Ive been trying to contact my spirit guides but i havent been able to.. i find meditation very hard.. spirit guides can see into the future right? I speak to them every night, i address them, and wonder if they can hear me.. i asked them a question and told them to give me a sign if something was going to happen by making me dream of something particular but it never happened. How do i know they can hear me and how can i ask them about things in my future?

I find meditation tricky myself. I don’t tend to be able to quiet my mind down unless it’s guided meditation. I’ve had better luck with self-hypnosis, but that can be difficult for me as well, just not quite as difficult as meditation.
I would say that yes your guides can hear you it just might be proving tricky for you to hear them yourself. I know I have a lot of issue with second guessing or doubting answers that I receive. I was raised to be very logical and some times still even despite everything I’ve seen and experienced I find myself being overly analytical rather than taking things on faith.
It also takes time some times to train yourself to remember your dreams.

Other people I’ve dealt with and spoken to who have communication with their guides speak of just taking the time to see what answers repeat themselves, or notice things that recur during the day. If there are a lot of instances of a particular number popping up or a particular name that may be a sign. They’re not always direct.
I had a friend who was constantly finding that she would look at the clock when it was 4:44 and on April 4th the next year something significant happened.

While it might not be wise to try and contact a guide to find out if you should be Grohe faucets or not. I think it’s a great idea to keep in touch with them to help better yourself and help tune in to insight they might have. Guides that I have don’t always offer deep swathing commentary on future events but I can find myself getting information like “No, don’t touch that,” “Wait a minute,” and things like that if I’m planning on going somewhere or doing something. It’s just making sure I listen.
I got a “wait a minute” the other night about locking our house door behind a friend and the next minute he was barreling back into the house because there was a bear in our yard and I’m glad I listened. There have been other times where I second guess things I’m hearing or feeling and been kicking myself about it later. It’s not always so clear as a “Wait!” in my head, some times it’s just a feeling or a misgiving.

I never have any luck asking them about lottery numbers but then I think that’s a good thing too because I would feel guilty using my gifts like that.

If you have a question about anything paranormal or supernatural don’t hesitate to Ask Catriona too.

How do you contact spirit guides?

I’ve also seen spirit guides being discussed in a forum that I participate in over on IMVU. Working with spirits like working with anything non-corporeal has always been a bit up in the air with me. It’s hard to say there’s a definitive way to go about this because you’re dealing with the whims and whimsy of another entity than yourself, as far as most people believe. There’s been several times in dealing with guides myself that I’ve felt that I’m dealing with a different-me, my “higher self” if you will, especially as my first guide showed up in the form of a past life of mine, Myeda, who was a shaman in Peru in the early sixteenth century. I’m still not sure if I was just talking to “other me” because he had been a lot more open in his life time to what I was wanting to find out from my guide, or if that’s just how the guide chose to manifest because that was a trust worthy image.

I wasn’t actively seeking a guide that I knew of. It just kinda “happened” that he showed up. My friend and I had previously done work with guided meditation for past life regression and uncovered our shared life time in Peru, where I was Myeda, and a few month later while I was on vacation from college my mother and I were in the mall and there was a stall set-up selling random framed pictures, and as we were flipping through there was a big picture of a Native American crouched in a forest. We went back and forth passed that stall several times but each time I was drawn to the picture. It was my Mum who proclaimed he was my guide and insisted we bring the picture home.

After he was put up on the wall, I began to hear and feel impressions every once in a while as I was doing things. “Don’t do that,” “Oooh, go here!” “That looks like fun!” I had to bring the picture with me and hang it up above my bed in the dorm room, and he was always the first that was put up whenever I went to a different dorm or came back home.

It wasn’t until after I’d been married a while that I realized the picture had disappeared somewhere in the mayhem; but “Myeda” if that’s who he was has been quiet for a while. I think he’s happy that I’m with who I’m with now and feels he doesn’t have to comment. I do deal some times with other voices, words of wisdom from other lives, and occasionally from my grandfather who passed in 2001 and has been appointed “guardian of the munchkin”. There were different circumstances surrounding his appointment, also, dealing with entity attachment…which is something I’ll get into at a later date, other wise this will go raging off topic.

As far as guides, I’m at the point now where I can generally go “is this right?” and get a resounding feeling/chorus of “yay” or “nay” but I’m really not sure how I got there. My development in this regard is on rotation with my development in other areas, working to uncover past lives, future lives, alternate lives, learning to trust my intuition about reading the cards, doing meditation, grounding. Everything ties in together, I believe, whole-heartedly.

