Anna Sayce

Tag: claircognizance

  • What is Intuition?

    What is Intuition?

    In this post I explore what intuition is, including the differences between intuitive abilities and psychic abilities, because many people do not know what intuition is exactly, and how it differs from psychic abilities.

    What is Intuition?

    You know those moments when you get a feeling in your gut that someone is not trustworthy? Or a little insight about someone else’s life – for example, you know that your friend is going to get the job that she’s about to go to an interview for? That would be your intuition.

    One intuitive insight that sticks out in my memory for some reason was a scenario at work about 18 months ago – it was when I was teaching English and French in a language school in Spain.

    On Thursdays I only taught English, but that day as I was going out the door I knew I had to take my French grammar book with me. I wasn’t going to teach French that day and I rarely used my French grammar book anyway, even on the days I taught French, so it appeared to be pointless. But I heeded my intuitive voice and took it anyway.

    Then in the afternoon one of my French students came in unexpectedly and wanted a photocopy from my French grammar book. Ta-da, I could produce one because I had it with me, because I knew I’d need it that day. Although I didn’t know what for.

    I hesitated to include that story in this article because it’s kind of mundane. I didn’t find my life purpose through this intuitive insight or get guided towards buried treasure. It was a fairly small event and wasn’t too impactful, but it made my day and my student’s go more smoothly and that’s about it. Plus the intuitive insight made me feel provided for, and looked after. It was nice to have!

    So, intuition can be little insights which help you with the little things – such as making your day go more smoothly, saving you time, energy or money here and there. But it doesn’t have to be small – larger insights can also help you with the big things of life, such as prevent you from investing a great deal in something (such as a major project) which will come to a dead end. Intuitive insight usually comes to you in the moment, as you need it, just like the example above of my French grammar book.

    The Difference between Intuitive Gifts and Psychic Gifts

    A key component of intuition is that it comes to you and through you, usually spontaneously. In order for that to happen, you must be open and you must notice intuition. On the other hand, when we talk about developing psychic ability, we’re talking more about you going ‘out there’ energetically to receive information from your Higher self or Spirit Guides.

    For intuition, we often talk about feelings, impressions and a sense of knowing and all of these come through the intuitive ‘vehicles’ of clairsentience and claircognizance. (Claircognizance is an insight that just pops up spontaneously in your brain, perhaps unrelated to anything you were thinking about. Clairsentience can be a gut feeling, or a strong, meaningful emotion which speaks to you.)

    So, as a general rule, an intuitive tends to use mostly clairsentience and claircognizance, whereas if someone calls herself a psychic, it’s more likely that she’ll use three or four intuitive vehicles – clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience and claircognizance. I have also noticed that those psychics who mostly use clairvoyance and clairaudience usually refer to themselves as psychics, not as intuitives.

    I believe that for most people, intuitive ability is easier to develop than psychic ability, because it comes primarily through claircognizance and clairsentience and most people are naturally claircognizant and clairsentient. On the other hand, clairvoyance and clairaudience seem to be additional ‘specialties’ that you can have as an intuitive, as fewer people are naturally clairaudient and very few people are naturally clairvoyant.

  • Which Is Your Strongest Intuitive Gift?

    Which Is Your Strongest Intuitive Gift?

    If you’ve read any of my other articles you’ll probably notice I’ve been banging on about the importance of finding out your intuitive gifts. This is because intuition or psychic ability is not just one gift – it’s actually made up of six gifts – clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, dreaming, empathy and claircognizance.

    The chances are, you have innate abilities in one or two of these gifts. The chances also are that one or two of the above gifts you do not have yet. Your intuition will be difficult and slow to develop if you try to develop a gift that you don’t have yet and neglect the gifts you do have. So that’s why it helps to start your journey of intuitive development knowing what you’re naturally good at.

    Here is a quiz to help you to find out what gifts you have:

    (Note: you can also now take this quiz here, and it will automatically calculate the result for you.)

    Clairvoyance

    Clairvoyance is the ability to ‘see’ Spirit

    • Do you dream in colour and with vivid images?

    • When you’re doing creative work, like designing something and deciding how you want something to look, do you get a clear image in your head of it?

    • When you close your eyes, can you clearly see any object of your choosing? For example, visualize a bicycle. Can you see it in your mind’s eye? (Natural clairvoyants usually have an easy time than most at visualizing).

    • Do you get visual solutions to problems in your mind’s eye?

    • Are you very visually/artistically creative?

    • Do you ever see lights or auras around people when you’re speaking to them?

    • Do you ever see things moving in the corner of your eye?

