Someone asked me recently, “What does it mean to be a seer?” Admittedly I struggled with the answer. I realized that asking a seer what it means to be a seer is kind of like asking an athlete what it means to make a play, a musician what it means to play by ear, or a painter how they know what brush strokes will illuminate their art.

My internal response was, “Umnnnn, I just do it.” In that brief moment of “duh” I knew something more needed to be shared, but I didn’t have the words. Being a seer is paradoxical, both simple and complex, solid and dynamic, varied and specific. The senses are heightened and aligned with less obvious aspects of a moment in time. That is what makes it mysterious, shadowy, and curious.

Trying to break down a paradox is like trying to solve a Japanese Koan or explain calculus through interpretive dance. I have sometimes wondered what is the point? Years ago, when I still worked in health care I had a dream about receiving a delivery to my office at the hospital. In my dream, the delivery man was wearing a bright pink shirt. The next day at work I received a delivery at my office from a man wearing a bright pink shirt. And I wondered then, what is the point of this seeming premonition?

“Being a seer, like being an athlete, musician or artist is part gift and part work.”

I’ve since learned that the point is often a moving target and may be more about how the receiver chooses to interpret the information than anything else. After a few days of shaking my head about the seeming pointlessness of the pink shirt delivery, I chose to see it as a discerning opportunity. There is a broad spectrum of seeing. While the pink shirt premonition may be on the mundane end of the spectrum and Sacred seeing on the far other end, I believe all seers need to learn the art of discerning.

Being a seer, like being an athlete, musician or artist is part gift and part work. A gift is only as good as it’s practiced. And as peak performance neuro-coach Dr. Krueger says, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect.” As I see it the art of discerning is possibly the biggest practice of being a seer.

Let’s discern another example. As a child, it was common for me to see, hear or know things that weren’t obvious to others. I write about this experience in my memoir, “Orchid of Fate.” It was back in the ’70s a time before seatbelts mattered to anyone. My brother RJ and I were crouched down behind the seat playing “Who could become the smallest?” Mom was busy driving us through the city of Saskatoon when all of a sudden I saw an image in my mind of a cow walking down the middle of the street and I wondered, what if a cow were to be walking down the street?”

Moments later Mom exclaimed, “Oh my goodness there are loose cows all over the road! One is walking right down the middle!” RJ and I bolted up from behind the seat to see the back end of a lone cow swaggering down the middle of the city street and a farmer rushing to get his herd back onto the truck bed.

Hmmm, even as a kid this “coincidence” piqued my curiosity. Crouched down behind the back seat, there was no way for me to see the cows, yet I had thought it and seen the image of cows on the road in my mind before Mom said it. How did that happen?

This is the gift part of being a seer. There was no effort or work required on my part to receive the information. If it was the only “seeing” event ever I might have dismissed it, but this kind of seeing was consistent for me as a kid and has continued throughout my adult life. What I noticed then and have continued to hone is timing. In my kid way of understanding, I realized that the event already existed, the cows were loose on the road and I was somehow able to notice that without physically seeing them with my eyes (I am also visually impaired at a low level). I remember coming to the early conclusion that events may have already happened and I was merely stepping into that knowing. Many years later I learned that physics confirms there is only one time and place and we are all privy to it. Here is what Wiki has to say, The Problem of Time.

From my experiences of “seeing” the perspective of no time or only one time and place makes the most sense to me. Whether a seer is classified as a medium (seer of the past) or a psychic (seer of the future) or an intuitive (seer of what is), there is essentially only one place of seeing and that is in the present. If you imagine “seeing” is like listening to a song, and the present moment is every note, octave, lyric, instrument and time signature of that song, a seer is a person who knows one or more aspects of the song with ease. If the seer practices their gift, they, like a musician, may eventually come to know all aspects of the song with ease.

As I see it discerning and practice are the work of a seer. A seer needs to first discern through their senses and nervous systems what’s inside of themselves. Is the moment the sound of a treble clef flute sung in c minor by a young man in the Viena Boys Choir or something different? Seeing the cow and seeing the pink shirt delivery man were both internal ways of seeing, but they had different discernable qualities to them, understanding those differences takes practice. The way information is discerned determines how it will be interpreted and then what may or may not be done with it. My approach to seeing is not carte blanche. Not all seers agree on this point.

I don’t know if seeing is synonymous with healing, but many seers use their gifts to help others and lend to healing. For example, predicting catastrophe like the falling of the twin towers or working with police forces to find missing persons. There are seers who can communicate with the dead and medical intuitives like Carolyn Myss and Mona Lisa Shultz who give detailed health information over the phone. My form of seeing, what I call Sacred seeing, is noticing the difference between conditioned knowing and heart centered or authentic knowing. It is the difference between what I call head talk and heart knowing. It is connected with the sacred elements of earth, water, fire, air, sound and light AND how pure or polluted these are in the subtle body mind soul continuum. Sometimes the information seems random, sometimes I say stuff that’s spot on but ill-timed (what I call hoof in mouth disease:), sometimes it’s about a person’s body, thought patterns, Self-talk, Self-states, it’s a range. As best as I can I try to use Sacred seeing to help people live their best lives (me too) and to make the world a better place through universal love and the power of the heart.

Like a dog can smell cancer, a seer is someone with heightened senses who is attuned to non-local spectrums of the “now.” After 50 some odd years of practice I now consider seeing both a gift and a curse. At times the process is exhausting, at other times (like when we get to the heart of the matter) it is elating. Most of all I’ve come to realize now that the information I receive isn’t random or purposeless. Since it’s mostly related to how we can be kinder, healthier, more compassionate, joyous and humanitarian people, I now call it a gift. Sacred seeing has a sacred purpose, it’s just taken me a long time and a lot of trial and error to see that (lol pun intended).

Through this discernment process, I have found the practice of seeing, like the art of healing to be very much about timing. Timing is that final piece of alignment necessary for change or transformation. Without trying to prove this point, take a moment to notice when you have made significant healing or transformational changes in your life. Now look at all the variables that led up to the moment, was it that you got new information? …or that your symptoms were much worse? Were you older or wiser?... How much of your healing transformation would you attribute to timing?

I think the hallmark of a helpful seer in a healing profession is the ability to act kindly and at the right time. Offering information unkindly or just because it is there may not be helpful at all. Worse, it could block healing or cause harm. When a recipient isn’t ready for the information, even if it’s true, it will fall on deaf ears. If it’s shared unkindly there may be a backlash or rebellion of pushing the information away while also shooting the messenger (been there). I have listened to many seers interviewed over the years and if there is one commonality they seem to share, it is that their deliveries are straight to the point, assumed to be timely and sometimes this approach feels unkind.

Whether a person is a seer or not, living well as a human being is complex. It requires insight, resilience, understanding, patience and empathy, to name a few qualities. It is meeting the dance of energies within and between people with grace. The gifts of a seer or healer are only as helpful as the receiver's interpretation, delivery and timing.

Learning the art of delivery is paradoxically a rare form of non-interpreting, or seeing what is. It is communication that transcends the bias of age, gender, education, culture and creed while resonating with kindness. In the divine art of timing the beauty of seeing combines the gift with the work at the right time similar to miksang photography. And whether a seer in a healing role, an athlete making the play, musician playing by ear or a painter illuminating their art; it is in Einstein’s words, “the most beautiful and deepest experience we can have.. the sense of the mysterious… to sense that behind any experience there is something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and simplicity are but a feeble reflection of its magnificence”…