We are all familiar with our five senses – seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling. But you may not be as familiar with your other senses. Much like you have five physical senses, you also have the potential to experience eight ‘clair’ senses or intuitive psychic senses. Just as the name suggests these senses are accessed through your intuition.
In Psychic terms the clair senses are:
Lest’s take a look at each of these individually.
Clairvoyance
A clairvoyant (clear-seeing) receives extrasensory impressions and symbols in the form of visions or mental images through their mind’s eye (third eye). Their eyes can be either open or shut. You may be clairvoyant if you experience vivid dreams, visions, mental images and mini-movies that flash across your inner awareness. You may be able to see the colors of the energy fields (auras) around people, plants and animals, or perhaps you are able to see angels, ghosts or other beings.
If you are a visual person who can easily visualise solutions to problems, have a great sense of direction, or are very good with visual-spatial problems like rearranging furniture or loading and arranging the items in the dishwasher you may have a predisposition for clairvoyance.
A clairvoyant may be able to see the future (precognition), to clarify the present as it is happening (most common) and psychically see the past (postcognition).
Claircognisance
Claircognisance (clear knowing) is when you suddenly know without any doubt that something is true, even though you didn’t see it, hear it or feel it. You just know it. It’s like an instant insight or a download of information that needs no processing or interpretation. Claircognisance can show up as a nagging idea or unrelenting thought, similar to the persistant awareness that someone is lying to you when you have no actual evidence of it. Or you may suddenly know complex information that is completely outside your knowledge or experience.
Many individuals confuse Claircognisance (clear knowing) with clairempathy (clear emotion) or Clairsentience (clear physical feeling) because their “knowing” is quickly followed by either an emotional or physical reaction to the insight. Over time paying attention to how the insight comes into your awareness will help you distinguish the difference.
Clairaudience
If you are clairaudient (clear hearing) you perceive sounds, words or noise from the spiritual or ethereal realm. Someone is clairaudient if they mainly receive their intuitive information with their inner or outer hearing. This is absolutely about hearing voices, either outside yourself or in your head.
For example, imagine you’re driving to work and suddenly hear the direction “Take the next exit”. There is no one in the vehicle with you but the message is clear and seemed to come from outside yourself. So you take the next exit instead of continuing on your usual route. Later you discover your detour meant you avoided a five car pile up, which would have meant you missed a very important meeting.
You might be clairaudient if you are naturally attuned to sounds, tones, rhythm and music. If you sing, play music, have an easy time remembering voices, or can easily hear in someone’s voice when they’re lying to you you may have a predisposition to clairaudience.
Clairempathy
Clairempathy (clear emotional feeling) is an ability to sense other people’s emotions, thoughts and symptoms. It is an awareness or perception of emotional energy, you don’t necessarily experience the feeling in your body but you are aware of the feeling. You are clairempathic if you can sense the emotion in a room as soon as you walk into it. For example, immediately sensing the anger and hurt on walking in on a couple arguing.
Empaths need self-care and psychic protection techniques to successfully manage their empathic nature and shield themselves from energetic overload. A skilled empath knows how to maintain spiritual boundaries, replenish energy and clear unwanted negative energy from their auric field.
The difference between clairempathy and clairsentience is that empaths sense the energy and emotion whereas sentients feel the energy and emotion. Sentients actually experience it.
Clairsentience
A clairsentient (clear physical feeling) gains intuitive insight through physically experiencing the energy in their body. They have a “gut feeling” or “something doesn’t feel right” and experience it as a deep physical sensation in their body.
Clairsentients feel, not just sense, the experience of other people’s emotions, ailments or injuries. They can also feel the physical and emotional pain of a land or place where tragic events have occurred by sensing the associated emotions such as fear, jealousy, insecurity, hatred and pain.
An example of this is that a friend of mine, a gifted psychic medium, gets shooting pains in her body when she walks through the riverbank area where a massacre occured a hundred years ago.
The difference between clairempathy and clairsentience is that empaths sense the energy and emotion whereas sentients experience the energy and emotion.
Clairtangency
You may have clairtangency (clear touching) if you have the ability to perceive facts about an event or person either by direct contact with or being close to, an object or person. This is also commonly known as psychometry.
You may be clairtangient if you quickly gain unknown insights when you hold someone’s watch or ring, touch their hand, when you pick up an old antique, or you touch an old building.
Clairsalience
For those with clairsalience (clear smelling) insights come through the perception of smell. This might be smelling the odour or fragrance of a substance, person, place or animal that is not in your immediate surroundings. You perceive these odours without the using your physical nose. Other names for this are Clairscent and Clairscentency.
For example, you may suddenly get a strong smell of the perfume your deceased grandmother used to wear. Nobody else with you is wearing that perfume. Your grandmother is reaching out from the spirit world to communicate with you. Or you may smell flowers that remind you of a living person which serves to nudge you to contact them. Other clairsalients smell a wide range of aromas such as spices, foods, animals and many more. I have smelt various easily recognisable essential oils such as cedarwood oil during meditations.
Experiencing scents might trigger the other senses to “see” “hear” or “feel” what spirit or your intuition is trying to communicate.
Clairgustance
An individual with clairgustance (clear tasting) receives psychic information through their sense of taste without having any physical source of that taste in their mouth.
People sometimes report tasting a favourite food or drink from a loved one who has passed away. Sometimes the taste will draw you to a crucial detail in the situation that you may have overlooked.
Others report that when they are problem-solving they receive helpful information through an extrasensory taste in their mouths. For example, police sometimes get an unexplained taste of blood or a certain chemical relating to a specific drug when investigating crimes, which guides them to discovering what really happened.
Meditation or alone in nature are great places to pen yourself to recognising the Clair senses. Begin to detect your dominant Clair Sense by opening your awareness to anything you notice outside your normal physical senses. When you become aware of something, don’t doubt it, don’t put it down to your imagination or your strong wish to detect through your Clair Senses. Instead, simply acknowledge and accept you have experienced this as confirmation that you will continue to access information via this sense in the future.
Most people have more than one Clair Sense, however one sense will be dominant. Turning up and focusing your awareness to notice how your intuitive insights come to you will highlight your dominant Clair Sense. Once you are clear about which of the eight is dominant for you, you will begin to notice when other Clair Senses come online to support and expand the intuitive insights you are receiving from your dominant Clair Sense.