It's invaluable to me to have these words in her own voice...
TRAINING PSYCHIC INTUITION with KATHLYN RHEA
Jeffrey Mishlove: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is training intuitive and psychic abilities, and with me is Kathlyn Rhea, the author of several books including The Psychic Is You and Mind Sense. Kay is known as an intuitive consultant in the Washington, D.C. area, and her reputation is particularly extraordinary in doing concrete, practical work with police departments, the medical profession, and in business consulting. Welcome, Kay.
Kathlyn Rhea: Thank you, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Mishlove: It's a pleasure to have you here.
Kathlyn Rhea: It's a pleasure to be here.
Jeffrey Mishlove: You know, I might say at the outset that your reputation is most extraordinary in the law enforcement field. I've had the opportunity myself to interview law enforcement officials who have worked with you on cases where you've been able to locate missing bodies, for example, that had eluded them. You tend to view intuitive and psychic abilities in a concrete, practical way, not so much in the spiritual, mystical sense at all.
Kathlyn Rhea: I feel like if you can't use it, don't bother with it, and so it has to be practical for me. I think the law enforcement enabled me to sharpen my abilities, because when you're working with detectives, they want the facts, ma'am, and they don't want a lot of elusive things. So it really helped me sharpen my intuitive abilities over the years.
Jeffrey Mishlove: One of the interesting things about your view is you don't look at this so much as a gift from God, but as something that you work very hard to develop and to train, and something that's attainable by anyone who's willing to work for it.
Kathlyn Rhea: That's right. Let me explain how I see it. When you're born, if you're lucky enough to be a nice, healthy baby, you have the other five senses that we all accept. Now, you have eyes and the eyes can see, but the baby does not know what they see. So mother has to help teach them a visual vocabulary: "Baby, this is a cat. Baby, this is a chair. Baby, that's a man. Baby, that's a lady." So pretty soon the baby builds their visual vocabulary. And then the hearing. The baby had ears; they didn't know what they heard. So mother says, "The cat goes meow, meow; and the cow goes moo, moo," and pretty soon the baby develops a hearing vocabulary. The same thing with smelling the pretty flower, or "Eat your carrots, these are potatoes, this is lovely lemon custard;" the baby develops that taste vocabulary. So as the time goes by, it's nothing unusual that this child should identify things with their other five senses. Now, the intuitive sense is present too, but is not visual, so nobody exercises it for the baby. Nobody says that baby can sense whether they like that person or not; without any words or any vision, they can sense it. And so the poor intuitive sense just lies there and is ignored. If you develop it, I find that it's probably the most valuable source of information that you can plug in with your intellect, and it's only as good as your intellect. You go to the little lady along the road who has a palm on her sign, and she tells you something intuitive. Now, it'll be intuitive all right, but if she cannot interpret what she got intuitively she can't give you very good information. She'll give you something that you have to try to figure out what she meant by it. With me -- let's take a detective; he comes to me and he has a suspect he's looking for. Because I have been fortunate enough to travel most of the United States, I can say, "Well, he's left this state. Now he's gone to another state." And then my intellect takes over and says what I'm feeling is the same thing I'd feel if I were in the state of Arizona.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Oh really?
Kathlyn Rhea: Or I'm feeling the same thing as if I were by the Mississippi River. So my intellect has helped me identify what my intuition is telling me.
Jeffrey Mishlove: In other words, otherwise it would just sort of be a mass of amorphous sensations, but you've developed a very precise way of identifying, for example, how you would feel in Arizona.
Kathlyn Rhea: That's right. And by working with the detectives I got to where I could tell the difference if a body had been stabbed, in preference to a body being shot, or a body being strangled; whether the body's buried or not; whether the person's still alive or not. And assumption is a very dangerous thing, because in the beginning there were times when I would think, well, if the person hasn't come back, and I see them with blood around them, then they must be dead. But you must go further and totally finish looking at the picture and get all that information, and you may find that no, they're just not able to get back, and they're being held prisoner somewhere, and they're in very bad physical condition.
Jeffrey Mishlove: When you began in your adult life to train this ability, it took you a long time and a certain amount of perseverance, without any results, really, to get going at it, didn't it?
