Developing Your Intuition with Melanie Barnum

In this Episode

• [00:09]Stephan introduces his next guest, Melanie Barnum, a professional psychic medium, international author, life coach, and hypnotist who has been practicing for over 20 years. She’s the author of The Book of Psychic Symbols.
• [01:19]Stephan asks Melanie about the origin of her psychic abilities & the events that led her to write books.
• [04:34]Melanie expounds on intuition and its difference to psychic abilities.
• [08:56]The process of acknowledging and developing clairvoyance and clairaudience using intuition.
• [13:55]Stephan and Melanie discuss recognizing, acknowledging & validating signs and symbolic messages.
• [19:11]Stephan talks about his experience in receiving a message that popped out of nowhere while watching the Netflix series Manifest.
• [25:44]Melanie explains how to ask for confirmation if the sign or synchronistic event is intended for you and something you need to pay attention to.
• [29:19]Melanie shares her personal experience in recognizing the connections in a psychic circle.
• [35:27]Melanie emphasizes that past lives play a big part in this lifetime & learning to deal with them can hugely help move forward.
• [40:16]Melanie gives examples of how she moved on and learned from her past life.
• [49:40]Stephan asks Melanie about the ways she utilized her gift towards success and prosperity.
• [55:44]The Usage of Oracle cards and other psychic tools to validate and confirm intuition.
• [61:06]Visit Melanie Barnum’s website, melaniebarnum.com to purchase books, card decks, learn more about psychic readings, & develop intuition. You can also email her through melanie@melaniebarnum.com & connect on social media by
  looking up Melanie Barnum Psychic.

Jump to Links and Resources

Melanie, it’s so great to have you on the show.

Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. 

I’d love to start with your origin story. Have you always had psychic abilities or is that something that you developed or grew into? How did this all start for you?

Essentially, I was always able to read people and I thought that everybody did that. I didn’t think that that was any big deal. I never gave it a second thought. I was in my dining room holding my brand new baby. All of a sudden it felt like somebody hit me over the head and I heard the words, “You have to do this work now.” I said, what?

I was the controller of a company. I was totally not in that element. I was not about to hang out a shingle that said psychic. Even though I was blown away by what I had heard, I believed it, and in my heart I knew that it was true. I set out to do everything I possibly could to learn about how to do this work. Being the rational person that I was—very much a mix of left and right brain—I needed to get the science behind it and learn about it because I didn’t really know how it all worked. I didn’t really know how I could do this and feel legit about it. 

I realized that I was supposed to do this because it felt natural, and I was pretty good at it.

I went out, I studied, and I worked with famous psychics, famous mediums, and therapists. I worked with people that were from my hometown. I ran the gamut and realized that yeah, this is what I’m supposed to do because it felt very good, very natural, and I was pretty good at it. 

I practiced for a couple of years by giving away free readings and offering people the opportunity to ask me questions online, which was interesting because back then online meant a totally different thing, which is kind of chat rooms. Essentially, that’s how it all started is I practiced.

How did you end up with all these books?  I actually have The Book of Psychic Symbols and I’ve been starting to read it. It’s really good. You’re quite a good author as well as an amazing psychic. Those are two very different forms of art.

Thanks. I’ve always been an avid reader and I always like to write. I can remember back in high school my English teacher had told me, maybe you should turn this story into a book, maybe you should become an author. I just put it away a little bit, but before my mom had passed, she was always saying, we all have at least one great book in us. 

Back in 2010–2011, I said, “You know what? It’s time. I want to write.” I love to write and I wanted to share what I had experienced. I had discovered that we are all intuitive, we can all tap into it, and I wanted to share answers to so many questions that I get all the time. Whether it’s at home, whether it’s at work, people are always asking me questions about how intuition works and how they can tune into their own intuition. I wanted to write a book about developing your intuition and it morphed into The Book of Psychic Symbols.

I’ve heard the phrase, everyone is psychic, and you’re saying everyone is intuitive. How are these two concepts the same or different? Psychic versus intuitive. There is probably a lot of confusion out there about that.

A lot of it is just semantics. It’s what you call it. For me, intuition is something that we’re all born with. It’s part of our natural birthright. It’s part of who we are as a human and as an energy. I think that it gets confused a lot with psychic in that I believe psychics are more pronounced, more practiced, or more naturally developed. 

Just like you can take a baseball bat in your hand and you could try and hit a ball. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to be a professional baseball player. Anybody can do it. Anybody with hands can do it. It’s the same thing with your intuition and your psychic abilities. I don’t feel necessarily that everybody is psychic, nor do I feel like everybody wants to be psychic or a practicing professional psychic. 

I do believe 100% that everybody is intuitive. It’s a question of whether or not we realize that we’re using our intuition and how much we develop our intuition, rather than a question of whether we have it because we’re all intuitive. We can all tap into it to help us get through everything in life, guide us, and direct us.

I used to think even just last year that intuition was just gut instinct. It was what my subconscious or my gut neurons were telling me was the right choice. Now I understand it’s something quite different. It comes from other realms.

You could say it’s your higher self, or it’s your guides, your angels whispering into your consciousness. It could be the Holy Spirit, just whatever resonates with you, but it’s from higher realms. I’d love to hear more about your take on this and how people can receive this in the most effective way.

There is some question about that, does it come from inside of us or does it come from an external source? For me, it’s a mixture of everything. We’re all energy, we’re all connected. Our energy is connected universally to everybody else’s energy. The energy of the world is how I put it. When I do readings, I say, I’m getting this from the universe, I’m getting it from your spirit guides, your deceased loved ones, my guides, my deceased loved ones. Essentially, what happens is that they will send us information that we can easily access and easily use based on our own lives.

