I define an effective psychic reader as someone that is led by Spirit and not motivated by ego concerns around money, power, being approved of or validated, or being afraid of incorrectness,
High-level psychics have certain characteristics that I've noticed over the years. This article covers how to evaluate psychic skill and some of the earmarks of psychic fraud.
Of course, what would a well-rounded article on psychic phenonenom be without presenting the counterpoint? Visit Skeptical Museum of the Paranormal to learn more about frauds than you ever wanted to know.
....How to spot a psychic fraud
Related Resource: How to Develop Your Psychic Abilities How to evaluate a psychic reader's skill level:
If you are just calling up psychics in the phone book, it can be hard to evaluate them beforehand.
That's the value of a venue like a new age fair. If you can attend a new age fair and kind of sit at a distance from a psychic and observe them for a while, you can learn a lot. Integrity prevents you eavesdropping, of course, but one good thing to watch is the point of focus.
If the psychic spends most their time observing the client, and very little time with eyes closed, averted to one side or the other, or looking down at the cards, they may be "reading" the person instead of giving a reading.
Some people have a natural gift for reading body language and facial expressions. They guide the reading from feedback you unconsciously give and the reading may be led by your own, revealed but unconscious, fears and desires.
Short of being able to observe a psychic in action, the best thing to do is schedule their shortest reading and look for the following tip offs that may signal an inexperienced psychic, an insecure psychic or a psychic fraud:
High-Level Card Readers and Intuitives
Do Not Ask a Lot of Questions
Whenever I hear a psychic asking a lot of questions
like "I am getting the letter P....is there anyone in your family whose name starts with the letter P?" or maybe something like "Do you know a Mary or Mandy, maybe a Mindy?", I began to question their level of skill.
Several factors can prompt a lot of questions during a psychic readings, including insecurity, instability of the psychic connection, resistance on your part (you don't want to hear it) and downright fraud. Insecurity about the gift is probably the single-biggest cause of unclear answers in a psychic reading, followed closely by unconscious resistance on the part of the person requesting the reading.
If you put yourself in the place of a new psychic, it won't be hard to see that a person of integrity would want to be sure they were getting the message right. I certainly wanted to be sure i was receiving the information clearly and my own doubts about that colored my ability to do so at first.
One humorous example of questioning the information was when I was not even giving a reading, per se, but doing spiritual healing work.
Suddenly, I smelled cooking bacon, so strong that I opened my eyes and looked around me to see if someone had walked up who was eating bacon. Then, I heard a sentence about not eating bacon. I thought this was so bizarre and couldn't possibly have anything to do with anything so I asked a question. I asked why I would be smelling bacon? Did that make any sense to her?
The lady laughed out loud and said that she had been trying to eat better because of some recent health condition and that, just that morning, she had wanted bacon but didn't eat any.
High-Level Readers Do Not Relay Trivia
What someone thought about a particular meal for dinner that night is trivia. Guidance on a particular food that might be aggravating a health condition is not trivia.
A good psychic doesn't need to run off at the mouth, spouting every detail they see. They learn to wade through the information for what is truly significant.
If you get "I see you driving a red car" and you own a red car, that might be impressive but it isn't particularly useful; it's psychic trivia. On the other hand, if the psychic picks up that you need to check your brakes and you find a problem with them that you were unaware of, that's useful..
I learned this same lesson as a healing facilitator. Not everything that is released, at a cellular level, during a session, needs to be spoken out. In the example about the bacon, that was just her recent history I picked up. She made the correct choice for herself in choosing not to have the bacon so there really wasn't any message to be shared. We did have a good laugh over it though, and everyone knows laughter is the best medicine.
Soon, I became more confident and could discern when Spirit was moving with a message to be shared. I learned to notice the energetic difference between etheric debris and trivia, and something that was significant. Useful information has more weight, energetically, and is more present than the trivia, more stable in the consciousness.
Another way to discern trivia from significant information is through the linear timeline. Old, traumatic memories that surface are rarely trivia. They carry a lot of weight and typically have energy around them that is emerging for healing. Sometimes, that healing requires witnessing.
I remember a reading where I began speaking to a young man. I told him I saw him as a little boy, in a round, metal washtub and he was being scrubbed painfully by an angry, older woman. That young man did not tell me anything at the time of the reading but later, I learned that his Grandmother was that woman and the event I saw really happened, more than once in his childhood.
What happened in that moment was that the energetic energy around that painful time shifted and began to heal for him through my witnessing for him, in compassion.
Additionally, at that moment, he became a believer in Divine Intervention. That connection led to a great deal of spiritual awakening and spiritual healing for him.
If I had allowed my doubts to surface and asked him about what I was seeing (did he remember? did it make sense to him? etc.) or questioned him in the midst of it, we would have gone into a mental process that would have interrupted a cellular release in his body that helped him start to heal.
I remember another reading with a woman. I was just sitting, holding her hands in mine with eyes closed and connecting, when my face suddenly turned sharply to the right and I gasped, opening my eyes. Looking across from me, I saw her face was turned as well. I blurted out that I had just been slapped.
I closed my eyes again and saw her as a child. She was sitting on a floor, in a kitchen, in the corner, watching. I could not see what she was watching but I spoke out what I saw. Keep in mind I knew nothing about this person besides her first name.