    Clairaudience

    Clairaudience is the ability to hear your Higher Self, Spirit Guides and other extra-sensory input

    • Have you ever had a voice clearly direct you to do something and it turned out to be helpful or accurate?

    • Have you ever heard ringing or buzzing sounds in your ears?

    • Do you hear voices upon waking or going to sleep?

    • Do you sometimes hear music playing in your head?

    • Do you wake up in the morning with a song in your head?

    • Have you ever heard anything outside of you, such as whispering, music or voices when there was no-one there?

    • Do you get words popping into your head fully formed which are relevant or solutions to difficulties you’re having?

    Clairsentience

    Clairsentience is intuition in the form of emotional input, physical feelings or gut feelings

    • Do you get tingling sensations on your body for no reason?

    • Do you feel your emotions very deeply?

    • Can you feel the emotions of others?

    • Do you need a lot of time alone to recharge your energetic batteries?

    • Are you sensitive and thin-skinned?

    • Do you have an ‘F’ in your Myers-Briggs type (F for feeling)?

    • Do you know what’s the right path to take according to how it feels to you?

    Claircognizance

    Claircognizance is when intuitive information just pops into your head

    • Are you very analytical and thinking-oriented?

    • Can you be skeptical – does your mind often have the final say in things?

    • Do you get lots of great ideas seemingly out of nowhere?

    • Are you mentally and creatively inspired on a regular basis?

    • Are you good at solving problems and lateral thinking?

    • Are you often making subtle assumptions which turn out to be true?

    • Are you sizing up people and knowing things without being told?

    • Do you know that things are going to happen ahead of time?

    • Do you come across as a know-it-all because you always think of an answer to the difficult questions of life?

    Empathy

    • Do you know how others are feeling without needing to ask?

    • Can you feel tension in the air when there’s been an argument?

    • Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed that there are so many people on Earth who are suffering, and wish you could do something about it?

    • Do you often feel overwhelmed in social interactions because you are so absorbed in observing others’ feelings and experiences?

    • Do you identify deeply with other peoples’ problems and difficulties? (and this sometimes means you over-identify with other people, and sacrifice your own needs in order to help others)

    Dreaming

    • Do you often remember your dreams?

    • Do you wake up from dreams feeling like you learned or ‘realized’ something?

    • Have you ever had a dream where a deceased loved one showed up?

    • Have you ever had a lucid dream or an astral projection experience?

    • Are your dreams rich in interesting symbolism?

    Now add up how many times you said yes to statements in each category. Did you say ‘yes’ to some statements in one or two categories in particular?

    More tips to find out which gifts you have

    1. Experiment. Try exercises to awaken each clair. For starters, I have a few suggestions for what to try in each of my articles about clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience and claircognizance. You may notice that one of the exercises is really easy for you and awakens something in your perception.

    2. Notice where you’re already using your natural gifts. Remember the times when you actually have received some intuitive guidance – how did it come? Was it visual, auditory, emotional or kinesthetic?

    Which are the most common psychic gifts?

    Several years ago, I offered a free mini reading where I’d tell people which intuitive gift they had, out of the four mentioned above. I did between 600 and 700 of these mini readings. I found that claircognizance and clairsentience are really common gifts. The vast majority of people I read for have one of these gifts as either their primary or secondary intuitive gift. These gifts are usually classed as ‘intuition’ and they can be very subtle, which is why they can often go unnoticed. Only a small proportion of people I read for had clairvoyance as their strongest gift.

    If you would like further instruction on developing your intuitive gifts, you may be interested in my Intuitive Awakening Course.

    intuitive awakening

  • How Can I Accelerate My Psychic Development?

    How Can I Accelerate My Psychic Development?

    There really is no set period of time that your psychic ability should take to develop. How long it takes depends on lots of things, including how motivated you are to work at it, how much time you spend on hit and miss/trial and error approaches and your willingness to stick at it.

    But there are some approaches you can take which make the process more challenging and time-consuming than it needs to be. I’ve listed here the four approaches I’ve found unhelpful – from my own experience and from the experience of others, so that you can avoid them.

    1. Putting Pressure on Yourself

    I’ve noticed that sometimes people can get frustrated because they expect their intuition or psychic abilities to be like a switch that you can ‘switch on’ and life suddenly becomes easier. Actually, intuitive development really is a whole-person growth experience and because of that, it rarely happens overnight.

    It’s a process of tuning back in to your spirit, shedding the conditioning of a society which says you’re crazy and just talking to yourself and getting over your self-doubt. It sometimes requires you to develop courage, self-determination, patience or faith. And If you have unhelpful beliefs about the world and yourself, sometimes you need to shed them as part of the process. Often you’re learning important lessons before you can see the results. Those are the lessons which can make it time-consuming, but they are also the lessons and growth experiences which make it a worthy undertaking, from a spiritual perspective.