It does come from within. We do have those gut instincts because we’re connected to this energy. Whether or not it is coming from an external source or an internal source, isn’t as important as recognizing what it is. 

When you say gut instinct, it’s perfect because we can all relate to that. We’ve all had a gut instinct about something. Police officers have hunches, mother’s or father’s intuition connecting them to their children. We’ve all had these feelings. We walk into a room and something just doesn’t feel right, or the phone rings and we know who it is. It’s because we’re all energetically connected. 

We’re connected within the universe and even outside of the universe, if you choose to believe that. The information is just there at our fingertips. I believe, through all of my work that again, it comes from our spirit guides, our deceased loved ones. They’re helping us to communicate. They’re going to give us the information in the simplest way possible. 

Does intuition come from inside of us, or does it come from an external source? For me, it’s a mixture of everything.

Oftentimes, they’ll use some form of symbol or some form of feeling. That gut instinct that you have, trust it, because that is part of your clairsentience or your clairknowing, your psychic knowing, your intuitive feeling. That clairsentience, that gut instinct, that feeling that you have is a huge part of your intuitive awareness. Trust it.

Let’s say that our listeners wanted to develop not just claircognizance, but clairvoyance or clairaudience, to actually be able to hear the voices in their head and have that be their loved ones, or their angels, or their higher self, or whatever. Is that something that they could probably develop by maybe praying and by learning from a mentor?

Absolutely. As I said before, we’re not always going to be gifted with everything. As I explained the difference between intuition and psychic ability, everybody can practice it. Not everybody’s going to be great at it. You may have more of an aptitude or a propensity for clairsentience, or that feeling, that gut instinct, or you may have more of an aptitude for claircognizance, that clairknowing.

You just know things. You have no idea how you know them. A lot of people who are artists or who are more visual will absolutely have more of a propensity to be clairvoyant and have that third eye clairsight, which is also very commonly used interchangeably with the word psychic. 

That’s just one of the gifts that we’re able to adapt and to practice. Clairaudience, as you mentioned, is clairhearing. Musicians tend to be more about that. If you have somebody who (say) is an actress or an actor, they may experience a bunch of different senses naturally. Having said that, we can all develop all of them through practice, through meditation, through exercises. 

As you mentioned, all of my books have exercises that you can do. There are so many other great books out there, and so many wonderful teachers and mentors who can help you to practice. The more that you practice, the more that you open your awareness up, and the easier it becomes to tap into it. 

The information is just there at our fingertips. It comes from our spirit guides and our deceased loved ones.

When you want to open up your clairvoyance, when you want to be able to see things intuitively better, start using your imagination because your imagination is really what’s going to open up that vision. It’s going to open up that ability to see things in your mind’s eye. 

Just like we see a flash of an image when we think of somebody, you may start to see quick flashes, maybe just colors, maybe just a black and white outline. Maybe it’ll look like a polaroid picture, but something quick may open up in your mind’s eye. By using our intuition, you’re able to start to tune into that clairvoyant ability. The more you practice it, the more it’ll be there for you.

If you were to imagine somebody in your mind’s eye, like Abraham Lincoln, for example, would you be able to tune in to him and ask him questions? Is that how you knock on his door as somebody who’s discarnated back into non-physical?

It depends on whether you’re asking you as a general thing, for everybody in the population, or whether you’re asking you to a professional psychic. 

I’m asking both. 

Okay. Oftentimes, what happens is first when you’re setting out to practice using your psychic abilities or your intuitive abilities—you’ll see I will use them interchangeably those two words—and you want to tap into Abraham Lincoln, you see him in your mind’s eye, you may start to ask him questions. 

In the beginning, usually if you’re honest, you’ll say, I’m not really getting anything, I’m not really seeing anything besides the image that you conjured up with your imagination. I’m not really hearing anything, I’m not really feeling anything. That’s what happens in the beginning, but once you start to develop a little bit further, then you’ll be able to start to access more. 

Intuition is something that we're all born with. It's a part of our natural birthright and who we are as humans and as energy. Click To Tweet

One of the ways that I teach people to do that is to write things down. When you’re trying to tune into somebody, just start writing down any thought, feeling, image, sound that you hear. Don’t discount what you’re getting because you never know what’s actually going to mean something, what’s going to be important. 

When you’re doing a reading for somebody else, it’s the same thing. You never want to discount what you’re getting because it may mean absolutely nothing to you, but it means everything to the other person. 

When it comes to people that are famous like Abraham Lincoln, you tend to have a bias already in your mind. You tend to think that you’re going to know a lot of the answers that you’re going to get from them.

Until you really practice, the answers that you may get when you do start to get answers from them, may just be a little bit convoluted with your own imagination or with your own beliefs. Again, that happens and that’s natural, so don’t throw it away. Don’t discount it, but just keep practicing it.

Can you ask a confirmation question back? Let’s say, okay, Abe, here’s what I heard, is that correct?

You can absolutely do that, but again, you may still have that feeling of, was this real, was it me just answering it back? What I do say all the time is if you are trying to do a reading or if you’re trying to get information, ask for confirmation in a different way.

Ask for a sign, ask for a symbol to come, ask for something that you can see externally—a synchronistic event—because those things are things that, even though it’s still subjective to what you’re doing or what you believe, it’s more concrete. It’s more tangible. 

It’s those tricky intangibles that we have a hard time being able to discern. The signs, the things that we’ll see out of nowhere, that seemingly just pop up, those can really help us to understand and believe that what we’re doing is real. 

Can you give us a few examples? 

Imagine we’re talking about Abe Lincoln. You say, ‘Okay, am I really communicating with Abe Lincoln? Is this really him? Is this really the person that I’m talking to?’ You see the image, maybe you see that terrible night when he was shot and killed. You’re thinking, okay, this was him, but give me a sign because I really need validation.

