Psychic Telephone · 3
My Sister Adrienne
Adrienne has little moments, mostly. She’ll be giving someone a massage or doing energy work on them—Reiki or polarity or chakra healing, they’re all very similar—and she’ll get a psychic hit. A bodily feeling, feelings really, like being there, or even being the thing itself. That’s how it starts, just an experience. For instance, the time when she had her hands hovering over a client, the back of her rib cage, and they suddenly went cold. Really cold. She felt a contraction, some kind of dark energy, the sense of being plunged into frigid water. The woman’s lungs. There was fear, the color black, a flash of imagery. It’s like that, she says—almost as if she becomes the experience. As if, in that moment, she was the water. And that’s how it gets translated—quickly, before thought comes—into visual form. Sometimes sound as well. This fleshes out the feeling, the knowing, and turns it into something she can articulate. A cold dark lake.
When she talks about energy, she just means everything around her that she can feel but not see. It could be the energy of the sun or, say, the specific feeling of people sleeping in a house. It’s always been like that for her. As a kid, she’d feel the energy shift and know that something had entered the room. A spirit, perhaps—but clearly other. She had an imaginary friend, too. Unis, who she never saw but felt strongly as a presence, warm and loving. And she grew up pretty athletic, with an early sense of her body as a place that felt strong and safe. Anchored in her body, she didn’t question what it told her, just let it guide her. For her, intuition has always been about understanding what she feels, her relationship to what’s around her.
She doesn’t see herself as a psychic, though. Intuitive, yes. Empathic. Having what’s classically called the sixth sense. But not as any special category of people, like some psychics she has read about. She doesn’t feel like she’s one of those people who has those really insane psychic experiences. She’s more in the realm of, if you’re really listening—if you’re good at just being with people, and feeling people—you’re bound to get more information at some point. She thinks we all get hits sometimes and know stuff. So that’s very different from people who—they can’t necessarily stop the flood.
Still, she has had some moments she could describe as psychic, moments that differ fundamentally from her intuition. What she receives through intuition, it’s like it belongs to her own relationship with the world. It’s based in how she relates to what’s in the space around her, centered in her own nervous system, helping her navigate her environment. The genuinely psychic hits are different. It’s hard to describe this, but they just don’t feel as though they’re for her. They’re like interceptions, and she’s picking them up just because they’re there. But they’re for somebody else, about someone else’s relationships to places and to people. They’re less about what matters to her in a space in the present and more what just happens to be in the field.
So when she’s received a message, she’ll give the moment back to the client. Saying something like I think you’re holding some distress in this part of your body. It can be helpful to them to hear it. She’ll share the psychic hit—the feelings, the images—and will ask, Does that resonate with you? If it doesn’t, she’ll just let it go. But that time with the lake, the woman described getting rocked out of a boat when she was six years old, falling in at dusk. Not knowing how to swim and nearly drowning, heaving and heaving, trying to breathe. The terror, the pain in her lungs, the cold. Then Adrienne would have said, Let’s breathe through it. Because it’s good to work a little with the ways the body releases trauma. Asking, How can we accompany love into this sphere?