On Spirit Guides, Clairaudient Dictation, and The Difference Between Psychic and Mediumistic Information
One of the most valuable tools I have in my arsenal as a medium is
that of taking clairaudient dictation. In
contrast to channeling verbally, claircognizantly or clairvoyantly,
pairing spirit communication with a tangible act that grounds the
information in the physical dimension and records it, is one of the best
ways to strengthen the link we have with the spirit world. There are
some misconceptions out there about “automatic” writing, including a few
I harbored myself before figuring out how to develop this skill, that
may keep many people hoping to learn how to channel from breaking
through plateaus in their communication. So, today, I’d like to clear
some of these up and teach my readers how to get started.
Before we go into the technique of writing by clairaudient dictation itself, we will need to backtrack a bit. As with any clair-sense, part of the challenge for the medium or psychic is to differentiate whether or not a given impression is coming from their own consciousness, or from spirit. And this is where the biggest difference between psychic information and mediumistic information - a crucial difference I wish I had been taught earlier in my practice - comes into play. Though these two modalities of information utilize the same clair-senses in order to be received, psychic information and the interpretation of mediumistic spirit communication run on two semi-separate, though interrelated, systems. The language and currency of both psychic reading and mediumistic communication is what we call “energy” (in the metaphysical sense, not necessarily as per the exact scientific definition.) However, the difference is that when we read a person, object or situation psychically, we are actively perceiving and interpreting the energetic imprints, streams of events, memories, emotions and physical elements within their fields, whereas the energetic impressions of mediumistic communication are received much more passively from a different source - intelligences or entities transmitting information directly from spirit. It’s kind of like the difference between watching a pre-recorded video of a person talking, and engaging in, say, a live video chat with them from another country. (How I know this to actually be true is the subject of a whole other post. Just bear with me for now.) So, while certain types of spiritual work, such as psychic reading or healing, may require us to “dig into” the personal energy field of the person we are working with and actively think about the various cues we are receiving, mediumistic work requires us to learn how to quiet ourselves completely, until we are as blank a slate as possible, ready to receive spirit communication. This passive reception is what differentiates clairaudient dictation from stream-of-consciousness.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I will share that the way I figured out how to bring my clairaudience to the fore and eventually, to channel verbally, after decades of previous psychic practice, involves a method that is deservedly somewhat controversial within the field of evidential mediumship: initial spirit board work, done exclusively with high-vibration spirit guides I was already aware of. Indeed, this technique should not be used by people inexperienced with meditation, visualization, energy work and psychic protection, nor is it necessary to do so. (I myself abandoned plans to teach this particular method precisely because it could too easily be misused.) It is definitely not the only way to learn how to channel. However, if you look at the history of some of the world’s most respected teachers of channeling (including the wonderful Sanaya Roman, whose book, “Opening to Channel,” I heartily recommend), there are in fact quite a few stories that follow a trajectory similar to mine. Contrary to popular misconception, it is possible to communicate with high-level spirit guides through spirit board work, as long as one approaches the work well-prepared, with absolute discipline, joy, gratitude and love. (I cannot stress enough the importance of energetic preparation.) You will know a tree by its fruits. However, because this method is not fool-proof even for the experienced, I will not go into further detail on it here. What I learned from it was how to be receptive to spirit, communicate verbally, and raise my vibration high enough to meet my guides half-way. One need only replicate these effects to be able to tap into clairaudient streams of information as effectively as I learned how to do. So, here is how you can do that with a method that is safer, and tool-free.
1. If you have not yet learned how to contact your spirit guides, begin to build your connection and strengthen your energy body through frequent meditation and meticulous self-care. Chakra-clearing meditations are indispensable for this. Please review some of my lessons on chakra clearing and preparation, and begin to incorporate them into your practice, preferably on a daily basis. Raise your energy by eating healthily, listening to music that makes you happy, and through activities such as engaging in affectionate interactions with people, walking in nature, laughing, doing something creative, beautifying your environment, and making gratitude lists. Strive to become the happiest, most balanced version of yourself you can be! Also, begin to pay attention to how your thoughts manifest themselves verbally in your mind. What does your inner voice sound like?