He’s telling you, oh, the opera was great or the show was amazing, but you’re thinking, okay, this is just my imagination. Was I really connecting to him? I’m just giving you obviously very simple things. You say, I need a sign. Give me a sign over the next day that I was really communicating with him.

Then all of a sudden, you’re driving down the road and somebody has a bumper sticker that says, “honesty is the best policy,” “just ask Abe,” or something simple like that. You say, oh, my gosh, that was a sign, and then you say, wait a minute, I need something more.  

You come home and you turn on the TV. All of a sudden, as soon as you turn on the TV there’s an advertisement for a documentary for Abraham Lincoln. You say, okay, this is what I needed, this really was valid. I really was connecting to either him or the energy that surrounds him, and that had a lot to do with him. 

Those are ways that you can externally gather proof or evidence for yourself. It may not work for everybody else, but proof or evidence for yourself that you really were connecting, you really were tuning in to that energy.

They’re trying the best way possible and the easiest way to communicate with you in a way that you’ll understand.

And if you ask for a symbol to flash in your internal mind’s eye visor, being able to decrypt that or figure out what the meaning is of that. That’s where one your book comes in. Could you give us a few examples of symbols and how their meaning could be something other than what you might guess as a newbie?

Sure. I’ll give you one that I explain to people all the time because it sounds a little strange to most people. I talk about psychic symbols as a way that your guides, your loved ones communicate with you, because as I said before, They’re trying the best way possible and the easiest way to communicate with you in a way that you’ll understand. 

They’ll use symbols. Some of them are universal symbols. They may show you a stop sign if you’re asking should I move forward with this or should I back off. All of a sudden you see a flash of a stop sign, that’s pretty universal. That’s pretty obvious as to what the meaning is. 

Let’s say I’m doing a reading for somebody or somebody else is trying to connect to somebody, and all of a sudden I see an image of a baseball diamond. A baseball diamond could simply mean that it’s a baseball reference, or somebody that has to do with baseball, or for me, it can indicate that their mother is trying to come through. 

That’s not going to necessarily be your universal symbol for somebody’s mom coming through, but for me it is because at the end of her life, my mom got really into baseball and really enjoyed it. When I see a flash of a baseball diamond, it either means again, that it’s a literal connection to baseball in some way, or that their mother’s trying to come through. 

Symbols could be extremely universal and everybody can recognize them easily. Or I always tell people to develop your own symbolic journal because that journal will help you with your own personal symbols. Different ways to connect for your intuition and to get feedback for yourself that is meaningful for you because, as I said, they will use the easiest way possible to get through and to communicate with you. 

Symbols could be a universal language because everybody can recognize them easily, no matter what language they're acquainted with. Click To Tweet

By doing that, they’ll take what you know in your own life, and they’ll use that symbolically, whether they’ll show you an image or if we’re talking about baseball, you may hear the crack of a bat, or clairolfaction, smell, and taste. 

You may taste peanuts and popcorn, or hot dogs, or a cold beer, whatever it is that you associate with baseball. You may receive these symbolic messages in different ways. Again, it could be a universal symbol or it could be something more personal to you.

So essentially, everything that you’ve experienced up to this point in time, all the things you’ve seen, all the things you’ve heard, they’re all raw material that spirit guides, loved ones, and so forth can utilize to get a message across. 

Absolutely.

I had one happen to me the other day. I’m watching a Netflix show called Manifest, this whole plane full of people in the airplane. They have psychic abilities after disappearing in the air for five years.

There’s a point in the show where one of the main characters hears his own voice but it’s not him, saying. it’s all connected. That’s the message. Then I hear that as some of the raw material that’s being utilized later on, to inform me that it’s all connected.

How I knew that that was a message for me and not just my subconscious mind was it came in completely unprovoked and charge-neutral. There’s no emotional charge to it. It just popped in out of nowhere but the context was meaningful for me. 

I was able to connect the dots in terms of what the message was. It didn’t lead anywhere else, it just sat there. I wasn’t like, oh, I need to get whatever from the store, and then the next thing, and then the next thing. Who knows where it leads in five seconds from thought, to thought, to thought. It just stayed there and that’s a way that I can differentiate intuitive messages or psychic messages from just my own subconscious mind.

That’s also a really good point that you brought up, that it does come in a little bit of a different way. The fact that you recognized it, you owned it to be something. You deciphered that it was indeed something important. That’s huge. That means that you’re well on your way to being intuitive or psychic, and to understanding how we are all connected and how it works. 

I tell people all the time I go to synchronistic events. Those signs that you recognize, it’s the recognition and the understanding that goes off that light bulb, that goes off in your head, and that it does just stay there. It’s that acknowledgement that this is happening that really helps to move along your intuitive abilities and your intuitive development.

For me, I noticed that things just pop; a certain road sign. I was at a family reunion just this past weekend and I was driving to another family member from the reunion to an evening event. Different sides of the family so they were unrelated. Related to me but not to each other. I’m driving and I’m on the 23. I see 223 underneath it as well. It’s the 23, and the 223. 223 just popped for me. 23 was also important, but I just knew at 223, there was something important there. When I wasn’t driving, I looked it up in the Angel Numbers 101 book by Doreen Virtue and sure enough, there was a message there that was meaningful and relevant for that moment.

I just know that things will pop for me either as I’m reading it on the screen, or just out in the world, or in a book or whatever, or if I hear it, it also just stands out from everything else. I’ve tuned into that and I’m paying attention to those kinds of subtle signs. 

That’s awesome. 

How do people work on tuning in in that way? How do they notice the difference between reading from a book and reading with something popping off the page for them?

