The 8 Clair Senses: Which Psychic Ability Do You Have?

The truth is that everyone has some psychic ability, but it might just be trapped under some heavy expectations about what you think a psychic ability should look or feel like. Most people think that having psychic ability is actually bigger than it is, and that’s their downfall.

Everyone has natural intuitive ability, so it’s not a question of whether you have it or not – it’s a question of how open you are to using it.

As I described it to one of my coaching clients the other day, imagine each of the 8 Clair senses on a sliding scale. Some of ours will be turned up really high, whereas others will be so low that it feels like they’re completely off.

But they’re all still there! We lose touch with our psychic senses when we discredit them for so long or feel shame around them. Religious beliefs and past life trauma (such as being witch hunted) are often the main culprits, as well as any other energy blockages around the third eye and crown chakras. Clearing out and healing these energy centres quickly has a powerful effect on psychic ability – it was after a 3 hour meditation with binaural beats to clear my third eye that I had my first clairvoyant vision.

If you have even the slightest sense that you might be psychic, you are. 🔮

So, it’s just a question of which of your psychic abilities is the strongest…

There are 8 different Clair senses which are described below in detail. Which resonate with you? Which feel familiar? And which of these experiences have you had before?

Clairvoyance is a clear sense of vision, ie, psychic sight.

Let’s start with the most famous one, which is actually one of the least common.

There are even lots of professional psychics who don’t use this sense because they’re stronger in their other Clair senses, despite people often assuming that all psychics are clairvoyants. Those who are clairvoyant will usually advertise themselves as such, or as a “seer” or “remote viewer”.

If you’re clairvoyant, you may have had vivid psychic dreams where you saw premonitions (scenes from the future that came true) or dead relatives who came to visit you. Clairvoyance often manifests like a projector screen that gets pulled down in front of you and plays a movie of the past or future, either out of the blue when you’re fully awake or during meditation.

You can see things with clairvoyance either externally or internally. Sometimes what you’re seeing may appear as though it’s in front of you, outside your body. Whereas, other times it could be something you see in your mind which makes it easier to pass off as your imagination, until you find out later that it was a psychic vision of what was going to happen.

You can even classify your eye being drawn to visual signs such as Angel numbers and white feathers as a type of clairvoyance.

Clairgustance is a clear sense of taste, ie, being able to orally detect psychic information.

After talking about the most well-known psychic sense, I thought I’d move on to the least!

Yes, it really is possible for people to have a psychic sense of taste.

People with this ability might say that they can taste blood when they’re doing a reading for someone whose relative died in a tragic accident, or you might taste garlic when you think of your grandma and the things she used to cook for you.

As you can probably tell from these examples, this sense is most commonly used in mediumship to connect with spirits – rather than in fortune telling.

Clairsalience is a clear sense of smell, ie, being able to nasally detect psychic information.

This psychic sense is very similar to the one above, which is why I’ve listed them next to each other.

Maybe you’ve caught a whiff of your grandmother’s perfume while you were sat on the sofa, or the smell of cooking when no-one was. People report smelling tobacco smoke or cologne, when there’s no-one else around them and no logical explanation for where it’s coming from.

The smells don’t usually linger – they’re there just long enough for you to notice them before they’re gone. It’s also widely known that Angels can leave a floral scent when they visit so that you know when they’re near you.

Similarly to clairgustance, this sense is most often used in mediumship rather than in fortune telling, as it can be an effective way for someone to recognise which soul is visiting them.

Clairaudience is a clear sense of hearing, ie, being able to detect psychic information through the ears.

Clairaudience is quite a well-known psychic sense, but it also comes with a lot of common misconceptions about what it’s like to experience it.

Often people will assume that clairaudience always means hearing voices, and yes – a lot of clairaudient psychics and mediums will be able to deliver messages from spirits this way because they can hear words being spoken to them…

But again, this isn’t very common. A lot of people experience clairaudience in different ways, and you’ve probably experienced it too. Have you ever felt your ear/s get hot for no apparent reason? Have you ever noticed words in a song that seemed to be timed perfectly for what you were thinking in that moment? Or thought of a relative and a song that you associate with them started playing on the radio?

When I started to realise that I had some psychic ability, it was through clairaudience. I noticed bangs on the wall that would happen in perfect time with a thought or question I was asking in my head. It seemed too crazy to believe, but it became so obvious that deep down I knew I wasn’t going mad. I went to a psychic day with Katie Helliwell and she said in front of the whole room that I was clairaudient! It was confirmed.

