Adventures in Hypnosis and Psychic Experiences, Part 4

The Woes of Being a Medium with Aphantasia - How to “See” When You Have Trouble Visualizing

I never understood why I couldn’t “see” what guided meditations were instructing me to see. It led to frustration and giving up on meditation of all types. My mind constantly wanders, moving at a quick pace when it should slow down and seek stillness. Call me a Type A, yep . . . that’s me. When therapists had me try mindfulness exercises it was a massive failure. I just cannot do it – my anxiety and the quick pace of my thoughts are a constant factor working against me. Any teacher would give me an “F”.

The other side of my brain operates as an “intuitive” – empath, medium, psychic – and these abilities operate best when my mind is relaxed. I’ve been this way my whole life, but didn’t fully develop the skills until adulthood. I had experiences as a child, but it was inconsistent in frequency. My teen years were nothing but trauma, so nothing was happening then. Turning to my spiritual path of the Divine Feminine in my early 30’s kickstarted my abilities as if it were waiting for the key to start the ignition. My world opened and I discovered just how intuitive I was. Turns out, quite a lot. I already used tarot, and that was my primary medium. I didn’t realize the blend of abilities I possessed. I did not know that I could communicate with spirits, but I knew I had some psychic/intuitive abilities. The most important step in my process was nurturing the relationship with my primary Guides. It all began with this step and I now have several guides - an ancestor, a deity, and a spirit animal. I feel very protected in the world knowing they are with me and have my back.

The Woes of Aphantasia

Before I jump into aphantasia, try a simple exercise. It only takes a moment, and you only need to close your eyes and use your imagination.

Pay attention to how you visualize the red box. Is it bright and vivid, somewhere in between, or dark/grey?  Some people can hyper visualize in full color using their imagination with their eyes closed. Me? Not so much. I am probably at a 1 on this chart when I simply close my eyes and try to see that stupid red box. I am envious of those who can activate their imagination so vividly. What is must be like to see all the beautiful things your mind can conceive! I cannot say for sure that this is direct cause of my woes regarding my intuitive studies, but once I realized my limitations, I stopped fighting the process and used other ways to work my craft.  Changing the methods I used to work made all the difference and it is yielding more success.

I realized a few things early on in 2024 while I was deep in mediumship workshops and learning how to work with my abilities. One thing we talked about in class was paying attention to how we receive information. This is not to say I cannot visualize! I discovered a few years ago that if I am deeply relaxed, I can see visuals, however it is more like camera photos flashing in my mind, and occasionally a really short video clip. They usually come in strong and fast. Then . . . gone. I must remember what I saw and mentally hold on to it.

Contrary to the movies, intuitive people work on multiple senses at once, and sometimes at will. It is not always the rush of a super vivid 4K movie playing in our heads (causing the dramatic gasp!), and I am sorry to disappoint anyone who would like to hold on to that idea. It can bring visuals, smells, tastes, physical sensations, and just “knowing”. A lot of the time, its symbols, words/phrases, or short bursts of information and the intuitive must put the puzzle together into a tangible idea or message. The subtlety of what we receive is something we train to pay attention to, and it can easily be dismissed or misinterpreted when we’re not paying attention to the messages.

Try something for me! It will just take a moment. Close your eyes and do not imagine anything. Just black behind the eyes. This is my reality in guided mediations. Then, very slowly open your eyes and take a mental snapshot of whatever is in front of you. Close your eyes again, very slow. Remember what you saw? Don’t visualize it. Just a neutral impression of what you saw - say in your mind, “the tv and couch in the living room”, for example. This is the verbal version of the image (impression) of what you saw. This is how my mind works. I work on verbal impressions of images. My mind tells me that there is a tv and a couch and I can then intuitively gather further information by using my other clairs. Sometimes I ask my guides, “What do I need to know?” for “knowing”, or ask for a sensation in my body to represent what I need to “feel”.

But Erica! Your prior posts talk about hypnosis and all the wonderful things you “see”. Yes, I saw those things with a jumble of different clairs. However, I was also deeply relaxed and able to use those mental photo snapshots and short videos on my mind. I have also asked my guides to make those images stronger while doing work in the liminal space. However, I still depend on the mental impressions I receive as this is my strongest ability. I have a steady stream of teleprompt-like information downloading into my head telling me what I need to know, feeding me the answers from my communications with my guides, spirits, or the images I am trying to visualize. A clear thought bubbles up in my head, but it is not my “inner voice”. It’s more an internal ‘knowing”. I have also found that using isochronic tones or binaural beats as I do my work helps to deepen the connection and my abilities.

The Clairs and How Intuitives “See”

This brings me to the “clairs” – it is the primary ways intuitive people receive information. The list of clairs can be quite long, but there are a few common ones that most people recognize:

1 – Clairvoyance – Clear seeing. Visual images or symbols delivering messages.

2 – Clairaudience – Clear hearing. Waking up with a song in your head that is meant to deliver a message, or hearing things that are not audible to others in one’s mind.

3 – Clairsentience – Clear feeling. Physical sensation in one’s body, including feeling other people/spirit’s emotions like they are your own.

4 – Claircognizance – Clear knowing. Receiving a mental download of information, including things one couldn’t possibly know as true before that moment. A download of information.

