that child. But now I see another image of the child, who is a little older. She falls off the bicycle, hurts her arm, and lies in the street crying. I get the feeling that this is not an actual event, but is symbolic: that in childhood you were hurt and felt lost because of painful events in your family life. Now I see your stepfather appearing in the doorway and yelling at you for falling down; you are very frightened. I’m not sure of this, but I get the sense that you haven’t been able to trust being happy since then.”
In this example, all of the reader’s psychic senses were active. Still, the reader was unsure in places and had the wisdom to say, “I get the feeling” and “I get the sense that . . . ” The listener will interpret the images. Don’t guess about anything; give only what you receive.
Do not frighten the listener. If what you perceive could worry or harm the listener, convey your impressions carefully or not at all. If you decide to share the information, do not say that such-and-such (a heart attack, a car wreck, a death in the family) will happen; you could be wrong and cause unnecessary worry. Instead, tell the listener what you picked up, and then ask if someone has a fear or concern about such-and-such.
Schiller-Hanna added a comment about this practice in an interview with me, saying: “Sometimes I’ll be guided to talk in more general terms. Instead of telling an elderly woman that I see her husband passing in the next year, I may be guided to say, ‘I feel you will be having a change before too long. It will be helpful to learn to be more independent.’ This gives her tools but doesn’t burden her with anxiety and fear about the loss of her partner, if Spirit has not told me to reveal this loss directly.”
Be sure to point out to the listener that the future depends on the choices and decisions we make. Changing the present changes the future. Simply alerting the listener (or, if you are reading for yourself, your own conscious mind) of the possibility of a problem is the extent of your responsibility. After the reading, the listener must use his or her instincts, intellect, and intuition to determine if some kind of action needs to be taken.
Stop when the flow ends. The reading continues until nothing more surfaces for you. If the listener has questions, you may wish to return to your intuitive state to ask for more information.
For the Listener/Recipient: How to Listen and Give Feedback
If you are the listener, listen quietly without distracting or interrupting the speaker. Volunteering information could derail the stream of information or change its direction entirely. It’s better for the information to come from the intuitive reader, unless he or she seems stuck or unsure, in which case it may be helpful for the listener to supply a missing piece of information.
Despite this instruction, some listeners can’t help but respond to the speaker with a supportive “Mm-hmm.” This kind of agreement is human nature, but it is better for the listener not to comment. Besides breaking the speaker’s flow, the speaker may begin to listen for confirmation, and this delay could take the reading down a psychic alleyway that might be a detour from the soul’s original path.
When the reading is over, the listener is invited to give feedback to the speaker. The listener should report what resonated and what means nothing at present. Later on, the information may become meaningful.
I experienced this delayed understanding in my first psychic reading of someone else. A city magazine had assigned me to write a cover story on a well-known local psychic, so I attended her intuitive training class. Some thirty people sat in a circle in a large room, and during a psychometry exercise, each of us picked a name out of a basket. I unfolded the piece of paper and was astonished to get a clear, distinct impression of green leaves on a curving stem placed against a purple background.
The person who owned up to the name I drew said that image meant nothing to her. But later on, she took off her jacket and, lo and behold, her purple sweat shirt was decorated with a winding stem of green ivy leaves. This design was exactly what I had seen, but if she hadn’t removed her jacket, I would have assumed that I’d been completely wrong.
What does not make sense to the listener at the moment might become clear minutes, days, or even weeks later. So don’t worry about what seem like intuitive “misses.” They may turn out to be “hits.”
Extending the reading. During the feedback session, the listener may ask for details on certain aspects of the reading. Whether to go back for more information or not is the speaker’s choice. If the speaker is willing to give more, he or she may be able to do so immediately. There’s a simple explanation for this ready availability: the speaker and listener are still in the channel, much as the dreamer, immediately upon waking, is still in the dream.
The speaker may be able to answer questions by looking inward with the eyes open or may need to retreat inward by repeating the seven steps to get back into the channel.
Interpreting Imagery
Your subconscious soul is a brilliant playwright, director, and producer who uses the symbols stored in your mind, and some physicists theorize, in universal awareness, to communicate complex ideas quickly and succinctly. These images spring to life in multisensory plays with plots, settings, and characters that speak to you on many levels and in ways you can understand.
No one can interpret your inner imagery better than you can, as it comes from your life experiences and their associations with specific symbols. Your psyche uses these symbols as a kind of shorthand to telegraph richly meaningful messages to you.
For example, if you are reading for someone else and see an image of a house surrounded by a picket fence, your interpretation will depend on what this image means to you. You may have lived in such a house and had an idyllic childhood—or a miserable one. What you are seeing, then, may indicate the same situation for the client as what you experienced, or it may simply mean that the next few intuitive impulses will relate to the person’s childhood.
Could it also indicate that the person is living in such a house right now? Of course it could! Such is the ambiguity of psychic symbolism. Because of this ambiguity, it’s best for the new psychic reader to merely report what arises, unless the imagery is accompanied by a distinct sense of inner certainty (and even then, the wise speaker says tentatively, “I feel” or “I get a sense”).
It’s also possible that the symbols you see and sense are not part of your inventory at all and instead mean something to the listener, since it’s his or her reading. In both cases, it’s best to allow the story to emerge, image by image, until the meaning is clear.
If the listener has no idea of the meaning and you suspect that you do, share what you know. Couch it as, “This is what I feel/suspect/guess is the meaning.” Perhaps your insights are correct or will stir comprehension in the listener.
Paying attention to your dreams will better acquaint you with your symbol system. When a minister friend of mine shows up in a dream, I know the dream refers to my spiritual life. Similarly, the appearance of the color green, coupled with pictures of outdoor scenes and a tingling feeling in my palms, tells me that the recipient of the reading is a healer (the tingling in my hands indicates that idea) or a gardener, farmer, or landscaper who works outdoors in some way.
How you give a psychic reading is entirely your own choice. As in everything else, you will learn from your mistakes. I prefer to report—at least early in the reading—only what I see, hear, feel, and even taste, touch, and smell without giving any interpretation until other images tell the full story. I might say to the listener: “I see the color green and my hands are tingling, so I sense that
