Episode 17: The Aphantasia Journey: From Non-Visual Perception to Psychic Awareness

Welcome to Aphantasia Experiments newest episode: "Aphantasia Experiments and Intuitive Insights!" In this mind-blowing discussion, our host dives deep into the fascinating phenomenon of aphantasia and shares her own breathtaking experiences with developing her intuition and psychic abilities.

Join us as we unravel the mysteries surrounding aphantasia, a condition where individuals lack the ability to visualize images in their mind's eye. Along the way, our host reflects on her personal journey with aphantasia, revealing the misconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding this extraordinary condition.

Prepare to be captivated by our host's storytelling prowess as she recounts her conversations with friends and family about aphantasia. Discover how this condition affects not only visual imagination but also other senses such as hearing, smelling, and recall. You'll be amazed at how our host's ability to remember feelings becomes her superpower, making her a true "Claire Knower."

But the surprises don't end there! Tune in as our host explores the unique dynamics within her relationship with her husband, who also has aphantasia. Uncover the yin and yang between their different ways of processing and remembering information.

As our host's insights unfold, you'll be taken on an unforgettable journey exploring fascinating tangents, from the Rain Man's incredible true story to the captivating podcast series, "Where Is My Mind?" by Mark Gober. Prepare to be inspired as our host reveals valuable life lessons gained from embracing our individual strengths and appreciating the unique contributions we each bring to our relationships and communities.

So whether you're fascinated by the mysteries of aphantasia, curious about intuitive development, or simply seeking an uplifting and enlightening discussion, this episode of Psychic School is a must-listen! Get ready to expand your understanding of the mind and discover the incredible power of embracing your authentic self.

