experience amazing sensitivity when we are small. In fact, children see Spirit more than we realise, because they are so much more open and accepting. Often a child will say something that seems beyond their age and comprehension. What is really happening is that they are repeating information they have received from Spirit. This may also be coupled with the child’s ability to recall ancient memories. If asked, sometimes a child will talk to an adult about their ‘invisible’ friends. If they do, never ridicule them as it will make them feel slighted and stupid – and it may close a beautiful world to them. When she was little, my daughter, Tanya, had a spirit friend called Emma, who came with her little dog, Toby. If we were going out in the car together, I would make sure I left the car door open for a few moments after Tanya had got in to make sure there was time for Emma and Toby to climb into the back seat with her. I encouraged and accepted Emma and Toby in our lives, and I believe that if children are supported to enjoy their relationships with their friends in spirit, they will grow up to be caring adults, sensitive to the world around them. After all, children are the future and they may grow up to bring wonderful changes to the world.
I hope this doesn’t sound too serious. Psychic ability doesn’t require gravitas – although I take what I do seriously, I don’t take myself seriously. It’s an important distinction, because with sensitivity comes responsibility and joy. Expanding your senses means you can enjoy your experience of life all the more. At one point I went through a phase of wanting to be perfect in some way and I began to take myself very seriously; some might call this a sense of humour failure, which to a degree it was. Through this I learned that I didn’t have to live in an austere way in order to be spiritual. My humour is an important aspect of the way I communicate – my guides often laugh with me, like friends. Living with sensitivity is about being who you are now.
Sensitivity sabotage
Our sensitivity may lay dormant for years due to the work we do, the relationships we form or the general pattern of our life experience. Our reconnection with Spirit – our essence – may be subtle or dramatic, and it may come at any time of life, from our twenties to our seventies and beyond. What matters is that reconnecting with Spirit puts us back in touch with the truth of who we are.
I know that traumatic experiences can appear to sabotage happiness. Like many people, at one time or another I have suffered the loss of someone very close to me, illness and financial crisis. Yet the way we have lived prior to such an event may have been sabotaging our sensitivity and true life path. In some cases, trauma is the only way that Spirit – the energies that psychics work with – can get our attention. We receive a wake-up call that transforms our lives.
Many people have their first experience of Spirit when someone they love dies. For the first time, we may hear a friend say that they are sure that their loved partner or relative is close by. They are sensitive to the signs around them. A client of mine experienced her sensitivity only after the death of her sister, feeling her presence for days after the funeral. It is important to understand that when someone dies or we experience trauma, Spirit are not punishing us, or exacting a price for sensitivity – they are just trying to tell us that the life path we’ve travelled up to that point now needs to change.
In my experience, trauma often coincides with increased sensitivity in other areas of life, because it can act as a trigger to put us back in touch with who we are. Many clients of mine, whether bereaved or reeling from the shock of redundancy or a relationship break-up, have told me how they had begun to ‘sense’ a place before visiting it. One client recalled seeing the trees in the garden and the layout of the living room of his daughter’s new house, weeks before he visited her. Such experiences can feel confusing for people who have been unused to taking notice of their senses. Yet this is the language of sensitivity. For instance, I know that a tingling sensation on my temple tells me a particular guide is talking to me – their way. When I can smell roses, I know my mother is sitting next to me.
All too often, I hear people putting these experiences down to being out of sorts, or worse, being oversensitive. The word sensitive has become virtual criticism – a sensitive child is a ‘problem’ or ‘difficult’ – and this may give us the message that it’s not safe to have finer feelings.
As adults, we often repress our senses because of the environment in which we live. We expend energy trying to block out the noise from traffic and neighbours; we learn how to develop a blind spot for the unsightly or disturbing; sometimes we wish ourselves invisible in the press of a crowd. We want to sense less, not more, because peace and quiet can feel such scarce commodities. But, just as you have chosen to suppress sensitivity, so you can choose to regain it. It’s a choice you can make. Your senses are your spiritual connectors, through which you can live a sensitive and spiritual existence. I have found that many people who have burgeoning psychic ability may want to ignore it, particularly if they are surrounded by friends and family who do not accept their sensitivity. At the heart of this is the fear of being labelled as a bit odd. Given that many children and adults resist being ‘different’, it’s not surprising that we try to suppress our sensitivity before someone notices that we don’t fit in.
Total sensation
Sensitivity is about using all the senses together. When Spirit communicate with me, I may hear them as sound, feel their presence as vibration in my body or sense them as colour in my peripheral vision. Because all my senses are heightened, Spirit can always find a way to talk with me. This is my personal definition of ESP: the cumulative effect of all five heightened senses working together to enable a ‘sixth sense’. Although the dictionary may define ESP as means of ‘obtaining information about the environment without the use of normal sensory channels’, in my experience, ESP doesn’t just come from nowhere. Psychic ability, or sensitivity, relies upon us using our everyday senses in every possible way.
Several years ago, I was fortunate enough to see an opera singer rehearsing her scales before a performance. I say ‘saw’ rather than ‘heard’, because I realised I was able to see the energy coming from her mouth as she sang. It was the colour of purple velvet. She had the most beautiful voice, and it was all the more magnificent because I could see and hear it.
The next time I experienced the sight of music was as the Glyndebourne Festival. Watching several performers sing together, again I could see the colour of a voice, but this time it was even more spectacular. I saw the energy pouring out of the singers’ mouths – the tenors were purple, the sopranos indigo; others were shades of mauve and some even yellow. And I could sense how the singers put themselves behind the high notes. When a long note resonated, I could see the tremor in the colour.
I have never understood why I saw those colours. Maybe it was because I could truly feel the music – the sound resonated so deeply within me that I was literally shown the beauty of music through colour. Looking back, I realise that sometimes I was seeing the colour of the sound before the sound itself, perhaps because light travels faster than sound. Psychic phenomena and modern physics may have more in common than we think!
Some of you may be able to see sound as colour as I do. When you next hear live music, try feeling the colours. You may see a faint aura of colour around a musician, or the colour of a note. Try half-closing your eyes and relax your mental focus – when you do this, sensitivity can come in unawares (see page 30 for more on seeing with peripheral vision).
Sensitive situations
We are often most in touch with our sensitivity when we are in emotional situations. If we feel deep compassion for another person, we can really sense their energy. When we fall in love, our energy is revitalised as our senses heighten. We feel temperature more keenly, and our sense of smell is often heightened. I do sense Spirit through smell at times, but more commonly I experience dramatic changes in temperature when I am reading for people. I get really hot, then I can become cold and, when Spirit come in, I can be really freezing. It is a particular, unusual kind of cold, which I’ve become used to recognising. When I am working with a client, Spirit just pour energy through me and, if I need to send a healing thought to someone, that heat comes through. Again, through years of practice I have learned to recognise