Intuitive readings: I’ve noticed that different people have very different gifts and experiences of what it is like to tune in intuitively. Some people receive symbols, some hear and see their guides when they do intuitive readings. I think it may be useful for others if I share some of my experiences. Some of which you may recognise, and some of which may be very different to your experience of reality and of healing and intuitive work.
For me, doing intuitive readings is a little like watching a movie. Not because I see a whole drama but because my feelings are so strong. I am not sure what watching a movie is like for other people, but for me it is quite overwhelming. I really feel so much, so strongly, even quite mild movies and TV can feel like too much to handle. Sometimes readings can feel the same way for me – I need to go for a long walk in the sun, or sing, or pray to process what comes up sometimes. Or I can get off balance, tired, drained and entangled.
When I am working with an actual person in front of me, I notice that sometimes we feel things in the same parts of our bodies, such as in our solar plexus, hearts or throats.
At other times, in different places. I’ll feel the sensation of the emotional charge in my heart. My client will feel it in their bellies or throats etc. But the emotion is usually the same.
When the emotion is different during some intuitive readings, say I am feeling grief and the client is feeling anger, then I notice that often, the client will process the anger and then allow themselves to own their grief. Whereupon the feeling immediately lifts from me. So I feel the feelings as a sensory guide to what we need to do and what we are working with, as well as simply resonating in sympathy with my client.
There is also an interesting synaesthetic aspect to intuitive readings. I feel the emotions, and they are sometimes connected with colours, shapes and a tactile sense of dimension and weight and flavour, and also with sound – occasionally concepts in words but not very often. So I will say to someone that their grief feels sour and stagnant like water that has not flowed for a long time, and is all dull and dirty. So it is contaminated with what? Is that resentment? Helplessness? Shame? I can usually feel which chakra or subtle body the feeling is in and sometimes body organs and systems.
So for me I see our journey as one of moving from unpleasant feelings to pleasant ones. To move from a feeling of dissonance and stuckess to harmony and free-flowing expansive energy. To shift the sour into sweet, and the feeling of contamination into one of cleanliness and purity.
It is quite Disney in a way – it has that more real than reality feeling, as if you can really see and hear the emotional and spiritual qualities of a person’s being.
You know how in Disney the villains are in the dark grey to black scale? And always a mix of curves and spikes, with gloomy diminished 7s in the scale, and the hero’s are pure light colours, major/minor scale, with clear beautiful faces and harmonious proportions. It feels like that in a way.
When you are doing intuitive readings, the difference is that you don’t see so much villainy in this realm of perception as you see stagnant anger, fear, entrapment. So even people who are acting very maliciously, when perceived with intuition, are in some sense, victims of a kind of personal insanity.
So for example, a very violent person, who did terrible things to people and animals, when you work with him energetically, is a tragic victim of his own mental illness, continuously injuring himself like a snake biting a razor blade.
To work with him, you have to be ready to hold and support excruciating pain, and honour, from that dreadful reality, his great courage and stubbornness in a terrible personal universe. You also have to do everything in your power to minimise the harm that he does. But once you have felt his energy clearly, you have deep compassion and respect for someone that repeatedly does the most awful harm. That doesn’t mean you want to be around the person, simply that you see their true beauty.
In fact, in my opinion, if you don’t feel sincere and heartfelt compassion for the “villains” that you come across, it tells you that you have failed to perceive someone clearly enough. It’s an indicator that you have your own blockages and fears that are holding you in a coldness of being. Even the tragic, broken psychopaths… They live in a coldness of affect in which the only colours are dirty greys and blood red.
Compassion follows empathy and understanding like a cart after a horse.
Empathy and understanding follow naturally from clear and accurate perception of what it is like to be another person.
And the energy of a person who is filled with goodwill, with meaning that comes from beyond themselves, with kindness and love and compassion, is simply breathtakingly beautiful, when you connect with their energy field and feel it clearly.
The body and energy field are a spatial map of meaning, from head to foot, inside, through and to the outside. For learning this system, the greats are Caroline Myss Anatomy of the Spirit and Barbara Anne Brennan Hands of Light. And Ido find that my experiences match, very much, their accounts of what is going on. Maybe because I love their work sooo much!
So when you start a reading, you first get grounded and connected with heaven, so that you are vibrating in harmony with the earth, Divine light and love, and your own heart. Or that is how I like to do it, anyway.
