I see pictures for a living.

That's not the same as creating them; I can’t so much as draw a stick figure. Nor is it equivalent to collecting art or hanging photographs or scanning MRIs. It's a little more, well, complex than that.

I'm a clairvoyant. I see images in my mind that inform me about reality. If you were to ask me what you ate for breakfast, I might watch an entire filmstrip of you in a chef hat being Julia Child or Jean-Luc Albin (okay, he's a pastry guy, but you might be into croissants.) Based on your kitchen antics, I'd most likely make a pretty good guess at what you whipped up.

Or maybe I'd envision a hen and deduct that you ate eggs. I might even visualize a Starbuck's drive-through, which suits my idea of haute cuisine. Whatever the case, I perceive images that are literal, descriptive, or metaphorical; from the past, present, or potential future; or appear as shapes, colors, and symbols. From these, I construct and construe answers to various life questions, which provide the fodder for my work as an energy healer, intuitive consultant, and author.

I've shared images with more than thirty thousand individuals and countless groups. That's a lot of pictures—and questions, which preceded my answers. These questions constitute life's major concerns, which always fall into one of three categories: relationship, destiny (work), and balance (health). See if you can think of something important that doesn't edge into one or several of these baskets.

Will I ever get married? Do I have a soul mate? Is s/he having an affair? Are affairs always bad? Do I have spiritual guides? Did Atlantis ever exist? What happens during miscarriage? Abortion? How do I deal with an abusive partnership? Are there ghosts? Do animals have souls? You guessed it; these are RELATIONSHIP questions.

What's my purpose? Is it bad to go bankrupt? Did I ever live before? How might past lives affect my current life? What are my specific spiritual gifts? Why we there so many people on this planet right now? How can I make more money? Will I ever win the lottery? Is peace on earth possible? Here we are in the land of DESTINY.

Why am I sick? Why is there illness on this planet? Can entities cause problems? What are the keys to being healthier? How do I deal with stuck emotions? Bad beliefs? Can I ever really become who I want to be? Here we are in BALANCE.

In my book, Everyday Clairvoyant: Extraordinary Answers to Finding Love, Destiny, and Balance in Your Life, I share the most burning, typical, and stellar questions I've heard, such as the ones listed. I provide a summative response, crafted from twenty-five years in my trade as a clairvoyant. I also talk about what being a clairvoyant means in my "real life," for that's where I show up every day: at home, in relationships, going grocery shopping, mothering, and even cleaning the house. I share all of it to underscore one main point:

Even though my profession isn't listed on IRS forms—or any other, for that matter, I'm no different than you.

What does that mean but that YOU are as "weird" as I AM.

Words like ESP, supernatural, channeling, telepathy, psychic, shamanic, empathic, clairvoyant, and paranormal aren't only descriptive of "different people," but of ALL people. We are ALL intuitively gifted. We are ALL amazingly, brilliantly, and sometimes annoyingly, psychic.

We are all born with psychic abilities. "Psychic" simply refers to the ability to gather, decipher, and generate information that moves quicker than the speed of light.

While a lot of people don't like to admit that they are psychic—or even see a benefit to it— it's a great thing to be. When moving really fast, you don't have to obey the traffic cops of the Universe. You can slip through walls, bypassing obstacles. You can enjoy a cup of coffee before it's even served, which is pretty important if you need an instant shot of caffeine. A thought doesn't even need to halt at a stop sign the way that sensory, "earth bound" information does. You can receive knowledge from the future, awareness from the past, and make it all work for you right now.

Whether or not we know it, our spirits communicate through psychic activity much more often than through sensory means. It's just easier. If you know something important is going to happen tomorrow, why not get ready today? If you can disappear a tumor before it happens, why not play doctor right now? If you can "reach out and touch someone" through psychic e-mail versus sensory snail mail, why not go for the time advantage?

Clairvoyance is only one of the many psychic gifts available to us all. When teaching classes, I share that there are eleven major universal gifts and a twelfth that is unique to each person. Each gift is housed in a chakra, an energy center that connects the psychic with the sensory.

