How to Activate Your Psychic Abilities, According to Real Mediums

That flicker of something’s off before the text comes through, the pull toward a person or a place you can’t quite explain, the answer you knew before you finished asking the question. We tend to call it a gut feeling and move on. But what if that quiet signal is actually your psychic ability, and the only thing standing between you and a stronger version of it is a little practice?

On the Dear Gabby podcast, Gabrielle Bernstein makes a bold promise right out of the gate. You’re more psychic than you think, and in the episode we’ll discuss below, she says she’ll prove it.

To do it, she brings in a lineup of intuitive teachers and mediums (John Holland, Rebecca Rosen, Shawn Collins, and Lisa Williams among them) and turns the whole episode into a working session. They talk intuitive blocks, reading energy, connecting with guides, protecting your energy, and finally learning to recognize your own inner knowing.

It’s less lecture, more open studio. In this guide, we discuss how to activate your psychic abilities, how to know if you have these skills, and how to develop them, all according to Gabby Bernstein herself. Tune into Gabby’s episode below as you follow along!

How to Activate Your Psychic Abilities With Everyday Practice

The throughline of the whole conversation is that intuition behaves like a muscle, not a lightning strike. 

Bernstein and her guests describe being born psychic, then racking up experiences that build a wall against that truth, until those intuitive muscles go dormant and need to be woken up again. The fix isn’t dramatic. It’s consistency.

That reframe matters because it lowers the bar in the best way. You don’t need a bolt of otherworldly certainty to start doing psychic development. The guidance is to build a spiritual practice that’s authentically yours and stay consistent with it, whether that’s once a day, once a week, or once a month, as long as you keep showing up.

This is where the episode meets you no matter your starting point. If you’re just now getting curious, the practices give you a low-stakes on-ramp. If you already meditate, journal, or work with energy, the mediums offer sharper tools and a shared vocabulary for what you’ve been sensing all along. The common instruction across every teacher is almost annoyingly simple: notice the subtle thing, and don’t talk yourself out of it. 

Your mind will immediately ask whether you’re making it up, but the moment you catch even a hint of I wonder if I’m sensing something here, trust it. That trust is what makes it stronger.

Does Everyone Have Psychic Abilities?

According to the episode: yes. 

The teaching is that everyone has the ability to feel and pick up on energy, and that each person listening can do this for themselves. Within that framing, there are a couple of perspectives running side by side. 

One is that the capacity is universal and mostly a matter of removing what’s blocking it. Bernstein describes it as accepting and embracing that you’re psychic, which makes it easier to “open up and lift the veil.” The other, from the professional mediums Gabby invited on, is that skill and sensitivity vary and grow. 

John Holland points to the everyday phrase “I can’t get out of my head,” and suggests the practice is to instead think up. Move your energy and awareness above the body where, he says, more information can come through.

Even Bernstein’s own take leans practical rather than mystical. Her point is that anyone who pressed play on a video like this is already the kind of person ready to receive those messages.

In other words, the curiosity itself is the tell.

It’s worth saying plainly that these are spiritual beliefs and lived experiences shared by the show’s guests, not scientifically established facts, and we’re presenting them as exactly that.

How Can You Tell If You Have Psychic Abilities?

Before you go looking for signs, one useful reset from the episode: forget the movies. 

Holland says to stay away from the Hollywood version, the woo-woo, the transparent ghost, the scary stuff, because real intuitive hits are very, very subtle. With that expectation set, here are the experiences that tend to make people wonder if they have psychic abilities in the first place.

You Get a Strong Gut Feeling You Can’t Explain

That drop-in sense of knowing, with no story attached, is arguably the clearest signal. Rebecca Rosen describes intuition as something that speaks through the heart, not the head, and says it drops in simply and clearly, without a narrative. It’s very direct but very subtle; she calls it dropping into a state of “head-heart coherence.” If you’ve ever known the right call before your brain built a case for it, you’ve felt it.

You Feel Other People’s Energy More Than Most

If you leave certain rooms drained or you can read the mood before anyone says a word, that’s the empath experience the mediums describe. Being highly empathic and constantly telling people “I’m such an empath” is, in their framing, evidence that you’re feeling and picking up on energy. Learning to protect that sensitivity is its own skill, which we’ll get to later.

You Notice Signs From Loved Ones and Pay Attention

Pennies, dimes, a certain bird, a butterfly that shows up at an oddly perfect moment. Holland calls these ADCs, “after-death communications,” and lists the blue butterflies, the cardinals, the pennies, and the dimes as classic examples. The instinct to explain them away is common, but noticing them and choosing to pay attention is the beginning of using your psychic muscle.

You Sense a Color, a Warmth, or a Shift Around People

Reading energy often starts with something you’d hesitate to mention out loud. Holland describes the possibility of feeling a breeze, a warmth, or suddenly seeing a color. The instruction is to go with the feeling and not talk yourself out of it.

If subtle physical impressions like these are already part of your world, you’re likely more tuned in than you assume. And if you’re not sure whether what you’re picking up is a real signal or just your brain in overdrive, it helps to learn how to tell the difference between intuition and overthinking.

How to Develop Your Psychic Abilities, Practice by Practice

This is the part of the episode built to actually use. Each medium brings a different method for strengthening intuition and spiritual connection, and none of them require special equipment. Here’s how to develop your psychic abilities using the techniques they teach:

Claim It First: “I Am Psychic”

Every teacher on the episode starts in the same place, with acceptance. The instruction is to accept that you’re psychic and repeat it to yourself, over and over: “I am psychic. I’m an intuitive.” It sounds almost too simple, but the mediums treat this as the doorway. You can’t develop something you won’t admit you have.