Since then, my clairaudience has developed into the sound of a bell ringing in my ear, like someone has struck a triangle just inside it. I have no control of it, but it will happen in Tarot readings or when I’m thinking about something – like my hopes and plans for the future – as a big YES from the spirit world.

I call it an ‘Angel ring’ when it happens and, in psychic development groups that I’ve been in, many other people there experienced this sound of ringing and feeling of pressure in their ears too. Clairaudience can come in many different forms, but if you’ve ever had a strange coincidence happen related to your ears – it was probably a sign of your clairaudience.

Claircognizance is a clear sense of knowing, ie, psychic insight.

Have you ever just known that something was going to happen, without knowing why?

You were probably experiencing claircognizance. The name of this psychic sense isn’t widely publicised, even though it’s accepted under other guises – such as ‘mother’s intuition’, for example.

Even people who aren’t spiritual can usually accept the fact that sometimes you just know, and you don’t have any outside proof or evidence yet; but you don’t need to, because you’re so sure.

This is a subtle symptom of claircognizance. I’ll often have this sense about past lives, as though I just know where or who I used to be before. This psychic sense can be tricky to distinguish, especially if your others are turned up high, but it’s an amazing one for confirming what the other signs might be telling you.

Clairsentience is a clear sense of feeling, ie, being able to detect psychic information through your body.

This psychic sense is very common in everyday life and with people who would never identify as spiritual – but can still recognise when they’re having a ‘gut feeling’ about something.

Investors use this. Doctors use this. And mothers definitely use this, because their energy is tied so closely to their children.

I always say that our body is an antennae, and for people who are very clairsentient, their antennae is finely tuned to pick up on a lot of vibrational energy. There are two ways that clairsentience can manifest: internally and externally.

Experiencing clairsentience externally is when you feel something cold or goosebumps in one part of your body. This probably means that there’s a spirit nearby, and so, external clairsentience is often used by mediums. I’ve also had it where spirits have given me the feeling of how they died, like a heart attack or cancer in a certain part of the body, which is another example of clairsentience.

Internal clairsentience is more common as it’s that ‘gut feeling’ or sense of dread about something that you can’t explain. It can also be a good feeling about something to come, which helps you to know that it’s going to be the right thing for you.

Clairempathy is a clear sense of emotional feeling, ie, being able to detect psychic information through your emotions.

Clairempathy can be another subtle psychic sense that’s hard to detect, partly because it’s so easy to confuse with being an empath.

Empathy is a normal human emotion and being an ’empath’ – being able to actually feel the emotions of other people – affects about 20% of the population. From my experience of the spiritual community, the vast majority of people who would call themselves spiritual also identify as an empath.

However, clairempathy is different. It means being able to feel emotions in advance, or being able to feel the emotions of others when they’re nowhere near you and you’re not communicating with them.

Mediums might also use this sense to channel the emotions of lost loved ones, and professional psychics might tell you how you felt in your childhood or how you will feel about events in the future.

It can also manifest as knowing that something is wrong with a loved one who’s on the other side of the world, because you can sense their sadness and grief. You can’t explain it, but your energy is so closely linked that you’re able to psychically feel their emotions.

Clairtangency is a clear sense of touch, ie, being able to detect psychic information through your hands.

If you’ve ever held an antique and felt like it had a long story, you might have been experiencing clairtangency.

Some psychics are able to hold an object and tell you how many hands it’s passed through, when and where it was made, and what the last owner was like!

When you go to an in-person reading with a medium, they may ask you to bring an object related to the person that you want to connect with – like a belonging of theirs, a gift they gave you, or even a photo of them. This is because they have such a sensitive sense of touch that they can pick up on the energy stored within an item using their hands.

This is an impressive skill, and people with strong clairtangency will probably avoid having old things in their home because the energy is too much for them to be around all the time. Objects are constantly soaking in energy (and obviously they’re energy too) so there’s a lot of psychic information that can be gained from the homes and belongings that we keep around us.

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I hope you can see that there are so many ways of accessing the information stored in the Universe, and we all have a unique set of skills to do so.

Our psychic abilities will start to open up when the time is right for them to, and we can learn how to harness them through books, psychic development workshops, and courses. Some people will have limited psychic experiences in this lifetime because it’s not necessary for the work they’re meant to do and the role they’re here to play in people’s lives. That’s OK too, and many people will live with psychic senses while never believing that they’re a real thing.

But they’re a part of all of us – whether it’s as simple as a gut feeling and mother’s intuition, or being able to hear your dead Uncle talking to you. You have so many different abilities, and they fall under these categories of extrasensory perception.

Embrace them, and use them to bring more understanding and connection into this world we live in…