Second Sight (39 page)

When you're ready you can go into more detail. Once again, you begin by formulating a very specific question. Where is your friend right now? What's she wearing? What's she thinking? Is she alone or are there other people there? Specifically break down every element. Ask each question separately and allow sufficient time for the answers to unfold. You may pick up only snatches of scenes, solitary images—or maybe you'll even watch an entire scenario play out. Release any previous expectations; let yourself be surprised. Clairvoyance can be like seeing for the very first time. There's something sacred about it, tuning in so closely to another human being or event that you can actually merge with that experience.

Clairvoyant impressions often come in snapshot-like flashes, the images, smells, tastes, sounds, and textures vivid but fleeting. They're typically presented to you in a series rather than as any single, fully formed picture. For example, if you're tuning in to a friend's present location you may first see the stunning profile of a towering snow-capped peak, then a second scene below it of a single-story rustic log cabin perched above a dry creekbed. But you must wait for the third image to reveal your friend, sitting outside knitting in an antique willow rocking chair, alone on the front porch. These impressions may be elegantly detailed and fit together like intricate pieces of a puzzle that might not make sense right away. You may feel a sense of urgency about them, see an unusually striking sight, have a palpable sensation. Listen to the nuances of your reactions, noticing when something feels “off,” “on,” or unusual. Jot down all your impressions. Otherwise they too easily fade.

When the reading is finished, call your friend as soon as possible to check out these impressions with her. This gives you direct feedback about your accuracy. When you make mistakes, don't be discouraged. This is the way you grow. The mistakes I've made over the years have been just as valuable to me as my “hits.” If I'm off about something, I try to figure out why. So many times I've overlooked or discounted images because they seemed meaningless at the moment, only to discover how correct they were later. From this I've learned that it's vital to remain neutral, to report everything and not overanalyze or make arbitrary judgments about what I see. Feedback is central to developing as a psychic. It can validate our perceptions and allow clairvoyance to mature.

The process I've described—tuning in, giving yourself permission to go wild and allow your impressions to take form, no matter how outrageous, then getting feedback on your reading—is the basic formula for refining clairvoyance. Use it to illuminate any circumstance that is confusing to you. Clairvoyance is a gift to be treated respectfully. With practice, it can come to feel so second nature to you that it naturally intermingles with all aspects of your life.

A patient of mine, Dana, was an energetic and ambitious production assistant at a major film company in Hollywood. Lately, though, she was beginning to wonder if she was losing her mind. At work, nothing she did seemed right. Her boss, an executive producer, snapped at her constantly and, it seemed, for no apparent reason. He had always been a joy to work for, but recently something had changed. Dana was afraid that she was one step away from being fired. On the surface, none of this made sense. Since Dana was good at her job, and had never had problems with her boss before, I advised her to look at the situation clairvoyantly.

Dana was no psychic novice. For the past year, as part of psychotherapy, I had helped her develop her clairvoyant skills. By now she felt comfortable doing readings on her own. I suggested that she set aside a half hour to focus on her boss. “Even if you get all the information you need in the first few minutes,” I said, “it's a good idea to allow for more than enough open-ended time.” Sitting in her favorite brown suede armchair in the den while her three-year-old daughter was away at preschool, she meditated quietly and began to tune in to her boss's name. Trusting that whatever impressions she received would be related to her answer, she knew not to interpret them until she was done.

Within minutes, she noticed an annoying pressure in her forehead, which gradually built until her head felt as if it would explode. The throbbing was relentless. Dana wasn't prone to headaches, and never appreciated how excruciating one could be. But she went with the pain, didn't succumb to the temptation to open her eyes and cut the reading short. Inwardly she stayed focused and asked, “How is this headache related to my boss?” Fot a while nothing came. Then suddenly she saw a single, sharp image of him looking dreadfully ill. He was at the drinking fountain right outside his office. He leaned over, swallowed a tiny red pill. At once the situation become clear. It had never occurred to Dana before that her boss might be sick, that this could explain his erratic behavior.