Channel Your Spirit Guides Through Automatic Writing

Gabby’s go-to practice is a journaling technique that borders on channeling. 

She writes at the top of a page, “Dear guides, of the highest truth and compassion, what would you have me know?” and then lets the pen rip until her handwriting starts to change and a kind of inner directive begins to download onto the page.

The reader version is easy to try: open a journal, write the prompt, and keep the pen moving without editing yourself. The idea is that at some point, it stops feeling like your own words and something else seems to take over. But it arrives with a feeling of revelation, like you’re seeing your psychic abilities in action for the first time.

Let Spirit Lead Your Day

Lisa Williams runs what she calls spirit-led days, and it’s more playful than it sounds. 

On a day with nothing planned, she’ll ask what spirit wants her to do, and follow oddly specific nudges. Think: going to get coffee even though she doesn’t drink it herself and ending up in a conversation she was clearly meant to have.

Bernstein layers her own version on top: a morning check-in she calls her daily design method. She wakes up and asks who she’s meant to be that day, what she’s meant to receive, and what she’s meant to give, and lets the answers design her day.

You don’t have to clear your calendar to try it. The point is asking the question and staying open to the nudge inside whatever schedule you already have.

Read Auras, Starting With a Soft Gaze

Shawn Collyns teaches aura reading as a shift in how you use your eyes. Close your eyes and notice how your focus seems to move slightly up and back, which he describes as your primary vision closing off and your attention moving to the third eye. Then open your eyes with a soft gaze while holding your attention there.

From there, you look for haze. He suggests starting at a person’s shoulder to find that haziness, then using your peripheral vision to catch a sense of a color before it builds. The recurring message is the same one that runs through the whole episode. It’s always subtle and always about trusting the super-subtle impressions. As you trust them, they get stronger.

Ask Better Questions to Receive Guidance

Gabby’s reframe here is genuinely useful even if you’re skeptical of the metaphysics. 

Instead of demanding a sign out of desperation, which she says puts you in a pushy, gripping, controlling energy, change the question to “What’s the next right action?” She frames it as the difference between a demand and an invitation. 

The prayer she offers is simply “Thank you for guiding me in a way I can clearly understand,” which she says opens your energy field and shifts you into relaxation and invitation. The logic tracks even on a human level, which she points out herself: nobody rushes to text back the friend who opens with “why haven’t you texted me.”

Connect With Loved Ones on the Other Side

Holland’s method for connecting with someone who’s passed is tactile and gentle. Find the happiest picture of them, the one where they’re looking at you with bright eyes, put it on the table, light a votive candle, and get quiet. Because when the mind is quiet, the soul speaks.

Then you invite them in and wait without forcing it. He suggests asking for a sign, giving it three days, and staying aware without hunting for it, summed up in his own accidental rhyme: “don’t look, don’t stare, be aware.”

Tune Into Your Intuition With a Cue

Gabby’s most repeatable tip is to build a physical cue that drops you into a receptive state on command. She talks about a heart hold, placing a hand on your heart and a hand on your belly as a cue to tune in. You could also hum or listen to a specific song. The mechanism is nervous-system regulation as much as anything spiritual. 

Focus on head-heart coherence and a few deep breaths in and out; it’s one of the simplest ways to regulate your nervous system. But there’s a bigger point behind this practice: intuition can’t reach you when you’re dysregulated.

Try the Soul Shift Technique

Holland’s signature move, the soul shift, is the most hands-on practice in the episode. You hold your hands up where you can just see them in your peripheral vision while staring straight ahead, then slowly relax your hands out to the sides while keeping that soft, foggy, daydreamy vision.

Then you move your energy up. 

He describes putting your energy above your head without rolling your eyes up, which is where he says he starts seeing things. His iceberg image lands it: only a piece of your soul is in the body, and the rest is out there, like an iceberg flipped upside down where all the information lives.

If any of this has you thinking about the bigger why behind who you’re drawn to and what you’re here to learn, the show has a whole episode on the idea of a soul contract worth queuing up next.

Protect Your Energy If You’re an Empath

Bernstein closes with a three-step morning ritual for empaths, and it’s the practice she promises will change how people respond to you. 

First is the bubble of light: before you leave the house, close your eyes and visualize a bubble of golden light around your whole body. Not a wall, but a filter that only lets in what’s positive. Next you seal it. You envision the edges becoming solid like breathable glass, letting guidance and love in while keeping the emotional noise and low-vibe energy out.

Then comes the sacred command. She says every morning: “I am the gatekeeper of my energy. I only allow love to enter and only love to leave.”

Her advice? Run all three steps daily for 30 days and you’ll start to see how your energy shifts and how people respond to you differently.

You May Be More Psychic Than You Think, and Gabby Proves It

Across all nine practices, the same instruction keeps surfacing, and it’s the one to leave with: trust your intuition, especially when it’s subtle enough that your mind wants to argue. Pay attention to the small hits, keep a consistent practice going, and the signal gets louder. Whether you came in as a total beginner or a seasoned meditator, that’s the real work of psychic development, and every psychic medium in this episode agrees the muscle is already yours to train.

Want the full guided practices, including the meditations you can follow along with in real time? Watch the complete episode on the Dear Gabby YouTube channel! Don’t forget to check out the variety of other shows across the Dear Media Network, home to over 100 top-rated pop culture, entertainment, and lifestyle podcasts hosted by today’s most talked-about celebrities and creators.