Stepping Into my Clairvoyance: A Journey

There lies a bridge between clairsentience, the experience of feeling the emotions of others vividly, and clairvoyance, clear seeing. I’ve spent a lot of time standing on that bridge.

For the majority of my life, before I had the verbiage to describe my experience, I’ve felt the energy of other people. This meant taking on their emotions, and having little to no boundaries for a long time. Much like any empath, I was used to getting completely entrenched in the energy of any given situation.

I navigated through the tumultuous seas of my 20s with these blinders on and was met with many rude awakenings. Each occurrence that rattled me was always a reminder to come back to myself, and using this method I slowly began to wake up.

Crossing the bridge between pure feeling and clear seeing was a gradual process; a journey rooted in intuition. I started to become aware of my intuition at a young age. I’d pinpoint this milestone to my first hot yoga class at age 12. Though I didn’t fully understand the practice of yoga back then, I knew I was communicating with my body and being guided by a deeper intelligence (based on the sheer fact that it felt good to move in certain ways.)

Though I carried this tool with me, I still wasn’t exempt from the programming of my childhood. My picture of “successful” meant working a corporate job that I pretended to like* (at the time I looked around myself and couldn’t fathom how anyone wasn’t pretending), having a mortgage and a family, etc. See also: “The American Dream”.

*note: In retrospect, I wasn’t convincing anyone that I liked my corporate job.

I was so wrapped up in being unhappy in this world and trying to escape from it that rather than honoring my intuition, I just assumed something was wrong with me.

But I kept pushing through. I knew I wasn’t destined to sit at a desk and daydream forever.

In the Fall of 2018, I started my 8-month 200 hour yoga teacher training, and things began to open up for me. I was already in a powerful place on my own personal journey: I was starting to own my intuition and leave situations that weren’t right for me. I was reading about magic and connecting to my ancestors (I’ve since found out I have relatives who were Salem witches). New England in the Fall always brings out my witchy-ness, my connection to the elements, and my relationship to death as a process.

It was a potent time for me to start this journey. I lived for my YTT weekends. I spent all my free time reading in coffee shops, meditating, journaling, and practicing yoga. I was still working a full time job, but my training created spaciousness and allowed for flexibility.

By the time I graduated, my life was completely different. I had left a long relationship that was no longer in alignment, and I was planning to move to Thailand to teach English.

Flashback to 22: right out of college, working my first corporate job (which made my soul cry). I was obsessed with joining the Peace Corps and got accepted to serve in Indonesia, but the doubts I had about what it meant to be a “successful adult” kept me from taking the leap. This is hilarious now because 22 is, and I cannot stress this enough, so young. Instead of pursuing the Peace Corps, I completed my Master’s degree while working full time. I studied Communication and Marketing, and at this time writing papers was giving my life a sense of purpose.

I didn’t have anything to lose at this point. I’d seen what the 9-5 life was, and it never worked for me. Rather than continuing to punish myself for not fitting into this structure, I followed my heart. Emboldened by the incredible connections I’d made in my training, as well as my own practices of magic, I took the leap.

Thailand was a lifetime in one year.

If you’re interested in reading more about my experience, I have a full blog dedicated to my time there.

However, this post is about my journey to clairvoyance, and the Thailand chapter is where it really started to come alive. I say it was a lifetime in one year, because while I was in Thailand, all the lessons I’d repeated over and over in my life presented themselves again with a new intensity. I was faced with situations that had made me crumble in the past, and was able to stand strong through them.

I know it’s cliche to say that I traveled the world to find myself, but that’s exactly what happened.

The peak of my time there was actually around the beginning of the pandemic.

My school had shut down, all of my expat friends were traveling back home, the world was freaking out about the impending quarantine, and I was in a state of bliss. Leading up to lockdown, I was having one of the most profound awakenings I had ever experienced.

Describing it in words can’t capture what it actually was… because I still don’t know what it was. I was meditating around 3 hours a day, spending 99% of my time alone, and everything around me was pure light. I was seeing energy before I was seeing people. I thought I was going to die because… well… I figured that’s how you feel before you die. Every time I got on my motorbike I truly thought would be the last time.

At this time, I was extremely familiar with my own energy. Remember that as an empath, it can be very difficult to separate oneself from the emotions of others. Because I had the opportunity to spend so much of my time alone, I was able to get in touch with how good my energy feels.

This had a flipside though, which was that being around other people during this period was very exhausting.

I was avoiding human interaction as much as I could at this point, but there came a day that it was a necessity. I was around people for an hour and a half, and by the time I got back to my apartment I was completely drained. I had been cultivating all of this beautiful energy on my own, but still hadn't learned the boundaries necessary to keep any of it for myself. Thus began my formal journey with clairvoyance.

My best friend recommended a program to me where I could learn the meditation tools necessary to clear my space of foreign energies, and keep a distance from them so that I could clearly see rather than get lost in the vivid feelings of others.

Of course, this was a very tense time in the world. Being in Thailand, so far away from friends and family, was a surreal experience as the pandemic was just starting. In the midst of so much global fear, my clairvoyant classes were helping me to recognize what was mine and what was external.

The classes were also helping me get more in touch with clarity in all of my senses. The way I experienced the world changed drastically simply because I was learning to separate myself from other people in a way I never had before.

Since my classes, I've moved through a lot. My environment has changed drastically more than once in a relatively short period of time. I'm constantly being guided by my spirit, and I've come to understand that this ability is inherent.

It's a practice to separate myself from the stories around me so I can actually see the truth that lies beneath, but it's a practice I'm dedicated to.