Someone wrote and asked. When did you first know that you had the sight? Good question. I, of course, do not have a very simple answer.

Firstly the sight is ofttimes a complete misnomer as many psychics do not actually SEE anything. I think that this is what can give rise to dismay amongst people who are attempting to develop their own sixth sense, they sit there hearing things and feeling things and never trust that they actually have a gift because they have not actually seen Uncle Bob come walking out of the mists and bow down before them in his burial attire.

Back to my gift…I suppose that I was a very precocious child, I was hungry for knowledge from a young age and had an inherent rightness about my way of speaking. Many may choose to coin this “Know-it-all Syndrome.” (Think Hermione without the wand.)

I truly do not remember ever thinking that I had a different gift then anyone else, and if I did it certainly revolved around reading and writing more than trancing and speaking in tongues. But I would tell stories to my friends. Everyone loved to listen to my stories, all of my little friends getting their free bit of after school entertainment out of me.

I would tell stories about the ladies in their funny hats and long dresses getting off of the train at a depot that used to be right where we are standing, about how cars used to be huge and shiny and have funny fins on the back of them, how a little girl used to play in the closet with her doll house just like we were playing now. Everyone loved how vivid my stories were and I felt like I had a gift. But the truth is that they weren’t my stories, I know that now.

My Mother always said that I was an Old Soul, something she could see deep in my eyes. She had a knowing of her own, seeing something in me before I was even born and naming me Vera Nadine, perhaps in the hope that I would become exactly what I am becoming today. I use to entertain her friends, and I think scare the pants off some of them, by singing songs from the 1940’s that I could not possibly have known on my own. Maybe it wasn’t me singing.

One summer, at camp, I walked along the forest path toward the lake with several other little girls and touched each tree for a time, the others pausing to listen as I told them the story of that tree, what it had lived through and seen, how it was feeling and when it would die. It only occurred to me many years later that I wasn’t lying to them but reading, at a very early age, the energy imprint of that living being…a signature that all things carry.

A part of me always knew that I wasn’t lying, that what I was saying wasn’t entirely made up out of my own imagination but tied, in some very real way, to an indescribable thing that I couldn’t see or touch but that was truly there somewhere lending its voice to my words. Call it child’s play or call it magic but I believe that my gift is inherent, something we all have that seeks expression.

Years later, after having attended a Protestant church for almost ten years with my extended family (neither of my parents condescending to attend with me mind you) I made confirmation alongside a boy named Damien (yes, really) and told my Father that I would not be going back there anymore. I didn’t find any truth or spirituality in the standing and sitting and mournful singing. Since we had agreed I could do as I wished after making confirmation, he didn’t fight me. (The whole fiasco I deem to have been arranged by him to appease his family’s desires to have me in church rather than by his own desire.)

Now I believe that spirituality and religion can coexist, but that they are not mutually exclusive and that the one can sometimes put a pretty firm end to the other and vice versa. After leaving Protestantism I embraced a solitary Pagan path and began researching more about earth-based religions. This is something that I worked at and learned more about all through high school. I do believe in magic, that is the ability to transform energies to your benefit, and know that I did some small bits of it as a teenager.

During this time I continued to be the learned-know-it-all and for some reason people always came to me when they had a problem that they could not solve or needed a shoulder to cry on. I also began attempting what I thought was Proper Divination, adopting a set of Tarot cards from a high school sweetheart (I still have them Lucas.) and toting them to a multitude of keg parties and Denny’s restaurants. I helped some people with what I told them, but always seemed to be more accurate when I forgot about the little booklet that had the card meanings and just “lied” to each person about what they meant based on what I thought that person needed to hear.

Why do I keep saying that I lied? Well because that is what I thought for so long, that I had lied to these people, that I was just being creative and making up stories to entertain. It is only just recently that I realized why I felt this way. It is because children are not raised to believe in the unknown as a thing of value, unless of course we are talking about certain select few deities, and therefore they believe that anything unseen is a figment of their imagination. But this is not always so.

Was I lying to these people about talking trees, what the tarot said for them or whether or not a little girl had once played with her dolls in the nearest closet? I do not think that I was. I think that I was simply exercising a gift which for me at the time had no definition, no recognizable value or purpose. Now that my connection to the divine is solid to me, has structure and definition, I see where these occurrences fit in to its development.

Freshman year of college my own spiritual path was illuminated for me in many ways, I met an older lady who was a priestess of the Goddess and had been taught many years earlier by another elderly lady whom she had met in her travels. She agreed to teach me her way of belief. I was so excited and by coincidence I also took a class that semester in the Myth and Reality of Witches…yes it did fulfill a General Education requirement.

I will not attempt to dispel all of the myths or explain all of the realities here, suffice it to say that the one strong reality I left the class with was that this was what I was meant to be, what I already believed and that I wanted to know other people who believed the same stuff….that there was a balance to all life, masculine and feminine, black and white, wet and dry, up and down and that we as spiritual beings having a physical experience could live in harmony with the rest of creation and in honoring it could harness its energy for the greater good.

My years of study with this woman included mostly work on the self, such as integrity of the word, cleansing negative habits, living in self-discipline and learning to slow the body and release the mind through meditation and path workings. She also instructed me in ways to connect to and commune with the different aspects of nature so as to better know their energies and be able to use them in a beneficial way.

As spiritual seekers, no matter what our mixture of beliefs or our chosen religions, we are all striving towards a true inner balance, a connection to the divine and toward personal impeccability. The truth is that this perfect impeccability cannot be fully achieved in manifest, physical form but it is the striving and the acknowledgment of our own imperfection that makes us impeccable.

When I was ready to go out on my own, armed with a strong spiritual foundation, my first guide finally came to me, not in a meditation but in a waking moment of self-despair. I had lost someone that I loved very much and could not reconnect to them in a constructive way and as I sat doodling crop circle-like forms on a blank paper (something I have done since puberty) a voice sounded in my head and my hand started writing words. That was Gretchen. Many other guides have come and gone since but she remains the constant.

Gretchen has helped me accept my chosen purpose in this life and has aided me in developing my gifts further so that I may help other spiritual seekers in this lifetime. I am sure that more gifts will develop in time just as I am sure that you are reading this because you suspect your own gifts and are wondering if it can be possible. I am here to tell you that it is so.

Popularity: 20% [?]