Preparation of Psychic Powers
Setting Goals
Types of Abilities
"Will you teach me psychic abilities?" "Sure, which ones do you want to learn?" "I don't know. What is there?"
Many of my conversations with beginning students start like this. They know they want to learn, but they aren't sure where to start or what interests them. Psychic abilities are quite varied, but fit into two basic categories, perceptive and alteration.
Perceptive
The most common type of psychic ability is perception of information. Empathy, telepathy, precognition, remote viewing, aura sight, seeing ghosts, knowing about illness or injury before it happens, reading cards, telling fortunes, recognizing disease, perceiving energy, and predicting dice rolls are all perceptive abilities. Many people have experienced these abilities at least once, but may not talk about them for fear of ridicule.
Alteration
The other type of ability is alteration: abilities that directly cause a change in the world. Telekinesis, levitation, healing, telepathic commands, empathic projection, teleportation, helping or hurting a plant's or animal's growth, and directing energy are alteration or projection abilities. Fewer people experience these, but the abilities are still somewhat common.
Choosing a Skill
Choosing a skill to learn is the first step in developing psychic abilities. Your interest, dedication, and belief will greatly affect the first few abilities you practice. Choose something interesting but not too difficult. You can skip ahead if you want, but it will be more difficult.
Patience Worksheet
What kinds of results do you want?
How long are you willing to wait for those results?
Look through the table of contents. What skill do you want to learn first? Why?
As you look at your plans, how do you feel? Are you excited about the skill you're going to learn? If you aren't excited, you may have trouble staying focused. Choose what interests you. What would be most fun and exciting to learn?
Dedication
You've decided which skills interest you. You've determined how patient you will be while learning them. You've considered whether to seek a teacher. Summarize your decisions with the worksheet below.
Summary Worksheet
Why do you want to learn psi?
What skills are you going to start with?
How long will you practice? I promise to spend ________ practicing a skill before I quit.
Any time in the future that you feel like quitting, or get discouraged, come back and reread this. Maybe your reason for learning abilities will change. Maybe your patience isn't as good as you thought. Maybe you will need more help from other people. Changing your mind is fine. Over time, you'll learn more about yourself. This worksheet may provide the reminder you need to stay motivated through the tough spots.
Choosing a Teacher
Teacher/Student Interactions
This section investigates your learning personality. If you choose to work with a teacher, these things are important for the teacher to know. If you are working alone, you should still understand them so you can work past any difficulties.
Personality Worksheet
How easily frustrated are you?
How much guidance do you want?
How much do you want to control what you do?
What do you want from a teacher or book?
Learning from a Teacher
A teacher can help starting certain abilities and increasing your control of them. With patience, you can learn the abilities even without a teacher. Most practicing will happen at home without teacher supervision.
Students are responsible for practicing, recognizing their own styles and feelings, and choosing which abilities to develop. The teacher may suggest that you improve certain abilities before learning others, because the basic skills generally need to come before the more complex ones.
Some expectations of teacher/student relations are reasonably normal. Others are unreasonable, because they require the teacher to do the impossible, or because they are an unnecessary drain on the teacher's time. The lists below explain some common expectations and which are acceptable.
Reasonable Expectations
Unreasonable Expectations
Atmosphere
Effects of Fear
Seances, fortune tellers, and ouiji boards brings to mind dark rooms, candlelight, and a distinctly spooky mood. Telling ghost stories around a campfire brings up similar feelings. You may feel scared, excited, or paranoid after a few such stories. You may feel the world is magical and different for a few minutes.
Atmosphere and mood contribute to the experience. They direct your feelings and perceptions in a particular way, to enhance the story. A spooky mood may help or harm, depending on your intentions. Watch how mood affects your psychic perceptions, and learn how to use it to help get the results you want.
When you are scared, you spook easily, jumping at the slightest sounds. Your heart races and everything that moves seems threatening. This is a normal reaction; it kept us alive centuries ago in the wilderness. It still helps us now to react to balls flying at us.
However, your perceptions are sometimes inaccurate when you are scared. You perceive and react quickly, but your perceptions may not be correct. That creak wasn't the sound of an intruder; it was the house settling. That shadow wasn't a bat in the house; it was only a curtain flapping in front of a fan. The movement in the corner of your eye was your own reflection in a mirror. Because you are scared, the things you perceive will tend to be scary.
For accuracy and concentration, you may want to avoid spooky settings when trying to use psychic abilities. You'll have enough doubts, fears, and new experiences to deal with. Once you are more experienced, you can use a spooky mood if you enjoy it. For now, if you get scared, your psychic abilities may perceive scary things. If you stay relaxed, you will tend to perceive more objectively.
