Psychic Abilities On The Spiritual Path
Written by Kirsti Formoso, MSc. Transpersonal Psychology, BSc. Psychology
If you're on a spiritual path, you've probably brushed up against something psychic at some point. Whether it was a reading you had or a reading you gave, a knowing, a sensing, or just a deep resonance, it was a part of your spiritual awakening process. But we don’t often talk about the junction of psychic emergence and spiritual awakening. And yet they’re deeply entwined.
I live at that intersection of spiritual awakening and psychic opening, and it’s taken a long time to learn to navigate it well. And this is what I’ve learnt along the way.
Exceptional Human Experiences (EHEs)
Psychic phenomena are yet another human experience that is tossed aside by modern science. As a result, in my undergrad psychology studies, on a module called From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary, we learnt that believing in psychic powers is delusional!
Thankfully, transpersonal psychology does not share the same attitude. In fact, it embraces what much of science deems as delusional with an open mind. That’s why I went on to do a master’s in transpersonal psychology;)
EHE is a transpersonal concept that captures all the weird and wonderful human experiences that science denies and traditional psychology pathologises. There are five categories of EHE, and psychic phenomena are just one of them. You can find out more about EHEs on my page: What Are Exceptional Human Experiences (EHEs)?
Rhea White suggested that EHEs are powerful experiences that, when reflected on, can have transformational potential. For many people, psychic experiences are the first glimpse that there is more to life than the physical realm. They are the first paving stone on the spiritual journey. For others, that paving stone comes later.
Psychic Spirituality
We often think of psychic stuff as being intrinsic to spirituality, and to a large degree it is, but we have to be cautious here. I assumed that psychics were inherently spiritual. And by spiritual I don’t mean airy-fairy spirituality; I mean real, integrated and embodied spirituality marked by qualities like present-moment self-awareness, integrity, non-judgment and compassion.
But when I first went to learn psychic skills at a world-renowned psychic and mediumship school/retreat centre in 2006, there was no spirituality. There was no focus on the spiritual journey or spiritual awakening, on meditation or mindfulness or inner work. Our own personal spiritual evolution was out of the equation.
The world of psychic and mediumship had a huge blind spot. They were developing psychic opening and awareness but not spiritual awareness. The focus was always out there, directed at the spirit world. Never at themselves.
I remember, while I was there, I wrote a poem about wishing to get to know my own spirit before getting to know other spirits. They were all so blown away by that concept that the teacher took my poem and printed copies for herself and everyone else in the class.
I have to say, I’ve been back many times since and over the years the teachers have become much more aware of the spiritual journey and the importance of inner work.
Psychic emergence & spiritual awakening
On the flip side, it is possible to develop your spiritual awareness without developing psychic awareness. However, as we open ourselves spiritually, psychic sensitivity often surfaces or intensifies as a byproduct. A side-effect.
A major part of the spiritual awakening journey is becoming more aware. We become more aware of ourselves, our behaviours, our dramas, our traumas and our environment. And we start to become more aware of the more subtle realms; we often develop empathic abilities, and start to become aware of atmospheres in the room, the things that were not said but felt.
And ultimately, we open ourselves to more subtle dimensions like the astral plane.
The “Clairs”
As our awareness and sensitivities increase, our channels for receiving the more subtle realms also come online. These are called the Clairs.
Just as our awareness of the physical world comes through our 5 senses, our awareness of the more subtle dimensions comes through the 5 clairs, plus a few!
Clairvoyance — clear seeing. Information arrives as images, symbols, or visual impressions, whether that's in the mind's eye, in dreams, or occasionally as something that feels closer to actually seeing.
Clairaudience — clear hearing. Information arrives as sound — words, a name, a phrase that drops in with a clarity that feels distinct from your own internal monologue.
Clairsentience — clear feeling. Information arrives through the body and the emotions, picking up on someone else's feelings, energy, or state as though it were your own. [I go deeper into what clairsentience actually is — and isn't — here.]
Clairolfaction/alience — clear smelling. Information arrives through scent — a specific smell that appears with no physical source, often tied to a person, place, or memory.
Clairgustance — clear tasting. The rarest of the group; information arrives as taste, with no physical source for it either.
