When I’m reading the aura, I use four main psychic perception tools. My strongest, most natural ability is clairsentience. Clairsentience is the ability to feel energy or to translate energy-information into feelings. Some people call this empathy and it is, I’ve noticed, an ability fairly common to healers, helpers and counselors.

Many people ask me questions like ‘have you always had this gift?’ and ‘Were you born with this gift?’ I’ve always had strong empathic ability but I don’t think it’s necessarily anything out of the ordinary. Psychic ability is natural to everyone and is something we all use on a daily basis to varying degrees; a subconscious function so ingrained into our automatic behaviour that we are simply not aware we are using it. The only difference between me and another person who says they aren’t psychic is that I have deliberately practised using my psychic ability in order to strengthen my psychic muscles and bring them under my conscious control.

Clairsentience is simply an extension of a good emotional imagination. If you can easily imagine how another person is feeling, you probably have a natural clairsentient strength. As a child, I spent a lot of time using my emotional imagination to enter into other worlds, like we do when we are trying to relate to a character in a book to make them more real to us. I spent long hours exploring imaginary worlds, whether it was through books or a communion with nature. I could study an animal or tree for hours, imagining what it might feel like to be that tree or animal.

Most people assume I see the aura with my eyes but I don’t. I’ve never seen it with my eyes and I don’t feel any interest in seeing it with my eyes. My feelings sense energy movement, texture, placement, form, temperature and character and this then becomes a picture in my mind. These mental pictures are as real for me as seeing with my eyes and often far more spectacular. Have you ever read a really good book and then been disappointed by the movie? It’s hard to beat a really good imagination!

So I guess its fair to say that my Clairsentience and my ability to visualize work hand in hand as a really good team. The ability to visualize is what Clairvoyance is based upon. Clairvoyance is the ability most people hear about, but they tend to think it’s the only psychic ability. There are a lot of clichés around the idea of clairvoyance. In movies, it’s easy to get the idea that Clairvoyants see all those magnificent visions with their eyes when really they are seeing them with their minds eye. Most of the time we see with our minds eye rather than our physical eyes.

Physical eyes are for seeing matter, whilst your psychic eye is for seeing energy. I once had a series of unpleasant dreams in which I could see the spirit realm in the same way as I see the material realm. It might seem romantically ideal but it was too confusing because I couldn’t tell what was ‘real’ and what was ‘spirit’. We need to be able to tell the difference because otherwise we loose our grip on consensus reality!

So for me, my clairvoyance tends to be secondary to my feelings and my feelings also help me understand my clairvoyant visions. Without my feelings to guide me, I would have difficulty sensing when my interpretation of a vision is accurate. When I interpret correctly, it ‘feels right’ and I feel the excitement and positive response of the spirit I’m passing the messages through for. My visions tend to be symbolic, drawing on visual metaphors and analogies to convey ideas and messages. I think this is because I tend to think in this way!

My clairvoyance also works as a team with my Clairaudience. Clairaudience is the ability to hear energy or translate energy-information into words. Again, many might think this ‘hearing’ is literal when most of the time, it’s more like words or thoughts that pop into your head. Perhaps because I think in metaphors, my Clairaudience usually comes through in the form of popular and historic sayings that are based on visual images. For example, I might see images of a cage being rattled and a tree being shook, along with the feeling of being unsettled and the words “don’t let people….”. With the imagery and feeling to back it up, its not too hard to finish the sentence and pass through the message: “Don’t let people rattle your cage or shake your tree”. It’s a variation on two sayings that have similar meanings and it gets the message across nicely.

Sometimes during healings, my Clairaudience is used to give a voice to unexpressed or hidden feelings in the client. This can be very healing for the client, because its difficult to resolve emotional issues if you can’t even admit to yourself how you feel. Again, being naturally Clairsentient, my feelings come first, forming the basis for a word-based message. When I put my hands on someone, I hear the feelings of the body as though they were my own and then I give them a voice. If I feel a lot of tension in my chest and jaw like a built up but held back sense of hot pressure in my body that wanted to explode, I might say, “I feel anger and frustration because someone is not hearing me, can you relate to this?”. This helps the client get in contact with the feeling and begin finding a constructive way to work with it.

The fourth ability is Claircognisance, which is a ‘knowing’ or ‘understanding’ ability. Ever had those ‘aha’ moments when something clicks in your mind and you suddenly understand how simple something is when it seemed beyond your comprehension just a moment before? That’s how claircognisance feels. It’s a bit like having instant wisdom downloaded into your brain with a flash of light! Spirit uses this ability to teach me spiritual psychology associated with the colours. I’ve often said that claircognisance happens when you expand into your higher self and certainly, its very much like having a broader, higher perspective for the time during which the information is coming through. The tricky part is remembering the wisdom when you come down to earth and shift out of that slightly altered state of mind. Claircognisance seems to open us to spiritual wisdom that our smaller, everyday way of thinking finds it hard to understand.

These four abilities are the main ones I notice in myself and other people and we all find unique ways to use them and blend them together. There are two other abilities that I don’t often notice myself using, but I have seen clients, students and other psychics use them with great success. Clairgustience is the ability to taste energy. Clairallience is the ability to smell energy. While taste is an ability I’m less consciously aware of, I have noticed that colours and emotions have a taste. For example, sometimes bitterness, disgust and shame will be emotions that come through to me as a taste in my mouth. I can’t say I’ve ever noticed pleasant tastes so maybe that’s why I haven’t worked on strengthening this ability! Today I found the manipulation colour in a person’s aura and experienced it as a really disgusting taste. It made me think of slime from a stagnant pond mixed with charcoal. Eeewww!

I do however, tend to smell pleasant smells, so it makes ‘clairsallience’ more alluring for me. My husband calls this ability ‘clairsmellience: it’s not a formal term but one I have become quite fond of. Whilst my husband tends to sniff out danger, I’m more likely to smell colours (like lemon yellow) or a person’s connection with nature. If you have a special bond with the ocean, to me, that bond smells like the ocean. If your bond is with fresh water on the other hand, that to me smells completely different! Other psychics can smell the perfume your deceased grandmother used to wear, or the tobacco your deceased grandfather used to smoke.

As you can see, psychic perception is an extension of normal physical perception, but it helps us perceive the energy realm rather than the physical realm. Having included these senses in my daily life they don’t seem strange or mystical to me, but they are nonetheless delightful to have and they greatly augment my appreciation of life. For me, psychic perception helps me keep the magic and wonder of my inner child well and truly alive. Often as adults we become drab, serious and afraid of anything we can’t explain rationally or scientifically. As long as you keep at least one foot firmly on the ground, the magical world of childhood can be kept alive in a safe and beneficial manner through spiritual play.