Kathlyn Rhea: The biggest thing I had to do was overcome the misinformation that was out there, Jeffrey, because there was nobody telling me what is intuition. It's a perfectly normal sense. So I went to all of the people in the field that I could find -- the crystal ball readers, the card readers, the palmists -- and they did not have the ability to tell you how they did it. Somebody realized they had an intuitive flash, and the next thing they knew they told them they were special, they were gifted, they were set apart from the rest of us, and so they would do it. And one of them would say, "Well, I can only do it on rainy days;" and another would say, "I can only do it if the moon is half full." They didn't know how they were doing it, and they did not know how to use it; they didn't know how to harness it, let me put it that way. We're all intuitive. I have yet to work with a child that's been murdered or is missing or had an untimely death, that they didn't try to tell the family that they had a fear of something that was about to happen to them. I have yet to see a child that's not intuitive.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I suppose in our culture one of the problems is that a child could have athletic ability or mathematical ability or artistic ability, and there's encouragement from the parents. But we don't encourage this intuitive ability in children.
Kathlyn Rhea: That's right.
Jeffrey Mishlove: In fact we discourage it.
Kathlyn Rhea: Yes. So often their parent will say, "Oh, run along honey, that's just childish prattle." And they won't listen to what that child is saying to them intuitively, because they didn't read it in a book, a teacher didn't teach them, the parents didn't teach them this, so how can they know this? Well, you know; we all know. I find in my classes -- we have eighty to eighty-five percent professional businessmen. Now, why are they there? All they want to do is learn to plug intuition with their intellect in whichever profession they're in, so they make better decisions, because like Hilton said, "Bring me all the computer facts you want, but if the gut doesn't feel right about it, I won't go for the deal." Now, he's plugging his intuition in as the last decision, and it's the same thing with any business. A good surgeon will have intuition, not just the medical training, but intuition as to what he should do, and he'll perform that unusual surgery, and he stands out because of it. And many notable people in their fields who've stood out, have all acknowledged the fact their intuition helped them end up with what they came up with, in the way of helping humanity or the world.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, intuition is a funny word, and when we talk about a scientist using intuition, that seems very different from an individual such as yourself, who can close your eyes and begin describing information about a scene that took place perhaps thousands of miles away. RHEA: Well, I don't even close my eyes. Actually --
Jeffrey Mishlove: You have telescopes.
Kathlyn Rhea: As you say, there are some people who have more ability as an athlete, and some as a musician, and some as an artist. I happen to be very creative in my mind. Now, for the audience that is not creative in their thinking, they may only have feelings and never be able to take the feeling and develop a picture out of it. Because my major was art, I find it very easy for me to develop a picture from my feelings, and so that gives me some information to give to the law enforcement I'm working with. But remember this, most people who are great inventors and creators have always worked it out in the pictures in their mind. They don't realize it perhaps, but they've always seen it in their head before they did it. When I used to have a modeling school and I would put on big benefits, I would always have a theme, and I would sit down early in the morning when it was quiet, and I would suddenly start putting it together in my head, long before I put it on the paper, and I could see exactly what I wanted, and then I would do it. Now, I'm sure your great directors and your great artists, great musicians, all see it in their mind before they put it down. So my intuition helps me get a picture. Some people will not get pictures, and that's all right. They may just feel; it feels good or it doesn't feel good.
Jeffrey Mishlove: What you seem to be saying, though, is that where it starts is somehow in the body itself, that physiology picks it up. It's as if the body is somehow an antenna sensing information that the normal sensory organs don't get, and if you can learn how to translate that information that arrives in the body into something that you can grasp intellectually, that's how it works.
Kathlyn Rhea: Right. It'll start out with -- well, let's take people that are walking down a dark street, and somebody's going to ambush them. Seconds before it happens, they have a horrible feeling -- that they should either run, or turn around, or do something. Now, that was their intuition, before they knew it. When you almost have an accident, how do you intuitively sense what to do quickly? I mean, your intuition comes into play, and it comes right out of here. You know -- "It's that feeling I get in the pit of my stomach." Everybody describes that -- "I get a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach." Well, it really is, but it's not any good to you unless you bring it up to the intellect and say, "What does this feeling mean? How can I utilize this feeling? How does it become a piece of information?" So I have built a very large intuitive vocabulary for myself, so if somebody says, "We have a business deal. Do you think it's going to work, Kay?" I may have an uneasy feeling, but then I have to go further than that and say, "I feel uneasy about it, but now, why? I feel uneasy because I don't like the man you're doing business with. I feel uneasy because your contracts aren't signed well. I feel uneasy because the product isn't developed like it should be. I feel uneasy because you're not reaching the right market." See, there's many different uneasy feelings. So I have learned you don't just feel uneasy, you have specific uneasy feelings to go with specific things. That takes time. It's taken me twenty years to get to where I can do that. And twenty years, as you know, to describe a face of a suspect, of someone they don't even know who has committed the murder or the crime, and I can sit and describe the face to a police artist, and he can draw the face, and we now have had numerous ones match the mug shots when they finally solved the crime. This was something that I had no idea you could do with your intuition. Now, if I can do that, think of how many more things we might be able to do that we haven't even tried in this field yet.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, my sense is that part of your success, since you didn't have anybody to teach you, is your dogged determination. Something propelled you into it.
