Witches are often credited with psychic abilities, and as a witch you may seek to develop and further these abilities, this so called ‘sixth sense’. But jumping right into psychic boot camp is a bit like putting the cart before the horse, without having first mastered or fully developed your other mundane senses. Much information can be obtained with the five senses. Scientifically, of course, we have more than five senses, but for the purposes of this post I will be talking about the traditional five: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.
One of the easiest ways to make full use of our senses is to remove one of them.
Sight.
Arguably our most dominant sense. Spend an evening blindfolded. Go about your normal routine as much as you can without seeing (for obvious safety reasons do not attempt cooking blindfolded). When you eat pay attention to the flavours, can you identify exactly what you are eating, what ingredients have been used, the way it has been cooked? Sit and listen to the TV. Can you follow the plot of the show purely by listening? Listen for background noises, footsteps, to help identify different characters. TV is a much better tool for this than radio, since radio is designed to be purely heard whereas TV is a much more visual medium. Walk around your house blindfolded; you will be surprised by how nervous or tentative you are, walking with arms outstretched despite your familiarity with the layout.
To strengthen your sense of sight spend some time people-watching. Sit at a café or a mall and observe people and try to determine what they are doing. Who is rushing somewhere, who is dawdling? Who is happy, sad, angry? Look for facial expressions and body language cues.
Open a magazine and stare at a photograph for 60 seconds, then close it and write down everything you saw; how many people were there? What colours were they wearing? What are they doing? Once you have written down absolutely every detail you can remember, as precisely as you can, open the magazine again and compare the picture to your notes, you may be surprised at what you have missed. A similar exercise is to lay on a tray an assortment of different coloured pebbles or marbles, give yourself 60 seconds to watch, and then cover them with a cloth. Write down how many pebbles there were and their colours, then check how accurate you were.
Arguably our most dominant sense. Spend an evening blindfolded. Go about your normal routine as much as you can without seeing (for obvious safety reasons do not attempt cooking blindfolded). When you eat pay attention to the flavours, can you identify exactly what you are eating, what ingredients have been used, the way it has been cooked? Sit and listen to the TV. Can you follow the plot of the show purely by listening? Listen for background noises, footsteps, to help identify different characters. TV is a much better tool for this than radio, since radio is designed to be purely heard whereas TV is a much more visual medium. Walk around your house blindfolded; you will be surprised by how nervous or tentative you are, walking with arms outstretched despite your familiarity with the layout.
To strengthen your sense of sight spend some time people-watching. Sit at a café or a mall and observe people and try to determine what they are doing. Who is rushing somewhere, who is dawdling? Who is happy, sad, angry? Look for facial expressions and body language cues.
Open a magazine and stare at a photograph for 60 seconds, then close it and write down everything you saw; how many people were there? What colours were they wearing? What are they doing? Once you have written down absolutely every detail you can remember, as precisely as you can, open the magazine again and compare the picture to your notes, you may be surprised at what you have missed. A similar exercise is to lay on a tray an assortment of different coloured pebbles or marbles, give yourself 60 seconds to watch, and then cover them with a cloth. Write down how many pebbles there were and their colours, then check how accurate you were.
Hearing.
Again, spend an evening without sound: wear a pair of earplugs underneath some noise cancelling headphones. Can you follow along with the TV plot without hearing the characters? Can you read their lips? Try your hand at cooking without hearing the food sizzle and bubble and boil. Can you feel the presence of someone else without hearing them enter? Pay attention to sights and smells and even vibrations through the air and ground against your skin.
To enhance your hearing a great tool is an audiobook. Listen to an audiobook and close your eyes, let the story appear in your mind, listen to the subtleties in the voice, and take note of the information you receive that wasn’t specifically said but that you 'heard’ anyway.
Again, spend an evening without sound: wear a pair of earplugs underneath some noise cancelling headphones. Can you follow along with the TV plot without hearing the characters? Can you read their lips? Try your hand at cooking without hearing the food sizzle and bubble and boil. Can you feel the presence of someone else without hearing them enter? Pay attention to sights and smells and even vibrations through the air and ground against your skin.
To enhance your hearing a great tool is an audiobook. Listen to an audiobook and close your eyes, let the story appear in your mind, listen to the subtleties in the voice, and take note of the information you receive that wasn’t specifically said but that you 'heard’ anyway.
Touch.
Harder to eliminate completely your sense of touch, but running your hands under cold water until they’re numb is effective, and then try to perform a simple task such as writing your name; you may be surprised at how difficult it is and how much more you rely on your sense of sight to complete it.
To strengthen your sense of touch gather a number of items that have entirely different feels; cloth, metal, wood, stone, plastic, etc. It is better if you have someone else put together this assortment for you. The idea is for you to, without looking, identify the object by touch alone. Another exercise is to get a selection of different coloured sheets of paper, close your eyes and try to identify the colours by feel. You may find that different colours have a 'warmth’ or 'coolness’ to them.
Harder to eliminate completely your sense of touch, but running your hands under cold water until they’re numb is effective, and then try to perform a simple task such as writing your name; you may be surprised at how difficult it is and how much more you rely on your sense of sight to complete it.
To strengthen your sense of touch gather a number of items that have entirely different feels; cloth, metal, wood, stone, plastic, etc. It is better if you have someone else put together this assortment for you. The idea is for you to, without looking, identify the object by touch alone. Another exercise is to get a selection of different coloured sheets of paper, close your eyes and try to identify the colours by feel. You may find that different colours have a 'warmth’ or 'coolness’ to them.
Smell and Taste.
These two senses are very much intrinsically linked, and eliminating the one can strengthen the other. Pinch your nose with a peg and eat several things of different flavours blindfolded. Packets of flavoured potato chips can be useful for this purpose. Without your sense of smell you are forced to rely solely on your tongue. Complete the exercise again but this time without eating but only smelling, the to identify the flavours by smell alone. Complete a similar exercise with different herbs and flowers; can you pick up the scents correctly?
These two senses are very much intrinsically linked, and eliminating the one can strengthen the other. Pinch your nose with a peg and eat several things of different flavours blindfolded. Packets of flavoured potato chips can be useful for this purpose. Without your sense of smell you are forced to rely solely on your tongue. Complete the exercise again but this time without eating but only smelling, the to identify the flavours by smell alone. Complete a similar exercise with different herbs and flowers; can you pick up the scents correctly?
As with all things in my Beginner Guide series, these exercises will require continuous practice. You will find as well that you begin receiving a lot more information about the world and the lives of your friends and family simply by making a fuller use of your mundane senses. Much you will pick up with your senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and tarts that others would attribute to psychic ability. This is not to be confused with being a charlatan; rather it is a poor witch who relies solely upon their psychic senses and does not make full use of the mundane five.
These exercises will help you develop your senses to a fuller degree, and this will help your witchcraft to no end; not the least of which are your visualisation skills, which are integral to the practice of magic.
*DISCLAIMER: this is how I started as a beginner witch, not how everyone starts. A dozen different witches will give you a dozen different ways to begin. This is merely how I do things.