I work with a twelve-chakra system, which is described in my book, The Complete Book of Chakra Healing, but I also reference these energy centers and corresponding gifts in Everyday Clairvoyant, for one main reason: the key to enjoying satisfying relationships, living on destiny, and being balanced, is to uncover and embrace your true spiritual gifts.

Which gift is incipient to you? Scan this list, which outlines a couple of ways to label each gift and corresponding chakra, and see if anything pops out:

• First chakra: Physical empathy and manifesting
• Second chakra: Feeling empathy and creativity
• Third chakra: Mental empathy (clairsentience) and administrative ability
• Fourth chakra: Relational empathy and healing
• Fifth chakra: Verbal empathy (clairaudience, channeling, telepathy) and communicating
• Sixth chakra: Clairvoyance, visioning, strategizing
• Seventh chakra: Spiritual empathy and prophecy
• Eighth chakra: Shamanism
• Ninth chakra: Soul empathy and harmonizing (representing world causes)
• Tenth chakra: Nature empathy and sensitivity to the environment
• Eleventh chakra: Force sympathy and leadership
• Twelfth chakra: Unique to you

Know that whatever gifts you have, they aren't to be used in a vacuum or "solo."Our strongest gifts—each and every one of them—support our destiny or spiritual purpose. You could say, "They help us help others." Besides being a clairvoyant, I am also a communicator. I therefore combine my sixth chakra clairvoyance with a fifth chakra communication skill in order to teach and write about my vision for the world.

Our gifts also impact our relationships. Being both visual and verbal, I relate to others these ways. I notice how someone wears a hat, eats a sandwich, moves his or her head. I respond to what I perceive. And I talk. A lot. Not for me, the strong, silent type. I’d be bored silly.

As well, our chakras and corresponding gifts affect our health. Each chakra is based in a bodily locale and connects to our physical self through a specific endocrine gland. As a fifth and sixth chakra person, I have to nourish the glands associated with these chakras: the thyroid and pituitary glands. If I don't, I'll get sick. I also participate in fifth and sixth chakra activities in order to burn off stress. For instance, movies are a great sixth chakra escape. Know what works for a fifth chakra person? Talking is a good start. (The problem is it's hard to combine these two without getting kicked out of a theatre.)

In the end, we can't separate ourselves from our gifts. The "paranormal" isn't something outside of ourselves. We are "para" or beyond "normal" ALL the time. I might sit in a chair all day and see pictures for a living. But I also interweave my abilities—my psychic self—into and through everything about me.

Even my mothering.

My friends can testify to the fact that my youngest son would never have survived childhood if I didn't have "eyes in the back of my head." I think back to a remark made by a friend of mine after I'd been on the phone with her for a while.

"Did you know that you saved Gabe's life three times in the last few minutes?" She asked.

I pondered the question. I hadn't even seen Gabe for a while, although I did remember punctuating the house with a few "marching orders" called out to him, sight unseen.

"What do you mean? I asked.

"Well, first you told him to stop tying the dog's tail onto the curtain rod, which could have fallen off and beamed him. Then you kept him from playing Spiderman on the wall over the glass tabletop with all the sharp edges. Lastly you made sure he didn't turn the bathtub into a swimming pool and nosedive in."

I did do all that—from a different room, unconsciously tapping into my clairvoyance.

Having mastered the fine art of psychic mothering, I've set myself the goal of psychic housecleaning. Wouldn't it be grand, to imagine the house picked up and have it so? To envision the dogs' food bowls full, the guinea pig's cage scrubbed out, the cat litter changed, and presto?

I'll work on it and let you know when I've figured it out. Maybe I'll even invent a computer with psychic command functions or kitchen appliances that make the bread and bake it with a single thought. And perhaps I'll visualize something even more grand, like peace on earth. Because if I know anything, I know this:

Underneath it all, we are spirits, embodied so as to engage the everyday world toward a single, vital goal: We are here to create more love on this planet.

And we have the gifts to do it.