Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I do psychic readings for a living and also because I enjoy helping others. However, over the last few months, I panic as soon as I think about doing a reading because I feel like I’m a fraud. I have had a lot of stress over the last few years. I’ve lost faith in myself so much that I feel utterly lost. It may help you to know that I’m also very concerned about my choice of life partner. I feel like something is not quite right about this relationship but I can’t work out what’s wrong. We’ve been together for three years, and within that time, my life, work, health and spirituality have suffered a marked decline. He is always nice to me so I don’t understand what’s wrong.

Karen

Dear Karen:

This may sound a little odd, but I think the fact that you feel like a fraud for no apparent reason says good things about your ethics. To me, it says that you care deeply about the quality of your work and would never want to misrepresent yourself or your services. I bet all the best psychic professionals regularly question themselves, their abilities, and the value of their work – I know I certainly do!

There are a number of good reasons for this questioning. For one thing, being a psychic is an unusual endeavor. There is also a lot of denigration of the term “psychic” and everything related to psychic reading work in mainstream society, so it takes an extraordinary amount of self-esteem to walk this path. Telling someone you’re a psychic is sure to raise eyebrows; while some people will be intrigued, many will immediately write you off as either self-deluded, crazy or a charlatan. If you don’t have rock solid faith in yourself, other people’s opinions will constantly eat away at your confidence.

The psychic realm is itself slippery and ethereal, for we’re dealing with that which can’t be perceived or measured by physical means. In this sense, doubt about one’s psychic abilities is similar to all the other spiritual doubts that plague humankind. I regularly review all the amazing experiences I’ve had that contributed to my spiritual beliefs. When I take all of that evidence together, I can’t deny what it’s saying, but when I don’t “live” that reality day after day because I’m immersed in mundane life, it’s natural to start doubting the conclusions I came to in the past.

Being a psychic is like being a painter. It’s pretty easy to determine if you’ve done a “good job” when you’re painting walls and trim, but if you’re creating original works of art, “good” becomes a very subjective matter. Most poets, novelists, dancers and other creative types regularly go through periods of doubt when they wonder if they’re deluded, if it’s ridiculous to consider themselves artists, and even if what they produce is utter crap. In fact, I bet the more successful the artist, the more they doubt the quality of their work.

You don’t have to be an artist to suffer this sort of self-doubt, however. Many highly skilled, knowledgeable and successful people suffer from “Impostor” or “Fraud Syndrome” in which they feel like their success is nothing more than luck or others mistakenly believing them to be more capable, skilled and knowledgeable than they really are. In fact, in 1984, a study of randomly selected American psychologists demonstrated that nearly 70% of them felt like impostors! When you add in the extra challenges of the psychic component, it’s no wonder psychic professionals sometimes feel this way.

Working as a psychic or spiritual counselor is a very heavy responsibility. In my view, it’s like surgery for the soul, for when people reach out for help from us, they are often desperate for comfort, hope and guidance. Since people tend to believe whatever psychics say more than their own inner guidance and common sense, our words have extraordinary power both for better and for worse. Many traditional counselors trying to help deeply troubled people also regularly doubt themselves and their ability to be of true help because so much is at stake.

There is something I do that helps when I start to doubt myself. I’ve always asked for feedback on my reading work, and I keep all of that feedback in computer files. When I start to experience the doubts you’re going through, I’ll go back and read through some of this feedback. When I read email after email full of appreciation and amazement for my work, I begin to relax and remember that I have only to keep doing what I’ve been doing to continue to succeed.

I do think the fact that your life has not been going well is playing a big role in all of this. In fact, one way to evaluate the power of your intuition is to ponder how well your own life is going. Since it sounds like things have been going downhill in many areas for some time now, odds are good that you’re not listening to your intuition, and this would certainly prevent you from doing good psychic reading work for others. I also happen to be of the opinion that if you’re feeling utterly lost yourself, you shouldn’t be trying to guide others. This may be another reason you’re feeling like something of a fraud.

There are lots of reasons why someone who is highly psychic may turn off the voice of their intuition. In your case, your inner guidance has been telling you that something is not right about your relationship, but your head has been arguing with your intuition by saying that this guy is nice to you so your feelings must be unfounded. Since you’re still in this relationship, your head is obviously winning. You can’t regularly deny or ignore what your intuition has to tell you about yourself and still get great psychic impressions for others.

You don’t mention if you’ve had any professional training. If not, now would be a good time to get some. Once you’ve reconnected with your own inner guidance and honored it by taking action to create what you want in your own life, you should be able to return to reading for others with a reasonable degree of confidence, especially if you’ve learned and mastered reliable techniques for tuning in to a high level of spiritual guidance.

Trust plays a huge role in psychic performance. This is a bit of a Catch-22, but if you doubt yourself, you’ll tend to fail, which will just create more doubt. To bring through pure psychic information, we have to connect to Spirit and relay what we get without filtering it. Knowing that we’ve been trained by the best can give us the confidence to relay our impressions without censoring them.

It’s also essential to develop a good working relationship with Spirit and then simply trust that whatever is needed will be provided. I always feel a little tense when beginning a reading because I care deeply about doing my best. After I pray for Spirit to help me deliver a reading that is accurate, useful and empowering for my client, I place the outcome in Spirit’s hands and just get on with it.

What we do as psychics is really extraordinary; if we thought we had to do it all on our own, it would be natural to feel paralyzed by trepidation. Fortunately, all we have to do is remain clear channels for a high level of guidance and trust in Spirit to deliver whatever the person we’re working with needs to hear at that time.

– Soul Arcanum

 

« »