Kathlyn Rhea: My mother accused me of being a very stubborn little girl, and if I get hold of something I'm like a little terrier; I hold on till I get an answer. And so often I would say, "Well, now, why is it this way?" And then I'd go to a doctor and say, "Now, why do I see this in a body? What does that mean?" And they will give me a medical term that I can now use to go with that feeling. Or I'll go to a detective and say, "This is strange. Do people ever do this, what I'm getting right now? It's so unusual. It's not what I'm used to at all." They'll say, "Oh yes, we have people that do that." And so they will help it make sense to me. And so you just keep building as you go along.
Jeffrey Mishlove: In a sense you're really approaching this, if I can sort of stretch the use of the word a little bit, like a scientist. You're constantly operating out of the feedback that you get, developing hypotheses, testing your hypotheses against feedback from the next trial in the real world that comes up, and modifying and developing your theories and cognitive framework, as you go along.
Kathlyn Rhea: Right. And in fact without feedback I would not be anywhere at all. I have to have feedback. I remember a chief of police sending me one of these detectives with a picture of a skull they'd found, and I said, "Just don't bring the skull. It's OK. Come over and talk to me if you want." So they did, and I called the police artist in, and we drew the person as we thought the skull had been. They didn't know if it was male or female at the time, how old, or anything else. I described what this person had looked like. Later they had a well-known doctor of anthropology who reconstructed the skull, did a complete reconstruction of it, and it matched our drawing. Now, this feedback really helps me know that I'm on the right track, to be able to add this as a usable tool when nothing else works.
Jeffrey Mishlove: And if the feedback were to come back that you were off, then you would just discard that approach, I suppose.
Kathlyn Rhea: That's right. It's like anything else. If a scientist is working with something, if this formula doesn't work he discards it and he works on this one. So by having feedback, you say, well, I have to perfect this more, or I have to add or take away from this. And so you keep working forward with it. My biggest goal is to make people realize they're all intuitive. It is not a separate thing. It is part of every human being, and they can use it as a very practical tool.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Now, there's a lot of concern, a lot of talk, many approaches to developing these abilities that have to do with altered states of consciousness -- hypnosis, meditation, dreams, channeling. I gather that you are very matter-of-fact, wide awake, just like you might be right now, when you do this work -- that the altered state is not at all necessary for you.
Kathlyn Rhea: Of course that is because it's taken me so many years where I can stop and soft-pedal my other senses and that information, and be very aware of what my intuitive sense is telling me. It took some practice, though. I used to have to really work to get to that point, and I don't mind how people reach there -- whether it's through self-hypnosis, whether it's through standing on their head in the corner. I don't care. What they have to realize is if their mind is working too furiously, or if they are distracted by what they see, or if there's a lot of noise that's distracting them, they are not going to be aware of feelings, and it's the feeling you have to interpret. So these other senses come in and take precedence, and they really overpower that sensitive, sensitive feeling. What they have to do is learn to say, "I'm going to deliberately not be distracted by my vision or my hearing or my sense of smell or taste or touch. I'm going to really say to myself, what do I feel about this situation? How do I feel if I go into that business? How do I feel about this person I've just met?" Because we all feel. You've met strangers where you immediately like them. Now where did that come from? It wasn't what they had on. You've met people you've immediately disliked, and this poor soul, it wasn't what they were wearing, but there was something about them that your intuition told you was not pleasing or was pleasing to you.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, I get the impression that in effect what you're doing is treating every moment as a kind of meditation.
Kathlyn Rhea: Well, you know, you don't even realize it any longer, and the word meditation to me means stilling the other senses and listening to the intuition. Now, some people think they have to sit for an hour and meditate. I used to, until I got to where I had it down pat, and now I can switch. If you were to ask me about a particular question right now, I could switch to that immediately and tell you what I feel, because I'm very aware of that inner feeling now, I'm very aware of what it's saying to me. So I have practiced it long enough to where I don't have to stop and go into any particular set steps or state; I can just say, "Hey, I don't feel good about that, Jeffrey, and I don't feel good because this is what's going to happen."