As I said, the biggest part of that is the acknowledgement that it’s really there. When people ask me how I know, I tell them to stay open. If something does strike you as, that’s a little interesting, or that’s a little funny, or where did that come from, then pay attention to that, because sooner or later, you’re going to begin to recognize these things. They will pop even more and they will happen even more to you. It really is about the acknowledgement and the recognizing of these events, or these symbols, or these signs, or these synchronistic opportunities, or things that are happening around you or to you. 

I’m not saying that everything. Let me backup a little bit, because I do get a lot of people that say, oh, I saw this and I saw this. This happened and this happened, and it’s all going to be connected. Not everything is going to be connected. Obviously, we’re all connected—I didn’t mean it that way—but not everything is going to be a sign. Not everything is going to be a symbolic message.

When I say, be open, be aware, recognize things, I’m not saying that every single step you take in life is going to be a major sign for you. The things that you start to say, wow, that was interesting, and oh, I have to go home and look that up, like what did that mean? Those are the things that once you start recognizing them and acknowledging them, it’s gonna happen even more.

Just be open to that possibility. Be open to it. And especially, start using it. You can decide to use that ability. You can decide to use those signs or symbols by asking a question and then expecting an answer. So, expecting a symbol to flash in your mind, expecting a song to answer it for you, expecting to see something externally—a tangible thing that you can put your hand on—expecting synchronistic events to occur in order to answer your questions or in order to guide you in a certain direction. Start to use it with intention and expect that you’re going to have those awakening moments, those opportunities to use your intuition in that way.

The early days, as you said, you can get confirmation by asking for a completely different format to come through to you, or a synchronistic event, or whatever that confirms that I’m not imagining things. I’m not just making logical leaps, this is actually a message for me. I had that happen maybe four or five months ago. There was a message for me, it was on my little son’s t-shirt that said never give up. We had that shirt for several months prior to that, but there was this particular moment where it just popped for me and I needed that reassurance in that message at that time.

I think it was a psychic reading. I’m sure it was. It was a psychic reading that I had and I asked, was this a sign? Was this my angel giving me a message? The answer was yes. I already knew the answer. Great hearing the confirmation of that because I was still very early on and not sure the difference between something that I could just imagine or something that was coming to me. 

When I say, be open, be aware, recognize things, I’m not saying that every single step you take in life is going to be a significant sign for you.

That’s also what I’m talking about when I say not everything is a sign. Ask for validation. If you think that it’s a possibility that something was a sign or you just had a synchronistic event, again, ask for validation. Like you were saying before with the Abe Lincoln thing. You can ask for confirmation. Ask for validation. Hey, universe, show me another sign. Give me something more to let me know that I’m right, that this was a sign for me, this was something that was important for me to pay attention to.

When a professional psychic imagines or draws the picture, the visual of Abe Lincoln in their mind’s eye, do they then make an instant connection with that person? 

No. Most psychics are mediums. Most professional psychics or mediums will tell you that they’re not always connecting. They turn it off because we can’t walk through life just connecting to everybody else’s dead people or everybody else’s guides. 

I’ve got too much going on in my own life to constantly be doing that. If it was in a certain situation or a certain setting that I said, okay, I want to try and connect to Abe Lincoln, that’s different than just getting that imagery and saying, oh, I’m instantly connected, because we would be doing that constantly. 

Anybody that’s ethical in what they’re doing is going to tell you that it doesn’t happen instantly, but if we’re intentionally trying to connect to them, we may get information about them right away. We may get flashes of information, flashes of messages or information, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re connected to them specifically. It could just be that we’re connected to the energy around them, that we’re getting information from that.

In fact, there are situations where people see ghosts at a “haunted area.” It’s just the psychic imprint of a traumatic event that happened. It just keeps replaying and the souls have moved on to bigger and better things. It’s like a movie reel that keeps playing over and over again, that’s my understanding.

It’s interesting you bring that up because it made me think of something that happened to me a long, long time ago. I believe it’s in my first book, the book that you’re reading, The Book of Psychic Symbols. I think it’s one of the stories in there. I use stories to share or to get a point across as to what I’m trying to talk about or what I’m trying to teach in the book. And exercises, of course, to practice those things. 

Your gut instinct is a massive part of your intuitive awareness. Trusting it will be one of your strongest guides. Click To Tweet

One of the stories that I had there was from a long, long time ago when I was first starting out. I was, again, going out to learn everything I could. I was in this psychic circle and I was practicing. Somebody said something about their home that they had just bought, and all of a sudden I had an image. I got a woman that reminded me of Phyllis Diller with that crazy white-blond hair sticking out straight from her head. I saw her in this night gown, and I saw her running up and down this hallway with this beautiful elaborate woodwork that had light sconces up and down the hallway. 

I kept seeing her crazily running up and down and touching the sconces. They would turn on and off and she would just be laughing hysterically. I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this image, and I was like, what is going on here? What is this? It just kept happening. She was running back and forth, back and forth, turning on and off the light sconces. 

The person in this group said, oh my god, that’s what I was going to ask about, like do we have electrical issues in our house? We just bought this house and the light sconces in the front hallway where there is elaborate woodwork keep going on and off. I said, no, it has nothing to do with that. It’s this woman that’s replaying this event, or she went crazy and she’s just running up and down the hallway. It just kept happening in a loop for them. They were going a little nuts trying to figure it out.

Once we are able to determine that that’s what it was, that it was this loop, we were able to do some clearing work, and they were able to have the lights stay on when they wanted them on, and turn it off when they wanted them off. They were able to let that energy go, so it didn’t have to keep repeating in their home over and over again.

Also you can get electrical issues showing up where it is a sign, it’s a message. They’re like, hey, you need to pay attention to this, or hey, I’m here. That can be a different situation that happens seemingly more randomly, not just on a repeated loop, right?