Claircognizance — clear knowing. Information arrives as sudden certainty, with no sensory component and no traceable reasoning behind it — you simply know. [I unpack claircognizance, and how it differs from ordinary intuition, in more depth here.]
Psychometry — a related but distinct ability: picking up information by touching an object or being in a person's physical space.
Most people don't experience all of them; usually one or two feel far more natural than the rest, often the same channel that's dominant in how you process the world generally. For example, my strongest clair is clairsentience – I feel things, and my second strongest is Claircognizance – I just know things. Clairaudience comes in third for me. But it is really rare for me to experience clairvoyance, clairgustance, or clairolfaction.
None of these is mutually exclusive, and it's common to lean on more than one depending on the situation. What matters more than which category you fall into is recognising the pattern when it shows up.
Yogic Siddhis
As a yoga practitioner, I learnt that these psychic and mediumship abilities or spiritual gifts should be left alone, as they can become a distraction on the path to enlightenment. And I think there’s some merit in that. As our sensitivities deepen, we can become enamoured by them. They become like sweets for the ego to feel special, important and all-knowing.
This can be especially bad if we haven’t developed certain qualities before our psychic abilities start to emerge. For example, if we don’t have a strong integrity practice. Which is quite likely – I rarely hear people talking about integrity in spiritual circles.
Equally, if we don’t have present-moment self-awareness developed through a strong mindfulness practice, these spiritual gifts can be used for harm, not good. Especially if our spiritual path is more about escaping life’s challenges and bypassing our trauma than doing our inner work and really getting intimate with our egoic patterns.
In short, the yogic traditions teach that these spiritual gifts or yogic siddhis are byproducts, not the goal. Don’t give them to your ego.
The Ego And Psychic Emergence
If I’m honest, I could pull a ton of examples where the ego is sitting in the driver’s seat when it comes to psychic abilities and powers. It’s not really surprising; I consider our thoughts to be our first superpower or spiritual gift, and most people have no discipline over that power either.
In the same renowned psychic and mediumship school I mentioned earlier, everyone wanted to be a medium. Being psychic was seen as lesser than. (I discuss the difference between psychic and medium in the next section). Psychic skills were demoted because they were seen as a stepping stone or spirituality level one. Whereas mediumship, channelling and trance were seen as the next level, harder to attain and producing more profound and superior information. There was a hierarchy.
But mediumship is very transcendent and outwardly focused. You can use mediumship to spiritually bypass. You can feel like you’re really spiritual; ego loves that. But inside you’re a mess; lacking self-awareness, unaware of unhealthy behaviours, bad interpersonal skills, little integrity, and running from your trauma.
I saw people being horrible to each other! It’s classic spiritual bypassing and what the yogis warned us of. And without real inner work, self-awareness, self-discipline, and integrity, the siddhis or spiritual powers like psychic ability can be used in harmful ways and often are. This is often what happens in cases of fallen gurus.
Psychic Versus Mediumship
Psychic and mediumship use similar skills to collect information from different places. A psychic picks up information from the physical world; a medium picks up information from the spiritual world. So, if I was tuning into you, being a living person in a physical body, that would be psychic work. But if I was tuning into your great-grandparent, that would probably be mediumship because most people’s great-grandparents have passed over to the spirit world.
Mediumship includes contact with any entity not in the physical realm, so this could be ancestors, spirit guides, nature entities, angels, archangels and otherworldly entities (more on all that on the EHE page). All very exotic and exciting for the ego.
I learnt from an amazing teacher that if you want to be a good medium, you first have to develop your psychic abilities. I think a lot of them said that, but everyone was in a rush to skip past the psychic stuff and on to the more glamorous and exciting world of mediumship (ego in the driving seat).
If you do this, your mediumship will likely hit a ceiling. However, if you slow down, take your time, and really develop your psychic abilities, your mediumship will be really powerful and accurate when you get to it. But here’s the thing…
To be a really good psychic, you have to do inner work; you have to go towards your pain; you have to excavate your own psyche.
Psychic Versus Empath
These two terms get used almost interchangeably, and there's real overlap, but they're not the same thing.
Being psychic is about knowing. It's the reception of specific information: an image, a name, a smell, a sound, a feeling that goes beyond what you could reasonably pick up through ordinary means.
