I promised Bev that I would explain about psychic muscles. This seems to be as good a place as any. Ok everyone, on the count of three... one, two, three, extend your mind and move that lamp.
Everyone's body is comprised of muscles (I learned this in anatomy and physiology classes). Everything we do requires moving muscles, from running to lifting weights, to blinking to breathing. As we move a part of our body, electrical impulses are sent along pathways through the body to tell certain muscles to move. If we don't use some muscles for a while, and then use them (such as walking five miles after not exercising for six months) we feel pain as those muscles start to pull the load that they have gotten unused to pulling. If we don't exercise our muscles at all, they become very weak and begin to atrophy (weaken to the point that they can't be used).
I could make a good example of your arm. Let's say that with your right arm, you lift a 10-pound weight with ease. Now if you take that arm, and put it in a sling for three months and do absolutely nothing with it, it will weaken, and the muscle tissue in it will start to go away. If you then try to lift a 10-pound weight, you probably won't be able to. You may not even be able to move the arm at all.
We are all born with some degree of psychic ability. This ability can come across as many things like intuition, seeing auras, feeling energies. Not everyone has them to the extent that they can predict the future or move objects with their mind (otherwise we'd have a lot of broken items around the house every time some two year old threw a tantrum). But none the less, we do have these muscles which give us certain abilities. (I do have an internet friend in Connecticut that has the ability to move things with her mind, at least when she gets angry. She has tried to control it consciously, but can't seem to get it to work unless she puts the strength of anger behind it. Avoid anger, it leads to the dark side of the force.)
Depending on how we play, on what we like, on how we are taught, we either exercise these muscles, or we don't. If we use our imagination a lot, we tend to use our muscles more. (This is the point that I will mention how the TV generations have tended to use their imaginations less because so much today is given to them. Those that read more, tend to imagine more.)
It's that imagining works the muscles of the mind. The more we work those muscles, the stronger they become. As a child, my friend Carolyn used to sit in school and focus on various boys in the class. She'd concentrate and focus on them to make them like her. (Sorry Carolyn, but the secret is out.) What she was doing was not necessarily imagination. She was actually stretching her muscles. She was focusing energy. Now, she may not have been moving energy (although I'd be pretty sure she was), but she may just have been visualizing energy moving. In this way, she may not have been moving her muscles, but she was teaching them how she wanted them to move.
With children, we tell them to use their imaginations. They 'pretend' that they see things moving around a person. When we grow up (and I still haven't yet), we stop using words like imagine or pretend. We start using words like visualize or see.
What Carolyn did was to 'see' energy moving, focusing, and reaching an objective. We do very much the same thing when we do shielding exercises. We visualize ourselves in a bubble of light. When we astral project, we start by visualizing energy coming out of us. (The book I read on AP mentioned that the movement of the energy may not actually happen initially, but by visualizing we were training our muscles how to move.)
When we start learning things in the ethereal realm, we start exercising and training our muscles. When we do meditation we are exercising. When someone learns Reiki, they start exercising, and in exercising, they open themselves up to a larger world.
The more we 'exercise' the stronger we get. The stronger we get, the more we find we can do, or notice, that we couldn't before. The first time someone goes into meditation, it may not be easy, but the more they do it, the easier it gets. The more someone practices Reiki, the easier it gets. The beauty is that not only Reiki gets easier. One finds that they can pick up things that they couldn't before, like to know when the subject has had enough.
What now happens is that this thing we call intuition starts working more, and better than before. It may come across as knowing what someone is going to say, or knowing to move out of the way of an oncoming car. It may show up as feeling emotions, or simply knowing to do, or not to do something.
A side story dealing with intuition...
I was at a club meeting years ago (all right, it was a meeting of a science fiction club), and one of the people there had her son who was playing with his small toys that were in a box. What held the box together was a screw and wing nut. At one point he was holding this screw up in the air over his face when he dropped it. The screw went into his mouth, and lodged in his throat.
He started to choke and turn blue. His mother started to panic. I had this vision of holding him by his ankles and shaking him. Unfortunately, I was frozen by the situation. The whole scene was flashing around me like slow motion. I was too unsure of myself to think to do anything. I felt that I didn't know anything and didn't have any right to even suggest any course of action.
What happened was that one of the group started to do the Heimlich maneuver. This didn't seem to do anything. The one member whose house it was, ran to get her Dad who had been staying with her for a few days (he is a doctor). Another had picked up the phone and had dialed 911. I was still sitting there feeling that I didn't know enough to interfere in any of it. In the next few seconds, something happened, and the child swallowed. The screw was free from his throat, and now in his stomach. Everything was ok.
At this moment, the doctor came out to look at the boy. He determine that the child was ok, and that the mother was going to spend the next few days looking for the screw to make sure it came out. When told what had been done, he said that the best thing would have been to hold him upside down by his ankles and shake him up and down to get the screw out.
Interesting. I had been shown the proper means of solving the problem. Had I been confident in my intuition (as well as myself), I could have done what was needed.
Now what does that story have to do with opening up and flexing muscles? I had muscles that I wasn't using. They opened up and told me something. I did not believe it. Since then, I have learned to flex my muscles, and trust them. You have to have trust in your muscles as well as have them work. If you pick up a 10-pound weight, and don't trust yourself to do so, you could drop it on your head.
Here's one more thought to leave you with...
When you are a child, you use your imagination. How much of it is imagination? Were those things hiding under your bed just figments? Did you have an invisible friend? Was it something you made up? I've been told otherwise. The jury is still open for me. How about you?
Think about it. Visualize it happening. Imagine a bit.