The Clairs

Your home is the spirit world. You chose to come here for learning and adventure and many other reasons, and you still have a connection to that world, even if it is a limited one. That means you are connected to your higher self, and that means you have a connection to all of the higher abilities.

The clairs are the most common of them. Clair is French for clear, and each of the clairs is a clear sense of something your ordinary senses cannot account for. Seeing it. Hearing it. Feeling it. Smelling it.

Most people have had at least one of these and filed it under coincidence.

Clairsentience: feeling

Almost everyone has this one.

Clairsentience is being able to sense the vibe in a room.

You will be able to think of a time when you walked into a room and felt the tension in the air before anyone said a word. That is clairsentience. You did not see anything or hear anything. You felt it.

If you have lived with someone for a long time, you will have a heightened clairsentient awareness of that person. You know their mood the moment they walk in the door, simply by being around them.

Developed, that ability can know anyone's mood just by sensing them. That works in person, at a distance or from a photo, and it works whether the person is still living or is in spirit.

This is the one I most strongly encourage you to develop. It is perhaps the best ability there is for drawing you towards positive people and positive outcomes, because you feel the wrong ones before you walk into them.

The Empathy page takes this further.

Clairaudience: hearing

Clairaudience is the ability to hear sounds that have no source within earshot.

Very often it comes while you are reading for someone, as a way of connecting with that person. It can also be something just for you. A warning. A sign of good things on the way. Something to help you heal, or to help you relax.

There are times when you hear it in your head and not in your ears.

Have you ever heard your name called out, turned around, and found nobody there? Ever wondered why that happens?

Clairscentience: smelling

This one is rarely mentioned, and it is easy to confuse with clairsentience because the words are so close. It is a different ability.

Clairscentience is the ability to smell things that are not present, things with no source anywhere within smelling distance. It can happen at any time and in any place, and like all the clairs it is often strongest when you are reading for someone.

Say you are reading for someone and you suddenly smell a particular pipe tobacco. You mention it, and they connect it straight away with someone they knew who smoked a pipe and passed over long ago. Or it might be a particular perfume, or the smell of a particular kind of cooking.

These things help get a message from spirit to the person you are reading for. They help the person identify who the message is coming from, and they are good confirmation for you that you are on the right track.

Clairvoyance: seeing

Clairvoyance is seeing what is not in front of your eyes.

My earliest childhood memories include visions. The first one I remember clearly came at around four years of age, and it was a vision about the physical nature of the universe. I was nearly thirty before I understood it, and I learned early to keep that sort of thing to myself.

A lot of people tell me they cannot visualise, and what I have learnt over the years is that the word is what stops them. The ability was there all along. They think seeing means a picture playing in front of their eyes like a film. For the great majority of people there is no actual imagery at all. There is a perception of an image.

Close your eyes and picture your front door. You can describe it, every one of you. You have just seen it in your mind's eye. That is the same faculty clairvoyance uses, and the Visualisation page goes into it properly. In my experience very few people see things in the literal, movie sense, and you do not need to.

Sometimes a clairvoyant vision arrives without warning and gives you a glimpse of the moment you are in. Because it is unexpected, people often mistake it for déjà vu. It can be the first sign of abilities waking up. The Deja Vu and Its Four Kinds page sorts that one out from the others.

There is also the seeing that happens out of the corner of your eye. Your peripheral vision is usually what picks up a spirit presence, and the Seeing Spirit page explains how to stop turning your head and losing it.

Knowing before

There is a close cousin to the clairs that nearly everyone has met. Knowing something before it happens. Knowing your phone is about to ring, or that a particular friend is going to call, or that some news is coming. Then it happens, and the knowing is confirmed.

The more you tune in, the more often it happens.

Which ones are yours

You will have more than one, some that you know about and some that are still unknown to you.

Everyone wants to know what gifts they have. People want to know whether they are psychic, a medium, a clairvoyant, an empath, or any of a thousand other labels. What defines a gift is the source of the information that comes to you, and the label is just a name we give it afterwards. Whatever the label, the path for developing it is the same.

Which of the clairs above have you already met, and put down to coincidence?

Telling a clair from your own head

Every one of these can be confused with Monkey Mind, and Monkey Mind can be confused with every one of them. A smell might be the neighbour's dinner. A voice might be your own worry.

So use the same method from the Monkey Mind page. Note the sensation that came with the impression. Follow it through to the outcome. Keep the ones that turned out to be real, and learn the feel of the ones that did not.

Where to start

Start with the basics, and keep doing them. Meditation, grounding, and the habit of noticing. To this day I still practise my basics several times a day, because they are what every ability stands on.

Then pay attention. The clairs grow when they are noticed, and the more you tune in, the more they give you. You do not have to force any of them. You are remembering something you already know how to do.

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.

Related pages
Psychometry