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September/October 2006 Featured Stories
The Key: An Interview with Echo Bodine

by Connie Hill

Echo Bodine

Echo Bodine is a world renown psychic, teacher, healer and author. She hosts Intuitive Living, a radio show on www.fm107.fm. Her latest book, The Key, is a guide to help you develop your psychic gifts. And according to Echo we all have them.

Connie: How did you get started as a psychic?

Echo: My family was sitting around the dinner table and my brother went downstairs to play on his drum set. He was just learning to play and was pretty rough. That night he was clanging away and then started to play some really great music. About a minute later my brother came running up the stairs, hysterical. He said a figure came up behind him, grabbed his hands and played the “nice” music, then floated out the door.

My mom was in a spiritual group at the time and one of the women in the group had mentioned going to a psychic. When she called, the psychic said she had been expecting my mom’s call. “Yes, Mrs. Bodine, your son has just met his guardian angel, Dr. Fitzgerald.” (Dr. Fitzgerald was a drummer when he was alive.)

About a week later, we went to see her. She was not a gypsy or spooky like I was picturing, but looked like someone’s grandmother. In the reading, she told me that I was born with all four of the psychic abilities and the gift to heal. She told me that I would write several books in the area of spiritual phenomena and I would travel throughout the world. I was a mainstream Presbyterian, so part of me was listening and part thought she was wacky.

Two months later, my mom and I began taking classes from a spiritualist minister in the Twin Cities. My mom and I went out of curiosity at first, but ended up continuing for two years. Then I went off to college. I did things I wanted to do and resisted the plan. After three years of college, I went to barber school and was a barber for four years. My abilities were getting stronger and people started to call me the psychic barber. But I had a car accident and was not able to hold my arms up for very long. Finally, my doctors said I needed to find another career. I knew it was time to come out of the psychic closet and I’ve been doing readings, teaching classes and writing books ever since, just like the psychic said.

ch: Talk a bit about the four types of psychic gifts.

eb: First we have clairvoyance, which is the gift of seeing. It’s the most common gift. With this gift we get our information in the form of pictures. It’s like a dream, but you’re awake. The information comes in to your third eye, but it doesn’t stay there. It sort of rotates around your head, which can be confusing. What that means is that I can be sitting here and if a spirit comes up behind me, I can see it even though it is behind me. It just means that you see things on a different dimension. You see it happening all around you.

Clairaudience is the gift of hearing, which means that we have psychic ears, but when you talk about the gift of hearing, it throws people because you don’t hear an audible voice. We receive thoughts from spirit guides, deceased loved ones, other spirits out there, and our job as a clairaudient is to learn how to discern the difference between our thoughts and these others, because they all sound the same.

The next "clair" is clairsentience (which most people have), which is the gift of sensing. They use their body to sense what is going on. The problem for clairsentience is that they can get physically sick because they can absorb so much of what is going on around themselves. They need to learn how to protect themselves so they don’t feel so vulnerable all the time. A lot of people on this planet have clairsentience. It’s a bummer because it can physically affect them and cause all kinds of physical problems.

The last clair is clairgustance, which is the gift of smell. Let’s say there’s going to be a fire and the psychic may pick it up by smelling the fire before it happens. The way it works the best for me is when a deceased loved one comes to visit and they project smells to me. One lady projected the smell of fresh baked bread. I told the client that a lady was saying hello. She said she was an aunt and she was sending the smell of fresh baked bread. The client said, “She always baked us a loaf of fresh baked bread when she would come to visit us.”

ch: Why should people want to unlock their psychic abilities?

eb: Let’s talk about intuition. Intuition is different from psychic abilities. I always teach it because if we are going to use our psychic abilities we need to have a good relationship with our intuition. It can help us to discern and it’s our absolute best helper when we are doing a psychic reading. It helps us know if we are interpreting something correctly or if we are giving the right information. I want people to be able to rely on their intuition to see if they are in an unsafe situation. Let’s get everyone trained so they can rely on their thoughts and pictures and can see the difference between truth and fear.

Echo Bodine will be at New Renaissance on Friday, November 3 and Saturday, November 4. Call 503-224-4929 to register or visit www.echobodine.com. Connie Hill works at New Renaissance Bookshop and is a local astrologer. She can be reached at 971-244-0567 ext. 2 or gmnite@yahoo.com.