There are some exercises I’ve used to get insight on other lives, and to talk to my Higher Self, which can easily be adapted to ask for guidance from an actual guide. One of those is to talk to “Sister Swan”. I’m honestly not sure where I first heard about “Sister Swan” but she’s credited with being a dream-space guardian. You talk to her before you go to bed at night and ask her to show you in your dreams whatever it is you’re wanting to know about. For example.

Sister Swan, Sister Swan.
As you guide me into the land of dreams, please set me on the path to see what happened when I was in the frozen north as a fisherman’s daughter…I had an image of sitting on a rock and watching boats go by…it looked as though two ran into each other. I’m troubled by what happened and would like to resolve it.

That could easily be turned into “Sister Swan, Sister Swan. I’m in need of guidance. As you take me to the realm of dreams please show me the path so that I can see the face/find the name of one of my spirit guardians.”

The main thing I cannot cement home enough with all of these sorts of exercises is that you have to do something very simple. Listen.

I’ve not done it myself many times, and I can get images of being hit over the head with something large and heavy numerous times by guides going, “QUIT ASKING WE’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU FOR WEEKS!!!!! SHUT UP AND LISTEN!!! YOU WOULD HAVE HAD THE ANSWER A MONTH AGO IF YOU DID!!!!!! It’s not like putting together Delta machinery after all…” to which I leave you for now as I have a resounding chorus of “It’s ABOUT TIME,” in my ears.

If you have a question about tarot, hypnotherapy, psychic abilities, ghosts, witchcraft, paganism, being in an interfaith marriage or anything along these lines of paranormal and supernatural feel free to Ask Catriona.

Is there such a thing as instant hypnosis (snap your fingers and the person is “out”)?

That’s a tricky one. A lot is made in mass media of being able to put a person into a hypnotic state with the touch of a button or the click of fingers, a trigger word or two. These are also the same shows that usually depict a person behaving robotically and with no awareness what-so-ever of their being or personal safety, which is not in line with the truth but makes for a good show.

There are hypnotists who can and do practice quick inductions which occur within a few seconds rather than the protracted induction that a lot of us partake in which can take up to a minute. Myself I’ve found that the longer I have worked with someone the more quickly I can bring them into a hypnotic state. A person that on the first session might have taken a few minutes to bring in, say getting to the count of seventeen in the induction may be under by ten and then four because they’re also used to working with me, know they can trust me, and remember the way things operate themselves and become ready more quickly.

If you have a question about tarot, hypnotherapy, psychic abilities, ghosts, witchcraft, paganism, being in an interfaith marriage or anything along these lines of paranormal and supernatural feel free to Ask Catriona.

What am I going to remember about being hypnotized? What does it feel like?

When you’re hypnotized you’re going to remember everything which happens to you, anything that’s going on in the background you’re going to hear you’re just not going to acknowledge it because you’ll be so focussed on relaxation.

It was weird to me the first time I was hypnotized in class because I could hear everything going on in the room. The other students talking to each other, the teacher explaining the technique he had used to hypnotize me. If they had been discussing High School Musical tickets I would remember.

When you’re hypnotized you feel relaxed. I feel warm all over when I’m hypnotized, and like I’m sinking into a deep bed. I always feel energized when I come out of a session where I’m hypnotized.

Can I be hypnotized without my consent? i.e. can someone just randomly hypnotize me without me knowing?

This is another one which is: short answer “No”.
You are aware and completely in control while being hypnotized. If at any time you’re uncomfortable with what’s going on, if say your hypnotist is completely disregarding things which you talked about before the session, or you suddenly realize you need to use the bathroom or something like that you can bring yourself out of the hypnotic state and wake up.
A lot of people think that when they’re going to be hypnotized they’re not going to be in control of the situation, which is scary I know it’s something that freaked me out when I first thought about being hypnotized, even though I wanted to know about my own past lives it took a while before I was willing to be hypnotized by anyone other than my best friend because I just wasn’t sure I trusted anyone enough.
But you’re in control the whole time, which means that no-one can just randomly start talking to you and hypnotize you. It just doesn’t happen the way it’s shown in movies, and given I’m still out on the whole “hypnotized online” issue I seriously don’t see it happening over the internet especially.

