DID LOCKDOWN make you psychic?
The pandemic changed the world forever. But did it also have a mysterious effect on your mind?
If there’s one thing lockdown left us craving, it was connection. Remember those days, glued to your phone, constantly reaching out to friends from past and present?
But as well as a natural instinct to interact, for some there were times when connections felt more supernatural. Thinking about a close friend who would seemingly sense it and immediately send a text. Or talking about an ex from way back who would then mysteriously pop up and get in touch.
Were we just consciously
(and subconsciously) creating more opportunities for contact? Or did the physical separation caused by the pandemic make us more mentally in tune, or even open us up psychically?
Liz O’Brien, a mindfulness coach based in Australia, experienced so many chance moments during the pandemic that she started blogging about ‘lockdown telepathy’ as she called it.
‘I would think of a client and they would ring me,’ she says. ‘I’d wonder were they thinking of me, which is why they’d popped into my mind, or did something remind me of them and they’d picked up on that? I noticed in lockdown it was happening to other people too so I decided to blog about it. That’s when lots of people started emailing saying “Yes I’ve noticed that too”,’ she says.
Liz believes that when life slowed down during lockdown our minds became quieter places too. She says this gave us mental space to tune in to ourselves, which strengthened our ability to tap into things such as nature, our intuition and other people.
‘We’re all picking up more information from our environment than the conscious mind is aware of,’ she adds.
Liz believes the profound shared experience of the pandemic heightened our senses and fostered deeper connections between people on both a conscious and subconscious level.
‘It isn’t just coincidence,’ she says. ‘There’s something going on.’
But can this ‘something’ simply be explained by extra time and head space or is something more spiritual at play?
Emily Thornton from Manchester says she experienced a spiritual awakening during lockdown which made her acutely more aware of the energy around her. This led to her picking up tarot reading, which she turned into a business called Solar Sister Tarot.
‘I had a massive influx of clients looking for guidance during this uncertain time and it did feel like people were being opened up spiritually. Plus a lot of people were confiding their own psychic experiences with me,’ she says.
Emily found that people who already had psychic traits were opening up more due to what she calls the ‘magnified atmosphere’ of lockdown.
She believes this also led to people, including herself, feeling heightened sensitivity in crowded spaces such as supermarkets.
‘I noticed at the beginning of my spiritual awakening that I was experiencing an increased amount of migraines with aura (a complaint which can cause flashes of light, blind spots and other vision changes) particularly in these kinds of situations,’ she says.
However, she adds that once she picked up tarot and started meditating, these symptoms ‘completely disappeared’.
Emily isn’t alone in using the extra time afforded by lockdown to take up hobbies linked to spirituality.
As well as a widely reported surge in popularity for online meditation apps, many turned to healing techniques such as crystal therapy, and pagan witchcraft even became a huge trend on TikTok. Spiritualists and psychics reported a significant boom in business too. The Spiritualists’ National Union (SNU) saw new online members more than double in 2020 compared to the previous year.
‘Pre Covid most people were busy living their lives and didn’t really think about this kind of stuff,’ says SNU spokesperson Steve Upton. ‘But Covid put the whole world in a very difficult situation and under a lot of stress and people started to seek it out.’
Clairvoyant medium to the stars Jayne Wallace noticed new types of people started opening up to psychic guidance too.
‘I got a lot more men and business clientele seeking advice during lockdown, especially about new startups,’ she says. ‘There were also a lot more young people, and millennials seemed particularly in touch with themselves.’
And if this all sounds familiar and you think lockdown opened you up psychically there are lots of ways you can now extend those skills.
‘The best place to start to develop your psychic power is to quiet the mind with breathing, and practise using your intuition and gut as much as possible,’ Jayne advises.
‘It’s also a really good idea to search online for your nearest Spiritualist church which will have online tutorials and can also introduce you to a development circle.’
According to Jayne these support groups can teach you how to connect to spirit guides and get in touch with your higher self in order to develop your own intuition and psychic gifts. It seems a spiritual awakening courtesy of lockdown could be just the start!