"Everyone is intuitive. Most people block it out."

Elizabeth Mayer writes: “John Huddleston has been in private practice as an intuitive for thirty years, with clients throughout the country. For the past fifteen years, he has also been on the senior faculty of the Berkeley Psychic Institute, teaching others to develop their intuition. After a number of conversations, I scheduled a phone session with him. By now I was familiar with the uncanny sense, palpable throughout our conversation, that he somehow knew me. Half of me practically expected it.

“Then something happened that I wasn’t expecting. John came up with a description of a very close family member that was not only totally unlikely but also profoundly disturbing. I knew this person so well that, before we ended our session, I told John that he’d been right on a lot of things, but was totally off the mark about that one person. It was simply impossible that this person would do what John told me he’d been doing.

“John didn’t hedge. He seemed relaxed and easy, admitting he could be wrong sometimes. But, he said, he’d stick to his guns on this one. I hung up, uneasy but refusing to doubt my sense of someone I knew and loved. Twelve days later, I received the news. Everything John had told me turned out to be accurate. I was as stunned as the rest of my family—but they didn’t have to contend with the fact that someone had told me all about it twelve days earlier.

“John was able to recall the first time he became aware of picking up information on a different level:

It was in grammar school, in Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, when I was seven or eight years old. We were studying a textbook about world history. I remember the illustration in the chapter on ancient civilizations: a low-angle shot of the pyramids. Whenever I looked at it, I got light-headed, almost to the point of passing out. It was an extremely visceral experience, like being buried beneath a collapsing sand dune. If I turned the page, I would feel better immediately.

The information came from a different realm, but I knew it was genuine. And the otherworldly shimmer of the experience was fascinating and compelling. Where did it come from? Jung’s universal unconscious? Past-life recollection? I’d say the latter, because as children, each of us is much more closely knitted into that luminous world, which includes imaginary playmates, conversations with God, and glimpses of past lives.

It also helped that I was raised in an atmosphere where the nonphysical was accepted. My mother was a widely respected artist, and I can recall her pausing before beginning a landscape of an old red mill, ‘waiting to hear what the landscape has to reveal to me,’ she explained. And my grandfather, who was a university professor and author, drove down from Harvard to Walden Pond in 1893 so he could read Walden at night by candlelight in the remains of the celebrated cabin, the better to commune with Henry David Thoreau. He also wrote verses about past-life glimpses.

“I asked John to describe the state of mind he’s in when he does his readings:

It’s relaxed focus, that’s the best way to describe it. There’s calm, clarity, and a receptive quality. There’s also a physical component, and by that I mean I’m physically centered and grounded within myself, not drifting and discorporate. I’m in communion with the client, the barriers are down, and they are very easy to see, but I don’t merge with them in order to read them. This is not an out-of-body experience. In fact, my state of mind is surprisingly down to earth and ordinary.

“I had a hard time accepting John’s premise that what he was doing was by any stretch ordinary. John seemed amused at my consternation.

Ordinary? Oh yes, it’s surprisingly ordinary. In fact, most people use aspects of this state of mind in their daily lives without realizing it. For instance, an important key to this state of mind is ‘no effort.’ And that’s quite ordinary, because if you think of a time when you tried hard to remember something, you know the more you tried to remember it, the more you pushed it down within you. However, when you relaxed and allowed it to emerge, it bubbled right up. You accomplished that with no effort. That’s how intuition works. Effortlessness. It’s easier than you think. Doing a reading is as effortless as opening a garden gate and stepping into a new landscape. I simply observe the garden; I don’t have to create it.

Another state of mind is discrimination. A reading is like observing a huge, moving, transforming mural: the client’s health, relationships, family, joys and challenges, future—they’re all there. So discerning what’s important among all that is essential. Think of it as talking to a friend at a noisy, crowded party. You’re able to screen out fifty other voices and hear the voice that’s important. How do you do it? Well, you just do.

On a deeper level, spiritual discrimination is also what allows a mother to sleep through noisy trucks rumbling past, but awaken when her baby cries in the next room. And finally, a reading is also personally reflective; in the way psychotherapists are aware that they learn from their patients. Remember when you nurtured a friend when he or she experienced a death in the family? That was also an opportunity for you to uncover and heal some of your own unresolved grief. In a reading, both the client and the reader have an opportunity to learn, heal, and grow.

The truth is that everyone is psychic. Everyone is intuitive. Most people just block it out. Parents teach their kids to be sensible. They stifle the kids, who learn that intuition is unacceptable behavior.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007).