EPISODE 041: The Joy Of Scrying with Ann Théato

• What scrying means
• How you can scry using anything
• A brief history of scrying in history & legend
• How to use a crystal ball
• How to scry using water
• The importance of creating sacred space
• What Pareidolia is
• Techniques and methods scrying
  
  

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to episode 41 of the Psychic Matters podcast with me, your host, Ann Théato.  

I’m so proud to say that this podcast has moved up by .5% and is now one of the top 2% most popular shows out of 2,599,307 podcasts globally, as ranked by Listen Score.  It’s a fantastic achievement and I have you, the listeners to thank.  I’m so grateful to you for making this happen by simply enjoying the podcast and listening to it regularly. 

If you are able to do so, I would love it if you could leave a written review on iTunes or Stitcher, as it helps the podcast move up the podcast charts.  Thank you to all those who have left incredible reviews so far – we’ve had 66 five star reviews – I am so grateful to all of you and thrilled to read about how Psychic Matters is touching your lives and helping you understand your psychic and mediumistic gifts. 

I just think it is really wonderful for us all as lightworkers in the world, to have a strong and ever-growing platform, where we can safely talk about the work we are doing, listen to the advice and guidance of experts in the field and investigate where spirituality meets science. We were Number 12 in Japan last week!  I was so delighted, I can’t tell you, so if you would like to help Psychic Matters get to the top of the charts – I mean,  wouldn’t it be great to come in at number one? – the way to do it, is to leave a written review on iTunes or Stitcher!

In this episode, it is with great joy, that I talk to you about my passion for scrying.

Scrying means to reveal or perceive that which is not known to the conscious mind. How do we do it? We do it by using our intuitive knowing. Our gut feeling our clairvoyant vision. Clairvoyance means clear seeing and scrying is a clairvoyant method of seeing images, significant messages or visions and relaying information about that which we see.

‘Scry’ comes from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘descry’, which means to see and since time immemorial, our ancestors from every culture across the globe, have used the ancient art of scrying to help them gain personal guidance, prophecy or inspiration via imagery, symbols and messages. But time is not linear and since the energy of all things can be felt, perceived and read – we can tell not only the future, but the past and the present as well. 

You can scry using ANYTHING – a dark mirror – I mean you can get specific scrying mirrors actually, you can use the surface of a bowl of water, candles or crystals, a crystal ball, seer stone, that is S-E-E-R, it  is a bit like half a crystal ball and one side of it is flat and polished and you can read from the surface.  You could scry using a hag stone (see episode 11 of this podcast), you could use clouds, entrails if you have got them to hand, smoke, sand, stones, leaves, feathers, tree canopies, wallpaper, tea leaves and for those medium friends whom I have had the utmost pleasure of sitting with in a bar with after a hard day’s psychic training – crisps and beer froth!  Yes friends, you can scry with anything!

Going back in time, legend and history, scrying using water was popularised by Nostradamus – he was a French seer, astrologer and physician, and he used a bowl of water in order to see images of future events. Mirrors of highly polished metal were consulted in ancient China and in 3000 BC in China, eggs would have been cracked and their contents spread around and interpreted.  In Egypt young boys were chosen to look into vases filled with oil.  Merlin, King Arthur’s magician, used his magical mirror to warn the king about plots and potential invasions. In ancient Greece the Oracles of Delphi gazed into special springs to gain predictions. Vulcan-Roman god of Fire, fashioned a mirror that showed past, present, and future. The Greeks used bronze mirrors to see into the future and in Medieval times, witches’ mirrors were used, Black shiny mirrors and in Ancient Rome – practitioners of scrying were called specularii