    So, intuition develops best in an environment of allowing, exploration and non-detachment. If you’re dying to see results, putting pressure on yourself or full of impatience, frustration or fear, the process will be much more challenging than it needs to be.

    If your approach to psychic development is a little too goal-oriented, remember why you’re doing it. You aren’t developing your intuition so you can psychically find out the lottery numbers, you’re doing it to develop yourself. It’ll happen on time.

    Let’s have a look at the second approach that trips people up and slows them down in psychic development:

    2. Trying to Develop the Wrong Gift

    Did you know your intuition is not just one gift? It’s made up of many gifts.

    The five main psychic gifts are dreaming, clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience and claircognizance.

    (Other sub-gifts will fall under the umbrella of one of these main gifts.)

    Some of these gifts you have naturally and can just awaken, and some will come less naturally to you, so you need to work much harder on those if you choose to develop them first.

    About your intuitive gifts and how they work

    Think of your inherent psychic ability a bit like a television set and aerial. On your television set, you have several different ‘channels’ to get intuitive messages. You might be born hard-wired with really good ‘signal’ on one channel. Let’s say clairvoyance (seeing Spirit) is your primary channel, clairaudience (hearing your inner voice and your Spirit Guides) may be your secondary channel, clairsentience (gut feelings and emotions) is channel three and claircognizance (getting Divinely-inspired thoughts and ideas) is channel four.

    Some of us are specially designed or ‘wired’ to broadcast really clearly on one channel only. Others on two or three channels. A few people can broadcast really well on all channels without any practice. Actually, most people are naturally good at receiving some transmissions through one or two channels, with some practice, so this is what we need to do, as intuitives:

    We need to find out which is our strongest channels (our strongest gifts) and work on developing those first.

    Most people just take one gift at random which they think is kind of cool and try developing that.

    That was also my approach to intuitive development, in the beginning. I wanted to be clairvoyant but it wasn’t my strongest gift. I wasted several months thinking I wasn’t very intuitive simply because my clairvoyance wasn’t developing fast enough.

    But when I hit upon automatic writing (which utilises claircognizance) I couldn’t believe the difference – I was getting much more connection. It was clear and the information just flowed. Whereas clairvoyance felt exactly like some dodgy, untuned channel – little clarity or flow. The same with my clairsentience (gut feelings and feelings in general) – I was already getting information through clairsentience as I needed it. But those two ‘channels’ – clairsentience and claircognizance – I wasn’t really seeing as valid channels through which to tune into Spirit, I wanted to be clairvoyant like most other psychics.

    I’ve seen clients in a similar situation – trying to make their intuition come through a gift or a channel which isn’t one of their strongest and it makes the process more difficult than it needs to be. On the other hand, finding out what you are already gifted in, and developing that makes the process more satisfying and saves a lot of time and energy.

    But this does not mean you have to settle only for the gifts we already have and just forgetting the rest.

    What usually happens then is that as your primary gifts become stronger, you also become more accomplished at tuning in the other ‘channels’, if you want to, because you’ve done it once and you know what to do now – your overall ‘signal’ is good. Your primary gift is a starting point.

    If you want to speed up your intuitive development, I’d recommend you find out what your natural gifts are and develop those first. Because if you don’t know what your personal psychic strengths are, then you will probably waste some time with a hit-and-miss/ trial and error approach.

    If you don’t know what your primary gift is, I have an online quiz here which can help.

    3. Not Having a Plan

    Most of the people who are slow to develop psychic ability are those who don’t have a program or a process they’re following consistently. They’re often not setting aside time in their week or day for intuitive development. They’re just trying a few things here and there to see what happens.

    To develop your intuition, it really helps to have structure. You want processes which teach you to awaken your psychic ability, a process to teach you to develop your gifts and a process so that you can access them at will whenever you want – and you only want processes which suit you and utilize your natural, existing strengths.

    Investing energy, time or money in an intuitive development plan broadcasts an entirely different intention to the Universe than just doing a couple of exercises here and there. The more invested you are in terms of time and energy and the more structure you give your intention to develop psychically, the quicker you’ll get results.

    I also reveal my process for psychic development in this article:

    4. Letting Fear Get the Better of You

    Like attracts like, so if you hold yourself in a place of fear, you’ll create more things which make you fearful. But if you acknowledge the fear and allow yourself to rise above it, you just won’t encounter anything that scares you.

