Your Psychic Self

by Melissa Alvarez

  Animal Communicator

  An animal communicator has the intuitive ability to communicate with various kinds of creatures in the animal kingdom. This is also called animal telepathy. Someone with animal telepathy may picture something in their mind that they want the animal to do, send the picture to the animal, and ask it to follow the instructions, and the animal does it. This ability is quite often used in training animals and trainers often refer to it as a technique instead of an intuitive ability. (I believe it is an ability and not a technique.) It’s easier for the animal to understand and learn if you’re telepathically sending it visual images along with your verbal instructions. As an animal communicator, you will feel a special connection with animals. You will have a healthy respect for them but no fear. When you ask animals questions, you see, feel, or hear their response in your mind or you may even see visual images that they’ve sent back to you.

  People who are animal communicators can help you resolve issues with the animals in your life. They are different from animal trainers in that they are not trying to train the animal to do something but are trying to understand why they are acting in particular ways.

  Try It Now: Animal Communication

  If you have a pet, you can try animal communication with it. If you don’t own a pet, practice animal communication with a wild animal, such as a bird or squirrel. Send a thought and mental picture to the animal of something that you would like for it to do. If it’s your pet, ask them to come to you when they’re in a different room. If it’s a wild animal, ask that it comes closer to you or that it moves in a certain direction. When you’re practicing animal communication, make sure that you send the animal a visual image of what you’re asking in addition to the thought in words. Write down your results and over time you’ll find that your success rate increases.

  Animal Totems

  An animal totem is an animal spirit that guides you during your lifetime. Some animal totems are with you from birth to death, and others come and go in your life when you need them, just as some spirit guides do. Animal totems are all positive beings. If you find yourself encountering an animal in your dreams or an animal that evokes fear when you see it, there is something in your life that you need to change and the animal totem is there to help you change it.

  Animal totems are not chosen by you; instead, they choose you. If there is a particular animal that you feel drawn to your entire life, it is probably a lifetime animal totem for you. For me, it is a horse. If there is an animal that has started to suddenly appear in your life, then its presence has meaning at that time. You’ll become aware of this happening because the animal will get really close to you or will appear out of the blue. Today as I walked toward our tack room, I heard the beating of wings inside. In the years that we’ve had the barn, we’ve never had a bird fly inside the tack room. So I waited a minute, and a black raven flew out, right past me, and then went and perched on the side of one of the turnouts and stared at me. When I got home I looked up what a raven animal totem meant and discovered it is the keeper of secrets, heightened awareness, greater understanding of consciousness, and teacher of mysticism. All of which had meaning to me that day.

  Take time to notice the animals around you, even if you don’t own a pet. Pay attention to the animals you feel drawn to. Take the time to learn about them, what other cultures think about them, and their meaning as an animal totem. By learning about the animal, you may just learn something about yourself.

  Try It Now: Connect with Your Animal Totem

  For this exercise, I want you to find somewhere that you can sit comfortably or lie down. Close your eyes and ask that your animal totem come to you. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the meaning of the animal totem; you can look it up later. The important aspect of this exercise is that you make the connection. Relax your body and clear your mind. Wait for your animal totem to appear in your mind’s eye. When it does, don’t be quick to reject it, especially if it is an animal that you don’t like. Watch how the animal interacts with you as the scenario in your mind’s eye plays out. Can you receive a message from what you’re seeing? When the animal totem leaves, thank it for visiting with you and then look up what that particular animal means as a totem to you.

  Master Palmist

  A master palmist is someone who has studied and mastered the art of palmistry over many years and is able to read a person’s character or predict their future by reading the lines and shapes in that person’s palm(s). You do not need to be intuitive to be a palmist, but many people who read palms often use their intuition while doing the reading.

  When a palm reading is conducted, there are many factors that are examined including the lines of the hand, the mounts, the shape of the fingers, the thickness of the hands, and the texture. Through these shapes, lines, and other qualities of your hands, the master palmist can often tell you about your life lessons and purposes, your challenges and potentials. They can predict the number of children you will have, your financials over your lifetime, and your spiritual path. A master palmist can also tell you about talents that you may not realize you have, how you respond to others emotionally, and how to find harmony in your relationships.

  If you’re interested in palmistry, you can learn to read the hands of other people through practice and further reading.

  Past Life Regression/Past Life Consultant

  If you’ve known how to do something that you shouldn’t because you’ve never studied or practiced it, then you’re probably connecting to a past life memory. Or maybe the first time you visited a place, you knew exactly what you’d see around the next corner. Do you have a phobia that has no root source in your current lifetime? All of these instances are signs of reincarnation.

