I am not foolish enough, nor do I have enough hubris, to think that what follows is a complete list, or even that it is in any absolute sense, “right”. It is, though, everything I can think of at the moment (and it is how I try to live, but like everyone else, I’m imperfect). I am certainly open to suggestions for additions to the list, so please send them along and I’ll post any updated versions on my blog — or better yet, post them directly to the blog, http://10minutesaday.blogspot.com.

1) Act from love.

• Be kind, accepting, tolerant, patient -- and that includes acting that way toward yourself!
• Be mindful of the divine flow.

2) Be careful what you do and what you think. You are responsible for your actions and therefore for your consequences.

•  Actions have consequences.
•  Thoughts are actions in energy form.
• Appreciate what you have, because what you focus on, expands.

3) Live your truth/higher perception to the best of your ability.

• Be who you are, not who you think you are supposed to be. The world doesn’t need another pale imitation of some commercial ideal; it needs real people, being who they are, and bringing their unique gifts and point of view to heal the problems we have.
• Listen to your own higher wisdom. We all have access, even if we’ve been taught not to use it because it’s been too much of a threat to the power structure.
•  Tell the truth, whenever possible (you may not know it, or it may conflict with another of these rules, in which case, see #11). Remember, spoken and written words are actions.  

4) Respect others.

Part I: The Platinum Rule: Treat people as they wish to be treated.
Part II: In the absence of the Platinum Rule (that is, when you don’t know how someone else would like to be treated), use the Golden Rule: treat others how you wish to be treated.

5) Respect nature.

• This includes your own body (eat food, not chemicals).
•  Use as few resources as you need to to do the job properly and comfortably.
• Turn down the thermostat (or turn it up in the summer — or better yet, open the windows and let nature in!).
•  Turn off the lights you don’t need.
•  Walk (you’ll get to know your neighbors and neighborhood) for your errands (it’s great exercise, too!).
•   Recycle.
•   Share: borrow and return in good condition (neighbors and friends are a great resource) and be willing to lend, too. This builds community.
•   Buy used or recycled, or better yet, ask if you really need something before you buy it.
•   Don't print if you don't have to, and if you have to print, use both sides of your paper.
•   Take your name off the mailing lists (so the paper isn’t wasted).
•   Don’t drive if you don’t have to (carpool! Or take public transit — you might meet someone interesting).
•   Grow what food you can — it’ll taste good, and feel good, too.
•   You get the idea.

6) Respect limits, including the ones you reasonably set, and expect others to as well.

• It’s okay to know your limits and to be clear in stating them.
• ‘No’ means ‘no’, whether someone else is saying it, or you are.
•  If someone isn't respecting your limits, you have a right, or maybe even a responsibility, to teach them to respect your limits, or to ask them to leave, or to get away from them.
• Get 7 hours of sleep a night (research shows it makes a big difference in your quality of life).

7) Honor your agreements. You can keep an agreement as is, or you can renegotiate it, but don’t change an agreement unilaterally (which includes not telling the other person for any reason, aka ‘flaking out’.)

8) If it feels good, and it doesn’t harm anyone or anything else, do more of it. This is the Universe (aka God) speaking to you through your desires.

9) Be clear about what you want — it’s probably the only way to get it. Remember, thoughts are actions in energy form.

10) You will never know everything (nor will anyone else), so stay humble.

11) When in doubt, see rule #1.

How do you know if you’re psychic? Most people are, to some degree, even if they don’t refer to themselves that way. Most people have some sense of what’s coming, even if they don’t quite trust it. In fact, one of the main reasons people call me is to validate impressions that they have themselves, and I’m happy to do that. So over the years, I’ve talked with too many other psychics (though they may not think of themselves that way) to count. And we all have a few major issues:

First, we’re all incredibly impatient! We expect what we “see” (or “hear” or “feel” or “know” or dream, henceforth all referred to as “see”) to happen immediately. I mean, if we “see” it as true, then why isn’t it here now? As I remind people constantly, in physical reality, things take time. Yes, in the spiritual world, things happen as fast as we can see or imagine them, but in the physical world, actual people and things have to be in actual places for an event to happen, and it takes time to move those to the appropriate positions. And most of us are bad at knowing how long it will take for the reality we “see” to show up.

I suspect that most of us have particular time signatures for certain types of events, though those signatures can change over time (I know mine have gotten faster).  What is a time signature? It’s the length of time between when I choose to create something, and “see” it, and when it actually happens. I have two types of signatures. My time signature for things seems to be a few days. That is, when I choose for a thing to show up, such as a toy basket or a beach chair, they tend to be in my path within a few days — I don’t go looking for them, they just show up. But bigger items, like my husband or a meditation group, tend to take longer — 9 months, in fact.

