit or ghost and we haunt places and frighten people. This just isn’t so, we are spirits here and now, whilst we’re still physically alive and it’s that part of us that lives on after the physical body ceases to function.

Think of it like this: you want to go scuba diving under the ocean. Now the ocean is not our natural environment, we cannot breathe under water so we have to make adequate provision for this to allow us to function as near normally as possible whilst under the water. We have wear a diving suit and carry an aqualung on our backs in order to be able to survive in that hostile environment. This diving suit and aqualung impede our natural movement and expression, but we can still interact with the environment enough to see it, hear it, feel it and learn about it. This is how it is with our spirits too. The physical world is not our spirits natural environment and so, in order to be able to live here and interact with our world, we need to ‘wear’ this physical body which is designed to be able to cope with this atmosphere, this gravity and so on. Having a physical body enclosing your spirit does impede it somewhat. It cannot move in it’s usual way, or communicate in it’s usual way, but it does these things in a way that this physical body does allow. So we can still move about our world and communicate with each other.

Our spirits do not lose all of their abilities however, we still retain our intuition, our gut feelings and our ability to visualise and think. Being physical does lessen the strength of these abilities though and in order to keep them strong we must use them. It is the inner spirit that gives the physical body it’s life force, it’s animation and without it, the physical body couldn’t function.

Really, the person wishing to develop their psychic abilities and get to know the spirit world should really get to know their own spirit first. Your inner spirit is the true spiritual you, that spark of eternity deep within and you can get to know them and communicate with them. The best way of doing this is through meditation. If you communicate with your inner spirit, it will talk back to you, you have only to be open to it’s existence and listen. Building a firm and trusting relationship with your own inner spirit will help you to realise that we are all part of the spirit world, each one of us, whether physically alive or passed.

This inner spirit is what gives us our aura. It is the energy of the inner spirit and is a visual guide to the state of your relationship with it. When you hear that ‘little voice’ telling you not to do something, or that you’ve left the gas on, it’s your inner spirit that is trying to reach you. You can have a conversation with your inner spirit. Try this:

Sit down comfortably in front of a full length mirror and look at your reflection. Think of your reflection as your inner spirit. Now talk to it, tell it you wish to listen to it. Ask it a question and listen within your mind for the answer. It will be subtle and feel like one of your own stray thoughts but it will be without emotion.

Once you get to realise and accept that you are a spirit too, it helps us to understand and accept the way spirits interact with us, by thoughts, feelings and visual imagery.

MEDITATION

Meditation is something everyone has heard about, but most people don’t know a lot about. People still think meditation is sitting cross legged and saying “om” for hours on end! You can do that of course, if you wish to but meditation is so much more than that and there are numerous techniques available. From obscure eastern practices to much more up to date and easy ways to get into the meditative state of mind. Whichever you choose, meditation is essential in anyone’s endeavours to further their psychic abilities.

Put simply, what meditation does is slow down your brain waves to a frequency closer to those of when you are sleeping. This enables you shut out the everyday thoughts that cloud your mind and go deeper into yourself. This will not only strengthen your link to your own inner spirit, but will enhance your intuition and your ability to communicate with your guides and spirit in general. It is a discipline that needs practice though and many people give up because they realise how difficult it can be to concentrate on only one thing and not let any thoughts intrude.

Try this: Sit comfortably in an upright chair and close your eyes. Breathe deeply but comfortable for a couple of minutes to relax the body and mind. Now, picture a rose in front of you. Focus your entire concentration on this rose and nothing else. When thoughts of dinner or TV intrude just bring your focus back to the rose. After 5 minutes, come back and do something else. How long did you last before thoughts crept in? It’s not easy at first but it does get much easier with constant practice. You can get to the stage of being able to just ‘switch off’ your daily mind and ‘switch on’ your meditative mind.

There are other forms of meditation, many others and some involve movement. Yoga and Tai Chi for instance both have a meditative spiritual aspect to them. There is also what is known as the walking meditation. This is easy and lovely to do. You simply take a walk somewhere peaceful and quiet. Along a deserted beach or through a woodland. Simply walk along, not too fast and keep up a steady walking rhythm. Don’t actively think about anything but concentrate on the rhythm of your walking, listen to the sounds, feel the breeze and smell the scents. This is a wonderful way of slowly easing yourself into meditation and of getting yourself used to the meditative way of mind. You could also use drum beats or simply gazing at a candle flame, whatever works for you to enable you to concentrate and focus on one thing only.

You can also join a meditation circle if you wish to do it with others. These are run by the spiritualist church. If you fancy one of the eastern meditative practices there are many to choose from. There are hundreds of sites on the internet.

Whichever form of meditation suits you, it is essential and with regular practice will help you develop your psychic abilities.