2. When you are comfortable meditating and clearing your chakras, and feel ready to meet your spirit guides, go into a meditative state, close your eyes, and envision your heart chakra filled with golden light. Imagine this light expanding to fill your aura in a protective, golden bubble. Fill your heart with as much excitement, joy, anticipation, love and trust as you can. Suspend any disbelief. (Be playful about this, if that helps.) Then, in your mind, invite your highest, most loving, wise and helpful spirit guide to appear before you. If no-one appears, say “thank you” anyway, come out of meditation, and try again another day. If a being of light does enter your field of vision, thank it for making itself known to you, and begin a conversation. See if you communicate with it most effectively through thought, word, vision, smell, sound, taste, feeling, or a combination of all of these. You may ask for a name, but this is not mandatory. If you do receive a name, accept the first one you hear. In the unlikely event that the being that appears in your vision makes you feel uncomfortable, do not fret. Just say thank you and goodbye, and send them off with blessings. Sometimes, more than one guide will present themselves to you. This is how I met Natalie, and my other main guide, Salvador.
3. Get to know your guide or guides by inviting them into your presence when you meditate or do energy work. You can also ask for assistance with various tasks or challenges throughout your day. In your mind, address your guide, explain your situation, and ask them to help you. (I prepare my guides for readings by letting them know days in advance who our next client will be. That way, when I go into the reading, they are raring to go and do not even need to be told what questions the client has.) You may notice new ideas and solutions popping into your head, little synchronicities helping you out, or, the next time you meditate and invite your guide, they may appear to offer advice.
4. Ask your guide, or guides, if they would like to communicate with you through clairaudient dictation. If they say yes, you can move on to the next step. If they say this is not part of their expertise, you can ask them to appoint another high-level guide who will be able to communicate with you in this way. (In my case, the guides who come through in writing often tend to be part of a collective consciousness that is broader than Natalie or Salvador individually.)
5. When you get the go-ahead, buy yourself a nice new notebook, and sharpen up a pencil. Go into a meditative state. Ask your spirit guides to come close, relax as deeply as possible, and begin to draw with a free hand, not thinking about what you are drawing, and inviting your spirit guides to guide your hand. Do this for a few pages, not thinking about the result. Do not worry about the drawing looking like anything in particular. Just feel the energy of the movement as an expression of feeling, and the freedom of your hand. Thank the guides for working with you. Then, begin to write, with the same freedom of expression. It is important here to not think too much about the meaning of the words, or even the grammatical correctness. Just express verbally a feeling you are getting. Write full sentences, without worrying about their coherence. You can start by writing free association, but the goal is to move beyond active association to a state where the mind is as passive and relaxed as possible. The first few attempts will probably be word salad. Don’t worry. This will change. The process of learning to channel is like tuning a radio to a precise frequency and learning to tune out the interference. This is what this step is about.
6. Now, the most important part: Let your mind go completely quiet and blank. Then, ask a question you would like your guides to answer. Write it down. Go completely quiet again, and listen. As soon as you hear a word, write it down. Do not think about the meaning, or the structure of the sentence. Do not continue writing until you hear the next word. Trust what you hear, and do not worry about what you think the next word should be. When you are truly channeling, you will be able to write paragraphs of information in coherent, eloquent text, one word at a time, with no idea of how a sentence you have begun to write, will end. Do not rush through this process. If you feel your conscious mind interfering with the message you are receiving, take a deep breath, quiet your mind again, and listen, almost as if you were in the process of falling asleep. When a word is coming from spirit, it will repeat itself and not change until you have written it down.
7. When you are done, do not only thank the guides mentally, but write down your thanks after your message. Say goodbye. Come out of meditation. You might not even remember fully what you have written. Now read your answer. Congratulations! You will know you are truly channeling spirit when the text is coherent, eloquent, insightful, compassionate, evidential (in the case of readings tied to events in the physical world), and carries wisdom greater than what you thought you were capable of.