I move my awareness from my face down into my heart, which is where the Tibetans think of the mind as being present, not like the head for us westerners. (Thank you Peter von Maltitz for teaching me this), and put up protection for both me and my client. I also call on our Spirit guides for help and invite other light beings to help if they feel called to do so.
From this place of balance and resilience (so I don’t get bowled over by the experience and lose my centre), I connect with my client’s energy field by putting my hands into the outer layer of her energy body, about 30 centimetres out from the person. This is the emotional body.
Sometimes, as you do this, healing immediately starts to flow, before I have even perceived anything consciously.
Sometimes my hands feel nothing at all, because the emotional body is collapsed or displaced.
Sometimes the person has a beautiful bright emotional body that is much larger and brighter than most.
And often, I start feeling emotions as if they are my own. Anxiety or exhaustion and overwhelm. At this point, I need to check in with myself. Am I anxious or exhausted???? Because feelings often dictate our thoughts, it can be tricky to discern. How did I feel a minute ago before I connected with the client? When I disconnect my hands, does the feeling also disappear – this is the sure tell – you can switch the feeling on and off a few times by connecting and disconnecting to the client’s energy field.
This is the first impression stage. Often at this point during the intuitive readings, you are connecting with a person’s defences or shadow projections of themselves too. For example, a client who feels like everyone dislikes her may at first connection, trigger those feelings in you too. Even though the truth is that you personally do like her as a person, this strange irrational dislike wells up in you as you connect with her emotional body.
So I often put negative feelings aside as I initially connect and get ready to feel at a deeper level to find out what is really going on.
When I am doing intuitive readings, I like to start scanning from the crown chakra, because in a way, this connects a person to their true nature and essence as Divine Spirit. I am also curious to know if my person has a clear connection with God. There may be trust issues, problems with conflict with organised religion or with perceptions of what God is, or issues of feeling unworthy or unloved/abandoned.
When the crown chakra is in balance and well, light cascades down over and through the person from above, protecting, healing, cleansing and uplifting them. This is the feeling of the song Amazing Grace. Sometimes it feels like water, and sometime it feels like light. There may be a perfume feeling or aroma, and a feeling of being blessed. When the crown chakra is working well, this protects people from negative external influences and it also enable empaths, who are often universal receivers, to manage their tendency to resonate with everyone around them like a human tuning fork.
Some people who have been traumatised by life spend too much time with their crown chakras wide open, but half their energy body up above the physical body, as if they only need to be half-incarnated in this lifetime. Such people are often very spiritual and otherworldly. And they may struggle to be present in our everyday reality.
People who have a closed crown chakra live in a diminished world filled with greys and walls and feeling a little like the inmate of a planet-wide prison. They are often atheists (or people who have walled off God from their lives for whatever reason.
This does not mean that such a person is not good hearted or moral. It simply means that they are not receiving nourishment and love through the crown chakra, and they are not in close contact with their own souls at the time of the reading. They may feel deeply depressed or despairing. Or soldiering grimly on through life.
Occasionally I will feel a dark cloud or seal over the crown chakra. Sometimes this is a curse that has blocked the person from themselves and from Source. Sometimes it is a protection that they themselves have put up. Often out of feelings of unworthiness or mistrust. Or feelings of abandonment and of being alone in a cold dead universe.
“I am not real.”
“We all die alone.”
“I don’t want to exist.”
“Leave me alone.”
All of these blockages are untruths that get reflected back into the person’s experience of reality like a mirror, so that the whole world appears to be disconnected. People with these kinds of blockages may suffer from major depression.
However every state of imbalance is also a learning opportunity. People who have blocked crown chakras are often very moral, good and kind. And often self-identify as atheists. This is common sense because they are not able to experience the presence of the Divine in their consciousness, because they are split off, and experiencing the delusion of separation in which every day reality appears real and the world of the spirit appears to be an illusion – the opposite is the experience of someone whose crown chakra is open, activated and in alignment.
Such a common state of being can hardly be seen as an imbalance or blockage, but perhaps simply a state of equilibrium at a particular energetic resonance. And I suppose that at some level there must be a higher purpose at work for the experience. Even though it can be quite painful and hard for the people who live in this version of reality.
Perhaps it is part of the great forgetting that we all agree to when we are born into these physical bodies. And these brave people have chosen to develop real valour, by living in a colder, harsher world than people whose lives are driven by faith and a sense of connection with the Divine.