Being an empath is about feeling. You absorb the emotional states of physical people around you. So it overlaps with one channel of psychic information: clairsentience. But you have to be careful here because the clairs are often assumed to be purely mediumistic. You can be empathic without having any mediumistic abilities. And you can be receiving information through clairsentience without being empathic. The terms empath and clairsentience can not always be used interchangeably.
I am not a medium; I also don’t call myself a psychic, but I do tap into psychic abilities in my one-to-one work with clients. So, for me, I can use the term clairsentience in the psychic sense or empathic. I make no distinction; for me, they’re the same phenomenon, different vocabulary. But feel free to discuss this in the comment section below; I’d love to hear your thoughts.
HSPS, Thin Boundaries, And Trait Absorption
If you've ever wondered why you pick up on things other people don't, why a room's energy lands before you've placed why, or why someone else's emotions arrive in your body like they're your own, there's a real psychological framework for this, even if it doesn't fully explain everything that's happening.
Three traits show up again and again in people who report frequent psychic or empathic experience:
1. Being a highly sensitive person (HSP),
2. Having thin psychological boundaries: a more permeable line between self and other, inner world and outer world
3. High trait absorption, the capacity to become fully immersed in an experience to the point of losing awareness of everything else.
Being a highly sensitive person or having thin psychological boundaries tends to make you more prone to both empathic absorption and psychic reception, since the same permeability that lets other people's emotions in is often what lets other information in too.
None of these proves psychic information is objectively "real" the way a thermometer reading is. What they show is that some people are wired to take in more, merge more easily, and notice what others don't. That's very likely part of why this comes through you, and it can be steadying to know it's something explicable about how you're built, not something strange or wrong with you.
Psychic Emergence
But there can be times when you definitely think there’s something wrong with you. I was picking up other people’s emotions all the time, but I didn’t know. The term empath was not in common use like it is today. I had been going to the psychic and mediumship school, had a serious yoga practice, was spending weeks and months at a yoga retreat and had been doing 10-day Vipassana silent meditation retreats.
I was developing my spiritual awareness and my psychic awareness. But I didn’t know. I didn’t understand. My sensitivities were growing, but no one was teaching me what I’m writing about on this page.
I was being swept up in other people’s emotions and had no idea why I was on an emotional rollercoaster. I was so confused. One minute I would be feeling an overwhelming sense of excitement and the next I’d be drowning in grief!
I didn’t know where I ended, and other people started. I didn’t know I could turn it off! It got so intense about 11 years ago that I felt like I was carrying the world’s pain on my shoulders. That went on for quite a while before I worked it all out!
All this to say, psychic emergence is a natural part of spiritual awakening.
Trauma And Psychic Abilities
Trauma can be a pathway that heightens absorption and permeability, which in turn can make us more prone to psychic and mystical experience, but it's one contributing factor among several (including temperament), not a required cause, and not a diagnosis. Just because you’re psychic doesn’t mean you have trauma, and just because you’ve had trauma doesn’t mean you’re psychic.
But if you have a trauma bio, tread carefully as you open psychically and spiritually. I recommend that you continue with inner work and healing before pushing forward to develop psychic abilities. Not knowing where you end and others begin or what is yours and what is not can be really challenging. Plus, when we open psychically, we open ourselves to the astral plane, which is not all roses and light.
Having a strong sense of self, (I know that contradicts a lot of what people actually think in spiritual circles), is really important as our sensitivities develop. There are certain qualities that act as protection when engaging with the astral plane, like being at peace.
See also the section below on Developing Psychic Abilities.
Personal Development from Psychic Experiences
As I mentioned at the beginning of this page, psychic experiences are classified as EHE, which means that they have the potential to change us and transform us if we work with them in a reflective way.
A very specific process has been mapped out for processing EHE, which I detail on my EHE page. But even just journalling about your psychic experiences can help you understand them more deeply. When we journal, we are working with our relationship with the event; it gives us an opportunity to connect new dots, see through different lenses and create new meaning, which can all lead to deeper conviction, inner knowing, and a more holistic perspective - the stepping stones of the spiritual path.
Developing Psychic Abilities
There are some amazing teachers out there in the world who can teach you to develop your psychic abilities. And if this is something you want to proactively do, I highly recommend you find yourself a reputable teacher. Use discernment in finding a teacher. Where do they teach? What training have they had?