Scrying is something I’ve been doing an awful lot of lately, and it’s something that the more I do, the more I see.  And I’m particularly prone to doing this in the hot tub at the gym. I tend to sit there in the hot bubbles after my swim, and of course, I don’t have my glasses on.  Surprised I can find the hot tub actually as I’m so myopic,  But anyway…  that doesn’t matter when you’re scrying it doesn’t matter because it’s almost done with the inward eye to you use something as a point of focus and then you go inwards to see the inward visions on the inward eye.  So I will sit in my little hot tub and I will stare at the trees or the bushes outside and I will initially begin by seeing nothing.  Not because I’m myopic. I mean, I can see the trees and bushes outside just not in detail.  So initially I will begin to see a face staring back at me (or a shape or an object) and this face is usually a shape made from shadows – the light and dark of the tree itself.  But the more I stare at that face and the more I just look at the face, allow myself to see beyond the face, that face begins to change, and the face becomes another face, and then another face begins to appear and face after face after face comes forward and forward like a very fast flickering movie.  Mostly they are faces I don’t recognise and then every now and again a face will come forward of somebody that I know from the spirit world. I’m open to anything happens. I’m open to scenes that begin to play in front of my mind and I allow myself to travel in those scenes – it’s like a living daydream.  And it seems to happen wherever I put my gaze these days.

Now my kids will tell you how often I used to go into these mini trances at the dinner table during their childhood – they were constantly clicking their fingers in front of my face during meal times and saying, Mum! stop staring at my plate –  you’re staring at my food again. And I would be brought unceremoniously out of my reverie.  And I always found it a bit sad because I was somewhere really beautiful in my soul and then brought back to earth with a bump. But it does happen all the time and as I said, the more I do it, the more I see.  I realise thinking about this, I have always done this.  My mother used to say to me when I was a really young girl, she’d waft a copy of the newspaper in front of my face and say, “Whoo hoo!  Where have you gone?  Come back to me!  Where on earthy are you!  Come back, come back, you’re sitting there looking at nothing!”  So I know this ability to scry has been with me for many, many, years. But I think it needs a certain amount of relaxation of the mind, it needs a certain amount of curiosity, and ability to go with the flow and allow whatever happens to happen without trying to influence the event at all. You have to just go with what you see and allow the images to come to you and reveal themselves.

And of course this is just me receiving my own visions and messages and symbols about life.  When you work with somebody else and you read for them, you are tuning into their soul, their energetic aura, their life force, and by blending your energy and your soul with theirs, you can pick up information, symbols images and guidance for them and about them, in the same way.

Now, there is such a thing as pareidolia, which is a psychological phenomenon that causes people to see or hear a vague or random image or sound as something significant. So a common example might be seeing a likeness of Jesus in the clouds or an image of Madonna on your cheese toastie.  If you want to while away a pleasant five minutes on the internet, look up “peppers that look like British politicians” because it’s hilarious.  Pareidolia was once thought of as a symptom of psychosis, but it is now recognised as a normal human tendency.  As soon as a baby is able to see, it recognises faces and that skill is hardwired into our brains.  And humans are not alone in their quest to see human faces in a sea of visual cues that surround them.  Scientists have, for decades, been training computers to do the same, and like humans, computers display pareidolia.  I’m sure your mobile phone is now trained to recognise photographs of your face and those of your friends.

Now pareidolia has its place in science for sure and I believe that scrying can sometimes begin in this way, especially if you are using anything other than clear glass, or crystal or water.  So say for instance the trees outside when I am in the hot tub.  I will begin by seeing a random face made from the shadows of leaves and trees.  But this is where scrying gets interesting, the more you stare at that face or shape or perceived house, or road or scene, the more animated it starts to become, until it starts becoming a moving image and you can move your awareness right into the scene and walk among it.

You may have heard of the Hero’s journey.  It is a common story structure shared by cultures worldwide in which a character ventures into unknown territory to retrieve something they need in the form of treasure of some kind.  It is a bit like that when we are scrying.  We are attempting to go to another realm to bring back treasures of the soul.