Transcript:
Speaker A [00:00:01]: Hello and welcome to another episode of Aphantasia Experiments as well as psychic School podcast. I am excited to have you here. I wanted to take this episode to talk a bit about aphantasia, but then also share some crazy experiences I've had recently with my intuition development, my psychic development, all that stuff, and some crazy moments I've had during meditation. So I'm going to just start off with the Aphantasia component because when I first learned I had Aphantasia, I went on Facebook and I posted a question to my Facebook community, and I just said, if I say picture an elephant, what do you see? And a bunch of people responded, Whatever. But I was talking to one of my best friends about this, and I just said, I can't picture a horse in my mind or an elephant in my mind or whatever. And she was with one of my other friends this past week, and they were talking about aphantasia. And my friend was like, what do you mean so she can't hear or see me in her mind? For some reason, it clicked that I couldn't bring up a horse in my mind, but it didn't click to her that I couldn't pull up people that I know or recall a memory. So I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding or a lot of people who are hypervisual people when they learn that I can't visualize. Speaker A [00:01:48]: Like my dad when I told him, he was like, that makes no sense that you can't do that, because I think that it's so part of people, like the ability to visualize or close your eyes when you're falling asleep and picturing a sunset or whatever or an example would be. I played cards with my dad this weekend, and he totally stores all the cards in his brain in a visual way, and I definitely don't do that. And I immediately forget what suit it is. So I have to put like a little card down to remind me what suit it is. I also just don't have a great memory, but I don't know if that has anything to do with aphantasia. I think we all just store things differently in our minds. So this was like one of my best friends, and we had talked about aphantasia before, but it literally just clicked in her mind when she was talking to another friend of mine who I'm very open about my aphantasia with, and she didn't understand that it also affects other senses too. So I can't hear my best friend's voice or laugh in my head. Speaker A [00:03:03]: I can't pick up, see, picture, or smell someone. I can't recall any of those things. The only thing I can do, and I don't know if other people with Aventes are like this as well, but the one thing that I can do is remember the way something made me feel. So I can remember feelings really well. And I think that that's like, who I am. Like, I'm a feeler. I feel things very deeply. I feel other people's emotions. Speaker A [00:03:36]: I feel I sense things. I know things. If we're going to go into the claire, your Claire senses, I'm a Claire knower, and I think it's because all of my other senses are completely off. So if you're listening to this and you have Aventas and you're like, what's my superpower? I think that's it. I think that we just know more. And if you don't feel like you're a knower because my husband also has aphantasia, and I'm sorry, my kids are screaming in the background now. I hope you can't hear them, told them to be quiet, but they're not. So my husband has aphantasia, and he is not a knower of feelings. Speaker A [00:04:26]: Like, we're yin and yang, in a sense. Like, he's a left brain, I'm a right brain. Oh, no, my dog's gonna bark. Oh, boy. This podcast is not going well, guys. Sorry. It's okay, Rosie. See, she sees a ghost right now. Speaker A [00:04:44]: She's, like, looking up above my shoulder. One secondary. And I'm switching editing software right now, so I'm using one that's, like, cloud based, so I didn't want to stop that and have to rerecord. Okay, so back to my husband. He's different than I am. He doesn't feel things deeply. He doesn't sense other people's emotions. He doesn't have that. Speaker A [00:05:15]: But he does remember things way better than me. So we were playing cards this weekend, and he stored the cards in his brain, too, in a different way, not a visual way, but he's storing them. Like, he's basically like the Rain Man, who's based off a true character, by the way. It's very interesting. There's an episode the Rain Man is with Dustin Hoffman. He plays a man who has, I think, autism. He's on the spectrum of sorts, and he goes to the casino and he can read cards, basically. That was just a random thought that came into my minds. Speaker A [00:05:57]: But there's an episode by Mark Gober. It's called Where Is My Mind? By Mark Gober. There's a whole podcast series on it. It's one of my absolute favorite podcasts. I can't say enough good things about it. It's so great. And it's only, like, eight episodes or something, but I've listened to it so many times because it's so good, and it just kind of shows the guy that the movie was based off of, like, a real person. I think it's the episode on Savant. Speaker A [00:06:39]: So if you're interested in just learning more about that, go to Where Is My Mind? With or by Mark Gober, and look up the Savant episode. But seriously, all of the episodes are amazing. So I would definitely give it a listen. And you don't have to listen in any sort of order, I don't think. So. It used to kind of drive me crazy. My husband, who has aphantasia, also is hyper organized, and I am hyper not organized. I'm hyper ideas and creativity and intuition and all that stuff, like very feminine energy and he's very just like everything has its place kind of thing and it used to almost drive me crazy. Speaker A [00:07:29]: And I think what I've realized in the last few months of really digging deep into why that frustrates me, that I don't have that in myself and it frustrates me that I feel like it can't do that. So it's not about him doing something and that making me mad. It's about me not being able to do it. Anyways. The life lesson I got from this was there's a lot of things that he can't do that I can do and there's a lot of things that I can do that he can't do that I can't do. And relationships and friendships and families and everything are built on different types of personalities coming together and working as a whole, right? You have different people and different we we have all different minds and our minds work in all different ways and we all come together and make this planet function sort of. And with my family, every single person in my family is a unique person and obviously every family is like that. And the things that used to frustrate me, now I just try to see as each person is unique and brings their own special wonderfulness to the mix. Speaker A [00:08:55]: And that's important. And it's important that we're all authentically who we are. So I don't know where I was going with that. But I recently cleaned my closet and a task that