Yeah. This was every night, it would happen. I don’t remember what time it was, but every night, it just kept happening at the same time. But absolutely. Electrical issues can definitely be a sign that somebody’s around or somebody’s trying to tell you something, for sure.

What would be an example of that happening in your life?

Electrical issues?

Yeah. For example, for me, we’re in an Airbnb right now for several months while we look for a house, and the lights flicker in this room, but not all the time. It tends to be in the evenings and when things have settled down, and I’m trying to be more meditative and think about bigger picture things. 

It’s not a malevolent entity or mischievous entity, it’s actually just a confirmation like, hey, you’re on the right track. I got confirmation of that, but I’m curious if you’ve got any recent examples in your life.

I’m going to say something back to what you were just talking about that room, because unbeknownst to our viewers right now, one of the things that was happening when we were trying to connect is that you kept crackling in my ears. Whether I tried to use the connection on my phone or my computer, it didn’t matter. You just kept crackling. I finally knew something was going on in your house, and there’s somebody around you. When I kept saying, no, I can’t hear you at all, I finally said, leave him alone for right now, because we need to do this set. We need to do this video, and all of a sudden, it was fine, and it’s been fine ever since. 

You definitely have some activity there. It doesn’t feel malevolent to me, it definitely feels helpful. It feels like you asked for your guides, your spirit, your spirit team to come around you before this video was happening, before our session was happening. You asked for them to be around you all the time to help you, and they’re letting you know they’re there. That’s what they’re doing. 

For you, absolutely. That electrical stuff that’s happening in that room and in the house in general—depending on what you’re doing and where you are because I feel like it’s not just in that room—there’s definitely a connection there for you. 

When you want to open up your clairvoyance, and see things intuitively better, things around you today, from many lifetimes ago, and things to come become clearer. Click To Tweet

For me, personally, I can ask questions, or I can ask for guidance. The lights may dim a little bit, or the air conditioning unit, I can hear it slow down for a second, and then It revs back up, and then I’ll get my answer. That does happen often.

We joke around all the time in the house because my whole family pretty much is very intuitive. Both of my daughters see people. It just happens in our house. It’s a joke now. If the lights flash on and off for no reason, everybody says, oh, who was that, who was here? 

Again, it’s not always a sign. It’s not always something happening just because something electrical happened. But a lot of times when you start recognizing, you know in your heart what it is. You know that it’s there.

Yeah, and oftentimes, we don’t see the bigger picture, at least not at first. There might be a connection in some way from a past life and we’re needing to resolve it, but we don’t see it because we don’t remember that past life and the issue, the unresolved thing. Then if we tune in to the guidance, then we can get directed into handling that one area.

I’m also a past life regression facilitator. I’m trained in past life regression, hypnosis, and I feel like it all goes hand in hand with all the spiritual stuff that I do. So absolutely, your past lives play a big part in this lifetime. Learning to understand that and to deal with what you’re pulling through to this lifetime can really help you in a major way to what’s going on and to help you move forward, even leave behind things that you no longer need to carry. Leave behind anxiety or stress, et cetera, and be able to move forward.

Your past lives play a big part in this lifetime.

I’m actually reading the book, Many Lives, Many Masters. 

It’s a great book. 

Yeah. No coincidences. I’m having my first past-life regression session in a couple of hours. 

Awesome. 

She’s been trained by Brian, the author of Many Lives, Many Masters. I’m excited for that but I’m a little nervous. I don’t want to drum up all this gunk from horrible traumatic past life scenes and have that stick with me. 

What’s the higher purpose of doing past life regression? Is it to just know that oh, I’ve been here before sort of thing, or is it to clear things that are spilling over into this lifetime? I know the answer already, but I want to hear your take on it.

Like you said, you know the answer and I just touched on it a little bit. It’s pretty much whatever you want it to be, obviously. We can all connect to our past lives. I did study with Brian Weiss as well. That’s not how I got certified through. Anyway, long story. 

One of the best things about past life regression is that if you believe and you’re open to the possibilities that you’ve led other lifetimes or that you’ve lived other lifetimes, and you’ve led different lives in other lifetimes, then it makes total sense to know that you’ve brought things into this lifetime. 

We’re all here each lifetime to learn, and to be able to evolve, and to change. When we bring things over, it’s because we haven’t learned them from our previous lives. We haven’t learned those lessons, or we haven’t learned how to deal with things, or we haven’t learned how to let things go or move forward. 

When we bring things over, it really is another opportunity for us to learn and to understand how we can move forward, or how we can experience this lifetime in a different way by letting things go, or by clearing our own energy of that past life. 

Learning about your past lives can help you understand why maybe you have certain feelings or you feel a certain way about things in this lifetime. A lot of people bring forward things that are so simple, like I was always afraid of heights. I could do roller coasters because as long as I was moving, I was fine. But if I was standing still, like on a ferris wheel, I would go up in a ferris wheel, the weirdest thing would happen to me. I would want to jump when the ferris wheel stopped at the top. I literally would want to jump off the ferris wheel. I know that that makes absolutely no sense, but that’s what I would want to do. It’s because height terrified me, and I just had to be done with it. 

I realized through a couple different past life regressions that I had some crazy stuff that happened. Not that I was a famous person, which a lot of people can tend to have that feeling that they were Cleopatra or King Henry. Most people may have a connection to that timeframe or that area and that’s why they believe they’re famous people. Most people will not be Cleopatra or King Henry. 

If only one of us could, right?

Exactly. You have that connection to that area, or again, that timeframe. I did have a bunch of stuff, a bunch of different past lives that I was able to connect with, where I was thrown off a cliff or things like that, and it was because of the work that I did. 

