Complete Psychic Ability List for Beginners

There are six types of psychic ability, and as you’ll see in a minute, they’re simple to understand.

Best of all, you can use your gifts to help others and to gain clarity and guidance in your own life.

This list is a MUST have (like those shoes on your birthday list) cheat sheet of all the common and uncommon psychic abilities. It’s like SparkNotes, but better!

Psychic Ability is Like Instagram or Facebook

Just like social media helps us stay connected with people, psychic ability helps us connect with spiritual or intuitive guidance.

There are four main types of psychic (intuitive) abilities:

• Clairvoyance – psychic seeing
• Clairaudience – psychic hearing
• Clairsentience – intuitive feeling and sensing
• Claircognizance – inner knowing

We connect with our intuition through the different types of psychic abilities known as the ‘clairs’.

Each of these abilities works in a different way, but tells the same message.

For example, if I wanted to let you know I was baking cookies (chocolate chip, of course), I could:

• Send you a text
• Call your cell phone
• Open my front door and let the smell float over to your house
• Post a picture on Instagram

All of those ways of communicating would almost guarantee you rushing to my kitchen… They deliver the same message in different ways.

That’s how psychic abilities work, too. Each intuitive ability gets the message through in a different way.

Tip: The repeated prefix ‘clair-’ is from the French ‘clair(e)’ and means ‘clear’.

Types of Psychic Ability

Let’s go into a little more depth about the types of psychic abilities. As you explore these intuitive gifts, you may realize that you have all of them, or just one or two.

Either way, it’s easy to develop all these abilities with practice and the right guidance.

We’ll start by learning about the most popular type of psychic ability, clairvoyance.

Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance is the ability to connect with your intuition through visions, images, and colors.

You may also see faint colors around people (their aura). Cool, right?

Typically, clairvoyant visions are seen in your mind, via your third eye (psychic eye). Don’t worry, though, they aren’t scary or dramatic like you see on TV (and you won’t see a spirit sitting on your couch).

People often picture a psychic waving their hands around a crystal ball and looking into the future, but real clairvoyance is subtle and insightful.

You may see:

• A color or object in your mind’s eye
• Pieces of a “scene” unfold in your mind
• A vision that’s like you’re watching a movie in your mind’s eye
• An image or symbol

Here are some posts that will help you understand and develop this special intuitive gift:

• What Every Newbie Should Know About Clairvoyance
• Signs You’re Clairvoyant
• 6 Ways to Develop Psychic Seeing
• How to Trust Your Clairvoyant Experiences

Clairsentience

Have you ever:

• Picked up on the thoughts and feelings of the people around you?
• Felt like you need to curl up alone with your fuzzy blanket after spending time with others?
• Avoided the news because it’s painful to watch? (Those animal shelter commercials… *Gulp*, I’ve been there too!)
• Sensed the energy when you walked into a room?

If these signs resonate with you, it’s likely that you have the psychic ability of clairsentience!

Clairsentience is the ability to connect with your intuition through sensing, feeling, or physical sensations. Being an empath is also part of clairsentience and means you can feel the emotions of others.

Those with clairsentience pick up on the energy around them.

As a clairsentient psychic you may:

• Not be able to shop at consignment stories
• Feel overwhelming joy when your friend shares good news, almost as if it were happening to you
• Get drained when you’re around people for too long
• Get good or bad vibes about your new neighbor

You may also know for certain when someone is lying to you, or elaborating, or hiding parts of a story. If you have empathic abilities, you may also feel twinges like a headache (yuck), or cramps (double yuck) when others are in pain.

As a clairsentient myself, I can tell you that it’s super important to learn how to control your gift so that you don’t feel drained. This post will give you some tips on how to do the same.

Helpful posts:

• Clairsentience for Psychic Beginners
• What Does it Feel Like to Have a Clairsentient Experience?
• 6 Ways to Develop Clairsentience

Clairaudience

Clairaudience is that ‘little voice within’.

It’s the ability to connect with your intuition through the auditory channel in the form of words, phrases, or music. As your gift develops, you also may hear larger blocks of thought that feel like they are downloaded to you.

This intuitive gift is usually experienced in your own mind, in your own voice, as an inner hearing. (Psychic hearing sounds like when you are reading to yourself.)

For example, you’re driving along when you suddenly hear “turn right” in your mind. When you turn, you discover that your favorite coffee shop is selling lattes for $1 today, yay!

You may also experience clairaudience as inspiring thoughts or ideas that pop into your mind, or as sudden messages like “check the garage door”.

To learn more about this amazing psychic ability, read:

• Understanding and Developing Clairaudience Like a Pro
• 11 Signs You Might be Clairaudient
• 5 Exercises to Develop Psychic Hearing

Claircognizance

Claircognizance is the ability to connect with your intuition through gut feelings. It’s the psychic ability to know something without logic or facts; an inner knowing.

For example:

Claircognizant feelings can be very strong and come on as a flash of insight:

• You hear that a friend was diagnosed with an illness, but you know he’ll be okay.
• You’re about to sign a contract but have a gut feeling that there is a mistake in it.
• You awaken at night with an insightful answer to a problem.

If you’ve ever known that you should take a different route to work, not take that drink, or throw out those leftovers, you’ve experienced inner knowing.

At the time, you probably didn’t know why you were having those feelings. Your friends may have made fun of you, or you may have thought you were being silly — but your gut was telling you that you were right.

When you experience it, you don’t know how you know, but the message is loud and clear inside you.

For example, your daughter asks if she can go play at her new friend’s house. Your answer? Namasta-NO!

You don’t know why, but you just know that her friend’s house is bad news.

It’s wonderful when we honor and act upon our claircognizance. These messages are a gift, for sure!

More claircognizant goodness:

• 7 Exercises to Develop Claircognizance
• Surefire Signs That Claircognizance is One of Your Psychic Gifts
• 5 Foolproof Ways to Tell Your Inner-Knowing is Spot On

Clairalience

Clairalience means psychic smelling. It’s the ability to smell fragrances from the spiritual realm, like flowers or perfume.

For example, you might suddenly get a whiff of pineapple when your grandma in heaven (who’s signature dessert was pineapple upside-down cake) is around.

Spirits will often connect with us through our clairalience to let us know they’re around.

Clairgustance

Our last psychic ability is clairgustance which means inner tasting; that is, you can taste things like chocolate without eating chocolate. Joy to the world!

This isn’t the most common psychic ability, but it can be useful in giving mediumship readings. For example, if a spirit loved to eat chocolate-covered cherries, the medium might sense or taste chocolate.

Next Step:

Now that you know about all of the psychic gifts, let’s figure out which ones resonate with you! This fun post will help you discover which natural psychic abilities you have. Get cozy and start reading.

Which of the psychic abilities did you discover that you have?