It’s all about tapping in, tuning in, and paying attention.
Have you ever had a gut feeling that something was going to happen and then it did? Or perhaps you had a vivid dream that ended up coming true in some way? Or maybe a distinct vision swept through you and you based a real-life decision on it? Most of us have had psychic experiences at some point in our lives, but many either brush it off as mere coincidence or pure nonsense.
“‘Clair’ means ‘clear,’ and ‘voyant’ means ‘vision,’” says Eboni Banks, a mystic and author of the upcoming Your Intuitive Nudge: A Step-by-Step Guide to Connecting with Your Intuition. “Clairvoyance is the ability to receive intuitive information from visions.” Banks thinks of intuition as a muscle; it’s not something that ever goes away, but you do have to use it in order for it to expand and grow. And there are many types of psychic gifts, including mediumship and several “clair” senses, such as clairgustance (the ability to receive information through taste), claircognizance (a clear knowing), and even clairtangency (through touch).
As a small child, I didn’t have a language for my psychic gifts, and I didn’t fully understand them. I just accepted them as a natural part of who I was, even if it seemed a little strange. It wasn’t until I got older and began talking about my experiences that I realized many, many others share the same thing. While the question of whether we’re born with psychic gifts or can learn them is up for debate, I believe it’s a mix of both. Since we’re spiritual beings living in a physical form, gifts like clairvoyance are an innate part of every human being (similar to how we all have a spectrum of other intelligences like E.Q. and I.Q.), which can also be developed and enhanced over time. But first, these gifts have to be acknowledged and developed.
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Banks agrees: “Everyone is ‘clair’ something. It is not a gift that is for the few. We’re all born with it, but unfortunately, we’re not taught about intuition,” she says. “I think 90% of the human population has the ability to receive images in their mind.” Just like there are different levels to these gifts, Banks says they can show differently for different people, especially because we all process information differently. For instance, some might have the capacity to “see” things out of their physical eyes, while others see them through their mind’s eye, like when they’re dreaming. “Some people who have developed their [clairvoyant] muscles are able to see auras and energy and other things that are not non-physical,” says Banks.
Similarly, Granddaughter Crow, a Navajo shaman and author of Wisdom of the Natural World, also believes everyone is born with psychic abilities, but acknowledges how these gifts are also handed down through our ancestors. “If we were to look back far enough into our ancestral line, we would come across many individuals who paid attention to their instincts for survival and evolution,” she says. “In this day and age, we might have different uses for these natural instincts. It is a human birthright for a few to focus on developing these instincts (aka intuition, gut checks, psychic gifts).”
Granddaughter Crow’s gifts manifest through impressions, which she picks up with her five senses and inner knowing: “If you think of the five senses (touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight), then psychic gifts are a heightened sense of one or another of these five. ‘Sensing’ can come through each of these, or a combination of them. However, they don’t always manifest the same way as our five senses. They manifest more within the ‘inner world,’ meaning ‘inner sight,’” she says.
For Banks, people who don’t believe in clairvoyance or think it’s so “woo woo” aren’t allowing themselves to actually have psychic experiences because they simply don’t understand it. In fact, much of her work involves helping others develop a new understanding of intuition and psychic awareness; not as rare gifts but as natural aspects of our human design. And since we’re actually envisioning things in our mind all the time, recognizing our clairvoyant gifts requires a deep, personal sense of self-awareness.
Recognizing Your Clairvoyance
Sometimes psychic gifts can feel confusing, especially for children who are taught to solely rely on rational thought or grew up in households where these gifts aren’t acknowledged and nurtured. For Lisa Stardust, a NYC-based astrologer and author of Survival Guide: Navigating the Cosmic Rite of Passage, her psychic experiences started when she was three years old, and her parents (luckily) recognized her sensitivities. When she was a child, she could feel the energetic pain of a butterfly whose wings were clipped or would tell her parents about things that hadn’t happened yet. Once, she told them she’d just been named her school’s club captain, despite never trying out for it. “A few days later, a teacher asked me to audition for the role, and I got the gig,” Stardust says. “So for me, it was just that I would see things [in certain] situations and then they would unfold.”
