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Tales of a Reluctant Psychic (c) by Colleen Rae Read the Introduction Endorsements Thanks Click the icon to download a free PDF version of Colleen's Rae's book

Colleen Rae grew up with a psychic grandmother in a family that considered her "knowings" perfectly normal. She inherited her grandmother's gift for second sight, but it didn't sit comfortably with her. Over the years she both suppressed her own abilities and developed the psychic talents in others, including her now-grown son. Finally, she came to see why the psychic side really mattered - a recognition that brought her to the Rhine Reseach Center, where she learned ot come out of the closet as a psychic and empath. In Tales of a Reluctant Psychic, she shares her journey and talks of what parapsychology has to offer those who, like her, always wanted to ask, 'What's it good for, anyway?'

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TALES OF A RELUCTANT PSYCHIC

excerpts from BODY ORACLE

"A THOUSAND THANK YOU'S, for your book. I'm not all the way through it, but each page provides affirmations and confirmations: "Ohmygod, I'm not crazy, she experienced this, too" 'So THAT'S how it works!!!' . . . . You are a wonderful writer and you did many people a great service by writing this book." Beth Dennis, BFA, NTS, LMT Endorsements for TALES OF A RELUCTANT PSYCHIC __________________ Larry Dossey, MD, Author HEALING BEYOND THE BODY TALES OF A RELUCTANT PSYCHIC is a rollicking ride through the world of parapsychology or psi, as told by an insider. If you've ever wondered whether or not psi exists, what it's like to be psychic, or what the world of psi research is like, you will find this book fascinating. TALES OF A RELUCTANT PSYCHIC could forever change your views of the spectacular possibilities of consciousness. __________________ Sherry Suib Cohen, Author of 19 books including LOOKING FOR THE OTHER SIDE Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, TALES OF A RELUCTANT PSYCHIC will open your mind to a realm of infinite possibility – believe it. With great intelligence and humor, Colleen Rae allows us to eavesdrop on her experiences with parapsychology at the prestigious and academically pristine Rhine Research Center. Rae was never thrilled with her gift for second sight, but in a fascinating, can’t-put-it-down true story, she learns to trust her empathic and psychic ability--kicking and screaming all the way. TALES allows us to see grace in synchronicity and hear new, hopeful sounds in a suspicious, cacophonous, don’t-believe-anything world. I loved the lyric truthfulness of this book--and Rae’s respect for science and logic. She gives me good reason to trust a sixth sense and put my own skepticism on hold. __________________ Gail Ferguson, professional psychic and author of CRACKING THE INTUITION CODE Here’s a prize! Colleen Rae’s personal tug-of-war involves her impressive psychic ability. Staged against the rigorously analytic backdrop of the Summer Study Program atthe renowned Rhine Research Center, her discoveries will help you benefit from your own psychic experiences.
The Introduction to TALES OF A RELUCTANT PSYCHIC © Colleen Mariah Rae
Back in the 1970s, I used to sit back-to-back with friends, and while I'd look at a page from a Norman Rockwell art book, the other person would try to receive the image psychically. I never met anyone who couldn't do this. Even my famous scientist husband, who chaired the department of astrophysics and astronomy at the University of Chicago. I still have the first image I telepathically sent him in 1979, a flier from KLM airlines that showed windmills with lattice-patterned blades against a pale blue sky. Before turning around, he described a lattice-work fence and a lot of sky. He couldn’t contain his excitement when he finally saw the image I'd been sending him. If he could do that, he wondered, what else could he do? That one experiment propelled us forward into the many psychic "science projects" that spanned our years together. None of this was odd to me. I'd grown up with a psychic grandmother in a family that considered her "knowings"; perfectly normal. I remember when our little Pomeranian dog died after she'd developed peritonitis from eating a used bandage my little brother had left on the floor. When the telephone rang, we were all sitting around the kitchen table, grieving this pet who'd been a part of our lives for so many years. My mother said, "That will be your grandmother" And we knew that, too. "What's wrong, Vi?" she asked before my mother even finished saying hello. Although we lived in San Diego and my grandmother lived in Fargo, North Dakota, she knew. I realize now that we would have found it odd if she hadn't known. And this was how I grew up, knowing that all this was normal.I got my grandmother's gift for second sight, but it didn't sit comfortably with me. Because I am my culture – enamored of science – and because my mind tends to be an overly analytical one, over the years I suppressed my psychic ability unmercifully, pushing it back until it festered in me, raging at it when it exploded forth with information I didn't want to know. And why not? Too often, it would tell me things like how my first husband was making love at that very moment with my friend under a bridge. When I confronted him with my knowing later, he wasn't surprised I