On my spiritual journey it has become quite evident that awareness is the key to expanding one's consciousness as well as being the foundation to developing our innate psychic gifts. Through awareness our spiritual senses become honed and clarity is allowed to reveal to us what the five senses cannot. Having a consciousness of their own, our psychic abilities are always available and are waiting to express themselves through us just as we are now expressing ourselves through Source Energy.

My latest work, Open Your Third Eye: Activate Your Sixth Chakra & Develop Your Psychic Abilities, offers spiritual insights, meditations, and exercises that are geared towards expanding one's awareness as to create an atmosphere for the opening of the third eye. Through personal experience I have come to know that words, especially when they are extensions of higher dimensions, have great potential within them and can be catalysts for transformation. In other words, awareness is what awakens us to possibility, which is where the real magic happens.

Let's now take a look at five ways to develop our psychic abilities through greater awareness:

1. Awareness of the present moment.For us to experience greater clarity in order to tune into higher frequencies or listen with greater discernment to our spirit guides, we have to raise our vibrational frequency. One of the most powerful ways to do that is to be fully present in this now moment. All of us experience thoughts that seem to arise from the past or future. There is nothing wrong with that, but for us to align ourselves with the third eye and its clarity and wisdom, we're going to have to bring our focus, attention, and awareness to the present. Doing so, or rather being so, brings us closer to alignment with our spiritual selves and the sixth chakra (which is an extension of our inner being). Here are a few more tips to help in reminding you of the present moment as you go about your day:
   • Reflect on the following whenever you feel you want greater clarity in order to tune into your intuition with more understanding. The past is only experienced in our minds, as is the future. You were never in the past because life is always unfolding in this one miraculous moment—the now. The present is a gift, and it is here and now where we connect with our highest self and our spiritual faculties on a more conscious level.
   • Being conscious of the present moment is a practice of remembrance and reminding ourselves of it. Whether you're out having coffee with a friend or at home reading a book, take a moment and remind yourself, "This is the only moment there is." A simple, and yet quite effective way to keep us anchored in our beingness as we go about our doingness.
     
     
2. Awareness of the third eye through meditation. When it comes to spiritual practice or expanding one's consciousness, less is more. Taking five minutes a day where you focus and contemplate the reality of the third eye shifts you from potential to possibility in its activation.
   
   Here is a simple guided meditation:
   • Find a quiet spot.
   • Get in a comfortable position and relax. Drop your shoulders, close your eyes, and take with a few breaths, and then let go.
   • Bring your awareness to the space between your eyebrows, just slightly above them. Take a minute or two and just feel. Allow for the energy in this area to just flow. You may begin to feel waves of energy in this area. Just let the moment unfold. Don't try to make anything happen. After a few minutes have passed, take a deep breath and open your eyes. This simple meditation is a wonderful way to align yourself more with the subtle energy body and the chakras within it.
     
     
3. Awareness of inner stillness and the nothingness around you. I really love this insight because of the potential and power it has to shift us into higher dimensions where we can more easily tune into universal consciousness and our spirit guides. A simple exercise, it only takes a few minutes but the spiritual gains can be profound and lasting.
   • This exercise can be applied anywhere and can take as little as thirty seconds. From within, you can bring your awareness to your thoughts and then shift your awareness to the space or nothingness in between them. The more you become aware of that space-that stillness-the more presence you invite into the forefront of your consciousness. Becoming aware of stillness, the gap between thoughts is key in fine-tuning our minds to receiving information from our spirit guides. They communicate usually in soft tones through the vibrational frequency of inner stillness. From without, or the space outside of you, you can take a minute or two and just become aware of the space around you. That space is consciousness, and it's self-aware. Looking at a plant in the room, and noticing the stillness of that plant, and the nothingness around it, has the potential to have that stillness be reflected within you. All of life is a mirror and what you become aware of is what is made reality.
     
     
4. Surrendering to what is. To some, this may sound disempowering, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Going with the flow, practicing non-attachment, and being in a space of trust is one of the most powerful things you can do. I'm not saying that life cannot get hard or difficult at times, but what I am saying is that we can choose to resist "what is" and expend our energy or we can see it for what it is and take conscious action. Operating from a free-flowing space, where we trust in the Source within us that everything, including adversity is serving us, we can relieve ourselves of some of life's stresses. This is key because when we are bombarded with stress and unable to manage our emotions, we make it harder to tune into our psychic abilities that can be more easily recognized and read on an energetic level when we're in a more relaxed state. Surrendering to what is can be as simple as saying, "I'm letting go. I accept this moment as it is and am letting go of resistance." If that's a little too much at first, you can choose to come to accept your non-acceptance. In other words, you can make peace with what you're feeling about a situation or circumstance and by doing so, you open the door to shift and become unstuck from the adversity before you on an energetic level.
   
   
5. Know that you're already fully equipped. A spiritual teacher can point you inwards, can point you towards enlightenment, but he or she cannot give it to you. They can't give you what's already yours. They can demonstrate their wisdom, but they cannot add anything to you. The same goes for your psychic abilities; they are already a part of you. Clairvoyance, claircognizance, telepathy, the ability to read the energy in a room, or tune into spirit guides—these gifts are already potential inside of you. But in order to uncover them, realize them, and develop them requires your acknowledgment and awareness of them. What you become aware of is what shifts something from the quantum field to your reality here on earth. Nothing has to be added to you. What we have to do is shift our awareness, align with our spiritual self, and operate more from the energetic field of awareness than through the five senses, which gives us only a certain point of view.

I hope that this article has inspired you and made you more aware that you're already whole and complete—spiritually and from a psychic ability stand point. Awareness is the key. It opens the door to another realm, one where all things are possible. A thousand blessings!