One of the perks of my job is experiencing many of the treatments and services available in the field of conscious living. Lately I've been getting lots of intuitive readings—Four full readings since May.  Getting that many psychic readings in one small time frame has really shown me what a reading can and cannot do, what to expect when you go into one, what the benefits are, and ways to maximize your time. I thought I'd pass some of this along.

 

First, a definition: a good reading is a conversation, in which the reader receives messages from highest vibrational spirit guides and higher dimensional beings.   Its purpose is to help you back onto your right path.   A reading is part of an integrated journey to wholeness and healing.   A good intuitive reading bears as little relationship to fortune telling as a good astrologer does to newspaper horoscopes: absolutely nothing in common except for the English Language.

               

 Note:  while I will be giving some personal details here, parts of my readings involve other people in my life.  To protect their privacy (and mine), some of my examples will be deliberately vague. And I'm leaving things out.

               

My readings have been from Peggy in Arizona, Michele Bigness who works at Ananda, Nancy, a local Charlottesville woman who reads professionally (but not at Ananda) and a channeled high level spiritual entity named Bartholomu, who will begin holding sessions at Ananda in August (unlike other intuitives who retain full consciousness while they read, a channeled being 'moves into' the body of a human host, whose consciousness goes somewhere else and who does not know what is said in the reading).  

All four of these intuitives are excellent at what they do, and this matters a great deal. I've had lots of bad readings before,   generally from well meaning people with some intuition but who are not tapped into authentic Source.   How do you know the difference?

 

A bad reading is vague and hard to understand. It may contain information that seems 'cool,' but has no ability to help you live your best life now. The worst reading I've had was about fifteen years ago.   A psychic told me that Princess Diana and I were soul sisters and I would become good friends with her and Prince Charles when they had their third child. Obviously, this reading was wrong on many levels, but at the time the two seemed happily enough married, so that part of the 'wrongness' wasn't readily apparent. I knew it was off because 1) it mentioned famous people, 2)it told me something completely out of sync with my life as it was then, 3) it felt absolutely ridiculous and 4) it did nothing to help   me in the life I was then living.  

 

This last two responses are the most important. It's entirely possible that meeting famous people and experiencing   out of the blue life events can happen.   But the most important criteria in picking an intuitive is trusting your own internal judgment. Something about this person felt off to me, so when his reading was so out of bounds, it only confirmed what I already sensed.   And the most important way to judge if a reading was worth the money is if the information helps you with your current life, not anything that might happen in the future, or cool information you hear about a past life (I've found readings that mention past lives distinctly irrelevant, but that's a subject for another article).

 

How to find a good intuitive? First, get a recommendation from someone you trust.( If it matters to you, an intuitive works at Ananda only after they've given me a reading so I can experience the quality of their work. And I recently told someone very close to me that she couldn't work with us anymore because the quality of her work had dropped).   Second, follow up on that recommendation by paying strict attention to your response to the person when you first hear/meet him or her. For all that I've had 4 readings in 8 weeks, I'm very particular about who I let give me a formal reading and I turn down more people than I say yes to.   I listen very closely to my own intuition when it comes to choosing and if anything feels wrong or out of alignment to me (and this can be a subtle sense), I say no.  

 

Just because someone claims to be intuitive it doesn't mean they are, and even if they are it doesn't meant they are the right person for you.  he first and most important guidance you must follow is your own.

 

Did they all say the same thing? Yes, and no.  Here's what they all said in common:

 

1)       I did the right thing quitting my stable U.Va job and opening Ananda in this economic climate.

2)       Business will start slow and pick up.

3)       There are serious events taking   place in my family and none of them are within my control. We cannot control the actions and choices of others and will you please learn this Abby.

4)       Old romantic love is leaving my life and a new one is coming in.

 

What was different in all these readings: the way(s) in which and time frame within which these things will take place.    And the ways in which I was able to hear and understand what each one said. That is, each intuitive (including Bartholomu) receives information which must be filtered through individual consciousness, and is received and filtered through the listener's consciousness.

For example #2: Business at Ananda will start slow and pick up. Peggy said it would pick up Sept./Oct and I needed to do lots of networking. Michele said to keep building our class schedule and money would begin to flow in the fall. Nancy said it was my healing work and communication and money would flow next year. Bartholomu said to focus on writing and in 3-4 months things would change.

             

So you can see, there is overlap but also very contrasting opinions. What's true for all of them though is that Ananda's success is based on my effort: no talk of winning the lottery or stumbling into an unexpected fortune.   Maybe one of them is right about what it will take, maybe all of them are and they each picked up on a piece of it. That will play itself out.

               

Don't take what an intuitive says as the only possible information on the topic.   There is almost always more information, more aspects to any situation than can be covered in one session.