With a little bit of asking around at work, Dana found out that she'd been right. Her boss, she learned from a co-worker, had been suffering from horrible headaches for months. Only recently had he broken down and seen a doctor. The diagnosis was high blood pressure, for which he was now taking medication. With this information, the elements of Dana's reading now came together: the pill, the headache, the sense that he wasn't well. This put a whole new slant on things. Dana decided not to take his moods personally and to see what happened when he felt better. Her strategy paid off. Not long after, he visibly brightened, stopped lashing out at her, and became the easygoing guy he'd been before.

Clairvoyance, as a discipline, can be learned, but at times it may also come to your aid when you least expect it. The more pressing the problem you're trying to solve, the more passionately you care about it, the more readily the psychic will be engaged. When you are wide awake all night long wrestling with a complicated decision, you can unconsciously send out a distress signal and elicit a psychic response. Just as you're convinced that you've reached a dead end, the answer spontaneously comes.

A colleague of mine, a well-respected pediatrician who had no belief in the psychic, jokingly mentioned to me what he described as a “daydream.” He was sitting in the doctors' dining room at Cedars-Sinai eating lunch, totally absorbed in a newspaper article about President Clinton's plans to reduce the deficit. In a brief lapse that couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds, he inexplicably pictured Clinton telling him that now was the perfect time to refinance his house. The truth of the matter was, he had felt pressured about money for quite a while. For over six months he'd been relentlessly scouring the local banks for the right loan, with no success. He had exhausted all potential lenders and was about to give up—until he was startled by this unsolicited message.

The whole thing seemed absurd to him. Even if he had believed in the psychic—which he didn't—of all the messages to come through, why this one? It was so mundane. But what if it were true? He really didn't think his daydream would pan out; it was such a long shot, yet he couldn't resist the urge to check on it. “What do I have to lose?” he grumbled, making one last call to his bank. As it happened, on that very day, a new type of loan had become available, perfectly suited to his financial needs. When I gently prodded him, asking, “Do you have faith in the psychic now?” he just shrugged.

“It was a lucky guess. That's all.” He smiled at me as if we shared a forbidden secret. He wouldn't admit it, but I knew he had been affected by the chain of events, that something inside him had shifted.

Sometimes, however, there are situations when more is at stake than a home loan. One Saturday afternoon, a patient's mother made an emergency call to me, panicked with an overwhelming feeling that her nineteen-year-old daughter Katie was in trouble. She'd left a number of messages on her answering machine, but Katie hadn't returned her calls. Lately Katie had seemed depressed, disturbingly distant, but refused to talk about it. Her mother didn't want to intrude on her life, but she was consumed with worry. “What should I do?” she asked. “Is it okay to drive over to Katie's apartment?” I knew what a hard time Katie had been having, was concerned about her myself. Still, my allegiance was to my patient, protecting her confidentiality, not violating a trust. But sensing the truth of her mother's instincts, knowing how crucial it was to follow such feelings, without revealing any specifics I simply encouraged her to believe in her hunch and go.

When Katie's mother rang the doorbell and got no answer, she let herself in with her own set of keys. At first it looked as if nobody were home. Then she spotted her daughter collapsed on the bed unconscious, an empty container of sleeping pills and a half-finished bottle of vodka beside her. As she took in this horrific sight, her own heart nearly stopped. Had Katie not been rushed to the hospital, there's a good chance that she would have died.

Clairvoyance can serve as a basic survival mechanism by sending out a series of red alerts. I have heard many stories of parents who instinctively knew when their children were sick or in need, although separated by thousands of miles. Clairvoyance is at its peak when you love someone; you're bound to them by an invisible psychic web. If something is wrong you can sense it. This connection enlivens clairvoyance, enables you to receive signals much like a radio tower. The more open you are, the subtler the signals you're able to detect, the stronger your wherewithal to avert potentially dangerous circumstances.

For every major decision in my life, I bring to beat a combination of logic and clairvoyance. They complement each other beautifully. If I'm about to take on a new project, explore a different direction in my career, make an investment, plan a vacation, or enter into an intimate relationship, I try to look at what I may take on from every conceivable angle. The facts of any situation are important to me, but if they don't check out clairvoyantly, no matter how alluring the proposition I will invariably turn it down.