    I personally remember being so scared when I was developing psychically and it took me months to get over that. But once I let go of my fear, psychic phenomena and intuition became an ordinary part of my experience. I found out that my clairaudience was just an inner voice that sounded like mine, my clairvoyance was just like day-dreaming, only directed by Spirit and my claircognizance was a subtle intrusion of inspired thought into my consciousness. I realized that nothing was out to scare me unless I invited it to.

    Here are two more articles on overcoming the fear of the spirit world:

    Further Reading:

  • How to Develop Claircognizance

    How to Develop Claircognizance

    In this article, I’m going to explain a bit about claircognizance and how to develop it. Claircognizance is one of the four main intuitive gifts. I decided to write an article about this because I find that so many of my clients are gifted claircognizants, but few of them are even aware of this ability they have.

    What is Claircognizance?

    Claircognizance means ‘clear-knowing’. Claircognizants ‘know’ certain things without being told. For claircognizants, their higher self or Spirit Guides put information (in the form of thought) into their mind. This can be a whole load of information that is ‘downloaded’ into the mind. It can be smaller insights about people and situations here and there, or it can be an inspired idea. All claircognizance is characterized by this strong sense of knowing that goes beyond logic and by the fact that the intuitive information comes into the thinking mind, not into the heart or the mind’s eye.

    Who is Claircognizant?

    Claircognizants tend to be very mentally-oriented people. They are often analytical and are good at understanding abstract concepts and solving problems.

    As children, they seem to know too much and have an answer for everything. They were probably labeled ‘know-it-alls’ growing up.

    I find that around 50% of the people I read for are primarily claircognizant. Claircognizance is very common but not as well known as clairvoyance or clairaudience. Few people have heard of claircognizance. Most people think of visions and clairvoyance when they hear the word ‘psychic’. Many expect their intuition to be a voice from heaven or an amazing premonition. Some psychics can see dead people and hear voices, but many gifted psychics receive information through less ‘dramatic’ channels like claircognizance. However, if you’re expecting visions and fireworks and voices, you may miss your claircognizance.

    Claircognizance is no less powerful for being subtle. Anyone who had channelled information in written form (this is called ‘automatic writing’) is utilizing their claircognizance.

    Some Examples of Claircognizance:

    • You have a sense of inner knowing that it would not be a good idea to accept the job you’ve just been offered, despite the fact that it seems perfect
    • You have a certainty that someone is lying about something, despite evidence to the contrary
    • You receive information about future outcomes
    • You get a truly inspired idea.

    A Common Question that People Ask about Claircognizance:

    If claircognizance comes in the form of thought, how can you tell the difference between claircognizance and your own thoughts?

    Here is a key difference between thoughts and claircognizant input:

    When you’re thinking, your conscious mind is in control. When you receive claircognizant information, your conscious mind is only observing the information that is coming in and sometimes trying to interpret it — it is not generating the information. The claircognizant information just comes from nowhere, and it often has nothing to do with what you were thinking about.

    Another difference — thoughts are usually ego-based and want to protect you from failure, embarrassment or disappointment. Claircognizance transcends those fears and comes from a place of wisdom. Claircognizance may only make sense in hindsight. Your thoughts won’t usually require you to take a leap of faith, whereas claircognizance might.

    How to Develop your Claircognizance

    • Automatic writing is suitable for receiving claircognizant information, as it often comes through in big chunks. Open a word document or get a piece of paper and a pen and ask your higher self a question. Write down whatever comes into your mind in response — it doesn’t matter if it sounds like a load of nonsense at first, no-one will read it but you. Make sure the conscious mind is only a spectator in this exercise — don’t allow your mind to think about the information you’re getting. The first time I did this, I got a page of nonsense from my subconscious mind. When I persisted with it, I began to channel some insights which surprised me in their clarity and wisdom.
    • Just setting the intention for your claircognizance to develop will start the process! Write your intention down as this will make it more powerful.
    • Make time for intuitive guidance: if you don’t already meditate, start a meditation practice, as just five minutes a day will help you to tune in more to your intuition. Meditation helps to quieten your mind and Divine guidance can come through a quiet mind more easily than a distracted one. Claircognizant information often comes through to me when I’m meditating. When I’m meditating, I imagine my crown chakra (the chakra on the top of my head) opening up and I often receive spontaneous intuitive insights upon doing that. When you’re in a relaxed state and ready to receive intuitive guidance, if none is forthcoming, start the process by asking a question of your higher self and see what comes into your mind.

    Often your claircognizance is already operating and waiting to be recognized as guidance. Become more aware of your thoughts. In particular, be very aware of the thoughts you are having when you meet someone new or when you’re being told about a situation that you know little about. See what you glean about the person/situation between the lines and if you can, get it validated.

    Further Reading: