By Jeremy Rick
During the first half of March Whatcom Community College’s Community and Continuing Education (CCE) program offered a chance for people to discover and explore their psychic abilities in a course entitled “Developing Your Psychic Intelligence.”
“We’re always looking for course trends. What’s ‘hot’ now?” said Linda Howson, the CCE program specialist. “We’ve offered a class for many years called ‘Awaken Your Intuition,’” she said, adding that the class was quite popular and inspired the CCE program to create the class about psychic intelligence.
The course, which met Mondays between March 3 and March 17, was led by Marie Matteson, a licensed massage practitioner and professional psychic who has been an instructor with the CCE program since 2005.
Matteson said she introduced students to the topic with the book “Psychic Intelligence” by Terry and Linda Jamison, identical twins who gained public attention through their predictions of future events such as the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
In their book, the Jamison sisters describe psychic abilities as products of intuition, the ability to sense things through means other than the five physical senses alone.
“A lot of moms are like psychics on steroids,” Matteson said, because they often “know” things about their children that they did not perceive directly.
Matteson described this as “gut feelings taken to the next level.”
During course sessions, Matteson led students through exercises to help eradicate mental inhibitions that often prevent people from utilizing their intuition, she said.
One of these exercises involved “putting a thought, a feeling, or a color into a cotton-ball and passing it along,” she said. The person to whom the cotton-ball was passed then guessed what the previous person put into it.
The key to this exercise is “getting out of your own head and tuning in” to the world around you, Matteson said. There is no way for a person to rationalize their guess, she said, they must simply intuit it.
“Everyone is intuitive. Some people have stronger intuitive abilities than others because they use it like a muscle,” she said.
By using her intuition and tuning in to the world around her, Matteson said she has been developing her psychic intelligence since she was 4-years-old.
“I can remember hearing a distinctly different voice, and that started at age four,” she said.
Over time, the voices she heard began telling her information about things she did not otherwise see or hear about, which did not always turn out well, she said.
“I started getting in trouble for knowing things because I started saying them,” she said. “I knew in 5th grade that my teacher was pregnant. I didn’t see anything, I just knew. It was like the thought just popped into my head.”
Because Matteson could not explain how she knew, she said she was accused of eavesdropping and punished.
That was the “pivotal point where I decided ‘I’m not saying anything,’” she said.
While Matteson kept quiet about her intuitive abilities for quite some time after this, she eventually began incorporating them into her holistic medical practices, she said.
“We are moving into an age of new acceptance of things we previously couldn’t explain or has been limited by society,” she said, adding “there are psychics in every culture,” but they are judged differently.
“Our society tends to want to put labels on things. Our brains want to put labels on things. Our brains want to categorize things,” Matteson said. It is because of this, she said, that intuition and the scientifically inexplicable nature of its workings have been labeled as “psychic,” causing much skepticism around the topic.
Matteson also said that the human brain is incapable of processing all of the information it receives from the environment, and people must choose which information to pay attention to.
“Intuition is the general perception of all of it,” she said. Humans live in time and space, Matteson said, but there is a “different dimension with no time” or space. Intuition allows an individual to tune in to this other dimension and perceive information not available in this dimension, she said.
“I recommend people go sit in nature and just be,” Matteson said, because this allows them to perceive the intuitive thoughts and feelings that normally go unnoticed in everyday life.
While this is just one example of how to get in touch with one’s intuition, Matteson said to “figure out what works for you and use it to your advantage.”
Howson said students taking CCE courses are surveyed afterwards, and future courses depend on their reviews. Classes about intuition have received positive reviews in the past, she said, and the CCE program will likely offer more on the topic.
Course offerings in this field can be found on Whatcom’s Community and Continuing Education website under “current classes” and “self-exploration.”