As psychics and mediums our earthly life can sometimes feel like The Hero’s Journey.  Your life story might feel a little bit the same.  You live an ordinary life, then one day, something extraordinary happens to call you to begin your adventure.  Perhaps you had your first psychic experience or begin to see shadows or spirit people.  And like the hero, we often refuse to take up the call at first, preferring our ordinary lives, not wanting to rock the status quo or go on any adventure whatsoever.  Then, along comes a mentor.  Is this sounding familiar?  You decide, you know, I will do something about these strange experiences I’ve been having, so you go and see a mentor, get some practical training in under your belt, the mentor shares her profound wisdom with you and gives you grit, and self-confidence.  Now that you have been filled with confidence you set off on your journey of self-discovery.  But of course, there are challenges to face and you meet friends, foes, allies, in the form of divinatory tools, life challenges or experiences that either work well for you, or not, and then you approach the inner most cave, where you are prepared to defeat the big villain – this could be your own mind, fearing that you. will never do it, you will never be good enough.  You then face your ordeal.  Taking seemingly endless psychic or mediumship training courses, starting, stopping, changing, trying different ways hoping that you will push through. Ultimately your reward is the return of faith in yourself.  You, the Hero gets to return home. But, you go back a different person to when you started out: you’ve grown and matured as a result of the journey you’ve taken.

Well that’s all very well for you Ann, I hear you say, but how can I hone this particular skill of scrying for myself?  Well, I will teach you, a couple of techniques and methods you can use to receive prophetic visions or symbolic guidance.  Keep listening!

First, let me just say that by living and working as we all do, in controlled atmospheres in houses, offices, factories, shops, travelling in cars, we have lost touch with the rhythm of the seasons, the phases of the moon, which are v. important for food and growth.  We live and work in temperature controlled atmospheres. Agriculture has become a battle against nature itself – intensive livestock rearing, growing engineered vegetables crops – civilisation has moved away so far away from the natural world that we hardly ever go outdoors!

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the average American spends 93% of their life indoors. In the UK, 87% of our life is spent indoors. 6% of our life in automobiles. That’s means only 7% of your entire life is lived outdoors. That’s only one half of one day per week outdoors.

And it is so important for us to FEEL nature – it is so important to observe the vitality in plants and animals, feel the undercurrents in the air, as subtle changes occur through the year.  Touch the soil with your bare hands, notice birds and their behaviour, listen to their song, listen to the ways they sing their song, notice your family pets and feel the changing of the seasons with your whole being.  Make your own jam, brew your own beer and wine, your own remedies.  If you are a town or city dweller as I am, find the grass, observe trees through the seasons, watch the pigeons, the sparrows, the magpies, observe the skies, the cloud formations or even the weeds in the pavement cracks. Become good, become excellent even, at inactivity because we have to allow time for insight and inspiration to arrive.

So, let me explain how you can begin scrying for yourself.

For an optimum scrying experience, consider your environment. We create a “sacred” space to honour the work we do.  Just as a doctor will create a “healing” space for her patients to enter – it won’t be filled with old saucepans and paint tins – it will be clean and tidy and pleasant, a healing place, where someone can feel held, and safe and comfortable.

Similarly, if we have a client who is coming to us for a reading, or if we are reading for a client on Zoom, we will clean up our room, light incense perhaps light some aromatherapy oil, light a candle, perhaps play some beautiful music beforehand to harmonise and energise the space.  We may use colours, herbs or fragrance to heighten emotion and help increase visualisation and strengthen our intuition.  We create an energetically sacred place to work in, so that we can focus on our intent.

Consider the lighting in the place where you do your readings.  It is very important during scrying work and not for effect but for practical reasons. Softer the light the more it will help you. Why is this? Candlelight is great for scrying because if you are using a crystal ball, it will help you to see the natural inclusions in the ball.  Harsh overhead light can be difficult to read by but candlelight can put you in the relaxed mood that will help you to enter the altered state that you need to be in to do your readings.

Choose your scrying tool.  So whatever tool you are using, you will be working with your intuition, the same way you work when you are working with your psychic awareness, you may work with your gut feelings, visions that touch the inner eye, things you may hear subjectively in your head. Remember – there is no power in the psychic tool – the power comes from YOU. And there are several ways to read using scrying tools, so experiment to feel a way that feels good to you.

Begin with a meditation.  A meditation will quieten the mind and it is important for us to put the conscious mind to one side.  When scrying, we are working with our soul and the soul of our recipient, and we need to be aware, when we stare into our psychic tool and see symbols or shapes, we need to know where our information is coming from.  By knowing what it feels like to be totally present in the stillness of our own soul, it helps us to understand what our thoughts feel like, which come from the conscious mind, and what receiving information from the soul feels like. So a regular meditation practice will enable you to still the mind and help to make you a clear channel for receiving information on a soul level.