  Reincarnation is the belief that your soul has lived before in another physical body, time, and place. It is also the belief that when you die, you will go to the Other Side to review your life lessons to determine what you learned or didn’t learn in your most recent lifetime, and then you’ll be reborn into another body to learn the lessons that you still need to accomplish on your spiritual path. In each incarnation, you have the same soul, but different personalities. People you knew in past lives will often be part of your current life in order to work out any lessons between the two of you.

  Being psychically attuned to your past lives can be very enlightening and can help you resolve situations that are holding you back in your current lifetime. I’ve done many past life readings for people and one emotion that always seems to come up is fear. You may be afraid of something in this lifetime that has its basis in a past lifetime. For instance, a fear of heights may be due to death from falling off a cliff three hundred years earlier. When the connection is made between the past life and the current fear, the person usually gets confirmation in the form of the Chills of Universal Truth or a sense of knowing they’ve experienced a soul truth. As a result, the fear usually dissipates immediately or relatively quickly thereafter.

  Sometimes you may experience glimpses of past lives. We breed Friesian horses, and one of the horses, when I first met her, immediately put her head over my shoulder and breathed a big sigh. I looked at my husband and said, “This is my horse.” Then one day, when I was mucking the turnout attached to her stall, I glanced over and she was in the doorway, standing tall, looking out across the field at the cars on the interstate. I immediately saw a glimpse of a past lifetime in which she was standing in exactly the same manner and I was cooking some kind of meat over a fire built inside a circle of rocks. I knew I was male in this past lifetime and it was during the medieval era. There was no doubt in my mind that she truly was my horse.

  When you intuitively sense flashes like this, don’t be too quick to think that it’s just your imagination. Right after I saw this flash, my horse looked over at me, walked into the turnout, and nuzzled my face. That was all the confirmation I needed that what I’d just seen was real. This is cal
led reliving a past life. While what I saw in this instance was just a glimpse, you can also remember an entire past life in complete detail.

  Past life regression is when you use hypnosis to help you remember past lives so you can get to the root of current problems or discover more about yourself on a soul level. When you choose to follow this path, make sure that the person doing the hypnosis is a qualified professional with a lot of experience so that you don’t get harmed in the process.

  If you have ever wondered if you’ve had a past life and want to know about them without going through a hypnotically induced past life regression, then you can have a reading with a past life consultant. This is a person who is intuitively able to see your past lives by focusing on your energy.

  Having a past life reading can enable you to overcome fears, see karma at work, learn life lessons, and make a connection to your soul essence. If the consultant is able to read emotions in addition to seeing events during the past life consultation, they can help you understand the feelings based in the past lifetime that may have remained and are still connected to you in your current lifetime.

  A past life consultant can not only read your past lifetimes, but can also use their ability and intuition to help you resolve issues they saw in your past lifetimes. For instance, when I do a past life reading, I always ask why I was shown this lifetime and what the lesson is for the person I’m reading. Obtaining this information during the reading helps the person to resolve current issues.

  Card Readers: Tarot, Oracle,

  and Animal Card Readings

  Tarot cards have been around for thousands of years. They are most often used to connect with the higher self and receive insights about specific questions or general situations. Most often, the questions or situations are approached in a positive manner; you’re asking for broad insight through the cards, posing a specific question or an answer before you even do the reading. For instance, if you’re asking a question about your love life, you would ask how you can bring more love into your life instead of asking who you’re going to marry. By asking the questions in this manner, you’ll receive a more meaningful reading.

  All tarot card decks consist of seventy-eight cards that include the major arcana and minor arcana. The major arcana are picture cards that represent ideals, principles, or concepts. Some of the card names (depending on the deck) are the Sun, the Moon, the World, Strength, the Lovers, Justice, and the Wheel of Fortune, to name a few. The minor arcana includes four suits: wands, swords, cups, and pentacles. Some decks substitute circles for pentacles. Each of the suits includes the king, queen, knight, and page, as well as numbered cards from one to ten.

  Each tarot card has a specific meaning by itself and another meaning if it is laid upside down in the spread. A card can have additional meanings based on the other cards around it in the spread. Two of the more popular spreads are the Celtic cross, where the cards are placed in the shape of a cross and give an in-depth reading, and the three-card spread, where three cards are drawn that tell you the past of the situation, the situation now, and the future outcome.

  Oracle cards are decks of cards that are used for divination. There is a wide variety of oracle cards that you can choose from when doing a reading for yourself or others. These decks can help you find answers to specific questions or give you a general overview of a situation. They can offer guidance or clarity about your life path and purpose. These cards can have many different themes. Some of the more popular types of oracle cards are angel cards, ascended master cards, animal totem cards, fairy cards, life purpose cards, and spirit guide cards. When selecting a deck for yourself, choose a theme and deck that you feel drawn to. By doing this, you have a connection to the cards and will choose one that will give you valuable information when you do a reading.