I’ve always had this feeling of the height, that I wanted to just jump off and end it because I couldn’t deal with it being that high up and knowing what was coming. I realized after doing my past lives that that’s exactly what it was. It was literally because I had been thrown off the cliff before. 

That’s scary when you bring that forward into this lifetime and that’s a simple thing. The whole afraid of heights thing, a lot of people have that, but it’s scary to not understand where it’s coming from. When you do the past life regression and you realize what has happened before, you can understand or start to understand why you’re having issues in this lifetime, or what the issues are in this lifetime that you can clear up.

Did you have a particular end to a lifetime that was so traumatic, that you had to work through it several lifetimes into the end of that future?

I’ll use that one as an example. The details that I remember about this particular lifetime were that I was bound, I was wrapped almost mummy-like, I was wrapped in like this white muslin cloth. I never even checked this out to see whether this was a thing. I’ve never researched it at all. I just know what I saw in my past life vision, but I was bound head to toe in this white muslin cloth, almost like a burlap cloth. 

Learning about your past lives can help you understand why you may have certain feelings or feel a certain way about things in this lifetime.

I remember looking around before they covered my eyes and I could see off in the distance, there were these huts where everybody lived. I saw my current husband building a hut, just totally ignoring what was happening to me in this lifetime or in that lifetime, just totally ignoring me. He’s not having a connection to me, not really caring that I was about to be thrown over a cliff. 

I remember after this, I’m yelling at him in this lifetime saying, “Hey, why didn’t you help me back then?” and he was like, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” Because he didn’t remember it, obviously, a different lifetime. He wasn’t in my regression with me. It was very, very telling, because I knew going back in that lifetime that I was being persecuted for something that I hadn’t done. 

Essentially, it’s that whole witchcraft thing and that creepy thing, but it was a long, long time ago. That thing where they just persecuted anybody they wanted to that had any intuitive awareness.

In this lifetime, not only was I afraid of heights, but since growing up, since a little child, I’ve always had this feeling that I was going to be arrested and thrown in jail or persecuted for something that I didn’t do, for something that was just part of who I naturally was, or that was out of my control, that I wasn’t evil and I wasn’t doing anything wrong, that I was going to be locked away for something that I hadn’t done. There was no crime there. 

I realized after that regression that I killed two birds with one stone. I realized that my fear of heights, at least in part, and I know that there’s more to my fear of heights which is what you were asking about different lifetimes, but my fear of heights and part was that, and then the persecution was also part of that. 

I also experienced another lifetime where I saw myself going down on the side of a mountain and I was driving in a car. It was crazy, the switchbacks and everything on the mountain, where it’s just a hairpin turned. I know that I crashed and if I rolled over the mountain, I died. It was very steep and it was very high. That was all I saw. 

I came out of my regression really quickly and I knew that that was also a holdover for the fear of heights thing, and that I had been being chased for something I hadn’t done. It was those two things still, again, in another lifetime. This was a lot more modern and this was obviously in a car. 

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It feels like to me, this was maybe my last lifetime before I’m here now. It was pretty prevalent that these were two issues that I was bringing through in this lifetime, and it was from old stuff. I really realized and acknowledged where it was coming from. Hopefully to some, I get it a little more right.

It’s interesting how you have the same husband in both lifetimes. A lot of times this happens, where people who are in one lifetime show up in another in the same or similar role or just another role in your life. There are so many souls out there. Why are these the ones that keep showing up?

I don’t think he was my husband in that first lifetime, that’s why he wasn’t really paying attention to me. I think that I saw him quickly in that lifetime because he looked different but he still looked like him. I recognized him as him. I saw him in that lifetime to let me know and to let me acknowledge that he was indeed there, that he was connected to my life in some way. 

Obviously, I wasn’t significant in his life because he was just letting me die, and he didn’t really care. He was still building his hut, like it didn’t really matter. I believe anyway that we go through lifetimes with different pods of people. Those people may show up in one lifetime as a parent, or they may show up in one lifetime as a brother or a sister, and then the next lifetime they show up as your husband or your wife. 

In one lifetime, you’re a female and one lifetime, you’re a male. It doesn’t really matter. We go through life with these different people in our pods. For me, it feels like and it’s been my experience that what happens in our natural lives, our regular physical lives in this lifetime, once you’ve learned everything that there is to learn, once you’ve taught everything that there is to teach with somebody, then you’re done with them. You’re done learning those lessons, you’re done learning what you need to and teaching what you need to with that person in this lifetime, and then you can move on, but you still have all those other people in your pods. 

You travel through and they may be on the outskirts. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be significant people, but in the next lifetime, they may move in closer and become closer, or they may fade out further, depending on what you need to learn, what you’ve learned, what you’ve taught, and what you’ve shared with those people in your lifetime. I think that we do go from lifetime to lifetime in these pods with people until we’re done learning and teaching each other. It changes depending on the significance and what we still need to learn in the next lifetime.

Right. An important corollary to all this is that the lessons that you’ve learned in past lifetimes stay with you. You don’t have to relearn any of those.

Circumstances may have changed throughout your lifetimes, but you’re still there trying to learn that lesson.

You may need to be reminded. You may have these lifetimes say, hey, don’t forget about this. This didn’t work out so well for you the first time. Or this worked out really well for you last time, don’t forget about this. We may need those reminders. The full on lesson, we’ve been there, done that.

Let’s say that you were a racist in a past lifetime and then you end up being a minority in a future lifetime, you get the lesson like, wow, this is pretty awful. You don’t have to relearn that again in the future lifetime if you’ve graduated to that next level.

It may actually manifest itself in an even worse way in the next lifetime because you’re still needing to learn the lesson that it’s not okay to be racist. It’s not okay to have that bias for absolutely no reason other than skin color or location of birth.