Afterwards, she said that she had remembered watching her mother and father fighting, from where she had sat in the corner, on the floor, in the kitchen. There was a tragedy that happened that day. The cellular memory of that began to be released from her body during that reading. I saw her years later, and she looked wonderful.
The second reason a psychic will ask a lot of questions is not so benign. There are definitely those who can craft an amazing reading about your life from asking the right questions. They are, quite frankly, frauds. Do they serve a purpose? Yes. We are always drawn to what we are willing to receive. If deceit is what we need, to perpetuate some belief system or programming we have within us, we will find it.
High-Level Readers Barely Look at You
Whenever I see a psychic staring intently into a person's face or watching their body almost the entire time they are reading, I begin to question their level of psychic skill. Again, there may be more than one reason for this.
Drawing from personal experience once more, when I did readings with people I typically either had my eyes closed almost the entire time, off to one side or the other, or focused on the cards in front of me. This was a spiritual choice, to avoid any chance of picking up information from the facial expressions or body language.
When I did look up, it was with spiritual intensity to bear home an important point. I was not looking for an answer or confirmation of what I just said, in my gaze. I was connecting and vibrationally backing up what was just revealed in the reading or I was looking to see if the remark had hit home with the person it was intended to reach.
Typically, with a beginning psychic, I see a lot of looking at the person as a way of gauging how the information is being received. This is another form of insecurity.
The new psychic may fear that they are confusing the person or giving information that is not clear. The seasoned psychic really doesn't care much what the reaction is. They recognize that their job is to impart the information, not judge it or make the person receiving it, get it all that moment.
Sometimes, meaning does not come instantly. Sometimes, it never comes. The true psychic knows that resistance, blockages and cellular suppression around experiences can all stop a person from understanding all that may be revealed from the reading. Again, a person will only get what they are willing to receive, no matter how accurate the psychic may be.
This is not to say that a psychic will be insensitive to the effect a message may have. I sometimes wished I did not have to tell a person what I had to tell them but they came to me asking for truth and it was my job to give that to them, as it came thru in the reading.
A money-making, insincere psychic will look at you to pick up non-verbal facial cues that will lead them in giving you information that will excite, scare, or otherwise stimulate you.
High Level Psychics Answer to Spirit, Not You
One of the most challenging moments for a psychic is when a person comes to them with a written list of specific questions that they want answered. In my experience, this is the most most unproductive way you can approach a reading because you want, sometimes very desperately, to hear ONLY certain things.Remember that you draw to you what you are ready to receive.
If there is a strong level of urgency to the answers you need for that list of questions, your level of need makes it very easy to set yourself up for drawing a psychic that will simply read you and give you what you want to hear is true, or what you most fear but believe is true.
When I was doing readings a lot, I also took people's questions because everyone seemed to want that. Yet, everytime I started a session with a group of questions and felt the pressure of the person's ego toward a desired message, I became more certain that doing so was going against the natural flow of psychic information. Finally, I just stopped allowing specific questions altogether until after the reading was complete. Most times, the lists never came back out.
I would tell people immediately that they could have their questions but I didn't want to hear them and I would not direct the reading according to any list. I explained that I did not consciously direct the reading, and that they could not direct it either. I would hold Sacred Space with them and see what messages were there for them from the levels higher than what the ego may have wanted. After the reading, if there were still questions, they could be fielded. Usually, there were not any left that really mattered.
After explaining my way of doing readings to prospective clients at these psychic fairs, many people walked away and sat at other tables, clutching their lists to them as they left, unable or unwilling to let go of what was most urgent in their minds. This was perfect for them at the time because the type of reading I offered was not something that was right for those people, at that time in their spiritual development.
The job of a psychic, in my experience of that path of spiritual service, is to get out of the way and allow the messages to reveal themselves without judgment, personal push or ego-driven pronouncements. Neither the psychic nor the one getting the reading should be in charge. If the psychic reader is clear, open and able to be present fully without ego interference, the right cards will fall and the messages will be clear and clean.
How to Get a Good Psychic Reading
The single-most important factor in getting a good reading is to ask yourself what you are willing to receive. If you cannot open to guidance you may need, you will not be drawn to a psychic who can help bring that guidance forth.
If you choose not to know the truth about a situation, or you decide you already know the truth and are just looking for someone to affirm it, you may choose a psychic who will pick that up from your body movements, breath, non-verbal expressions, etc. and give you what you are willing to receive and/or what you need most to hear.
In the same way, if you come to the reading grasping a fear about something, you may draw a reading that supports that fear.
On the other hand, if you choose to set your intent to be open to the highest level of truth that your soul can accept at this point in time, and you agree to surrender your list of urgent questions, you will draw to you a psychic reader who will help you fulfill that Sacred Intent.
If you prepare yourself beforehand, by lifting up your fears to Spirit, and releasing thoughts about fearful potentials, you may choose a reader who will tell you the true potential in that fearful situation.
Part One: More about psychic readings and what makes a good one.
Related: The value of festivals and fairs as spiritual growth tools
Psychic Guidance Disclaimer: By pointing out specific traits of high-level psychics and traits that sometimes point to psychic fraud, I do not mean to say the every psychic that looks at you a lot or asks lots of questions is a fraud. The bottom line is whether the information you end up getting from them is useful to you.