Set the intention.  It’s important before you begin work, that you set an intention and when you set an intention, you are activating your receptivity and manifesting and putting out that which you intend to attract.

What can you expect, when you begin to scry with your psychic tool?  So some of you, it’s different for everybody, some of you may see shapes, some may see colours, you might see as I do symbols or faces, filmscapes, you might have “feelings”, you just have a feeling about something or you might just have odd thoughts that just touch the mind and like tarot – your interpretations will be different each time you use your crystal ball, your scrying mirror.

The visions that you see, might be static like photographs, they might be moving, like a movie, a film.  The image may say something to you, don’t worry about conventional meanings when you are reading in this way. It is what it means to you.  You may see colours, impressions, single images of something or entire scenes and landscapes.  Interpretation Is like learning a new language – the more you practice the better you become.

So, let your own insights guide you.  Be very observant changes in temperature, texture, pressure, can you hear anything, smell or taste anything.  Allow eyes to relax, soften your focus on the crystal so that you are looking through it, as if gazing at something beyond.  Wait, be patient, wait for mental images to appear, don’t force it. 

So let’s have a look and let’s do an experiment with a bowl of water.  So what you need, what you need to get is a very small bowl, 5 inches in diameter bowl is absolutely perfect and then ¾’s fill it with room temperature water.  And then, if you can, if it’s a transparent glass bowl, a mixing bowl or something that’s fine, place dark cloth beneath the bowl, because what you are trying to do is you are trying to create as few reflections as possible within the bowl because that can be very distracting.

Sit yourself down, open yourself up to the process.  Ground yourself – feel balanced, take some deep breaths, ask your inner self for guidance and just wait until you are ready before you open your eyes.  Then lean forward and gaze into bowl of water.  You don’t need to consciously raise your own energies – just maintain this beautiful free flow of soul power.  And if you feel tired/uninspired, don’t look away.  Keep breathing and letting the energies flow comfortable.  Don’t stare hard into the bowl, keep your gaze soft, keep that gaze beautifully soft and focussed on the water. And let any thoughts that come and worries, just let them come and then float off into the distance.  See nothing but the bowl of water in front of you, feel nothing but the softness of the breath as it nourishes and relaxes your body.

Don’t put a time limit on yourself, some people see nothing for a very long time – that is fine.  Just stare – envisage yourself moving along a timeline and see where you stop.

So your first stages might be as you stare into that water that you see maybe nothing for a while, then you might see a swirling mists, it might become almost milky, it can look like wisps of cloud.  The water might become completely black in your mind’s eye.  It is after all of these stage that images will present themselves on the water.  You might find yourself having new insight about things or flashes of memory.  You might find that you are contemplating a life issue you hadn’t thought of, you might see images in the water like a film sequence, like I said or you might see colours so interpret those colours as you go.

Again, like the tarot, interpreting images is very personal to you.  So this is a very rough guide and I think whatever we do as psychics, we have to find our own way of working.  We are all very unique.  We kind of know the framework of what we are doing but we all do work in very individual ways, so find out what way you want to work and guaranteed, the way that you want to work today, won’t be the way you want to work in two months’ time because it changes all the time.

So, just as a rough guide, as you look at your bowl, an image that is moving away suggests the event or person is moving away from the scryers world or a past relationship or issue is still exerting influence on the current, an image that is moving towards might suggest an event or person will occur or is coming very soon. Images on left you might decide are physical occurrences, things in the centre or to right you might decide are symbolic, pictures near to the top of the surface of the water might be very important.  You might feel that these things are important they need immediate attention.  You might see images at bottom of the bowl of water which are less prominent and therefore you may feel intuitively that these things are urgent.  And perhaps you might want to look at the relative size of the images, to indicate how important they are. So I mean, there are all these, I mean, I could go on and on and on.

