When Is a Psychic Not A Psychic?
August 17th, 2017
Way back in 1998, a fellow NLP student and I sat down to work out how I achieved the results I got with my ‘psychic’ party trick. I used to take a piece of jewellery from someone, preferably a complete stranger, and tell them things about themselves that should have been impossible to know. The kind of things that you might only tell your closest friend.
The student I worked with was a trainer for several large car companies and I was on my way to finishing my NLP training so I could do one to one psychotherapy sessions and help people with seemingly intractable mental, emotional or, in some cases, physical problems.
NLP provided us with all the tools we needed to elicit ‘how’ someone generates their behaviour, skills or abilities. So we thought we’d apply these tools to something that no-one else had bothered to use them for. We were both up for a challenge but it wasn’t our intention to create a working model of the whole of the psychic realm, just the small bit that I did, which was commonly known as Psychometry.
We had no idea if it was possible and had a lot of preconceptions and beliefs about what it meant to be ‘psychic’. It was also possible that we were looking for a needle in a haystack. As things turned out took us 45 minutes to create what we thought was a good enough step by step process. Now it was time for my fellow student to try it out to see if he got anything like the results that I got.
His results weren’t magnificent but good enough to hint that our model might work. The real test came when he taught the process to the eight other students on our course. They all got results and were a little stunned that within fifteen minutes they had experienced what it meant to be ‘psychic’.
One very sceptical student had the most dramatic result. He saw a bulge in the car tyre of the person whose jewellery he’d held during the exercise. The student who received the information drove home more cautiously that night, which was just as well as she had a blowout. Her mechanic later told her that a bulge in the tyre had caused it!
My model was just a distant memory until I stumbled over my notes in 2002. I began to get a twinge of curiosity to explore things a bit further and I find it hard to ignore my curiosity. It seemed my model and I had some unfinished business. I spent the next four years researching and observing mediums and psychics at work as well as reading extensively about the topic. I taught psychic skills courses from 2006 onwards but was curious about other applications. What else could you do with my model?
I decided that it was time to open up my Pandora’s Box of extensive research and give my students a taste of something other than ‘psychic skills’. Having worked as a therapist and coach for a number of years I realise that I’m a lot more interested in our potential to break free of the tried, tested and limited way that we think about our own capabilities. My simple model now consists of one basic step that, when practiced, opens a world of possibilities only limited by our imagination and willingness to experiment.
My new courses are designed to give us more scope to use our subtle awareness and sensitivity much more widely and in more areas of our lives. And this means never having to call our innate gifts ‘psychic’.
Colin Clark is an experienced lecturer, trainer and artist and therapist, often running workshops at The Isbourne. See www.isbourne.org for more details.
