Everyone, Tanya says, has a sixth sense. Psychic or intuitive—to her they’re the same, though she usually says intuitive, since psychic can scare people. And she believes that we all get intuitive or psychic hits all during the day. It’s just whether we accept it or not. It’s just, do we allow ourselves to tap into it? Because we live in a society that invalidates this ability and skill. A lot depends on how open your parents were to it, how open your religious background was, and just, your natural interest in it.
She thinks a lot of times being psychic is, maybe you’re more aware of smaller details than other people are. A lot of it is observational things that a human does. When we meet up with someone, we’re kind of sizing them up whether we want to admit it or not. Are they in a good mood? Are they in a bad mood? It’s just like a gut feeling. Your third chakra, in your solar plexus, is all about your physical body. So when you get goosebumps, or the hair stands up on the back of your neck, or your stomach goes into knots—that’s reading from your third chakra. And a lot of times when people read with their bodies, we call that intuition.
And the more you do it—like massage therapists, and hairstylists, all these people who touch people every day—you start to, whether you’re trained in it or not, you start to know what’s going on in their space. She does think there are some people who have more of an affinity for it, but everyone can develop it. It’s kind of like a musical instrument. There are people who have more natural musical talent than others. But, she says, anyone can sit down and put time in and practice—minimally thirty minutes a day—and become an expert within a year or so.
Everyone expects the Hollywood version of a psychic. People think psychic information is like, unicorns with rainbows coming out of their butts, and sparkles—angels are singing, the skies open up! And yes, there are those experiences. But intuition is very simple. It’s just, it’s a thought. It’s a moment. It’s a déjà vu. A lot of the time it’s boring and in black and white, which is probably why people ignore it. Because they don’t think it’s grand enough. They think it should be a powerful lightning bolt that comes down. And it’s not. It’s a sense. Like the sense of touch. You touch your skin and you feel that sensation. It’s simple.
Tanya sees her psychic capacity as about sensing energy, just noticing people’s energy. She has a knowingness, more than anything else. She knows how to do medium work too, communicating with the dead, but she doesn’t do it as a professional. Most of what she does is, she turns inward and connects, focuses. And she was lucky enough to be able to develop and hone it through classes. But it was something she kind of always had—or had been a little bit more open to.
Now she teaches classes through the organization she founded, the Center for Inspired Action, from her home in Texas. And she thinks that what mostly holds people back from developing their psychic abilities is fear. General fear. Fear of stepping out from their parents’ belief system. Fear of stepping out from what society wants them to believe. And honestly, the biggest one is fear of change. Like, they get an intuitive hit: It’s time to divorce my husband. I know it. It’s over. It’s been over for six years. That’s an easy example, but there are all kinds of bigger and smaller ones. So why do they keep ignoring that message? Because they don’t want to change. They’re thinking, I’m gonna have to move, I’m gonna have to pay a lawyer, I’m gonna have to—fill in the blank.