would take me forever to do. I asked my husband for advice on what he would do because he watches me every six months, do this whole thing where I have to take out all my clothes and clean out everything, and I get all takes me a whole day to do it. And he's like, why don't you just keep it that way? And I'm like, I don't know. I put into place structures that don't ever work and I don't like I need someone who knows me to help me with this. And he did. Speaker A [00:09:37]: And I'm happy to say it's been a month and my closet has never looked better. Normally within a week, I'm like throwing shit on the floor and it looks really good. So I think that if you have an ability that you're really good at, share that ability, bring that ability to other people who need that ability, be awesome at what you're awesome at. And then when you're not awesome at something, it's okay. You don't have to be all perfect. Lean into the people who are awesome at those things. My husband is an awesome organizer. He's really good at keeping systems in place. Speaker A [00:10:21]: I suck balls at that. So if I want to be successful in keeping my closet neat or my emails in order, I'm going to ask my husband for advice because he's going to be able to help me with that. And I think that goes for everyone in this world. We're all good at certain things and not great at other things. And I think we try so hard to be everything when there's like, reasons we're not everything. You know, we're supposed to we're not supposed to be everything. Sorry, I had an alert on my computer. I thought it wasn't recording for a second. Speaker A [00:11:15]: So that's just a random life lesson there that we're all just I think me learning about Aphantasia especially has made me really question how everyone's minds work and how we all process our thoughts and how we recall things differently and how different things affect our minds. I can hear oh, here's an example. I was just at the cottage with my family and my son and my daughter were fishing and my niece was there too. My niece is a year old or two years older than my youngest daughter, so she's seven. She was like just disgusted every time anyone had to take the fish hook out of the fish's mouth or put a worm on. And my son and my daughter were totally fine with it. My brother and my cousin were there and they were all taking the fish and it was just like, whatever. But for me and for my niece, we had the same reaction. Speaker A [00:12:23]: And where does that come from, that feeling that you can feel what the fish is feeling? So I don't feel this way about when I'm stuffing a turkey because the turkey is already dead, this fish is alive and I'm feeling this feeling and I just can't look at it. I hate it and I hate, like I hate blood and cuts and all that stuff. I feel that so much. And when I saw my niece's face, I was like, oh, she has it. She has what? I have, like, that feelingness and I think my daughter has it too, but she was able to do it. It's funny. So what else did I want to talk about here? I feel like in the last month so I quit my job at the beginning of the summer. It's August now. Speaker A [00:13:27]: I haven't done a ton of work to try to find new employment. I want to focus on this. And I have a couple other freelance things that I have got going on, but it's really opened me up to well, first of all, my kids are home for the summer, so it's not really like I have a lot of free time for myself. But the ability to not have the work stress in the back of my mind is the best thing for my brain. And I know that not everyone can do that. So that's like it's like shitty thing to say. Like, hey, you need to quit your job to be able to open up your mind. But I was in such a toxic work environment and I finally got out of it. Speaker A [00:14:19]: And as soon as I did, I swear my psychic abilities have been opening up. I have these dreams where I'm being taught these lessons and they're so profound. Every night I wake up, I'm like, I'm a different person. I literally wake up in the morning and I think, well, yesterday's me is like dead. And this is a new me because I have a new outlook on something about life that used to maybe bother me or I have a completely different perspective. My perspective on things keeps changing and it's pretty freaking magical and amazing. And it all started I mean, it's been a journey, but I've been on a very long spiritual journey. But in the opening up to things like my meditation practice has gone through the roof and just being able to regulate myself more, everything's just been so much better since I was able to cut ties with my energy. Speaker A [00:15:21]: Vampire the boss. So if you have the ability to let something go, to let more in, I think that it's important that you do that. That's another big lesson of mine. If you're struggling at your job and you're like drowning, drowning, drowning, drowning, you're just like waiting for the next job to come in so you don't have to drown anymore. It's like it won't happen until you've been able to at least tread water, get out of the drowning stage. You have to let something go to let more in. It's really important. And I've realized that so much since leaving my job. Speaker A [00:16:04]: There's so many even just talking to people I haven't talked to in a while, I've opened my head up to being able to have good relationships and just be a better human being all around. So that's another life lesson. I recently got back from a trip to a cabin with my family. It was really a great experience. I think being around my family is really good for me because each person is such an individual. Every single person is completely different and special and unique. And everyone's brains process things differently. So it's kind of like an experiment when I'm there not an experiment, but I'm a people person, so I'm just watching people and trying to understand everything and people and how things work and how people behave and I don't know. Speaker A [00:17:05]: I find human behavior very interesting. But on my way to the cottage cabin, I was listening to a book and they were doing a meditation and I wanted to share it with you because I had such great luck with it. For opening up my for accessing Source. I like to say accessing Source. That's like when my mind goes into a different dimension and I get these profound downloads, they just get dumped into my head or like solutions to a problem that I've been facing. It goes completely like I get the complete solution for the problem. That's what I call accessing source. I call it different things at different times. Speaker A [00:17:53]: But currently right now accessing Source so in this book I was listening to it, described this meditation and I did it when I was away and it was really awesome. So what you do is you say a mantra in your head and the mantra I say is really loud or long, sorry. It's something that I used