If it takes a while to get the hang of this, do not get discouraged. Even when you succeed at this technique, it is normal for channeling abilities to fluctuate with our general energy levels, circumstances, etc.. Keep practicing, and you will be amazed at the ease with which you will be able to receive higher guidance.
How do you get guidance and information from your guides? Have you ever tried channeling through writing? How did it go? Let me know if you try this method, and how it works for you!
Before we go into the technique of writing by clairaudient dictation itself, we will need to backtrack a bit. As with any clair-sense, part of the challenge for the medium or psychic is to differentiate whether or not a given impression is coming from their own consciousness, or from spirit. And this is where the biggest difference between psychic information and mediumistic information - a crucial difference I wish I had been taught earlier in my practice - comes into play. Though these two modalities of information utilize the same clair-senses in order to be received, psychic information and the interpretation of mediumistic spirit communication run on two semi-separate, though interrelated, systems. The language and currency of both psychic reading and mediumistic communication is what we call “energy” (in the metaphysical sense, not necessarily as per the exact scientific definition.) However, the difference is that when we read a person, object or situation psychically, we are actively perceiving and interpreting the energetic imprints, streams of events, memories, emotions and physical elements within their fields, whereas the energetic impressions of mediumistic communication are received much more passively from a different source - intelligences or entities transmitting information directly from spirit. It’s kind of like the difference between watching a pre-recorded video of a person talking, and engaging in, say, a live video chat with them from another country. (How I know this to actually be true is the subject of a whole other post. Just bear with me for now.) So, while certain types of spiritual work, such as psychic reading or healing, may require us to “dig into” the personal energy field of the person we are working with and actively think about the various cues we are receiving, mediumistic work requires us to learn how to quiet ourselves completely, until we are as blank a slate as possible, ready to receive spirit communication. This passive reception is what differentiates clairaudient dictation from stream-of-consciousness.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I will share that the way I figured out how to bring my clairaudience to the fore and eventually, to channel verbally, after decades of previous psychic practice, involves a method that is deservedly somewhat controversial within the field of evidential mediumship: initial spirit board work, done exclusively with high-vibration spirit guides I was already aware of. Indeed, this technique should not be used by people inexperienced with meditation, visualization, energy work and psychic protection, nor is it necessary to do so. (I myself abandoned plans to teach this particular method precisely because it could too easily be misused.) It is definitely not the only way to learn how to channel. However, if you look at the history of some of the world’s most respected teachers of channeling (including the wonderful Sanaya Roman, whose book, “Opening to Channel,” I heartily recommend), there are in fact quite a few stories that follow a trajectory similar to mine. Contrary to popular misconception, it is possible to communicate with high-level spirit guides through spirit board work, as long as one approaches the work well-prepared, with absolute discipline, joy, gratitude and love. (I cannot stress enough the importance of energetic preparation.) You will know a tree by its fruits. However, because this method is not fool-proof even for the experienced, I will not go into further detail on it here. What I learned from it was how to be receptive to spirit, communicate verbally, and raise my vibration high enough to meet my guides half-way. One need only replicate these effects to be able to tap into clairaudient streams of information as effectively as I learned how to do. So, here is how you can do that with a method that is safer, and tool-free.
1. If you have not yet learned how to contact your spirit guides, begin to build your connection and strengthen your energy body through frequent meditation and meticulous self-care. Chakra-clearing meditations are indispensable for this. Please review some of my lessons on chakra clearing and preparation, and begin to incorporate them into your practice, preferably on a daily basis. Raise your energy by eating healthily, listening to music that makes you happy, and through activities such as engaging in affectionate interactions with people, walking in nature, laughing, doing something creative, beautifying your environment, and making gratitude lists. Strive to become the happiest, most balanced version of yourself you can be! Also, begin to pay attention to how your thoughts manifest themselves verbally in your mind. What does your inner voice sound like?