knew, but he corrected me. They’d been under a pier at the beach.Why? I railed. Why did I have to know these things? Why couldn't I just be oblivious like other people to all these things I really didn't want to know? I felt cursed. But as much as I'd rant against the knowings and try to push them down, they'd throw their offerings on the shore of my consciousness again and again. For years, I had this love-hate relationship with the psychic side of me. Yet – just so I wouldn't feel so alone – I worked hard to develop the psychic in others, especially my son. From the time he was conceived in 1971, we communicated telepathically.I had come to believe that the reason so many people didn't know they were psychic, too, was that they'd never been trained to "name" their psychic knowings. I likened it to something I'd learned in a college philosophy class in 1969 from a professor who'd just returned from doing Peace Corps work in Africa. He said that when people from primitive tribes who'd had no contact with the modern world were shown a photograph of themselves, they couldn't see anything more than shapes in shades of gray. Their brains couldn't interpret what they were looking at. Much the same thing happened for people who were blind from birth because of cataracts and then because of advances in surgery had had the cataracts removed. They couldn't see because the part of the brain responsible for making sense out of the information coming in hadn't yet been developed. We all learn to make sense out of what we see. This, I reasoned, must be what it’s like for people who didn't grow up with a psychic grandmother in a world that thought all this was normal. And I set about to correct all that – often like some underground agent, fighting a war that no one had declared. Although my undergraduate work had been in psychology with a “creativity studies” focus, a stroke of luck (or destiny) had rerouted me into one of the first creative writing programs in the country. I earned my M.A. in English Language and Literature with a specialty in creative writing from the University of Chicago in 1981. After teaching college for several years, the University of Chicago accepted me into the cognitive psychology graduate program. For various reasons, though, I didn't take them up on their offer. I chose writing and the teaching of writing instead. Over the years, I came to focus on creative writing classes and workshops for adults and had published numerous articles and two books. One – my Movies in the Mind: How to Build a Short Story – became a Writer's Digest Book Club "classic." I'd also created the nationally distributed Santa Fe Literary Review. My move to Los Angeles in 1997 had given me a plum for all my years in the creative writing trenches: the opportunity to teach in the prestigious UCLA Extension Writer's Program. But all that had served as cover for my "real work." Under the guise of teaching creative writing, I'd been able to use my psychic ability to help my students bring their best work forward. I'd also for a decade or more been exploring people's capacity for knowing the thoughts and feelings of others. I'd taught my students how to "get into the body" of their characters (and by extension, their friends and family). In Movies in the Mind, I called this ability "The Seventh Sense." Since I'd written that book, I'd developed more empathic techniques, which I talked about in articles in both the 1997 Writer's Digest Novel and Short Story Writer's Market and an article in Writer's Journal. For me, this grew out of a desire to help people see that they do know what others feel if they but pay attention to their own bodies and thoughts. My students would often come to me in private and confess to "odd" psychic events that seemed to intensify as they immersed themselves in my techniques of creative writing. And this is how I lived my life, railing against my knowings, training others how to recognize theirs. In 1997, this see-saw I’d been riding got stuck.In February of that year I'd moved to Los Angeles to be with a new partner, Tag – a total skeptic who had no one "like me" in his well-established social circle. To teach at UCLA, I'd had to sign a "non-compete" clause that kept me from teaching even my private classes; unfortunately my UCLA classes would not start until the fall, many months down the line. On top of that, Western States Arts Federation for whom I'd worked as a private consultant for creative writing clients lost its funding. Over a period of a couple months, I found myself literally shut off from every outlet for my psychic ability. Talk about a light hidden under a bushel. That time turned into one of those dark nights of the soul, where one comes face to face with oneself. I'd never felt so alone – or so lonely – in my life. But as Kahlil Gibran wrote, "A pearl is a temple built by pain around a grain of sand." In that isolation, I started to see the truth. I had been at war with myself. In the past, I'd always been able to project my skeptic outward, which had allowed me to battle it in others. Tag hadn't given me that opportunity for long. He had succumbed to my teachings, and I quickly discovered that he was the better kind of skeptic than I – open-minded, able to change and also able to point out to me where I was entrenched. I also found out that the skeptic in me was the worst kind: a zealot who only saw all this