Mood as a Tool
Some moods are useful tools to enhance your psychic practice sessions. A relaxed, contemplative, quiet mood works best to begin with. It should feel slightly dreamy, or romantic like a plush room with candlelight. It will take you away from your daily worries. It will let you focus more completely on what you are practicing. Feeling a bit new and strange is okay; it'll help you focus as long as it doesn't worry you.
Create a Mood
Choose a mood to create, and think about how to best create it for yourself. Do you want candles or dim lighting? Do you want a soothing bath first? Do you want special music? Will it be energetic and playful, or quiet and soothing? Choose a time when you can be alone for an hour, and decorate a room for your mood. Set up lighting, music, a fan, soft blankets, a bed sheet tent, or anything that will help the mood. Spend at least half an hour relaxing in it. Learn how it feels to be totally immersed in that mood. Let the world fall away, daydream, and enjoy.
Practice setting up moods for yourself before you practice any psychic abilities in them. They will help you feel secure and stable while you practice. If you feel best in the middle of a sunny field in July, the field is as good a place to relax as any other. Lighting level only matters in how relaxed you feel. Having practiced with various moods will help you be familiar with various states of relaxation. Familiarity helps you be comfortable and more confident, and confidence improves your ability to learn.
Some moods to consider experimenting with are quiet, deep, trance-link, fluffy, light-headed, relaxed, contemplative, inquisitive, hypnotic, ritualistic, and playful. All of these can be used with other people involved, also. Cooperative, interested people will make the mood much more intense, if they are respectful rather than intrusive.
Drugs
Recreational drugs are sometimes used to set a particular mood. They do not help people gain controlled use of psychic abilities, however. If they do open the abilities at all, they do so wildly and without giving the person time to learn proper control. They can cause terrifying experiences, without any of the long-term practice needed to understand what's going on.
If you're already using such drugs, nothing I say will make a difference. However, don't start using them as a shortcut to psychic abilities. It would be like jumping off a cliff instead of climbing down the rope; you might get to the bottom, but it wouldn't necessarily be comfortable. Anyone can learn these abilities, completely safely, in only a few months. It's not worth risking your health for a shortcut that may not even give you the experiences.
Your Strong Sense
Visual/Audio/Touch/Intuition/Empathy
Everyone prefers one sense out of sight, hearing, touch/feeling/emotion, and intuition. When you receive information psychically, your perceive it through your favorite sense.
If you are a visual person, you will receive mostly images. If you understand more easily through hearing, you will hear voices or words telling you the information. If you learn more through touch, you will feel yourself in the situation. You may also be an intuitive person who simply knows the information without it taking any specific form.
Regardless of your strength, you will probably receive some information in every form, so be open to all of it. You will receive information best when you open all psychic senses.
Recognizing Each
Visual people prefer a variety of sights and colors. They prefer pictures full of meaning, written directions and maps rather than verbal instructions. Visual people say "show me" rather than "tell me." They are able to imagine vivid pictures and scenes. They may imagine colors and pictures when listening to music. They also read books by picturing scenes more than by hearing the words in their heads.
Audio people are drawn to a variety of sounds. They consider music and speech important. An audio person asks to be "told" directions and may spend much time on the telephone. They can get more information from listening to someone talk than from reading about a topic. If they do read, they may whisper or hear the words in their heads as they read.
Touch people are drawn to textures, crafts, and other people. They enjoy working with their hands and are often very good at it. They may learn massage techniques or sports early in life. When reading, they may follow the line with a finger to keep their place. They care about temperature and textures. When they shop for clothes, they care most about the feeling of the cloth.
Emotional/empathic people do something because it feels right emotionally. They are able to sympathize very well with friends in any emotional situation. Friends who are not feeling well may depress them. Likewise, if they have friends who are feeling good, they will tend to feel good also. They understand others' situations by feeling those emotions themselves. Some emotional people are also touch people.
Intuitive people often act on impulse, doing something because they know it is right. Intuitive people know unquestionably that their choices are right, but may not be able to explain why. Their information appears as sudden inspiration, but it doesn't last long. They enjoy games of anticipation, because they have just enough knowledge of what is coming to do well in them.
Regarding This Book
This book uses "picture" and "visualize," visual words, to describe imagination. If you are not a visual person, use mostly your own sense. Also, deeply involve as many senses as you can, so that the images are complete. That way if some of the information gets lost, there is still information left.
Learning Process
Overall Process
Learning any ability is a step by step process. Choose a skill, try it once, repeat until you are doing it properly, and then practice, practice, practice.