2. When you are comfortable meditating and clearing your chakras, and feel ready to meet your spirit guides, go into a meditative state, close your eyes, and envision your heart chakra filled with golden light. Imagine this light expanding to fill your aura in a protective, golden bubble. Fill your heart with as much excitement, joy, anticipation, love and trust as you can. Suspend any disbelief. (Be playful about this, if that helps.) Then, in your mind, invite your highest, most loving, wise and helpful spirit guide to appear before you. If no-one appears, say “thank you” anyway, come out of meditation, and try again another day. If a being of light does enter your field of vision, thank it for making itself known to you, and begin a conversation. See if you communicate with it most effectively through thought, word, vision, smell, sound, taste, feeling, or a combination of all of these. You may ask for a name, but this is not mandatory. If you do receive a name, accept the first one you hear. In the unlikely event that the being that appears in your vision makes you feel uncomfortable, do not fret. Just say thank you and goodbye, and send them off with blessings. Sometimes, more than one guide will present themselves to you. This is how I met Natalie, and my other main guide, Salvador.
3. Get to know your guide or guides by inviting them into your presence when you meditate or do energy work. You can also ask for assistance with various tasks or challenges throughout your day. In your mind, address your guide, explain your situation, and ask them to help you. (I prepare my guides for readings by letting them know days in advance who our next client will be. That way, when I go into the reading, they are raring to go and do not even need to be told what questions the client has.) You may notice new ideas and solutions popping into your head, little synchronicities helping you out, or, the next time you meditate and invite your guide, they may appear to offer advice.
4. Ask your guide, or guides, if they would like to communicate with you through clairaudient dictation. If they say yes, you can move on to the next step. If they say this is not part of their expertise, you can ask them to appoint another high-level guide who will be able to communicate with you in this way. (In my case, the guides who come through in writing often tend to be part of a collective consciousness that is broader than Natalie or Salvador individually.)
5. When you get the go-ahead, buy yourself a nice new notebook, and sharpen up a pencil. Go into a meditative state. Ask your spirit guides to come close, relax as deeply as possible, and begin to draw with a free hand, not thinking about what you are drawing, and inviting your spirit guides to guide your hand. Do this for a few pages, not thinking about the result. Do not worry about the drawing looking like anything in particular. Just feel the energy of the movement as an expression of feeling, and the freedom of your hand. Thank the guides for working with you. Then, begin to write, with the same freedom of expression. It is important here to not think too much about the meaning of the words, or even the grammatical correctness. Just express verbally a feeling you are getting. Write full sentences, without worrying about their coherence. You can start by writing free association, but the goal is to move beyond active association to a state where the mind is as passive and relaxed as possible. The first few attempts will probably be word salad. Don’t worry. This will change. The process of learning to channel is like tuning a radio to a precise frequency and learning to tune out the interference. This is what this step is about.
6. Now, the most important part: Let your mind go completely quiet and blank. Then, ask a question you would like your guides to answer. Write it down. Go completely quiet again, and listen. As soon as you hear a word, write it down. Do not think about the meaning, or the structure of the sentence. Do not continue writing until you hear the next word. Trust what you hear, and do not worry about what you think the next word should be. When you are truly channeling, you will be able to write paragraphs of information in coherent, eloquent text, one word at a time, with no idea of how a sentence you have begun to write, will end. Do not rush through this process. If you feel your conscious mind interfering with the message you are receiving, take a deep breath, quiet your mind again, and listen, almost as if you were in the process of falling asleep. When a word is coming from spirit, it will repeat itself and not change until you have written it down.
7. When you are done, do not only thank the guides mentally, but write down your thanks after your message. Say goodbye. Come out of meditation. You might not even remember fully what you have written. Now read your answer. Congratulations! You will know you are truly channeling spirit when the text is coherent, eloquent, insightful, compassionate, evidential (in the case of readings tied to events in the physical world), and carries wisdom greater than what you thought you were capable of.
If it takes a while to get the hang of this, do not get discouraged. Even when you succeed at this technique, it is normal for channeling abilities to fluctuate with our general energy levels, circumstances, etc.. Keep practicing, and you will be amazed at the ease with which you will be able to receive higher guidance.
How do you get guidance and information from your guides? Have you ever tried channeling through writing? How did it go? Let me know if you try this method, and how it works for you!
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