There are a lot of reasons why a person would choose to be hypnotized. I’ve mostly seen people coming through for smoking cessation and weight loss, but some come through as part of drug treatment programs, or for their own habit control, or as I’ve mentioned to look at past lives, but no matter what the reason you’ve come to a hypnotist to work with them they should stick to what they’ve told you they’re going to work with you on, and if something comes up which you don’t like you can change it, or bring yourself back to full consciousness.

When I was in class our teacher actually told us that every time someone comes into his office after they’ve had their talk about what they’re going to do in the session he asks several questions before they begin the hypnosis.

Q: Do you have any more questions for me about the process?
Q: Do you need to go to the bathroom before we begin?
Q: Are you ready to be hypnotized?

Can I be hypnotized without my consent? i.e. can someone just randomly hypnotize me without me knowing?
Can I be hypnotized over the internet?
What am I going to remember about being hypnotized? What does it feel like?
Is there such a thing as instant hypnosis (snap your fingers and the person is “out”)?

Some of these I’ve already addressed in previous posts on the subject but I thought I would go over things more directly.

If anyone else has any questions about hypnosis and what it entails let me know and I’ll add the question to the series I’m going to do looking into each of these areas that I haven’t already.

If you have any other questions about things you can always go to the Ask Catriona page and leave them there.

I was looking to buy an antique Hall bench with a mirror attached. When I went to the persons house to photograph it, I inspected it very carefully. The mirror was in good condition and looked to be original to the piece. It had heavy boards backing it. When I went home to look at the pictures on my digital camera, the mirror very clearly showed a circle with what looked like a backwards “B” in it. It was a very large image and seemed to almost be backlit. Every photo of the mirror shows a circle on it that is not present when viewing it physically. What do you make of this?

There are quite a few recorded incidents of ghostly images in photographs sometimes there is a logical explanation, dust on the film, light reflecting off something not immediately visible, but in other cases orbs, or even people have been captured on film.

Why an image such as the one you describe shows up…I couldn’t say. If it had happened once I might think that it was some kind of discrepancy, but it seems as though it could be an imprint of some sort.

I believe that spiritual energy can leave an imprint on things especially if it was something that a person who died cared for a lot.

What do you mean you’re attuning to your cards? What does that involve?

The deck I got is The Cosmic Tarot and while we did mesh very well energetically when I first flipped through them they were new to me and I to them so I felt it would be best to have them attune to my energies to make it an easier transition to reading with them.

When I got my first deck it was a bit of a painful slog to get used to the imagery of the cards, what that meant, what it meant to me versus what it meant to the little pamphlet that came with the deck and all the rest of it. I spent a great deal of time shuffling and dealing, shuffling and dealing and trying to work out what was going on.

After a while I picked up some other more in depth books about tarot and the meanings of the cards and was able after a good year or two to put that book away and rely on my own intuition about what the pictures that were showing up meant rather than just reading from the book, so the interpretation is partially standard and partially my own understanding of what things my cards have said mean. By this time I had the Witches Deck instead of what I originally started out with, and that deck I’ve been reading with for ten years or thereabouts, having bought them in summer of 1998. They know a lot of how I like to read and what I’m about, and I had read in a tarot book that I owned about ways to transition from one deck to a new one. I don’t remember fully what was said, the main part I remember is putting each card from your new deck with it’s counterpart from the deck you have been using and letting the energy attune.

I realize that there are going to probably be certain cards with the new deck which don’t mesh the same way as with the old deck because the images are different, but I figure it’s not going to hurt, so I did that, and then I put the decks together in my card bag along with some stones: tiger’s eye and heametite which mean a lot to me and I have good rapport with and let them sit with my main ritual candles and the protective quartz I have in the house to attune.

I left them completely alone for two days, and last night got them out for the first time to see how well I would be able to read with them. I shuffled them for a while and then I did a short reading for my Mum, and things flowed very well. I was immediately able to just let the information I was seeing roll off my tongue and even drew cards to supplement at certain points for questions she had she hadn’t even voiced yet, so that was very nice.

I’m still going to take my time, shuffling the deck several times a day and letting it attune to me even more, given I was having problems communicating and getting impressions from the Witches Tarot because my own outlook and needs have changed in the almost ten years I’ve owned them, but I think things are going very well with this deck and that we will be working together for quite some time.