Jeffrey Mishlove: But isn't it tricky to distinguish between what's coming from some external source and what may be the result of what you ate for breakfast --
Kathlyn Rhea: Oh yes.
Jeffrey Mishlove: -- or the fact that maybe you had a fight with your husband or something?
Kathlyn Rhea: Or wishful thinking. One of my students was in commercial real estate, and she said, "How do I know whether I'm going to sell that property and make this big bonus, or is it because I hope I'm going to?" And I had to teach her steps. I said, "All right, wishful thinking of course is there. We all want to make a success of what we're doing. So what you do is look at the building, and then think about it a month from now. Does it look the same? Have the signs been changed? Any colors changed in the building? Who do you see walking out of the building? Does it look like the same people? Take a contract. Look at the contract. Do you see a signature on there? What type of signature is it? Is it a large flourishing one? Is it a little cramped one? Is it a man's hand that's writing the signature? Look and check and recheck your answers, to where you get rid of the wishful thinking and you get something you know for sure is a positive that will show you whether that building's changed hands or not."
Jeffrey Mishlove: It's sort of a delicate thing, because on the other hand we have the art of creative visualization, of visualizing it and then having it happen. And you're suggesting not that, but looking at it as it happens.
Kathlyn Rhea: Yes, yes. You see, here's present, and here's future, and here's what I call free will. What you must do is go past the free will and look and see what actually happens -- not what you want to have happen, but what really happened.
Jeffrey Mishlove: What really happened in the future.
Kathlyn Rhea: Yes, yes. Or the past. You know, I don't understand it totally in a scientific way, how can we do this, but I do it all the time, so we can do it. Doctors Puthoff and Targ can tell you how scientifically you do it; you can tell us how scientifically we do it. I can tell you how as a practitioner we do it, and that's why I wrote the new book.
Jeffrey Mishlove: That's the strongest statement of all -- I can tell you because I do it; you figure out how.
Kathlyn Rhea: I get so angry at the scientists who say, "You can't do this." Well, hey, come take a look at a picture, a mug shot of a crime that nobody witnessed but the person who was murdered, and I have drawn this for them on a piece of paper and told them everything about this person. Now, how did I do that if I didn't have intuition? I didn't just dream it up, you know. It had to be good proof.
Jeffrey Mishlove: And you're saying also that you're nobody special -- that this is an ability that other people can learn.
Kathlyn Rhea: That's right. I happen to be more sensitive, maybe; I have a creative mind that can help me. I use all my senses. It's been funny, because I'll even have the sense of smell. Now, when I'm doing, let's say, a crime scene, I'll deliberately see if I smell anything particular in that area. And I didn't realize either you could use these five senses with this intuitive sense, but now I do. One case, I said, "You know, there's the most acrid smell in the air in this area. It's strange. It's a real strange smell." The detective said when he arrived in that area, the first thing he smelled was that, and it was the burning off of the gas fields down there where these girls had been murdered. Or I will say, "Gee, I can feel the soil, and it's real dry soil, real clay soil, or, "It's rocky soil." So I'll use all five senses. Or I hear an accent that this person has, an accent that's not normal. Then I have to decide is this southern or northern or northeastern, or is it a foreign accent that we can tie into this person and give us one more piece of information. So I use all my other five senses in conjunction with it, and that's where the intellect helps me give more information than a person who's just saying, "Oh, I've got a native sense, and I'm special and different, and I don't have to work at it." So it's very interesting as you go along, because you find there's so many things you can do with it.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, there seems to be a paradox in here. If you're able to look at the future and see a successful or an unsuccessful business deal, in a way it almost negates free will in some sense.
Kathlyn Rhea: Oh, I don't think so, because I've had people come to me that will ask me about something, and I will tell them what I feel about it, and they will still use their free will and go against what they were told, and come back later and say, "Boy, were you right. Many thousand dollars later we found out you were right." I say, "Well, that's all right. That's your free will. You should exercise that." What I normally try to do is use it as a positive direction for them to head in; they still have to do the work. The detectives, I don't do their job for them. I give them information. They must then go out and do their job as a detective. I don't replace them. I don't replace the businessman who's going to start a new company. I give him guidelines that I see. I give him steps that he can take that he can bypass a mistake. But I don't try to say, "Hey, this is all me doing it for you." I say, "This is your life, I'm only going to give you a little information to help you."