For readings to be dependable, I must remain neutral, but this isn't always easy. If I am too emotionally involved with the person or situation I'm focusing on, it's nearly impossible to set my feelings aside. Whenever I want something badly or am overly invested in the outcome, I can't stay detached enough to get an accurate take on it. My own desires and expectations muddy the picture. There's no way that I am going to be able to see clearly.

One night I got into a horrendous argument with my boyfriend. Out of nowhere, it just blew up in our faces. He got incensed about some remark I'd made but was too upset to talk about it. I was left in the dark, and the more I pursued the subject the angrier he became. Before I knew it he had grabbed his denim jacket and stormed out the door. Well, I felt as if I had committed the crime of the century, but had no idea what it was. Worse, there's nothing more maddening to me than being shut out. Unfortunately, I couldn't do much about it at that moment, so I attempted to tune in to the cause of his anger clairvoyantly. Good luck! How could I have expected to be neutral about such a volatile event? I was far too angry and hurt even to attempt to do a reading. It was ridiculous. I couldn't get enough distance from my own feelings even to begin to sense his.

To use clairvoyance you must recognize your capabilities and limitations. Although clairvoyance is not a magic bullet or an infallible instrument, it does offer you a more penetrating vision, a chance to make smarter choices, to respond more sensitively to others. Whether you study with a skilled teacher or begin to train yourself, the spirit with which this is undertaken must always be for the purpose of love: living it, communicating it, spreading it around. Then perhaps, with this knowledge, you can pause and take a deeper breath, find true solace in the wisdom you have gained.

PSYCHIC EMPATHY

Have you ever found yourself chatting with someone at a party who seems perfectly nice, and then you suddenly notice that your energy has been drained? How about that time you went to a light movie feeling fine and left sullen and depressed? In each case, there's a good chance that you were picking up the moods of the people just a few feet away. Or perhaps there have been times when the guy who sits next to you at work is in such a sparkling mood that his exuberance is contagious. You feel incredibly happy but wonder why. These are instances of psychic empathy, which many of us have, often without realizing it.

Empathy comes naturally when you're sensitive to somebody else's emotions or ideas. A good friend gets married and you celebrate her happiness. A business associate loses his job after his company goes bankrupt, and you too are shaken up. Your sister is diagnosed with cancer and you feel her fear and pain. When you respond to another person with a generosity of spirit, it's a sign that you're an open-hearted loving human being who truly cares.

Psychic empathy, however, goes farther. It's the capacity to merge with someone else and, for a moment, see the world through their eyes, to sense the world through their feelings. Psychic empaths are so uncannily attuned that they can feel what's going on inside others both emotionally and physically as if it were happening to them. If you're such a person it may be impossible for you to distinguish these sensations from your own, leaving you doubting yourself.

Not limited by the same boundaries as other people, empaths all too often feel more than they ever bargained for. Also, since empathy can become automatic, ingrained in your habits, you may not appreciate its impact on your life. Of all the psychic phenomena, it may be the most overlooked and misunderstood. Frequently confusing and disorienting when unidentified, empathy can become a gift once you discover how to adapt to it. Unfortunately, because empaths suffer from so many symptoms other than their own, they're too easily written off as hypochondriacs by physicians who are puzzled by their complaints.

Murray, a good example of such an empath, doesn't date. He can't. In the sixth grade, without realizing what it was, he experienced psychic empathy for the first time. In each of his classes, he was assigned a seat next to Laura because their last names started with the same letter of the alphabet. Laura suffered from terrible stomachaches. So did Murray, but only if he was around her. When he reported these stomachaches to his parents, they sent him to a pediatrician for a medical checkup. Nothing was found. His parents and teachers didn't know what to make of his complaints. It took Murray to figure it out. Once, when Laura was absent for over a week, Murray noticed that his stomach felt fine. With exceptional insight for a boy his age, he concluded that his symptoms somehow must have been related to her. As an experiment, he asked his teacher to change his seat—and from that day on the stomachaches never returned. But though Murray was sharp enough to realize that Laura's distress was influencing him, he never did solve his more essential problem: how to use his empathy in a positive way without being overcome by other people's feelings. Since empathic symptoms are most exaggerated around their source, the more intimate Murray is with someone, the more overwhelmed he gets. This makes dating next to impossible.