Diane Stein - All Women Are Psychics

Text copyright 1988 by Diane Stein

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except brief excerpts for the purpose of review, without written permission of the publisher.

Crossing Press
an imprint of Ten Speed Press
P.O. Box 7123
Berkeley, California 94707
www.tenspeed.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stein, Diane
[Stroking the python]
All women are psychics / Diane Stein.
p. cm.
Originally published: Stroking the python. St. Paul, Minn.:
Llewellyn, 1988.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78376-9
1. Parapsychology. 2. WomenMiscellanea. I. Title.
BF1045.W65S74 1999
133.8082dc21

98-55280

v3.1

For my grandmother Anna Backman
who never told me she was psychic

All Knowledge of Fate comes from the female depths; none of the surface powers know it. Whoever wants to ask about Fate must go down to the woman.

Helen Diner
Mothers and Amazons:
The First Feminine History of Culture

I would like to thank all the women who wrote to me, who answered my ads and questions and contributed their psychic lives and life stories to this book. Without them, the writing would not have been possible. I would also like to thank all the women who are writing about being psychic, within and without Goddess spirituality. Their books, interviews, stories, and methods are made available for all to read and learn from, and the teaching that they bring us all is vital.

Thanks, too to the women who have helped in the writing: Antiga for her review of the crystal gazing section, Gail Fairfield for reviewing the chapter on channeling, Dawn Richards for correcting my grammar and Theosophy, Lee Lanning and Nett Hart for editorial comments, and Maggie Tongue for comments. Their help and time have been given with generosity and love, and are deeply appreciated. Thanks, also to the several publications who ran my ad gratis, asking women to send me their psychic stories. No book is written alone, and these are some of the women behind the scenes.

Because the nature of our inner dimension is qualitatively different from the material world around us, we have no framework for understanding what we experience when working with it. Theres a vulnerability, an insecurity, that you feel when working with the innerconsciousness, for there is no objective world to knock up against so you can know your position and what youre dealing with When you understand the dynamics of innerconsciousness you will find yourself more able to trust and work with your own inner powers.

As a young child, I had the feeling that there was more than I could see. I asked questions, too many of them for grownups comfort sometimes, and often received no answers, or unsatisfactory ones. Lying in bed at night, Id wonder what was real, if what I was told or saw for myself was the whole story or if there might be more. I knew that there was another reality, something beyond what I could see or find out about, but that all the answers were there. Id imagine what that other reality was like, where it existed, and create the possibilities in my mind. At times I knew Id been there while dreaming, and waking had answers I couldnt logically have known. My parents reactions to this, if I talked about or let slip what I knew, were often to punishthey thought Id been listening at closed doors.