Actually, psychics DO use their minds.

The importance of mind work in psychic development, different definitions, pitfalls, and super helpful practical guidance to up your psychic senses & skills!

Just because you’re spiritual doesn’t mean you get to be an idiot. So often spiritual influencers say the mind gets in the way of spiritual and psychic development, and while in some ways that is true, it confuses the issue and trashes one of your most powerful spiritual tools.

Because the mind is a tool, like all tools, it can be used poorly and get in the way, or it can be used well and make your path easier, more fun, and more satisfying.

In this post, I’ll also go over the different definitions of mind, how they impact psychic work, some mind pitfalls, as well as some practical steps to help you use this powerful tool. This is a mammoth post and a portion of it at the end includes journal prompts, an exercise to counter overthinking, and a third eye meditation for upgraded subscribers (if you’re not already one, you can upgrade and get a month of access to posts like this PLUS the archive for less than the cost of a book!).

What is “Mind?”

The only way to develop into a powerful psychic is to use your mind. The idea that we don’t use our mind or that the mind is in the way is false. This is because often influencers and teachers haven’t defined clearly what they mean when they’re talking about the mind, and so it makes everything confused.

Whenever we’re talking about the mind, we could be talking about a few different things:

1. The ego

2. The thinking brain OR

3. The 6^th chakra – the third eye

One of these things almost always gets in the way of psychic development, another sometimes does, and the third is necessary for psychic development.

Let’s talk about these three pieces in more depth and how to navigate them in your psychic journey.

The Ego is a Shit Show.

If you’ve done any self-development work, psychotherapy, or dealt with a narcissist ever, you know the ego is a shit show. It is all about me. It’s concerned with image, how things impact the self and only the self. When the self or ego is injured, well… that’s a disaster.

The ego is what makes someone hang up a sign to be psychic when they know shit all about being psychic because they want to feel special. It’s also the ego that prevents you from pursuing psychic development because you might get rejected by friends and family for being psychic.

Another time when the ego gets in the way is when you receive psychic information and it plays the stories and conditions you’ve heard your whole life – “That isn’t real,” “That can’t be right!” or maybe “This doesn’t make any sense! Don’t say anything!”

In short, the ego is a hot mess and is most concerned with protecting and enhancing your self importance. In some traditions, this is associated with pride, but it’s also associated with shame.

Turn Off the Ego - Set Yourself Free!

It’s good and correct to let go of your ego for psychic development. We do this in many ways. Frequently this involves shadow work. This is because it is incredibly uncomfortable to confront your ego and let it go.

You are required to confront the stories about yourself that may make you who you think you are. These are things you’ve identified with and they may not be accurate, or they might. At the end is when you figure it out, but you have to go through a period of confrontation and questioning, and that can be extremely painful, especially if you were wrong.

In fact, some people find it so incredibly difficult, they will deny verifiable fact in order to prevent ego death. Researchers found this is true for early cult adopters whose leader is inevitably found to be full of shit because they fuse their own identity to the identity of their cult leader. Imagine, flat out denying sexual abuse, corruption, and lies of a leader because your little ego couldn’t handle the fact that you followed someone who engaged in these things?! [Note: If you’re seeing similarities between a certain leader and his followers, you’d be right.]

This is what most spiritual influencers and teachers mean when they say you need to let go of the mind. The problem is when people say this, most people also try to lose another part of the mind and everything that goes with it, which brings us to another definition of mind – the thinking brain.

Time to Think

I know it’s controversial to think on your own, what with AI being shoved down our throats everywhere, and the whole “let go of your mind” business, but I’m going to challenge you to do the hard thing.

Fucking think. There are two processes we want to use when we engage in spiritual or psychic exploration:

1. Analytical thinking &

2. Critical thinking

Analytical thinking is where we analyze an idea, breaking it down into digestible pieces to understand each part of the whole. Essentially, what I’m doing when I’m writing about these topics is going through the analytical process for you, but then you can easily take each piece and explore them on your own. If you do that, you’re engaging in analytical thought of a spiritual or psychic concept.