If they’ve never had any training, I’d steer clear and keep looking. I’ve met plenty of self-proclaimed psychics and mediums who have told me they didn’t need training because they’re natural mediums. And none of them was any good! Obviously, I’m not disputing psychic and mediumship as developing naturally; that’s what this page is all about. But, and this goes for you too, psychic abilities without training and discipline can be inaccurate at best, and even downright dangerous at worst.
If you’re opening alone, my one piece of advice is that you’re in a good place. That you’ve already engaged in a lot of inner work, that you’ve already worked through your traumas and hidden dark side. There are always more layers you can work through. If your general disposition is unbalanced or unregulated, or you’re suffering from depression, anxiety or any other mental health problem, now is not the time to develop your psychic abilities and open yourself to the astral plane. Now is the time to focus on yourself and your own healing.
Astral Plane Overwhelm
When working with the astral plane, spiritual hygiene is really important. You need clear boundaries and discipline. You have to know how to shut down. You have to know how to tune out. You have to stay in control and not give your will to the astral plane. There’s a reason I recommend finding a teacher ;)
You have to be able to stay grounded and embodied. You need to know where you end and another starts. These things come from knowing yourself deeply, from inner work. And these skills and depth of knowledge stop things getting overwhelming. They help us with discernment: what is psychic information versus anxiety, projection or my own thoughts.
And I know, sometimes as we awaken spiritually, these spiritual gifts come as unwelcome visitors, out of the blue and take us by surprise. And that’s OK. If you find yourself in this position, you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last!
I recommend:
· Eating a heavy diet, which helps you stay grounded.
· Doing exercises and walking that help you to stay grounded and embodied.
· Doing visualisations to close down chakras.
· Setting clear boundaries for spirit, closing yourself down for most of the day.
· Engaging in high frequency meditations like loving kindness and white light.
· Doing gratitude practice where you actually conjure up the feeling of gratitude and grow it exponentially.
· Exercise discernment.
· Get plenty of sleep.
Psychic Emergence and Spiritual Crisis
Sometimes, along the spiritual path, we end up navigating more than we can handle. Thirty years ago, my neighbour came banging on my door. She’d had a spiritual healing session in which the healers had been told to open all her chakras. She was blown wide open. Instantly she had all the Clairs, and she couldn’t turn them off. Her house was full of the dregs of the cosmos with malevolent entities that wanted a bit of fun with her. She described it as having a hundred radio stations on in the house at the same time, and she couldn’t turn them off.
She’d come to me because she was guided to by spirit. She brought through my late boyfriend. But as I sat with her and she conveyed her story, I discovered she had no idea what was going on. I had already been frequenting the psychic and mediumship schools and workshops, so I was able to give her some advice and context. However, I was no expert! I’m still not!
She was lucky. She managed to get it under control within a few weeks. Then she shut herself down for more than ten years. It had taken its toll on her. I have never seen anything like that happen at the school. That’s why I recommend finding reputable teachers.
If your psychic emergence is causing undue stress, I highly recommend getting in touch with a psychic and mediumship teacher. They are the best qualified to help you shut down your sensitivities. I also recommend seeing medical practitioners to rule out any medical causes.
For some, psychic abilities arrive with other challenges such as kundalini symptoms and mystical awakening. In these cases, it’s important to stay grounded. You can check out my page on kundalini awakening for more support on this.
Psychic Integration
Psychic emergence is all part of the spiritual journey and spiritual awakening. Sometimes it can be fun, other times it can be terrifying. The point is to stay grounded through it all. Be not attached to any emerging sensitivities but let them come and go. Use them as God would want; for healing and sharing. But remember, psychic abilities are not the answer to inner peace and the end of suffering; they are not the goal. They are side-effects, but they are also temptation, sweeties for the egoic program and will keep you distracted from what it is you are seeking.
Related Articles to Expand Your Wisdom
Continue your journey with grounded spiritual knowledge and insights from a transpersonal psychologist who has been walking the path for over 30 years. What questions are arising for you now?
What Are Exceptional Human Experiences (EHEs)?
Highly Sensitive Person – Everything You Need To Know
Get Out of Your Head: Guide to Practising Embodiment
Share this page: