Naturally Psychic is an introduction to psychic development. It’s not terribly in-depth or focused. It has a lot of user-friendly instructions for exercises, from grounding and centering, visualizing energy, shielding, working with dreams, and the like. About half of the book covers topics related to but not directly pertinent to psychic development. It does so in ways that are superficial and, in some places, misleading.
Author Karen Harrison is an herbalist and author of a number of books about herbology. She published an earlier edition of Naturally Psychic in 2013.
What I appreciate, from the first half of Naturally Psychic, is Harrison’s emphasis on learning and practicing meditation as “essential to clearly hearing your inner voice.” By “inner voice,” she’s “talking about accessing that part of yourself that receives, interprets, and recounts information not obtained from your everyday material world or physical senses.” With meditation, she notes that one doesn’t need to keep one’s mind “absolutely blank for ten minutes or more.” That’s generally not possible anyway! She’s talking, instead, “about creating a meditative state of mind wherein you are calm, relaxed, and receptive.” This book has good basic instructions for learning to meditate.
She also explains the differences between all the clairs: clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, claircognizance. This chapter is basic and concise. Then she veers into subjects that are related to psychic development. I find much of her treatment of these subjects to be problematic.
She starts with the idea of “contacting spirit and angelic guides.” She writes that there are “many energy beings available and willing to help guide human spiritual development.” Who are these “guides,” where are they, why do they want to get in contact? Harrison doesn’t explain.
In fuzzy New Age thinking, there’s a kind of article of faith that you just call out to these beings and, sure enough, they appear, like they’re on speed dial and they have nothing better to do. At best, this kind of thinking is fantastical and can be delusional. At worst, it trivializes the kinds of experiences that can arise naturally, without bidding, when one is ready for it, which is not necessarily when one “calls” for it. “Sometimes a guide will appear as an ancestral guide,” she writes. How would one know? This is a deep subject, addressed superficially in Naturally Psychic.
In her section on “ascended masters,” Harrison gives a list of beings she calls “ascended masters,” even though none of the religions these names come from would call them that: the Buddha, Kwan Yin, a Catholic Saint, Krishna, Mary Magdalene. It’s like there’s a New Age cafeteria where you can mix-and-match which “ascended master” you want to communicate with, today.
“Perhaps you are attracted to Zen Buddhism or are interested in the philosophy of Taoism,” she writes. “Read about the precepts; learn who’s who in those traditions; decorate your meditation space with symbols, fabrics, and art from that culture. When you meditate, use one of the major symbols from that path to explore in your focus…. Next you will be ready to open yourself to potential contact with an ascended master of that spiritual lineage…”
I put the book down and didn’t know if I could continue reading – because it is outrageous to collapse thousands of years’ worth of rich, cross-cultural spiritual iconography and the practices of millions of devotees into cute catch phrases and tchotchkes to play around with. It’s insulting.
But I skimmed on, through the pages about automatic writing, psychic animal communication and spirit animals before I got to her treatment of “shamanism.” Harrison writes: “In the last three of four decades human and animal spiritual work and association has been termed ‘shamanism,’ but ‘shaman’ is not necessarily the word that each individual indigenous culture uses for their practice.” No, it’s not “three or four decades,” and “shamanism” isn’t a word or a concept or a tradition that ought to be culturally appropriated and trivialized. I stopped reading.
There are lots of great books about psychic development, from Mat Auryn’s contemporary classic, The Psychic Witch, to the occult works of Dion Fortune and lots of others.
Naturally Psychic is not a book I can recommend.
~review by Sara R. Diamond
Author: Karen Harrison
Weiser Books, 2025
213 pp., $18.95