               

 For the family readings, each intuitive read the same situation and had basically the same thing to say: There's nothing you can do to stop it.   Even more, there is nothing you should do to stop it, except learn to accept that other people's journeys are their own choice. Again, each one had a different way to frame it. Michele said 'let go and send Reiki from a distance." Peggy  said "from the point of view of spirit everything is fine." Nancy, who comes from a traditional Christian background, said "there's nothing you can do except pray." Bartholomu said, "You do not know the nature of another person's sacred contract. Let it go."

               

 I found the advice to pray the most helpful in this situation. Prayer is such a powerful action and yet so passive—we can't control how the prayer will be answered, we can only know that it will be.  In this instance, for all that I'm a Reiki master, giving Reiki felt like another way of trying to exert control over the situation ("I'll clean up your energy body even if you won't do anything for yourself").

               

The romantic love readings were even more interesting. Michele told me in May that a new relationship would be entering my life, but it might be the old one returned in a new way or it might be someone different. The main thing was that I was not to know the answer to this because I needed to go through the work of transformation that would make the new way possible and if I knew the answer to the question of 'who' I wouldn't do the work. Needless to say, this really pissed me off.

 

Two weeks later, Peggy gave me more description of what the new relationship would feel like—nurturing, laughter—but when I asked old boyfriend or new person she stopped, laughed and said, "The guides don't want you to know because if you do you won't do the personal work you need to do."

This floored me—for all that I believe in guides and such, to have such unambiguous repetition was very powerful.   About one month later however Nancy told me the answer quite clearly--but this only came after certain events had happened that had already made the answer clear to me, without their help. Apparently this was a situation I had to learn and act on for myself.

 

Do not go to an intuitive to receive precise, unambiguous messages such   as winning lottery numbers or the name and address of your soul mate. The process is much more subtle than this.

 

A good reading points the way for us to make transformative change, or helps to guide us through challenging personal work.   It's not an instant solution. A customer recently asked if she could have a five minute reading—she just has one question she wanted answered. I told her no: Like all holistic healing, a good reading treats the whole person: one part of our lives cannot be disconnected from another.   Good intuitives don't want to be treated like fortune tellers.

 

And even when they do tell you something clear, something is coming that you want—here comes love, wait a few months and the money will be here, stop worrying—it doesn't mean that you automatically can accept it. Particularly if you are me. The habit of obsessive worry has been with me far too long. I hope I am getting rid of it, but it's taking some time.  

 

Then, talking about love, Bartholomu said:

                "You have two sides of your personality. One loving, gentle, sweet, the other not so nice."

                "Uh-huh, " I said, instantly skeptical.  

When an intuitive tells you something that sounds right but can actually be applied to lots of people, be wary. This may very well be an insufficient reading.

                "Well," he said, "with the old boyfriend, you have to let your not so nice side come out more."

                I laughed and laughed. Bartholomu took my expectations and completely disrupted them. Here was a disembodied spiritual being arguing for anger and telling me exactly what my girlfriends have been saying: don't put up with his shit anymore.  More importantly, he reminded me that all of our qualities and emotions come from God. We may not use them the right way, but anger, for example, has a place and a purpose that needs to be used in the right situation.   So many of us on a spiritual path think of emotions like anger as 'bad' ones that we need to shun, but actually our job is discernment, not avoidance.

                But before I got my righteous on too much, he added, "Don't stop speaking to him."

                "Why not?" I demanded.  

                "Because when we have a sacred contract with another person we must honor those bonds."

                Great. I can't just rage at him in a wave of self-indulgent indignation.  I'm supposed to be conscious about it.       

                Bartholomu also said, speaking about a different man I know, "He's a good listener. Most men aren't. In my human lifetimes I was not a very good listener either."

                Disembodied spiritual entity as best girlfriend, dissing men.   By this point I was ready for him to come over, watch "Beaches" and eat ice cream with me.  

               

 I've found that there is a strong correlation between an intuitive's accuracy and their sense of humor.   The ability to lighten up and have fun with our human existence appears to be essential to spiritual work.

 

Finally, don't assume that what you hear is what they are saying.   This is particularly true in the areas of our life where we are the most vulnerable. Twenty years ago, an intuitive asked me if there was a man named Richard in my life. I said no. "There will be," she responded, and moved on to another topic. I didn't think much about it until three weeks later when I met a Richard and we fell almost instantaneously in love. I then took her one sentence   to mean that he was my true love, my romantic destiny.  Two years and one broken heart later, I realized my interpretation was right only if I was destined to learn from him firsthand what it means to be in an emotionally abusive romantic relationship.  

 

If you think you are hearing your heart's desire, ask the intuitive to rephrase it. There's a chance you are practicing wishful thinking.  Do your best to pin down what they are saying, not what you want to hear.

 

A good reading has the ability to give clarity and insight into conditions in our lives, show us patterns that we are living, help us with insight into another person to improve our relationships.  Most importantly, a good reading does what all Conscious Living/New Age-y tools should do for us: it points us back to wholeness and healing.