I’m not discarding the Witches Tarot. I’ve bound it up and it’s in a drawer along with the Barbara Walker Deck which was my first set of cards, and will be read with from time to time. I’ve found when I switched from Barbara Walker to Witches that for a while I was unable to read with the Walker deck, but then after about six months I tried them again and I was able to get some insights from them, but they seem to prefer reading past lives rather than future for this one, perhaps something similar will happen with the Witches Deck but for now they’re resting and I’m working solely with Cosmic until we’re fully attuned and I feel I can split my interests.

If you have a question about anything paranormal, hypnotic, tarot or otherwise weird world related don’t hesitate to Ask Catriona

Can you hypnotize me now? Over the IM? Why not?

The short answer to this is “No”.

The explanatory answer is that for hypnosis to work properly you have to be in a state of consciousness which is not the “normal” every day state of consciousness that is known as “beta”. If your brain is active enough that you are reading text on a page and typing a response you’re still in beta consciousness and therefore not hypnotized. You might relax yourself, true, but the sort of relaxation that I’ve discovered people are generally looking for when they ask me to do this is not congruent with the work that I, as a clinical hypnotist do.

I’ve had several people argue back and forth to me that with my training I should “know that it is possible to be hypnotized online” and try to demonstrate that to me by typing out some sort of relaxing scenario and so on, and, sadly for me, most of these people that will argue with me are hypnotic “sexperts”. They’re looking for the rush and arousal of someone dominating over them, and being in control of them and that’s not actually what hypnosis is about. In a hypnotic session the hypnotist is just a guide, at no point are they supposed to exert their will over the clients, because the client has all the power. If at any time during a session the client wishes to come out of the hypnotic state they can. Just like that.

I will admit that part of the issue I have with online hypnosis is the fact that it’s going to be nigh on impossible to tell if the session is going well based on the type of feedback that instant messenger would offer. When I have a client “on my couch” I’m able to look at visual cues to see how deeply into a hypnotic state they are, how receptive they’re being to my suggestions. What isn’t widely realized is that when you have a client in a state of hypnosis and you ask them to raise a finger to answer you “yes” or “no” to a question they might not actually raise their finger. Your only indication that they’ve responded might be a slight muscle twitch in their hand, even if you have a web camera conversation going on there’s a good chance that the video quality is not going to be good enough for you to notice that sort of movement, whereas if they’re sitting next to you you’d be able to see it.

I do have the idea that at a later date I may try things out and experiment more with voice chat, or web cam conference to see if some things can be done for clients who’ve already had some office work done. It’s possible for me to burn some scripts to CD and send them to a client as prep work, or give them a CD to listen to at home to bolster work that’s already been done, especially with people who are working on boosting their self-confidence, or quitting smoking, but overall, no, I don’t and won’t hypnotize someone over the ‘net.

If you have a question about the paranormal, tarot, supernatural, hypnosis or anything like that just Ask Catriona.

A few years ago, I was seeing a hypnotherapist. Unfortunately, she did not help me whatsoever. I just could not seem to get relaxed enough to go under.
I always wondered if it was me, or if it was the hypnotherapist. Is it normal for someone to not be able to be hypnotized?

My hypnosis teacher was fond of saying that, “Everyone is able to be hypnotized just not by every hypnotist.” A factor in hypnosis is your own trust and rapport with the hypnotist/hypnotherapist because that will affect your willingness to go into the hypnotic state. You also have to genuinely want and be willing to work towards the goal at hand.

If you’re going to a hypnotherapist to quit smoking for example, but you really don’t want to quit then it’s not going to work for you. If there’s something holding you back from truly being able to relax in the situation then it’s not going to work for you; but if you have a good rapport with the person you’re working with, a good enough understanding of the process so that you feel comfortable where you’re at and with what you’re doing, and the desire and willingness to go through the process you should be able to do it, provided the hypnotherapist knows what they’re doing.

There are many different induction techniques that can be used some designed for people who are more left brained, more right brained, have more desire for control than others, have more or less ability to see imagery in their brain and many different scenarios that can be used while doing them. If you’re working with a hypnotist they should make sure that if they’re using imagery/visualization techniques that they’re not going to use something that you’re uncomfortable with. If you have a fear of swimming/water they shouldn’t use a visualization that has you out on a lake in a boat, for example.

If you have a question about the paranormal, tarot, supernatural, hypnosis or anything like that just Ask Catriona.