Are you following in the back? The way Betsy’s explaining all this is making total sense to me, but the hard part, she’s saying now, is then trusting your interpretation enough to actually share it.
“Nobody wants to look stupid, but the only way you’ll know if you’re right is by getting a confirmation from the person. So”—she looks around the circle—“I invite you again to share.”
But first, the guided meditation part, in which Betsy talks us through a group visualization to clear and protect our energy, as well as call in our spirit guides, angels, and the ascended masters.
Then, a bit like a game of psychic spin the bottle, Betsy allows “spirit” to dictate the order she delivers people’s readings—and the whole time I’m scanning my body for any out-of-context impressions that might actually be a message from somebody’s dearly departed grandma. By now I’m so psyched I might actually be psychic that I’m actively willing spirit to use me as its channel. And then it comes.
Betsy is speaking to the woman directly across from me when my mind’s eye fills with the color purple. And a very specific purple too: the deep magenta used to advertise a brand of cigarettes called Silk Cut, back around the time I thought it would be cool to start smoking in the early 1990s. I immediately go to the feeling, which is one of creeping unease, bordering on disgust (how I generally feel about smoking now). A lull in Betsy’s reading means it’s time to speak up: “Um … I’m getting … I wonder if … are you trying to give up smoking?” Epic fail; the woman shakes her head. But I get encouraging looks from Betsy and my fellow “students,” and we continue.
Finally, Betsy turns to face me. She smiles.
“When I look at you, Ruby, I see flowers turning to fireworks …” And I swear on my mother’s life that as she utters the word fireworks, the whole apartment begins to boom with the sound of a firework display starting up just outside the window over the East River. Even Betsy looks totally shocked and we’re all obviously freaking out, but in a “holy shit this is awesome” way. The firework noises continue throughout my whole reading, interrupting Betsy over and over with their whiz, pop, bangs, and at one point she pauses to tell me: “That’s all you, you know.”
The message she delivers is that something in my life is beginning to “bloom” and “take off.” Which of course I relate to the fact that, having been thinking about creating The Numinous for some time now, here I am actually walking the talk and researching a story for my brand-new website. “Whatever it is will be a huge success, bigger than you can imagine right now.”
By the end of the evening, I’ve got that elated feeling that always comes after facing something you’re afraid is going to (a) challenge all the belief systems you’ve carefully put in place to keep you safe in the world or, worse, (b) make you look like a total idiot. If we’re all made of chemicals that reward us with good feelings when we do things that are good for us and our fellow humans (sex, helping people, not drinking a bottle of wine every night), then following our curiosity (another example of our intuition at work) despite being afraid has got to be one of them, right?
And as I’m bouncing around feeling all excited about The Fireworks, the girl I got the Silk Cut purple impression for sidles over to me. “You know, I didn’t want to say this in front of the whole group, but this week I decided to stop smoking weed,” she tells me. Wowzer. So my message was kind of spot-on.
SYNCHRONICITY IS ALSO YOUR PSYCHIC VOICE
It was Carl Jung who first did any in-depth study into “meaningful coincidences” such as The Fireworks, which he termed “synchronicity.” Jung—also an advocate of astrology as a study of what he saw as the “archetypes” of our “collective unconscious”—was a proponent of the idea that, rather than a series of random events, each and every human life is actually the expression of a deeper cosmic order. He and Wolfgang Pauli, the Swiss-American pioneer of quantum physics, called this the Unus Mundus, from the Latin for “one world”—describing an underlying unified reality, from which everything emerges and to which everything returns (Source, the Universe, oneness consciousness … God, etc.)
Jung also believed that synchronicity, glimpses of this cosmic order in action, shifted a person’s egocentric conscious thinking (“we are all in this alone”) to that of a greater wholeness (“everything is connected”)—granting temporary access to the “absolute knowledge” that resides within us all. A.k.a. your intuition or “psychic” inner Voice!
Louise Androlia, a gifted intuitive herself, is also deeply invested in shifting the perception of “psychic” phenomena away from being a tool for “predicting” future events, and rather something that we all have access to, all the time, to be used for the highest good of both our human selves and of the collective. “The sixth sense is for us all,” she once told me. “In fact, we’re all very tuned in as kids. Having had an imaginary friend or pet as a child is a classic example of somebody just being very energetically sensitive. I think whether this carries on into adulthood depends on the rate we forget.” Or that it’s conditioned out of us by a society that decides it’s “weird.”
Remember what I said about tarot being like “Google for the soul”? It reminds me of a conversation I had with Brooklyn-based intuitive Lisa Rosman, who told me: “It’s our natural birthright to be able to tune in on deep levels to each other as well as what yogis call the ‘divine intelligence’ of the Universe. But the less we have to communicate on that level, the less we do.” Lisa went on to describe how she believes our reliance on modern devices—from computers to clocks—is partly to blame. “Rather than merely using cell phones or the Internet as shortcuts, we’ve been using them as a substitute to true communion with ourselves and each other. And yet in our dreams and disorders our deeper wisdom is still, always, clamoring to be heard.” Not to mention in the serendipitous synchronicities we kind of just know are there to tell us something, but which often get brushed off as “just coincidence.”
HOW TO LISTEN TO YOUR INTUITION
And so, since that night at Betsy’s, I’ve been actively practicing tuning in to my intuitive Voice, a.k.a going with my gut. After all, Jung’s theory suggests that this is actually how to live the life that has been cosmically designed for us. I also love what astrologer and modern mystic Gahl Sasson said about this when I attended his Become Your Own Psychic workshop, how “you only know it works when you don’t go with your gut and everything goes wrong.” Because how many times have you found yourself trying to wriggle out of a predicament you know in your heart of hearts (yes, your gut) could have been prevented if you’d been brave enough to go against all logic (peer pressure, expectation, EGO) and just trust your instincts instead?
One huge telltale sign that you’re about to go against your own intuition / the cosmic order is when you have to keep asking other people if they think it’s a good idea or not. An example from my life is when I recently walked away from what seemed like a really prestigious and potentially quite lucrative opportunity. It had taken a good two months to negotiate the terms, during which time I had laid the whole deal out in front of everybody and anybody who came into my path. I told them I wanted their “advice,” when actually I think my inner Voice was trying to find somebody, anybody to back up its pleading argument against me taking the job. Your freedom is way more important to you than a regular salary! And besides, you’ve got your soul project to fulfill!!! it kept insisting. But my ego would always drown it out with stuff like: But this will look awesome on your résumé, and not having a regular salary is REALLY SCARY.
After months of anguish, not to mention boring everyone to tears with my massive first-world problem, I used one of Betsy’s techniques to really feel into my decision. She calls it Stop, Drop, and Roll, and it goes something like this: