Posted @ 10:04:00 on 28 June 2008
Not the kind of subject line one would normally expect (or I wouldn't anyway...) I think if I had to pick my favourite thing about Psychic school, it would be that my lovely teacher has taught me how to do Psychometry (where you get stuff psychically by holding an object while you are reading for someone (a ring, a watch, a necklace etc). In the beginning I thought this was a colossal waste of time. We started with "bum psychometry" where you sit on a chair for a few minutes and then swap with your neighbour. Then both of you has to see if you can literally pick anything up from the chair. In the early days I didn't get much at all, other than a sense of how warm the other person's bottom was... But more recently, I have managed to pick things up that you couldn't possibly explain in any other way. The convincer for me came when my dear friend rebeccawood met me for dinner and brought along a wooden object, to see if I could get anything from it. It was a strange looking thing, about seven centimetres long, and obviously very old. As we sat in the Real Greek in Covent Garden, she asked me to see what I could get from it. Knowing her interests, I knew it was something crafty (no surprises there). She told me that it dated back to World War One, and from there on I was on my own. Over the course of the next few minutes, I got a sense that it had belonged to a woman, but that it had been passed down to her from someone else (possibly her Father). I got a sense of it having had a connection to France, and that at one held of the object where some wooden guides were, thread had once been wound round. I got a sense of wheat fields blowing in the wind, and a connection to a farm. Woody confirmed these details, some of which she had obtained from the person she bought it from. It was really affirming for me as I had a particularly difficult class that week, in which I fell very firmly on my face as a result of not listening to the quiet voice inside me was telling me, as it was not logical. Then last weekend, on a weekend away, I was able to touch the walls of a very old building, and get a sense of the people who had used the building in the past, and what they may have used it for. The thing is, none of this is logical, none of it can be proved or disproved scientifically because the frameworks with which you could test it are not there. Sceptics would scoff and dismiss it as a load of bunkum, but actually I don't think I really care. For me, it comes down to the fact that in this "rich tapestry of life", it is something which adds colour to my world, it makes what I am experiencing more vivid. I have always believed that knowing the history of an area brings it to life, and history is really a form of story telling. When I hold an object or touch the rough surface of an old wall or a wooden beam, what is really coming through is a story about who may or may not have lived there, what they felt, what they experienced. It may be true, or it may not be true, who is to say. But what harm does that do?