Practicing helps you remember how the skill feels. If you practice riding a bicycle, you learn how it feels to pedal, where your feet go, how to steer, and how to stop. Bicycling feels unfamiliar the first time, but after you do it many times, it gets easier. After a few weeks, you can get on a bike and ride down the road without thinking about how to steer.
Psychic abilities improve with practice just the same. You may feel awkward at first, paying attention to many details while you practice. With time, they will get easier. Learning a psychic ability involves remembering how it feels to use it. Once you know how it feels, you create that same feeling later to use the ability again.
Make it Happen
The first step of learning a new psychic ability is the hardest: making it happen once. To remember what it feels like to use the ability, you have to use it once. Most abilities will occur instinctively in day to day life. You just have to watch for them, and notice when they happen.
Pay attention to subtle thoughts and gut feelings. If you feel you should take a different route to work or school, take it, even if you aren't sure why. If you get a vision of a speeding car as you near an intersection, wait a moment to see if one passes by. When you notice yourself worrying about someone, give him or her a phone call and ask how things are going. Respond to the intuitive thoughts you have. This encourages them to happen more often and encourages you to notice them sooner.
Read about the abilities you want to learn. Gather information on how they work. Notice when they happen, who uses them, and what effects they cause. Read experimental studies of them, especially any with successful results. Daydream about using them, and consider ways to practice them every day. What fun things would you use them for? Thinking about using them will encourage your subconscious abilities to show up more often.
As you think about the abilities and watch for them, you will begin to notice them occurring throughout your normal daily life. When they happen, notice your mood, surroundings, thoughts, feelings, and activities. Remember exactly how you felt just before they happened.
On and Off
After you have an ability occurring "randomly" throughout the day, you will want to learn more control. Start out by trying to make it happen on cue. Recall how you feel just before an ability happens. Try to feel exactly the same again. Don't try too hard; if you were relaxed the first time, you need to stay relaxed and calm again.
Learn to turn the ability on and off like a light switch. You may not yet be able to control it when it's on. Just practice turning it on and off. Become open to it happening, ready to receive intuition, or whatever the ability requires. The important part is being able to remember and cause the same feelings and thoughts. When you can turn on the ability a few times each week, without too much hard work, you're ready to learn more control.
Direct Toward Goals
You've found an ability, and you can turn it on and off. Now, you want to make it useful—direct it toward a particular goal. This can mean receiving psychic perceptions, causing something to occur, or whatever. Choose the goal you want. What is this ability to be used for? Just as you thought about the ability to turn it on and off, now think about and focus playfully on your goal. What do you want to have happen?
Keep the same feelings you needed to turn on the ability. Stay in the same mood and same thoughts. Gently direct your thoughts to the goal. Visualize it as strongly as you can. Feel it, see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, taste it. Involve all of your senses, and focus on it. If you feel your mood change, guide it back to keeping the ability turned on.
If you don't get results after a few minutes, stop, relax, and try again later. Results may not happen until you try many times. Sometimes you may find that as soon as you quit trying, it works. This means you were working too hard at it the first time. Stay relaxed and playful. If you aren't having fun, you aren't going to make progress!
Practice
Life is exciting--you made the ability work! You've gotten noticeable results once or twice, and you want more. Keep trying the same way you have been. Notice what works and what doesn't work. Where are your inaccuracies? Are some of your perceptions symbolic, instead of realistic? Do you consistently mistake a telephone pole for a pencil? How do you feel about the things you get right or wrong? You will probably feel some differences in your incorrect perceptions. Aim for what feels right, and remember carefully how it feels.
Don't judge your results while you are still trying to receive. This will usually cause incorrect results. Receive everything and, if necessary, write it down so you don't forget. Stay open to all the perceptions, no matter how strange they seem, until you are fully done (usually 2-10 minutes). Don't let yourself give up early; stay confident and enthusiastic, even if you think all of it is wrong. You may be surprised at the results.
Keep a journal of your perceptions. Any time you have a chance to confirm or disprove something you received, write it in. You'll learn more from your mistakes than from your successes. Your mistakes show you what to improve and help you learn how to do it. With practice, you may be able to receive details with about half or a little more of the details being totally correct. Sometimes they may all be completely correct.
Practice, practice, practice. Stay relaxed and have fun; find games to practice with daily. Use the skills every time you get a chance. If you can find an interested friend, talk about your experiences. No matter what, don't give up! I took nearly 20 years to learn one particular skill but I did eventually get it. Most skills will only take a few weeks or months, but even if they take longer, just keep trying. Practice and play!