Second, we’re all very attached to what we “see”, so that if we don’t “see” something, or get it wrong, we then invalidate everything else we’ve ever “seen”. That’s just not so! No psychic is right 100% of the time. A good one is right 80-85% of the time. So why invalidate what is right because not all of it is? And I have definitely seen some psychics go into identity crises because they’ve been wrong. No one expects a stock picker to be right 100% of the time, and in a way, they’re in the same business. Why should you expect more of yourself?

Third, we assume that everyone else is like us. Now to some extent, everyone is psychic. I really do believe that we’re all born with an innate connection to all that is, and so we can access this information. But if you tend to see where things are going, and/or how other people feel or will act, you tend to assume you’re normal (what is ‘normal’, anyway?) and that everyone else does this, too. They don’t. At least, not to the degree that you do. And so we tend to be impatient with others for not seeing what we see.

In last week’s post, we established that you are psychic, to one degree or another, right? To recap, you’re impatient, you’re attached to what you ‘see’ or ‘know’ (and I use them interchangeably here to include what you hear or feel, as well as what you see psychically, or know telepathically, to simplify the language) , and you assume everyone else is like you and ‘sees’ what you ‘see’. (See that post below.)

And after dealing with my own issues around this, not to mention at least a few hundred of my clients and friends, I’d like to talk about some common issues people have with their psychic abilities and offer some advice:

Are you responsible for what you ‘see’? Did you create it, of just ‘see’ it? There is no way to tell if you are just ‘seeing’ what you ‘see’, or if you are helping to create it. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says that you can’t know exactly where an elementary particle is and how fast it is moving at the same time, which implies that the experimenter is choosing which to measure/see, and is thus deeply embedded in the experiment. (This issue was borne out by Marilyn Schlitz, who accepts psychic (or psi) phenomena as real, and Richard Wiseman, who doesn’t (or at least didn’t at the time), doing the same experiments on psi phenomena on the same equipment in the same lab at the same time, and getting contradictory results.) So you do affect the situations you ‘see’ just by ‘seeing’ them. You can’t not affect them. The truth is, you’re affecting them even if you aren’t conscious that you’re ‘seeing’ them. Just accept it. And take the attitude that everything you ‘see’ be for the highest good of all concerned. At least that way your effect will be slightly positive (no matter if it looks positive in the moment or not).

What do you do with what you see, especially if no one asked you to ‘see’ it? That depends... Here are two questions to ask yourself if you see something no one asked you to see.

• Would the people whom this concerns actually want to know?
• Would they take me seriously if I told them?

And if the answer to either of those questions is ‘no’, don’t even bother bringing it up.

What do you do when you don’t want to ‘know’ what you ‘know’, or ‘see’ what you ‘see’? Think of it like this: forewarned is forearmed. For example, if you ‘know’ you’re about to be laid off, you can start your job search before it happens, so that you have a new job lined up and you’re never out of work. Of course, you can play ostrich, and pretend that you don’t know what you know, but things will begin to happen to get you to pay attention to what you really know. And many of them are less than pleasant. So again, you’re much better off to use the information you have, even if you can’t explain to others exactly how you got it.

What if you’re wrong? We all are sometimes (for more on this, see below). And here’s what to do to improve your accuracy:

• Notice what you ‘know’ - Just notice it. Like, ‘oh, I just saw a flash of a bird that isn’t physically there’. You don’t have to know what it means. It may not mean anything. Just notice it.
• Notice how you ‘know’ it – Did you see something? Hear something? Feel something? Smell or taste something that wasn’t actually there? Pay attention to the specifics of the packaging of the information. Was it large and bright? Small and translucent?
• Write it down – Keep a notebook of all the things you ‘know’. You’ll be surprised how many there are. And then you get to look back and see how much was right, what types of things were right, and how you ‘knew’ them.
• Say ‘thank you’! - There’s an old line, ‘what you focus on, expands.’ And gratitude is a form of focus, so when you say thank you, you get more of that which you appreciated.

How do you know if you’re psychic? Most people are, to some degree, even if they don’t refer to themselves that way. Most people have some sense of what’s coming, even if they don’t quite trust it. In fact, one of the main reasons people call me is to validate impressions that they have themselves, and I’m happy to do that. So over the years, I’ve talked with too many other psychics (though they may not think of themselves that way) to count. And we all have a few major issues:

First, we’re all incredibly impatient! We expect what we “see” (or “hear” or “feel” or “know” or dream, henceforth all referred to as “see”) to happen immediately. I mean, if we “see” it as true, then why isn’t it here now? As I remind people constantly, in physical reality, things take time. Yes, in the spiritual world, things happen as fast as we can see or imagine them, but in the physical world, actual people and things have to be in actual places for an event to happen, and it takes time to move those to the appropriate positions. And most of us are bad at knowing how long it will take for the reality we “see” to show up.