You may end up in the beginning being a bit of a racist because that’s how your family was or that’s what you needed to survive. I’m totally making this up. This is not a reality. Or it could be a reality, but I’m not taking this from any person’s particular experience that I know. I’m totally making this up.

Let’s say you’re a Native American Indian and you see white people come and kill everybody you love. There’s a reason for that. There’s a reason that you feel a way against the white person, but then the next lifetime, you may come in and still be an Indian, but be able to be in a different space and realize that it’s not just because they were white, it’s because of what they were ordered to do. You can begin to see that side of it instead. You don’t necessarily need to be on the other end of it. 

The next lifetime, you can end up being a white supremacist. You still haven’t learned the total lesson as to why this is so bad, why you’re not supposed to be this way. You’re supposed to recognize that we’re all just people. We’re all energy and we’re all connected. 

We’re all equal. 

Exactly, 100%. Circumstances may have changed throughout your lifetimes, but you’re still there trying to learn that lesson. It’s not necessarily that you always get displaced or that you always end up experiencing the flip side. There could be many different sides, there could be many different ways that you’re coming back. It’s just about learning that lesson from different perspectives.

That makes sense. Something that you said a little bit ago, having that intuition or that knowing of what’s coming can scare people. You might get thrown off a cliff. It can also be very advantageous. You could pick the winner of the Kentucky Derby. Bet a lot of money and win a lot of money. How do you utilize your gifts to help your family prosper financially, for example? 

Everybody always says, well, if you’re so psychic why can’t you win the lotto? I’ve never been able to win the lotto. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s not for my greater good, although I think it is. I would love to win the lotto. I do talk a lot about that in my latest book, Intuition at Work, because essentially, you can help yourself become prosperous by tuning into what makes you happy. What career, what path, what direction is really going to make it feel like you’re not working because you’re enjoying it so much? 

We all have different levels of success. We equate success with different things. For some people, it is financial prosperity, so that’s where they need to focus. How can they become more financially prosperous? How can they do it in a way that’s going to create abundance for them? Because it’s important to them and that’s how they equate success.

For other people, it’s not about finances. It’s about having a loving family that is nurturing. You all love each other and you all care about each other. For some people, that’s success. 

For some people, it’s a mixture of many things. Money, financials are very important, material things, being able to have the perfect house, the beautiful cars, and the family that’s loving and caring, popular and happy, and all those things. 

It really depends on what you equate success with. Again, in my newest book, I give examples and exercises essentially on, how can you tune into the lottery numbers? How can you create the life that you will love? How can you pull out your greatest lifetime?

There are a lot of different ways, but some people will tell you that they just know numbers, and that’s how maybe they won the Pick 3, or Pick 5, or whatever it is. Some people will tell you that they tuned in and picked the right scratch-off ticket to win money.

My daughter, by the way, tends to do that. I can’t do that, but I’ll go out and buy five scratch-offs just for fun, like dollar scratch offs. I’ll hold them out like this and say, pick, and she’ll close her eyes, she’ll go like this, back and forth on the lottery tickets, and then she’ll grab the only one that won $10. Not a ton of money, but she gets the winners. 

Some people are able to do that just by using the energy of the ticket. Some people can visualize the winning numbers. The only time I was ever able to do that, specifically, was when my friend’s sister has always said she’s going to win the lotto. That’s it. Through my friend, she said, “Ask Melanie what my numbers should be.” 

For some reason, I wasn’t thinking that it was going to be the lotto, the six or five number lotto thing, but I was getting the Play 4 numbers. I said, “I’m getting these three numbers.” I told her, I said, “but you have to pick the fourth number.” It was zero through nine. It wasn’t like it was a huge thing. I said, “Buy one of each ticket, just pick the fourth number, because I’m not sure what the fourth number is, but it’s the Play 4.” 

They said, all right, and they went back. Sure enough, she went out and she bought tickets. She bought Play 3 tickets and used the three numbers that I had said, and that night, the Play 4 came out with those three numbers plus, I didn’t remember what the fourth number was. I said, “Why didn’t you listen to me? I said to do the 4.”

I’ve never been able to do it for myself, but that would have been for her, and she would have had won had she had listened to what I had said. Obviously, the message got a little crossed or she just figured, no, you only got three numbers, I’m just going to do the Play 3. 

More realistically, if we’re thinking about investing, we can start to use our intuition by feeling how a stock feels. How does it feel to you? In your stomach, does it make you nauseous? Does it make you want to vomit? It’s probably not a good pick. But if it makes you feel really happy, it makes you feel elated, and makes you feel it’s the perfect one, then you may have a better chance of scoring on that stock if you buy that stock. 

By the same token, you don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket and just focus on your intuition. Pull in a little bit of practicality. Analyze it. Don’t just listen to your intuition. Don’t just live by that when you’re trying to do something to make yourself financially prosperous. I always tell people, live your life, participate in your life. Don’t just sit there and go off in La La Land. Stay grounded, essentially. 

You got to keep your foot in both realities, the seen world and the unseen world.

Exactly. Maybe if we’re talking stocks, the first thing you do is you research. Figure out what stocks are looking good, what the market is saying for you, and then use your intuition and say, is this really the right one for me? You could do it any way. You can see how it feels in your body, you can ask for signs to come in, the more tangible things that we talked about earlier. 

You can ask for a symbol. Say, somebody talks to you about Ford Motor Company. You’re thinking, should I go for Ford Motor Company, and you want a symbol or you want a sign to pop up. All of a sudden, you start seeing Fs, just random Fs everywhere. That happens to be the symbol, the actual NASDAQ stock symbol for Ford. That might be a sign that it’s time to invest in Ford because you’re getting those tangible things that you can see.

Awesome. Oracle cards, where do those fit into the picture as far as getting confirmation, guidance, whether it’s picking stocks and making other kinds of life choices? 