Critical thinking is the process where we use evidence, logic, reasoning, and verifiable fact to evaluate an idea. When we do this, it hopefully leads us to come to conclusion about a subject. This would be when you explore a belief, for example, using different information and sources, and come to your judgment about a given belief. At first glance, I know the idea of using critical thinking sounds counter intuitive, and sometimes it can be for psychic development, but it’s also essential to developing your mind and deciding what you will pursue in spiritual study.

One of the things I really value about the Jewish tradition is the importance of questioning. It’s the only major world religion that builds questioning into it’s core. As a result, if you ever sit down with a good Jew and start a conversation, be prepared to have your beliefs and thoughts ripped to shreds. Now, if you’ve done your work, you will have used analytical and critical thinking to come to solid conclusions with good reasoning and you’ll be able to defend and explore the ideas with a playfulness that would be well received. If you haven’t, you may leave feeling hurt and burdened by the impending shadow work you still require.

Train your mind so you can actually question shit in an intelligent way and don’t assume you know anything until you’ve spent a quality amount of time exploring the thing with logic and intuition.

There is a stereotype that spiritual people are stupid. And some of them are, just as there are stupid people everywhere. However, you are reading this, which means you are not one of those stupid people. You are committed to learning and growing and finding out good information that is useful.

I want you to ask questions of spiritual influencers. I want you to confront your beliefs about Spirit (there’s some prompts at the end of this post to do just that!). I want you to explore concepts and compare ideas in order to come to your own conclusions in a thoughtful and measured way. And if that means you question the things I say – good! You should. You don’t have to take my word as gospel on things. And if you find something that is better, more complete, or more useful, please send it my way!

But, I refuse to foster stupidity. We’re not having any stupid psychics over here. Fuck that shit. We’re smart. And we’re going to use our smarts to enhance our psychic work and we’re going to make our brains work for us.

The Mind Chakra – Your Third Eye

I’ve talked about the third eye when I discussed clairvoyance (you can read my post about clairvoyance here), but it’s important to understand the third eye is one of the essential energy centers for psychic work.

Yes, you do have several other energy centers involved in psychic work, or seats of intuition and even if you’re struggling with the mind center, you can still have psychic abilities. Let’s break down how the intuitive seats work:

1. Solar Plexus – at your navel, where you experience “gut feelings” or “lower” intuition

2. Heart – at your sternum, which is deeply connected to clairsentience and what is typically understood as empathic intuition

3. Mind – this is where you would receive clairaudience, clairvoyance, clairaliance, and clairgustance.

4. Crown – while I wouldn’t say this is an intuitive seat in the same way as the others, it is your direct connection to cosmic consciousness/the Universe. This is responsible for claircognizance. Having this open really helps everything else as well!

Now that we know how psychic abilities are connected to the different centers, it’s clear the mind center is important in connecting with several psychic senses. If we want to have the full range of psychic senses, we need to be able to work with our mind’s eye (I have a meditation for doing just this at the end of this post!)!

Some people naturally have a more open and active third eye. If you have a dominant clair associated with this center, you are already half-way there! If however, your dominant clair is clairsentience or claircognizance, you may have a weaker third eye and will want to spend more time training it up! Don’t worry! It’s very doable!

Training Your Mind in Psychic Development

You are literally engaged in training your mind in every practice of psychic development. You do this with meditation and mindfulness practices by training your focus and attention which allows you to further develop your psychic skills. You train your mind when you read books and blogs, attend classes, workshops, and retreats where you learn strategies, techniques and the history of spirituality and all things psychic. Journaling, either to record or process psychic information, helps you integrate and think about your experiences, as well as trains your mind to recall details and connect them to other psychic experiences and more.

The fact is, your mind does a lot on the path of psychic development. It is actually an essential part of this equation and when you learn to love and accept your mind as part of this journey, you are able to embrace what it has to offer.

Critical and analytical thinking are skills which are necessary for psychic development. Not only do they help you discern good teachers and information from the bad, but they also help you understand your psychic experiences. The best psychics are those who have read and continue to read about different folk traditions, techniques, tools, and spiritualities. The best psychics are those who learn about the different meanings of symbols from a variety of cultural perspectives. Beyond that, the best psychics also know they are eternal students, and there will always be more to learn, more to explore, and more to understand. Such psychics use their critical thought, intuition, and deep symbol knowledge to understand psychic information and practice the art of interpretation – for it is an art.