I suspect that most of us have particular time signatures for certain types of events, though those signatures can change over time (I know mine have gotten faster).  What is a time signature? It’s the length of time between when I choose to create something, and “see” it, and when it actually happens. I have two types of signatures. My time signature for things seems to be a few days. That is, when I choose for a thing to show up, such as a toy basket or a beach chair, they tend to be in my path within a few days — I don’t go looking for them, they just show up. But bigger items, like my husband or a meditation group, tend to take longer — 9 months, in fact.

Second, we’re all very attached to what we “see”, so that if we don’t “see” something, or get it wrong, we then invalidate everything else we’ve ever “seen”. That’s just not so! No psychic is right 100% of the time. A good one is right 80-85% of the time. So why invalidate what is right because not all of it is? And I have definitely seen some psychics go into identity crises because they’ve been wrong. No one expects a stock picker to be right 100% of the time, and in a way, they’re in the same business. Why should you expect more of yourself?

Third, we assume that everyone else is like us. Now to some extent, everyone is psychic. I really do believe that we’re all born with an innate connection to all that is, and so we can access this information. But if you tend to see where things are going, and/or how other people feel or will act, you tend to assume you’re normal (what is ‘normal’, anyway?) and that everyone else does this, too. They don’t. At least, not to the degree that you do. And so we tend to be impatient with others for not seeing what we see.

Last weekend, I had the privilege of hosting Mark Macy (www.spiritfaces.com) and his Luminator (more on that machine later), for a couple of parties, where he described his research into instrumental transcommunication (www.worlditc.org), i.e. using electronic equipment to talk with the 'dead'. The reason I say 'dead' in quotations is that once you've seen his research, you can never again believe that the spirit that leaves a dead body actually dies. His evidence includes computer passages, typed from a computer which was turned on without anyone physically in the room, and which included information only known to the 'dead' woman and her still living husband, and a message left on Mark's own telephone answering machine from a colleague who was 'dead'.

While Mark's presentation is clear and convincing, the best examples of transcommunication he shows are the ones provided by the audience itself. With the Luminator running, he takes Polaroid photos of audience volunteers, and many of the photos have faces completely different from the physical ones of the photo subjects. (On my blog of this article (http://10minutesaday.blogspot.com, I've included 3 of my photos -- one of me (as me, not the best photo, oh, well), one of me that is clearly not me (as there maybe two faces, and at least the nose and mouth aren't mine), and one of my paternal grandmother, who might be the face in the second photo (or maybe not). The only alteration to the Polaroid camera is that black tape is place over the light sensor so that the flash doesn't go off, because the spirit faces need a low light situation to be seen on film.

Even more fun for me was getting to hang out with the Luminator. This machine seems to change the electromagnetic field in an area at least a hundred or so feet in diameter. Another clairvoyant who was there described it as changing the energy of the space in my home to that of the borderline between the worlds ('here' and 'hereafter'). At first, I was really taken aback by its power -- it felt like my body was on some kind of speed, or having an adrenaline rush, though my mind was completely normal. As I got used to it, though, something amazing happened. I was 'shown' what happens when you 'die'. I did not have the experience of the tunnel that most near-death experiencers describe (not that I was near death in any way), but doors opened from my heart and I came out on a beautiful landscape, which I was told was different for each person. After a few moments of enjoying that, I was showered with a beautiful green light that permeated me, and then a beautiful yellow or golden light that did the same. After a while, that faded away, and I was back in the beautiful landscape, but this time, there were thousands of 'people' there. (I think this is the welcoming party that everyone talks about.) I was at a distance, hovering in the sky, looking at the assembled group, but I noticed that if I asked for someone, they'd sort of come to the front of the group, or perhaps I zoomed in to them. I was given to understand that in a way, this 'party' is somewhat holographic, as if each soul sent a hologram of a part of itself that I would recognize, not necessarily that the whole soul was there.

A while later, a reproducible way to talk to 'dead' people occurred to me. All I need to do is go back into my heart, open the doors out onto the landscape, be cleansed by light, come out at the party -- and then ask for a particular 'person'. So I tried it with my husband's father, who 'died' when he was 15. I learned some things about him that my husband could verify, which believe me, I didn't know, and others that made sense to him, though he could not actually verify them.

The next day, I happened to be teaching my day-long 'Psychic Skills Workshop', and offered a guided meditation of the process to the participants as a bonus session after class. Everyone stayed, and everyone got to their landscape, and everyone found a person -- not always the person they had thought to contact, but someone they knew! Because it was the first time I had ever done the meditation, I didn't leave enough time for people to have satisfying conversations with those they contacted. Oh, well... that's how you learn. Next time I’ll leave more time for people to talk to their loved ones.