Inward Journey

In order to initiate psychic development, you need to tell your subconscious mind that you intend to be psychic. The best way to communicate this intention to the subconscious mind is through gentle repetitive suggestions.

The four necessary decisions you need to make and convey to your subconscious mind are that:

* you are open to psychic guidance,

* you will expect psychic guidance,

* you will trust psychic guidance, and

* you will act on psychic guidance.

Being Open to Psychic Guidance

The first intention you must establish is, "I am open to my intuition". This sets up your frame of mind to be receptive. Intuition and psychic energy are subtle. You need to create a mind-set that allows for these subtle influences to enter your field of awareness. Ask yourself: Am I open to psychic feelings? Am I comfortable thinking of myself as psychic? Am I mentally flexible enough for psychic energy to influence my behaviour? An attitude of openness is the beginning of psychic development.

Psychic energy and psychic feelings are repressed by a closed mind. If you are reading this, you are probably interested in psychic ability, but are you truly open to it occurring for you?

It is important to see yourself as a naturally intuitive receiver of psychic guidance. The truth is, you are presently being psychically influenced all the time. It happens when you are around strong-minded people. It happens when you think about someone, only to have them call the same day. It happens when you spontaneously change your plans for no reason and chance upon a very important discovery by doing so. It happens with every "coincidence" you experience. If you reflect on your own life, you may recall many events that were psychic, that you may have not acknowledged consciously. Therefore, you can see how being open to psychic energy is positioning your mind to allow you to acknowledge psychic energy when it does occur, rather than dismissing or minimizing its significance, as you may have done up until now.

Being open to your psychic ability is the first step on the psychic pathway. It is the beginning of what will make your experience different from that of the close-minded person. It is the shift that will allow your life to be assisted by psychic ability and by the divine assistance of angels, guides, teachers, and God.

Expecting Psychic Guidance

The second step is even more bold, more intentional, than the first. Once you are open to psychic guidance, you must move on to expect it! This may seem presumptuous to the old conditioning of your mind, but if you realize that your soul is living in a psychic receiver, the instrument called your body, it makes perfect sense that you should expect psychic communication. You are designed to receive this communication. It's natural.

Imagine for a moment that your body is like a radio receiver. It is designed to pick up and relay psychic vibrations, just as a radio is designed to receive and relay sound vibrations. Being open to psychic ability is like turning on the radio receiver. Expecting psychic communication is like turning the dial, the tuner, to a clear band of communication with your Higher Self.

The dial that tunes this band of psychic guidance is your attention. When you tune your attention to the realm of psychic activity, you can expect to receive this relay. If a radio is turned off, it will not receive and relay sounds that are being transmitted even though the sounds are always being sent. By being open, you turn your field of awareness "on" to psychic energy. By expecting it, you tune your attention to a particular band of psychic vibration called your Higher Self.

Ask yourself:

* How often do I check in with my intuition when faced with a decision?

* Do I expect my intuition will be available to me as I need it?

* When I do experience a psychic feeling, how do I react?

* Am I comfortable with it?

* Does it feel natural?

* Am I surprised?

* How does this feeling come across?

By making the decision to expect your Higher Self to guide you, you are placing both your attention and your intention directly onto your conscious station to your Higher Self. This shifts your orientation away from the energy outside of yourself coming from other people or from appearances as the basis for your decisions and places it primarily on the guidance coming from your Higher Self and your guides. By making this shift, you become a person who responds to life, rather than one who reacts to it. Expecting psychic guidance realigns you with your natural heritage and affirms that you are a spiritual being directed and assisted by God at all times.

Trusting Your Psychic Guidance

The third step on the psychic pathway is to trust what your Higher Self conveys to you. This step may be harder for some people to take. You may have a difficult time or struggle with your intuitive feelings because these feelings may not be supported or confirmed by appearances or by your beliefs. Or you may not want to trust your psychic feelings because they are telling you something you may not want to hear.

For example, suppose you meet a new man or woman for the first time, and you are really attracted to him or her for reasons of appearance, personality, or charm. And suppose that in spite of your strong attraction to this person, your psychic feeling is not as enthusiastic and warns you to be careful, cautious, and to get more information before you open yourself to this new person.

What would you do, especially if you are lonely and want a new friend? Would you ignore your feelings and proceed ahead enthusiastically, wearing blinders? Or would you slow down your emotional enthusiasm and take more time getting to know this new person before you become attached?

I know that can be a difficult choice. People, especially sensitive people, are very easily carried away with their emotions. They make decisions based on first appearances or on a strong desire to see everything through rose-colored glasses. Being psychic requires that you refrain from jumping to conclusions before "checking in" with your Higher Self and it means trusting your intuition, even when your desires and appearances urge you to do otherwise. It is the act of listening to the relay you have gone to the trouble of turning on.