to do with my friend in grade five. We used to stare at each other in a crawl space and say I am you and you are me and we are together. And that's it, over and over and over again by staring at each other. And then what would happen is our faces would start melting into different shapes and stuff and so I don't know why we did this, but we would do this. And so that was the mantra that came to my mind. So I kept saying I am you and you are me. Speaker A [00:18:41]: And in my head okay, so with aphantasia I can't hear people's voices, but I can hear my own voice. So it's like my thought voice. So I say it, I say it, I say it. And in this meditation, what you're supposed to do is go up all your chakras. So you start at your root chakra and you picture a flower opening up, a red flower. And then you go up to your solar plexus, your orange and then your getting them mixed up. But you go up red, orange, yellow, green, heart, blue throat, third eye chakra, violet, indigo, crown chakra. You go up each one and pretend the flower is opening up. Speaker A [00:19:23]: Well, I have advantageous so I can't see the flower, but I can imagine in a sense that a flower is there, like what it would feel like, what it would look like. I can put it together, it's not visual, but I can still do the exercise somehow. Okay, so I'm going up the red and I'm saying at the same time this is where it's tricky because your brain is doing so much, you're making your brain like workout in a sense. So I'm saying in my brain, I am you and you are me and we are together. I am you and you or me or we are together. And I'm picturing, but not really picturing a flower opening up and I swear to you I would do this. And as the flower was opening up at my root chakra, so not even going through all the chakras, which is what you're supposed to do, you do this on repeat, you just keep going through until you get to that source state. I was there before my whole root chakra flower had opened up because it takes so much focus and my mantra is so long, it's like I don't know, it put me in a hypnotic state and I was getting these massive downloads and these almost visuals, but not visuals. Speaker A [00:20:43]: Like I saw this again, saw it's a knowingness. I have a knowingness of a person or whatever. So I see but don't see a girl with, like, black pigtails, Wednesday Adams kind of character. I had that come in and then something else and something else and I was like, Whoa. And I did that every night at the cottage and every morning I would like this meditation and it was so nice because I could hear the water and just like nature and then this meditation and it took me there so quickly. So if you're looking for a way to access that part of your mind, I feel like you need to make your brain do two things at once. Like patting your head and rubbing your stomach kind of thing. So you're either, like, picturing something or trying to feel something and repeating something at the same time. Speaker A [00:21:34]: And if you're not repeating something, you should be listening to something that's repeating something. Like drum beats, singing bowls, something repetitive over and over again while doing something else with your brain. And then your brain you're shutting your monkey mind off. You cannot think about your to do list. You can only do this one thing or two things, I should say. And then, because that monkey minds is gone, it takes you to source and you're bada, Bing. Badaboom. You're an open vessel to amazingness. Speaker A [00:22:05]: So that was the meditation technique I wanted to share with you that I learned when I was away. And also when I was away, I was reading Tyler Henry's second book. I think it's the second book here and hereafter. I think it's really I really enjoy what he has to say about a lot of things, especially about The Secret and Manifesting, that kind of stuff. We have very similar viewpoints in that manifesting isn't just about saying a mantra or whatever. It's the desire, but also the action. Like, there's two parts to it. But there's so much that Tyler Henry says that I connect with and just even his journey. Speaker A [00:22:54]: I'm almost 40, so it started much earlier than mine. But the dreams about his grandma dying or he has more of a knowingness about stuff and my visions, like my psychic stuff is all a knowingness. It's never visual except for the red balloon I saw. There are things and I feel I was just saying this to my friend this morning when I was on my walk this morning. I said I wonder if a lot of people with Aphantasia had some sort of psychic experience as a child and then completely shut things down. Because I know I've always been interested in the spiritual side of things, but I definitely turned it off. I think I come from a family that's not that they're totally disapproving or anything, but they're not really open to this stuff. So I feel like I would have closed up a bit. Speaker A [00:23:58]: I still feel very closed with them. That's like taking everything out of me to not I have to really shut myself down around them, basically. But I wonder if we the people. Okay, if you're listening to the podcast and you're still with me, thank you, because I'm going all over the place. But if you're still with me, you clearly probably have aphantasia, but you're also interested in the spiritual side of life. You probably maybe have premonitions or dreams that have made you question things or something has happened in your life that you're like, why you're questioning things? Is it because when you were little, maybe something happened? Maybe you saw a ghost when you were two and you're like, fuck this shit. I need to shut off my abilities, and that's why we even have aphantasia? I don't know. I definitely know that I feel connected to the other side, and I feel like I always have. Speaker A [00:25:19]: But as a kid, I wouldn't have understood it like I do now, and I think that I would have probably purposely shut it down. So that's just a theory. I have no way of actually knowing if that's true. But I do wonder if you have aphantasia and you're also very spiritual and interested in learning about this stuff and passionate about this stuff. I'm curious what your childhood looked like. If you want to get in contact with me, please feel free to email me. You can email me at rofocreative@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. Speaker A [00:26:01]: I feel like I gave a lot of random stuff in this podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. I'm going to stop for now. I feel like there was more to say, but it'll come in another podcast. I appreciate you listening and I hope you have a great day. And if you ever have any questions or want me to cover anything specific in this podcast, please let me know. I am all ears, and I love hearing from like minded people. So feel free to drop me an email. Speaker A [00:26:33]: Talk to you later. Bye.