In short, you must train your mind and continue to train your mind if you want to be good at this stuff. I would argue everyone should do this because it beneficial for other aspects of life, however it is extremely important for anyone who wants to use psychic knowledge intensively – in work or relationship – because you are less likely to make big fuck ups when you know wtf you’re talking about.

Mind Pitfalls in Psychic Development

Okay – we know we need our minds. We know we train them on a regular basis with the run of the mill psychic practices with anything from meditation, to affirmation, to tapping into our intuition, to interpreting psychic knowledge.

And...also…

Your mind can really fuck shit up. We know the ego is inherently a problem, but what about the thinking mind? Where does that get into the mix? And can the third eye cause any problems?

Caught Up in Pretty Things

It’s easy to get caught up in pretty words of people who have a public platform. There are all kinds of psychological tricks that can convince people of all kinds of things.

1. We are more likely to believe someone who is pretty. There’s a reason why news anchors have historically been attractive.

2. We’re more likely to accept something as fact when it is stated confidently. Try it out with friends – say something that is true in a questioning way and watch everyone start to question it!

3. We’re more likely to accept concepts presented in a simplistic way. Our attention spans as a species have shrunk to that of a goldfish. Simple, fast, and dirty is the way most people like it these days.

4. We’re more likely to think something is true when it is shared by a friend. I mean, if your bestie is about it, don’t you want to belong too?

5. We’re more likely to accept a lie as truth when it has a grain of truth in it. This is because it’s harder to refute the lie. Just look at the propaganda and spin on news articles. You can even see this with AI.

6. It’s more convincing when a lot of people have supported the thing or like it. I mean, 100k followers or 1k followers? Which are you going to believe more?

Hopefully you don’t fall prey to these tricks, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. It’s just the tip of the iceberg of how your brain gets manipulated by all kinds of influencers etc.

Unproven and So…

I used to get into fights with people on the internet all the time for things like the emerald tablet (I want people to shut tf up about this because OMG it DOES NOT EXIST! The earliest references to it 9^th century Arabic writing...it’s not thousands and thousands of years old. It’s bullshit.).

Another one is the Lion’s Gate. That BS got me so irritated I wrote a whole post about it (you can read it here).

The thing about a lot of spiritual stuff is… it can’t be unproven or proven, therefore, people make shit up all the fucking time. With the internet and the democratization of information and publishing (and now with the trash of AI) it’s easy to get confused with what is trustworthy and what is trash.

This is why any time an influencer or teacher says something, explore where that idea came from. For example, consider the concept of “lizard people.” When someone says they believe in lizard people, I know for a fact, this is bullshit. It is a concept that comes from early 20^th century science fiction and somehow crossed over into spiritual spaces, likely, because someone was high and or wanted to feel special, or likes to imagine boogie men everywhere.

And yet, people believe this shit because it’s been peddled over and over again, despite its dubious origins. Could someone have a psychic vision and see lizard people? Sure. Does that mean there are lizard people? No. It’s a lot more complicated than that. The lizard people show up because that is a symbol you are ready to receive that has clear meaning to you. Doesn’t mean they’re a thing (for more about this, check out my post about belief here).

This is true with many conspiracy theories. There’s a big overlap between conspiracy thinking and spiritual spaces because spirit cannot be proven. It invites what is called schizotypal thinking – eccentric or atypical beliefs, that may include some paranoid aspects – that can poison the spaces when left unchecked or challenged. Instead, it’s important to bring a critical and analytical approach to such ideas.

Overthinking – Anxiety, Imposter Syndrome, Etc

This pitfall is a combination of both the thinking mind and the ego. When I posted my video on socials about claircognizance, I got sooooo many comments about people struggling with things like anxiety and imposter syndrome.

“How can I tell the difference?”

“I overthink things!”

“I’m worried I’ll be wrong!”

“It doesn’t make logical sense!”

Comment after comment of people questioning their knowing, going back and forth about how could the psychic knowing possibly be true.

Overthinking introduces doubt in a big way and doubt is one of the biggest enemies to developing your psychic abilities and skills. Don’t worry - I have an exercise below to help you counter this!