Stillness 7-25: Many years ago I read about a well-known yogi who could put his hand around the side of a door, and, without looking inside with his eyes, he could “see” with his hand who was in the room. This made total sense to me, since I’ve always felt our five physical senses are more limiting than freeing. When we expand our awareness of them, we learn to experience energy—including physical matter itself— in many different ways. Clairtangency, or seeing with our sense of touch, is a beautiful way to develop our intuition and expand our consciousness.
Our sense of touch is as essential to our physical and emotional wellbeing as is food and water. If you have a pet as a companion, you know already how you can connect through the sense of touch. And when you’re emotionally touched by something, you’re moved in powerful ways. A human touch on your arm can flow with hundreds of different kinds of energy directly into your heart: it can feel loving, tender, questioning, or even as a warning. Without necessarily calling yourself a clairtangent, you are that. You sense the energy of touch intuitively.
Mediums often use clairtangency (also called psychometry) to read the energy of someone who has died. They’ll hold a piece of jewelry or item of clothing and be able to sense through touch who the person was, what they were like, where they are now, as well as often connecting with specific greetings or messages. The “gift” works like any “clair” sense, but whereas a clairvoyant may see the person who died and a clairaudient may hear them, a clairtangent will connect with them through their sense of touch.
Practice seeing through your fingertips rather than through your eyes. Choose something you love, like a crystal or lovely fabric. With your eyes closed, hold it in your hands, placing your fingertips tenderly on it. Create an imaginative thread from your fingertips to your heart, and from your heart center to your fingertips. Do not think about the object—your goal is simply to feel it and to expand your imagination into it. Then state, out loud if possible, what you are feeling.
Here’s another one: With your eyes closed, touch the bark of a tree and sense its energy. Don’t try to analyze it with your head, or try to interpret or understand what it feels like. Just connect with it through your fingertips and let its energy flow into your heart, then let your heart energy flow back out through your fingertips.
Or ask a friend to let you hold an object, without telling you what it is or who it belongs to. Practice intuiting its energy. Or practice putting your hands around the edge of a door before you look inside and imagine what your hand is seeing.
Clairtangency is about sheer experience. It’s not hard! There’s no right or wrong—there’s no success or failure in this work. The challenge is usually in trying to describe it. But it’s simply practice. The more you do it, the more your innate capability and sensitivity will develop through your fingertips. And it can be great fun. Grow and expand into your clairtangent self and experience the wisdom that lives in the tips of your fingers.