In addition to the clairs, there are a few abilities which need special consideration:  precognition and psychic abilities. This information can come in using any of the clairs. As an example, I remember a night in Los Angeles with an ex (permanently known as “he who shall not be named”), and we were out and about going to a few parties. We returned late-ish in the night to a party we were at earlier in the day. It was a barbecue during the day, and crazy, packed house party at night filled with Los Angeles Burners (if you don’t know, those are LA folks who go to Burning Man – I have gone 3 times). Good people, but my ex, as I found out later that night, had a bad reputation with them. We were sitting in the car, and I got an intense flip in my stomach and dread filled my mind. I absolutely KNEW that we should not go in, nothing good would come of it. Of course, my pleas went unheard. We went inside.

Within ten minutes, as we were hanging out with a few folks we knew in a crowded room, the bouncer came up to us. Let me rewind a few moments before the bouncer reached us. I felt in my body the intense energy of this bouncer snaking through the crowd. His energy pushing ahead of him and slamming into me - and I felt it in my body as high alert. Every nerve in my body was on fire, my head was swimming with bad energy, and I felt that dread all over again. I motioned to the ex that something was about to happen. We (meaning him, and me too by circumstance) were kicked out of the party. Turns out, he was trying to use me as an “in” back into that crowd to repair his reputation. See why I call him “he who shall not be named”?

This was a good example of psychic/precognitive clairsentience – clear feeling in my body before an event happens. I usually get that just before something happens. Currently, I can get it moments before. My hypnotherapist told me that she has stopped guiding me step by step through journeys because I will say what she is about to say before she even says it. I can recall that while under, my mind will jump forward to the next thing she is about to say and start without her. Not exactly a superpower, but a few moments is a few moments. However, I cannot control it or make it happen at will.

Last year, I started more formal mediumship training with the very talented Cindy Kaza in her workshops. I learned so much from her, mostly that the work I was doing allowed me to communicate with spirits and that I had done this before when giving readings. I became better with meditating and grounding myself. I honed my skills and learned automatic writing, using symbols and signs with spirits, and how to deliver messages when they spoke through me. I intended to write about these lessons throughout the past year, but in all honesty the work was so much more than I anticipated. First and foremost, I did a lot of personal healing and development and that stays personal. The other challenge was finding the right words to describe my experiences without talking about those personal details.

Example of a Mediumship Reading - From the Medium’s Perspective

I would like to give an example of a successful practice exercise I did over the summer. In a psychometry exercise, each person in the practice group was to hold an object with another person’s energy on it (preferably someone who has passed) but to NOT show it on camera. We took turns grounding ourselves, connecting, and mentally asking for a spirit attached to one of the objects to come through. These spirits are attached to someone in the group, and in this exercise, the object itself holds the energy - such as book owned by their mother who has passed. We are not guessing the object, just using it as a bridge to connect. Here’s one of the spirits I communicated with:

Evidence:

• I asked for gender and relationship – I received female/sister (claircognizance)

• I asked what this spirit’s primary ailment was in life and/or how they passed – I felt a heaviness in my heart. This is tricky because it could be a heart attack or something along those lines. I was not sure yet at that point (clairsentience – heaviness on my chest)

• I asked for a color to represent this spirit – I got purple (claircognizance)

I shared my evidence and a woman in my practice group said she could confirm all these details. The rule for evidential mediumship is that all pieces of evidence must be true. We start with 3 pieces of evidence, ask for confirmation, and then work to gather more information to bring it all together. At this point, I worked with her to get some more details from the spirit. I cannot get too much from my groupmate, either. I started asking questions to the spirit directly:

• I asked the spirit if there was something that she wanted to communicate to her relative, and this is what I felt/received about her:

  • I felt such an emotional rush of sadness, I brought me to tears, and same for my groupmate (clairsentience)

  • I felt that due to this profound sadness, this spirit died with a broken heart

• This spirit watches my groupmate as she goes throughout her life (claircognizance)

• This spirit was mostly well but still heartbroken (claircognizance)

• I asked for a message she wants to deliver to my groupmate:

  • “Love is important. It is the priority of life. Love one another.” (claircognizance and perhaps a bit of clairaudience)

My groupmate then confirmed to me that this was her aunt, who was considered a “sister” to everyone in the family. She died sometime after her husband died, and she never got over the heartache of losing him. She died with a broken heart. The purple referred to a favorite flower of her aunt. I cannot recall what that was, my notes don’t specify.

There you have it – mediumship. This is how we do this work. Let me tell you, it is mentally draining. It can be quite emotional, as well. Learning this skill is challenging, and not always successful. Sometimes, you want to quit. But then you give an amazing reading that changes someone’s life or brings much needed closure. After those days, it’s all worth it.

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I have much more to say, specifically the hypnosis spirit journey I took a few months back to go deep into my psyche – I stepped right into The Moon card, past those gates, and into the deepest part of my mind to do some true healing and reconnection with myself. I met Hecate and her hounds, Spider Woman (or, the Grandmother of Time), and met some of my ancestors’ souls. This one will release sometime in the next month, but I am still trying to figure out the best way to write it without revealing deeper personal details. I am very excited to write this and share the amazing adventure.

Much Love,

Erica

https://experimentalintuitive.com/

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Hey! Have you read the first three parts of this series?