Psychic abilities are natural "extended sense perceptions" that we all eventually develop to varying degrees and in various ways. You may be a clairsentient - you "feel" psychic or intuitive information - clairaudient - you actually hear voices, or songs, or sounds - or clairvoyant - you see things like auras and fairies. You may have had a combination of these types of intuitive sensing.

Psychic awareness is simply tapping into other dimensions (there are something like 27 dimensions, and our bodies only inhabit 4). Psychic or intuitive experiences can be as common and silly as knowing someone is going to sneeze, to having conversations with dead people, to having dreams that later come true. These are all okay and normal! They become a problem if the rest of you is not developed enough to hold the experience, like when a child sees a spirit and has no context of what is going on. Some

people can also attract energies that are not helpful, which can be scary. But usually psychic experiences are positive and useful.

Here are a few ways to develop your intuitive abilities:

- Spend time in nature

- Meditate

- Record your psychic experiences in a journal

- Record your dreams

- Read tarot cards and other oracle decks

- Talk to plants, and listen quietly for any response

- Follow your intuition about people, experiences, and events

Our psychic abilities extend not just to sensing into people or events, but into the world around us. For lack of a better term,I call this nature psychic or nature intuitive. Of course, attuning with other levels of awareness just is - it doesn't matter if you attune to people energy or nature energy, and there is no such thing as just a nature psychic.

For more on attuning with the earth and the natural world, read Voices of the Earth: The Path of Green Spirituality (Llewellyn, March 2009)

From Voices of the Earth:

"As humans, our first relationship is with our mother – the mother who birthed us, and also the Mother Earth. Before birth we know the pull of gravity. We learn to dance with two bodies: the mother womb around us and the planet beneath. Once we slip from the salty waters of our conception, we become air-breathing terrestrials. The umbilicus is cut, but we will remain attached to the placenta of the earth until we die."

"Developing deep awareness of the earth and our own soul constitutes a power-filled spiritual path. [You can develop] your own spiritually-based path as a nature mystic through psychic connection with the land. [This includes aspects from] gardening to working with herbs and plant spirits to a more holistic awareness of your clothing, home, and food. Through this work you will awaken your psychic powers, and be able to talk to nature – and hear her reply. Your ability to talk to nature will have far-reaching consequences as you learn to love more deeply. When you open yourself to the wisdom of nature, you will find healing and renewal in the midst of a crazy world. Through deep listening, you find your own soul. You find tools to face the overwhelm of living in a sensitive body in the midst of wars, corporate greed, fear, loneliness – all the challenges of human history."