  Once you’ve decided on the oracle cards and before you start using them, cleanse them and give them the purpose of working for the greater good. If at any time you feel that the energy of the cards is clogged or not flowing freely, then cleanse them again with white light. Using a variety of oracle cards can offer you different perspectives depending upon the theme of the deck. You may use one deck for your reading and another for further clarification of the same situation.

  An animal card reading is when an intuitive uses an animal card deck to do an intuitive reading for you. These types of readings can be helpful to find your animal totem or to see how animals connect to you on a soul level. These are often called animal oracle readings or animal totem readings. People will often seek out animal readings after having a particular animal feature portrayed prominently in a dream or when a specific animal keeps appearing in their lives.

  Tarot, oracle, and animal card readers use a combination of their intuition and clair abilities along with tarot cards, oracle cards, animal cards, or any of the many types of divination decks available to give a reading. These readings are done based upon the way the cards are cut and laid in a variety of spreads that give the reader insight into the person and the situation for which they are seeking guidance.

  Each type of reading is used in a way that is specified by the instructions accompanying the particular deck. Some tarot or oracle card readers will allow the person for whom they’re reading to choose the deck from which they want a reading to be conducted; other readers choose the deck they are drawn to when focusing on the person’s energy.

  When doing a tarot or oracle card reading, the reader will focus on the person and their situation, shuffle and cut the deck until it feels right (or have the person they’re reading do this if it’s an in-person reading), and then draw the cards, laying them out in the chosen spread. Then they interpret the spread according to the meaning of the cards and the intuitive impressions received. These types of readings can answer specific questions or give a general overview of a situation.

  Try It Now:

  Do a Tarot or Oracle Card Reading

  If you already own a tarot or oracle card deck, then choose the deck you’d like to use for the reading. If you don’t own a deck, then go to your local bookstore or online retailer and purchase one in order to do this exercise. When making your selection, choose one that you feel drawn to as detailed above. You can often glean more information if the deck comes with an interpretive book, so this may be an added option that you’d like to consider. Other decks come as complete sets with the deck, book, carrying case or bag, and a journal to log your results. You might prefer this type of complete set.

  Once you have your deck, begin by doing a reading for yourself. Start with a simple three-card spread and focus on one specific question or situation. Shuffle the cards until you feel that the energy is right, and then cut the cards into several piles. Choose the piles you feel drawn to and then select a card from the top of each one or stack them back together and choose the first three cards from the top of the deck. Now read the meaning of each card and consider how it relates to your situation. Allow your intuition to give you additional information as you read about the past, present, and future of the situation. When you are finished with the reading, determine whether you’ve received a solution to your question.

  Runes

  Runes are an oracle that uses an ancient Germanic alphabet inscribed on tiles, small rocks, stones, or wood. Today, you can buy runes that have the symbols inscribed on metal, crystals, or plastic as well. These same symbols were used in writing thousands of years ago and were often found carved into standing stones, along well-traveled paths or roads, to guide travelers.

  A rune reading is not a way to predict the future. When doing a rune reading, you will find that they can offer advice that makes you think and analyze your situation and a possible outcome. If you’re intuitive, when doing a rune reading, you will rely on your intuition to help you clearly see what the runes are saying.

  When casting runes, you will focus on your situation, then reach into the bag holding the runes and touch the va
rious tiles until you feel that one connects with your energy. You remove that tile and lay it down in the pattern of the chosen spread. You continue doing this until all of the places in the spread are cast with a rune, then you follow the order of the spread and read the meaning of each rune from the accompanying instruction book. When interpreting the cast, you consider both the individual meaning of each rune and its position in the spread.

  Rune casting can be very enlightening, especially when you’re at times of change in your life.

  Were you successful in meeting your guides or finding spirits on film? Did you meet your animal totem? This is just the beginning of a giant step in your path of enlightenment. As you recognize and learn to communicate with those on the Other Side and on other planes, you will become more aware of the vastness of the Universe. There is much that you can learn from these beings if you’re open to their assistance.

  Doing readings is an enjoyable way to practice using your intuitive abilities. Even if you’re only doing them for yourself, you can gain insightful and wise knowledge through a variety of readings. Keep exploring your own abilities and trying different types of readings to find what works best for you. You may prefer one type over another to gain insight to questions and aid in spiritual growth. The knowledge you gain from readings is priceless.