In my own experience, clairvoyance manifests in several different ways: as either an image or vision in my mind’s eye (inner sight), a clear inner voice, a particularly vivid dream, a gut feeling, or a very specific word or phrase that suddenly pops up in my mind. These experiences feel extremely natural, like the movement of water, and are never loud, alarming, or scary. Granddaughter Crow experiences “impressions” as visions in her mind, too, sharing that the more she exercises her gifts, the more she understands how they work.
Like me, she doesn’t have a concrete moment in time when she “discovered” her gifts, since they seemed so natural to her: “I came to understand that other people didn’t perceive what I was perceiving in the way that I was perceiving it,” she says. “It was confusing to me. As I’ve grown, I’ve come to an understanding that it is my natural inclination to focus on this instinct that members of our ancestors held for survival and evolution.”
Strengthening Your Clairvoyance
Banks recommends allowing yourself alone time, since it’s really important to let go of distractions and get rooted in your authenticity to better “hear” that inner voice. “When we’re with ourselves, we’re more honest about our emotions and how we feel about things,” she says. “So much attention goes into what’s happening in our outer world, but [it’s important to] really learn to balance that with the amount of attention we give our inner world.” Banks says we can strengthen our clairvoyance when we learn to shift our level of awareness to our inner sight and pay more attention to it throughout the day.
Granddaughter Crow echoes that sentiment: “There are moments within the day where each of us needs to take a break, a breath, a moment. It is within these moments that I find that our gut or intuition can communicate with us. When we decide to give these moments validity, we begin to discover something special.”
Now, if your psychic muscles aren’t fully exercised — just like not working out your physical body for a while — it may seem a bit uncomfortable or confusing at first to tap into this inner sight. But over time, it becomes much easier to make sense of the messages. “Much of what we sense needs translation,” adds Granddaughter Crow. “It is a challenge to learn how to translate what we are sensing as it might come in the form of ‘impressions’ or ‘nudges.’ But the more we pay attention to it, the more it develops. It’s like building a relationship with a part of yourself that has deeper messages for you.”
Dreaming is also one of the most universal experiences of clairvoyance. “Sleep is such a powerful time for us. We spend like 30% of our lives asleep, and that’s purposeful because we’re processing so much information when we’re asleep,” says Banks. “The body is always communicating, just through all the natural, autonomous functions that are happening that we don’t even think about. Like when we’re eating, drinking, or walking.”
It’s important, however, to prep your body and psyche before sleeping, in order to tune into these messages. “Don’t watch anything disturbing on television, don’t have an argument,” recommends Banks. “Try to give yourself an hour before you go to bed to get your psyche and body lined up into a certain level of calm before you get into bed. Set an intention before you go to sleep, like ‘I want to be more aware of my clairvoyant vision,’ or ‘I want to receive a clairvoyant message.’”
Since, of course, not all dreams contain psychic information, discerning the difference between regular dreams and clairvoyant messages also takes some practice. “Sometimes it’s just stress from the psyche showing up in whatever challenge we’re having in our life, but sometimes it actually is intuitive information,” says Banks. For her, stress-related dreams are typically nonsensical, while intuitive dreams are much clearer, even if they’re abstract. “Your intuition wants you to understand it, it wants to be clear, it wants you to receive the message. And what I mean by ‘you’ is that it’s another part of you. It wouldn’t communicate to you in a way that is like some kind of Morse code. It’s not gonna do that, because it already knows how you communicate.”
Over time, with practice, your inner voice and sight will strengthen and become clearer. Another way to think about it is, it’s like trying to find the right channel on an analogue radio. It’s just about tapping in, tuning in, finding the right frequency, and getting ready to listen.