psychic stuff as "silly." As I wrote at the time, "It's becoming very clear to me that it's me who thinks I'm a kook. I'm the one who's not sure of all this." I finally came to see that the scientific or Zeitgeist-comfortable side of me had been waging war with my own empathic and psychic ability. And vice versa. As Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." That's when my adventure really began. I set out on a quest to pull these two sides of me together. Given my background in and love of science, it seemed that immersing myself in a scientific world that studied people like me might be the way to go.An Internet search eventually brought me to the site of the famous Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina, and to an email correspondence with Dr. Richard Broughton, the director of the Rhine's Parapsychology Institute. I'd known about the work of the center's founder, Joseph Banks Rhine, since I was a kid. How could I not? His card-guessing deck of circles, stars, waves, squares and crosses was as much a part of my 50s childhood as the new Rock and Roll music my father played. To the American public, J. B. Rhine had made the study of the psychic realm a science, coining the words extra-sensory perception (ESP) and being given the word parapsychology by Duke University's psychology program when they banished his work from their midst. Rhine continued as a professor at Duke, heading his world-famous lab. In the 70s I'd thought of transferring to Duke, but creativity studies won out over parapsychology. (All those card-guessing studies sounded awfully boring.) As it turned out, had I transferred to Duke, I would not have found J.B. Rhine there. Richard Broughton caught me up. “As far as our relationship with Duke goes, we are the heir to the famous Duke University Parapsychology Lab which was part of Duke from 1930 until J.B. Rhine's retirement in 1965 when he basically took it with him. Since then we have been operating as an independent non-profit educational and scientific research organization. We primarily do parapsychology research with a small staff, and in June and July we operate what we call the Summer Study Program which is an intensive eight-week program aimed at would-be researchers or academics who want to get a good grounding in parapsychology. Along with that we do what most small non-profits do, try to raise money to carry on. Being famous does not exempt us from that need." Tag and I had been looking for a place him to retire. I'd always "known" I would one day live in North Carolina, though I'd never been there. A couple of times before I met Tag, I'd almost moved, sight unseen. We visited the Triangle Area in the summer of 1998 just to check it out. Within five days, we'd signed a contract for a house. Two months later, at the end of October, we moved to North Carolina. The next week, I showed up at the Rhine.When I came to the old white house across from Duke’s East Campus for my first visit in November 1998, I was still battling. But I think intuitively I realized that at the Rhine I had found a place where both sides of me could just be. A place where a healing, an integration just might take place.I started coming to the weekly Research Meetings each Thursday; soon I became a subject in some of the lab's ESP studies. And then the Summer Study Program (SSP) beckoned. I almost chickened out. But I went, and I loved every minute of it. Even the hard times when I was up against an emotional wall – and that was an awful lot of the time.And that's how this book had its beginning.As I recorded my experiences day by day, I began to see how my life to that point had been very akin to a closeted gay person who could only share his or her true self with a few select people. The lie this creates produces an enormous tension. With my family and friends, I could usually be me. Outside of that protective circle, I hid myself for fear of being ostracized from the intelligent world that meant so much to me.The toll could only be measured once I began to "come out." That summer of starting to go public released a tension inside me that I'd never knew existed. It also made me sad for all those years lost, years I could have been more fully exploring and developing the abilities that I finally came to see as gifts without the quotation marks I used to put around that word.That summer and my next five years with the Rhine also made me see how this battle was more than my own personal struggle. It’s our culture’s struggle as well. During the SSP, I saw that people who had never had psychic experiences (and often were highly skeptical about such things) could actually have them readily and easily in laboratory situations. But as a student from Harvard named Sam said, "There’s a suffocating ignorance of the general public about the field and the phenomena that makes it hard to describe to your friends what you did for the summer." When people come out of the closet, they often become just as open as they were once closed, telling everyone they meet, "This is me. This is who I really am." For me the explanation for this behavior is simple. When all that one is gets confined in too small a space for so long, when it's let out, it just feels like it could fill up the whole world. My journey of coming out of that closet fills these pages. They were the start of my finally saying, "This is me. This is who I really am."