If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from 20 years of work as an intuitive, it’s that most of us are desperate to be seen.
To be seen – a metaphor for being understood, accepted, cherished, and valued exactly as you are. For the honorable parts and the quirks. The beauty marks and the scars.
On the surface, it might seem that this desire arises from ego, but I believe that it actually arises from a desire to understand ourselves as the whole beings we are, despite the scattered, broken, and split feelings that many people carry around.
Can You See Me?
This search to be seen is not foreign to me. From an early age, I had the feeling that few people could truly understand me. The desire for this kind of “click” I’d never felt sent me searching in all sorts of ways – it called me to leave the beige landscape of my suburban hometown, to use my appearance to signal to the world what I could not say about myself (from the tie-dyed Deadhead days to the shaved head years), and to search for spiritual teachers who would expand my sight beyond the mundane and into the magical.
One such spiritual teacher – my very first – gave me the first taste of what I was looking for.
Eyes on Me
I met her when I was a 22-year-old rebel with a lover’s heart. She was an intuitive witch ten years my senior. Though she was far from a good role model in the typical sense (I rarely saw her eat, and in the two years I apprenticed with her, she lived in at least five homes), I sensed she knew things I needed to know. So I followed her into the greatest turning point of my early life.
My experience with psychics before her was limited to campy expressions of women hunched over crystal balls that foretold the future, but my first intuitive reading with her was a life-changing experience that exploded all of that into the truth of what it means to be seer.
She sat me down at the edge of a river and looked, not at, but through me with her piercing blue eyes. She started moving her hands around me, releasing energies I could not see at the time. As she did so, she talked me through a map of my inside parts that I thought could never be described so clearly by anyone else. There on my seat on a boulder that broke apart the river’s flow, she outlined my form. Patterns I struggled with. Patterns I could relax into as gifts. Validation of countless experiences that I knew to be true but were framed as false by the adults who were guiding me through my youth.
She saw me. And I saw myself. It was a moment that taught me the bliss of vulnerability.
Search for Sight
It’s been more than 20 years since I sat on that riverbank, but I still retain one of the fundamental truths I gained that day: In order to be seen, we have to be willing to be seen.
It sounds paradoxical, and it is. Our search for love, partnership, sex, friendship, family and the like are all driven by a desire to have our existence validated with a nod of agreement from another’s head. Yet despite this, we expend tremendous amounts of effort trying to avoid showing our full selves to others, thus moving away from what fills us up.
Check any social media site to understand what I mean. Most people are masters of the art of carefully curating the parts of themselves that they let out into the open. Take nine selfies and post the best one; we all do it. Despite the likes, this is not the connection we hope for; showing parts only leaves us feeling hungrier for the real meal.
But when – if, because it is rare – we truly are seen, we experience a deep acceptance of ourselves. Here are the gifts to celebrate. Here are the corners whose cobwebs need a little dusting. Here is someone who understands that we don’t need to have everything mastered already. The experience of truly being seen is as soothing as falling asleep in your own bed after a long journey.
Seeing Souls
I’ve lost count of the number of intuitive readings I’ve given in the past 20 years of this work. Hundreds, easily. I’ve seen into the souls of long-term clients, strangers I never met again, friends, and a few lovers (not a path I recommend unless you enjoy a perpetually imbalanced dynamic). As I’ve named their struggles, their skills, their tears and laughter, I’ve found that their fears of being seen are as great as their terror of staying hidden. We are all alike in this sense, and thus we each have the capacity to accept ourselves and each other as perfectly imperfect beings.
Being seen comes from without, but the permission begins within. When my first teacher saw me, I was ready to show myself. This initial spark led to a decades-long process of discovering my gifts and shortcomings as part of my whole. I’ve learned to knit together pieces that I shy away from and to bask in what I truly value about who I am. In doing so, I’ve learned to carry the eyes that allow my clients to do the same.
After all, every experience we have, grotesque or beautiful, is a reminder that we are alive. And that miracle of egg meets sperm meets a journey of self-discovery is a work of art worth beholding.
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