Psychic guidance is God's gift to you. It is the collective voice of your Higher Self, your guides, your teachers, your angels, and the divine. To receive such a gift and have it work for you, you have to value it by listening. You have to accept that your intuition is there to help you, guide you, inspire you, protect you, teach you, lead you, and support you. It is a loving and beautiful force. But it is gentle. It will not override your free will or your emotions or manipulate you in any way. You have to listen to this influence and recognize that these psychic feelings, although inconvenient at times and frequently confusing, are a sacred counsel and should be not only trusted, but, even more, appreciated.

Walking the psychic pathway takes courage. It takes courage to let go of the egocentric viewpoint of appearances that says we are made up only of body and mind, that our worth is measured by our acquisitions, that we must fight and fear other people and strive to gain power over others. To walk the psychic pathway means to trust in yourself, in your psychic ability, in the counsel of God's helpers, to strive in every way to recognize that your soul is a true essence, and to see the soul in everyone you encounter.

To lead the psychic life takes courage to stand apart from the majority and to direct your life from within, focused on your inner counsel. It means taking risks and being patient as things unfold. It means making the decision to put your trust in the spiritual direction you receive.

Reflect on your own past psychic experiences and ask yourself:

* Did these feelings turn out to be accurate?

* Did this psychic feeling help me?

* Did I trust it? If not, what did I trust?

* Would I have been better off had I trusted my intuition? How?

For all the years I have been teaching psychic development, and for all the years I have lived on the psychic path, I have never known intuition to have harmed me or anyone else. True intuition, the natural voice of the Higher Self, seeks only to assist you in your growth. Most people acknowledge, in hindsight, the unhappy consequences of ignoring their intuition, but when they do trust it, it almost invariably is to their advantage.

Psychic feelings sometimes make us aware of our own shortcomings, and this recognition enables us to do something about them. Psychic ability supports your growth, but not at the expense of other people. Psychic guidance seeks only to return you to your divine heritage. Psychic ability can be trusted to guide you and help you in every way to express your creativity, but it won't be there to manipulate others on your behalf. So, in being willing to trust your intuition, you must also be willing to give up wrong beliefs or erroneous conclusions. You must be spontaneous and flexible and be willing to redirect yourself midstream if your Higher Self suggests that you do so. Trusting your psychic voice will change the way you are in the world. It requires that you be willing to stop, change, redirect, or even abandon a plan completely if your intuition suggests it, without letting your ego get flustered about it.

If you were on an expedition in a foreign land, didn't know the terrain very well, and had a limited time to achieve your goal, would you welcome an expert if he or she unexpectedly volunteered to show you the best and most beautiful way to explore the territory? Or would you reject the guidance, stick to the map, and fumble on? Either way would be okay, but the guided tour would be a lot easier, more fun, and more enlightening.

You are given that kind of opportunity when you choose to trust your intuition. And your experience in trusting this guidance will verify for you that it is indeed trustworthy! The final decision you must make and convey to your subconscious mind is that you are willing to act on it.

Acting on Your Psychic Guidance

Acting on your psychic feelings is the leap of faith that will propel you forward into the world of the extraordinary. Every time you make a decision to act on your intuition, you are telling your subconscious mind that you are serious about your psychic faculties, and you are telling your Higher Self that you trust and value its counsel. You are affirming to your guides and teachers that you will incorporate their guidance into your affairs. But above all, you release yourself from living your life through the limited power of your ego and place the power of your life into the hands of your soul and into the hands of God.

Acting on your intuition is an act of surrender on the part of your ego not an unreasonable or foolish resignation, but a conscious and wise leap into the counsel of an infinitely higher form of reason than that of your limited personal awareness. Acting on your intuition is making the choice to allow your life to be directed from a divine source, as opposed to being directed by your small, fearful ego.

Choosing to act on your intuition in no way relieves you of the responsibility of doing your work in life. I must stress that psychic energy will not be available to those who are manipulative. Avoiding responsibility is a form of manipulation. Rather, you must continue to focus and concentrate as hard as ever on any goal you may be working on, but the reward of this effort is that psychic ability becomes an added assist with which to move you toward your goals. Psychic ability, the Higher Self, becomes a partner to your reason, leading you to faster, more efficient ways to achieve what you set out to do.

Choosing to act on your intuition is the final shift into being in the world differently. It is the necessary step toward setting up an extraordinary life. Going back to the analogy of the radio receiver, when you are open to it, you turn on your receiver. When you expect it, you place your attention like a tuner onto the band of energy called your Higher Self. When you trust it, you pay attention and value the psychic guidance being relayed. You "listen", if you will, to the music. When you act on it, what happens is like what happens when you listen to beautiful music coming from a radio. You find yourself moved by it, and you allow yourself to express it. You begin to dance.

Acting on psychic energy is dancing the "dance of soul". Your life becomes a spontaneous flow of movement, carried by the beauty of the transmission. It becomes a life where you are carried from moment to moment with a conscious awareness of the spiritual vibration of divine energy. Life is free of self-consciousness, anxiety, and fear. A life lived on the psychic pathway is a life lived in peace and inner security.

- Sonia Choquette, Ph.D.