If you are enjoying this by the way – I would love you to sign up for my next Gypsy Magic one-day workshop which is taking place this Autumn.  I will lead you through a set of exercises where we will be using a crystal ball or scrying with a water bowl or mirror, and we will travel through time to see ourselves in the future and the past; we will use the crystal ball to see angels or guides appearing in the glass, giving you guidance and wisdom, and you will learn the beginnings of prophecy just like Nostradamus. So if that sounds like something you’d potentially be interested in doing – and it’s open to all levels of ability from beginners to advanced – Go to https://gypsymagic.anntheato.com. and register your interest.  So that’s https://gypsymagic.anntheato.comDon’t put the www in front of it, for some reason, that doesn’t work.  It’s just https://gypsymagic.anntheato.com.

I’ve run it before and we just had such a fantastic time in this workshop, so I’m bringing it back again this Autumn 2021 because I’ve had a lot of people saying please, please offer it again. PLUS if you sign up, I will immediately send you a FREE meditation to help you get started in quietening your mind.  So once again, go to https://gypsymagic.anntheato.com – put your email address in and get your free meditation, voiced by me.  Who doesn’t want a free ten minute meditation?!

Let me just teach you now, how to ask a question & get guidance for yourself, using a crystal ball.  Now, if you don’t have a crystal ball, you can use your bowl of water and it will work just the same. If you don’t have a bowl of water, you can use a mirror it will work just the same. 

So a crystal ball is a circle or a sphere it is a symbol of completeness. It was believed that a crystal sphere was a miniature version of the wider universe and therefore, information about past, present and future could be captured within it.  So crystal gazing is the art of looking into a crystal ball to receive perceptions of the past, present or future and we call it

Crystalomancy, which is divination by gazing into a reflective surface.

So, let’s do an exercise where you ask a question for yourself.  Something that is just pertinent to you, your current situation. So that is your intention, that is what you intend to see in this crystal ball.  And what we will be doing is, the imagine will begin to form in the mind’s eye and it is then held in the ball so you can study it.

Ask your question. Close your eyes, and just let an image form in the darkness. Just allow either in your, in the back of your mind or on the front of your eyelids, allow an image to begin to form.  Once you have that image, open your eyes, project that image onto the surface of the crystal ball. Close eyes again, let the image form clearer. Open your eyes and once again, project the image onto the surface of the crystal ball.  So just keep repeating this gently, as and when you feel the need to do so, each time casting the image further and further into the crystal or into the bowl of water. And then, as you can see it, in the crystal ball or your bowl of water, study that image as it begins to form and move and see what happens, what inspiration you get, what guidance you get.

And you might want to journal about this afterwards.  I think it’s always really important, when you are asking questions for yourself and seeking guidance from either the spirit world, your guides or your higher self, to take a note of the date that you saw, that you worked, and what guidance you received, what symbols came and what guidance you received. Because we do forget and it is great to be able to look back and compare notes from different days.

So I really hope you have enjoyed this episode and learned a lot from it.  Please do come over to the Psychic Matters Facebook page and tell me what you’ve learned and how it went for you when you tried it out for yourselves in your houses, or friends’ houses.  You can also email me directly, [email protected] will reach me and I’d love to hear from you.

If you’d like to pick up the show notes for this episode, including a complete transcription plus details of the URL link to sign up for the Gypsy Magic, head over to my website –  www.anntheato.com and you can pick those up there.  If you want to go directly to the gypsy magic page, it’s no w’s, just go to gypsymagic.anntheato.com.  My name by the way is spelled Ann T-H-E-A-T-O.

I’m so grateful to you all for listening to this podcast and huge thanks must go to my wonderful patrons over on Patreon, George, Jilly, Sarah, Stacy, Kazemaru, Kay and Angie. If you would like to join them and become a Patron yourself, head over to https://www.patreon.com/psychicmatters and see what wonderful benefits there are to be had – we are having great fun over there and the benefits are mighty –  there is free monthly healing, free monthly tuition, messages from spirit and a free monthly raffle to win a private past life regression session with me. 

For now I wish you well working with your scrying tools of choice and do let me know how it goes.

Until next time, my name is Ann Théato, and thank you for listening to Psychic Matters!