It really depends. Most oracle cards won’t give you a yes or no. You can use my Psychic Symbols Oracle Card deck that I have out or any other oracle card deck. You can use them to say, okay, what is the greatest possible outcome if I go in this direction? Your cards will help you understand.

A lot of times, my deck (in particular) has the meaning right on the card. It’s very colorful, it says what it is, it has an image or a symbol of what you may see in your mind’s eye if you’re thinking about that, and it has a description as to what the card means. I tell people all the time, just like with Psychic Symbols, interpret it for yourself as well. 

Look at the colors on the card, look at the name of the card, look at what is happening on the actual card, what the image is. If it’s a person, what are they doing? If it is a boat, which direction is it going? If it is a washing machine, is it churning? How does it make you feel? Look at the description that’s on the card as well. 

Oracle cards can definitely help you to determine whether something is going to be positive or negative, but it won’t necessarily give you a yes or no answer. There are certain spreads that you can do, like with tarot cards that will give you a yes or no answer, but with regular oracle cards, usually it’s more of a situational thing, like what will happen or is this for my greater good? 

I imagine just going through the Psychic Symbols cards, that then becomes raw material that your spiritual cheerleaders can then use to get messages to you. Until you’ve taken that input and those symbols may not mean anything for you personally and then they won’t use them.

Absolutely. It’s interesting that you say that because one of my cards actually is a cheerleader. It’s for that reason. You have somebody in your corner or somebody trying to help you, you have hope, you have people that are rooting for you to succeed.

Psychic Symbols Oracle Cards or any oracle cards, as well as pendulums or any other psychic tool, and I consider The Book of Psychic Symbols with over 500 words on the back, symbolic words that you can look up as a dictionary and you can keep it by your bed for dreams and stuff, these are all tools that you can use.

Using tools does not invalidate that you’re using your intuition. Using tools just helps give you validation that it is your intuition and that you are discerning the messages correctly. You’re interpreting these messages that you’re receiving or that you’re feeling in the correct way because now you’re getting validation, you’re getting confirmation by using these tools. 

You’re not using them as a crutch, you’re using them for validation. Also, I’m just thinking of somebody who wants to get answers through something like a Ouija board. I’d stay personally clear away from that, but what would you tell somebody who’s ever considered using a Ouija board?

I’m going to go back for a second and say that you can use your tools as a crutch as well, especially when you first try to start out. You may not be able to tune in to your intuition as easily, so you may need to use a tool to help you to do that. 

Like a pendulum.

Exactly, a pendulum or the oracle cards. That does help you to access your intuition a little bit easier. It can be a crutch but it’s really a tool, because it really does help us. Just like we use a computer to write, that’s our tool. We could write a longhand and we can write a script on a piece of paper with a pen, but it’s much easier to write on a computer. It’s our tool. It doesn’t mean that it’s negating our intuitive awareness. 

Moving on, what you’re doing when you’re using these tools is you’re asking for positive energy to come through. When you use something like a Ouija board, essentially, you’re opening up to any energy that’s out there.

That’s why people always say that Ouija boards are so scary or so bad. It’s because you’re literally just putting out that invitation for any energy to come through, for anything positive or negative to come through. 

If you use a Ouija board as a tool and you use it in the right way, and you set it up beforehand that you’re not going to allow anything negative to come through, only messages that are for our greater good that from a positive stream are allowed to come through, only messages from our own spirit guides or our deceased loved ones are allowed to come through, then it’s a little bit different.

But if you just sit down with a group of friends and you all put your hand on that planchette and you say, okay, whatever’s going to come through, just let it come on through, that’s when you’re opening up to anything that’s out there, and you can be asking for some trouble. 

You could end up in a really bad neighborhood.

Exactly.

This has been fabulous. If our listeners want to work with you, learn from you, maybe get training from you, how do they do that? Where should we send them to? 

The easiest way to contact me, just go to my website, melaniebarnum.com. There are different options, you could see what I offer, and you can email me through there, melanie@melaniebarnum.com. 

It’s pretty easy, or you can connect with me on my social media. I usually check my Facebook page pretty regularly, my Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, all the normal social media stuff. You could just look me up, Melanie Barnum Psychic and you’ll find me out there. 

As always, you can decide to purchase. If you want to purchase any of my books, my card deck, you can go on my website. For all my books, you can go pretty much anywhere, any store, online, Amazon, Barnes and Noble.

I would love for you to support the Mom and Pop shops out there, the actual brick and mortar bookstores are great. If you want an autographed copy, you could do it through my website. That’s about it.

Do you do private reading still?

Absolutely. I actually shut down my physical office because of Covid. I continued to have it open for a year and then at the end of last year, I actually had to shut it down because it didn’t make any sense. I do video sessions, I do phone sessions. I even do email readings. 

People do ask, how can you do a session if I don’t get to see you in person? It’s very interesting because energy is energy. We connect to anybody across the world. I do readings for people all around the world all the time. I’m an international psychic and medium and an international author. I get communications and questions from people literally all over the world that I do readings for. I’m able to connect to them the same way I can connect to somebody who’s sitting right in front of me in my office. 

Amazing. Thank you so much, Melanie. This was great fun, fascinating, inspiring, and informational at the same time. 

Thank you.

Thank you. Listeners, do something that involves your intuition and we’ll catch you in the next episode. This is Stephan Spencer signing off.

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About Melanie Barnum

Melanie Barnum (Connecticut) is a professional psychic medium, international author, life coach and hypnotist practicing for over twenty years. Melanie does private readings, virtual sessions, hosts workshops, teaches, mentors & more. Her 8 books include her latest, “Intuition @ Work”, through Llewellyn and her “Psychic Symbols Oracle Cards”.

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