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, one of the feedback systems that you have used in training your own abilities, and which is now widely available for people, are lotteries, gambling. I think you went to the dog races yourself in Florida.
Kathlyn Rhea: Yes.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Do you think that this is a method that people can actually reliably use for gambling?
Kathlyn Rhea: Oh yes, definitely, definitely. In fact, the commodity market is a great one. I've twice had a very strong feeling about it and done very nicely. You know, people say, "Well, if you can do this, why don't you just make lots of money and don't work?" I'm too interested in the field of educating this sense, to just stop and see how much money I can make in a lottery. But if I suddenly have a feeling about something, then I will probably go and make some dollars on it. But that's not what my goal is. My goal is to educate the public that from birth you have and intuitive sense to go with your other senses, and it is a practical, usable tool, and let's quit ignoring it. I speak to teachers' groups, and they all agree that the children in their class are intuitive, but they don't exercise it for them.
Jeffrey Mishlove: It sounds like what you're saying, though, and part of the application of intuition, then, is to look at the attitude with which we approach these things. That is, if you were to approach the lottery with the attitude, "OK, I'm going to use my intuition to make money," that might not be the attitude that would work for you.
Kathlyn Rhea: That's right, or you could get so greedy that you wouldn't really have a pure sense of what your intuition is. Again, you would have your wishful thinking, and you'd think, "Oh, I'm going to make this money." Then your other senses are going to overpower that very delicate intuitive sense. So I don't see that it should be used that way. I think it has been used and made very wonderful business deals and made people millionaires. I'm not against that, because it's like using your eyes to read a good contract that makes you a lot of money, using your ears to listen to a good idea that makes you money. So it's not that you're going against God or yourself by making money with it, but I feel that you need to use it to where greed doesn't come in and overpower all discretion with it, where you're not really reading your intuition right.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Ultimately, I suppose, the finest use of intuition for a person is to look at what is my direction in life.
Kathlyn Rhea: Right, right. And because it's a personal thing, we can make our mistakes in those too. You know, one of the good examples is one day I was to go in and have my hair done, and I was going to have some new things done, and the night before I thought, "I don't want to go." And I thought, "No, it's too late, I can't call this man and tell him I'm not going to be there. I'm his first client in the morning. He marked off three hours, and it's going to be a lot of money for him." The next morning, brushing my hair, I had the strong feeling, "I don't want to go." I went ahead and went against it. I went down and he put things on my head so I became totally bald on the top of my head for a few months, and still have indentations where the burning went into the skin of my head.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Oh my goodness.
Kathlyn Rhea: Now, that was my intuition, very accurate, and my saying I can't be impolite and not go. So I went right against it. So I can make as many mistakes as you, if I don't stop and look at it properly.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, there seem to be numerous cases -- we hear of people who wanted not to go on an airplane, and the plane might crash.
Kathlyn Rhea: Well, that last big crash we had from up north was that. A young college student told his friend, "I don't want to go. We're going to be killed. It's going to crash." And his friend said, "Aw, come on, there's nothing valid to that. You can't see it, hear it, taste it, or touch it." So he went aboard and died. And that type of thing happens all the time. If people would stop and pay attention to that, they would avoid an untimely death.
MISHLOVE: I know for myself, every time I'm about to go on a trip I have that feeling; I don't want to go.
Kathlyn Rhea: Well, that's when you could stop and play it in your mind. You really can stop and see yourself get aboard the plane, make the plane trip, get off at the other end, and what do you do? What happens at the other end, and what are the results there? Get back on the plane, fly back, and you see yourself in the future in your home, doing some other things. Then you can say, "Hey, I can quit worrying, it's OK." I had one detective say -- he was also a pilot, and he was going to fly me to a scene -- he said, "I told my wife this morning that if you didn't get aboard, I wasn't going." I said, "I wouldn't be out here if I didn't think I could get aboard this airplane." It's a fun tool. It's one that you can have a lot of enjoyment out of, as well as a very serious tool, and if we could just teach the educational department: exercise their bodies, exercise their minds, their reading, writing, and arithmetic, but exercise their intuition. That's their creative flow. Exercise that.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Well, Kathlyn Rhea, it's been a pleasure having you here with me. You're really an individual who embodies exactly what you're talking about in a very concrete, down-to-earth manner. It's quite refreshing.
Kathlyn Rhea: Thank you, Jeffrey. Just everybody keep using your intuition.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Thank you so much for being with me.
Kathlyn Rhea: Thank you.
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