A lot of the psychic work I do as a counsellor and healer is pulled off via a little trick called ‘believing without believing’ or ‘suspending disbelief’.
When I stitch up a rip in a clients aura, there is nothing solid under my hands at all, and I see nothing with my physical eyes. The rip exists in my imagination. So does the stitching. And yet, the more focus of intent and power of belief I can bring to this pantomimed act, the more powerful it is.
When I am experiencing a client’s ‘past life’, it can feel like a waking dream, griping with it’s intensity and powerful enough to move me to tears. When I talk with a spirit guide, I’m talking to air, my eyes tracking through empty space. What is ‘real’? In that moment, the spirit I can engaged with can seem almost as real as the client I am reading for, because I am suspending disbelief and allowing my vivid imagination to build a character rich with multi-sensory detail.
The physical world can fade a little when I’m so deeply engaged in this magical inner world of creative visualisation. But none of this inner world is as ‘real’ for me as the physical client sitting in front of me, the chair underneath me, the lunch I need to eat, the air I’m breathing, the bills that need to be paid, the people I love, the home I live in, or the pain in my leg from sitting too long. Thank goodness. I personally like being able to tell the difference between ‘real and ‘not real’, physical and not physical. I would be in trouble if I couldn’t. Therein lies the fine line between sanity and insanity.
What do I mean, when I say that I am believing without believing, when I am functioning as a psychic? I mean that I am choosing to entertain a possibility whilst knowing it isn’t necessarily real, or physically tangible. I choose to believe in things like spirit guides, but that doesn’t mean I think they are objectively ‘real’, the same way the ground under my feet is real. Spirit guides are energy, archetypes, ideas, imaginary friends and quite possibly very real in ways we have yet to understand, but you won’t find me knotting my brow trying to work out how.
If I pull a ‘knife’ out of a client’s back and their chronic severe back injury goes away, is the knife ‘not real’ simply because it’s not physical? The image of a knife is my mind’s way of telling me it has found a betrayal wound, an unhealthy cloud of colour in the aura that needs to be removed. It always amazes me how debilitating betrayal can be. Another aura colour that brings great results when cleared is ‘Loneliness Green’. People always feel lighter without that colour in their aura. Are aura colours ‘real’? What is ‘real’? How do you define real?
Realness, to me, seems very subjective. I get the best results with psychic healing when I immerse myself completely in the strange task of of removing things that aren’t really there, or sewing up invisible holes that only my imagination can see. The more I believe what I’m doing is ‘real’, the more powerful it is. And no, the client doesn’t need to ‘believe’ for the healing to be effective. But it does help. Two entranced/hypnotised people intending healing can be more powerful than one.
I never take my psychic impressions literally, or too seriously. I might suspend disbelief but it’s always hanging around the edges keeping me open-minded. I find my work more effective when I act as though everything is ‘real’ without really believing in it and considering how each impression might be a metaphor. The rip I ‘see’ in a client’s aura is a visual created from an empathic experiencing of my client’s story, whether they have consciously told me their story with words, or their body has communicated it to me in more subtle ways. The rip isn’t necessarily ‘real’. But it’s definitely a useful metaphor. So is the knife. And the past life. And the spirit guide. (My spirit guides always look a little unimpressed when I say they might not be real. I suspect they disagree with me.)
The mind-body communicates using metaphor, association and story-telling. It communicates with unspoken feelings and vague impressions, emanated and conveyed with a tone in the voice, a change in the breathing, the tensing of a muscle, the release of a pheromone, a shift in brain-wave patterns or electrical flow, a slowing of the heart beat. The entire body is thinking and feeling, processing and communicating, listening and speaking. I don’t pretend to understand how all of this happens, I just know that the psychic impressions I receive are often startling in their accuracy, and the psychic actions I take can effect surprisingly real effects on the mind-body.
I love thinking, philosophising, looking for patterns and considering possibilities when reflecting on psychic healing, but what I love most is the magic of just suspending disbelief and letting my imagination run away with me while I keep both feet very firmly on the ground. I love free-falling into metaphor and association, never knowing where it might take me next, while another part of me joins the dots.
I love believing in magic and make-believe when it makes my ‘real’ life more beautiful, balanced and effective. As soon as it stops having these qualities, I stop believing. My believing is conditional on usefulness. If a psychic impression can’t be used in a practical way to piece a client’s story together more effectively I toss it; if I can’t draw useful analogies between a past life story and the client’s real story I lose interest; and if a spirit guide doesn’t have anything helpful or positive to offer I let them fade back into non-existence.
Believing without believing is a beautiful example of non-attachment. This is how a psychic walks between two worlds without being trapped by the illusions in either of them.
Blessed Be