The 5 Stages Of Psychic Development
Updated 2025.06.02
Developing your psychic abilities is, in many ways, a gateway to hope, appreciation and gratitude - it’s a fast track to your spiritual growth.
When you're connected, you get closer aligned to your soul path, and you can find more meaning and fulfillment from your days.
That said, the development process for your intuitive, psychic, and mediumship abilities is a unique journey for everyone.
We all come to the decision to explore the opening of our intuitive and spiritual abilities for different reasons, guided by different life experiences, and we achieve different results because our gifts are all different.
As souls, we're a lot like the ecological graph of the warblers in an evergreen tree.
The graph explains that while there may be five different species of warbler in a single tree, they all occupy and thrive best in a slightly different space, making it possible for so many to coexist at once. This is called niche or resource partitioning.
Humans are just like this. We can occupy different niches and use the resources there in different ways. Likewise, our intuitive gifts lead us all to these various unique niches within a similar space where it is theoretically possible to coexist peacefully.
When people develop their intuitive gifts, not everyone wants to give psychic readings or offer energy healings in one-on-one sessions. Some people are better at teaching in videos or working with large groups. Some people use their gifts in other forms of art or societal service.
As far as the calling to the practice - you could be called to simply want to understand what has already been happening for years. Others have been called following a personal near-death experience or after the death of a loved one.
All of us are intuitive at birth and for many of us, our paths take us in different directions before you are led back to our innate form of knowing.
Moments of hardship can be when many people develop their gifts - it’s often because when you’re desperate that no other logical solution works, you’ll listen to a voice within, a dream or pray for an answer.
When times are dark the light truly does become easier to see. So we have to be thankful for these times, as the re-finding and re-discovering of your can lead to an incredible blossoming of the next phases of your experience.
Developing your intuitive gifts is as much a matter of discovering yourself, as it is a matter of helping others.
It's an empowering, self-transformational process.
The journey of psychic and spiritual development, while vastly diverse, though, does follow a general trend of stages. You may move back and forth between the stages more than once, before officially moving on to the next step.
So below, you'll find the shared stages we all go through in psychic development and what to expect as you transverse through each.
What To Expect In Your Intuitive Opening Path
Stage 1. Excitement Stage
In this stage, you find yourself excited and wanting to gather as much information as possible about anything you can find in your intuitive field of interest.
Intuitive events, validations and synchronicities often happen in fast sequence and opportunities to develop your gifts appear to be everywhere. You are driven by a desire to explore your intuitive gifts. Your passion is your guide and soul's way of confirming for you to keep going.
You will likely experience a crystal clear increase of intuitive experiences - it’s a time of quick inner growth. This transformative period may include other shifts in your life, as inner change often precedes outer change.
At times, you may find yourself moving between fear and excitement, not knowing if you should move forward into this unknown field and energy or back away from it.
Eventually, your courage takes the lead and you do step forward into the next stages of intuitive development.
Stage 2. Doubt And Limiting-Out Stage
The discernment phase. You begin to weigh what you've experienced with what you already know and compare it to new information.
It's where your old self, limiting self may tell you it's not real or you may receive negative social pressure to not move forward and change. You’ll likely confront your own concerns alongside others, as these fears present themselves so they can be released and shifted.
It’s important to be very discerning with the feedback you listen to - take everything that you learn with a heightened level of awareness. You may confront truths you previously avoided - these realities come forward to help you grow and accept what is.
It is in this stage, you might begin to doubt yourself, but keep going using discernment, self love and positive self talk. This phase often feels slower-paced, because you begin to take things a lot more judiciously and start to question and apply what you absorbed during the excitement stage.
Stage 3. Validation Stage
This is the stage where you want proof and physical evidence to explain what you've experienced.
You may start to share your gifts more proactively, as you are now looking for evidence in the physical world for what you received in the energetic, psychic, and spiritual world and you will receive it.
You move out of doubt; you start to get your trust and faith. You may seek out readings with other professionals, test out your abilities in the working world more and begin to record your experiences for later recognition and validation.
It is in this stage where you start to attract others who have had similar experiences - they will provide validation for what you've already experienced. This is a critical stage for confidence building.
All of this energy is needed to make a difference with your purpose. Through sharing your gifts with the world, in the validation stage, you get discerning and helpful feedback, taking your gifts to the next level.
Stage 4. Process and Methods Stage
In this stage where you have found out what works for you, what you believe in and what you have found to be true.
In the validation stage, you received feedback from your Spirit Guides, peers, or the Universe with synchronicity as to what aspects of your gifts were touching the world most.
Knowing what works, you can then think back to what you were tapped into your gifts, making your intuitive moments easier to recreate.
It’s now easier to identify what is your intuition and what isn’t. The more easily you can recreate your intuitive insights, the more reliable they become, and the easier it is to trust and call-upon your gifts in the future.
So in this stage, you perfect what works and you can apply them to your own life, well being, your relationships, and potentially, your career.
You may evaluate your systems of receiving intuitive information or explore new ways of using your gifts. You may begin to narrow down on an intuitive focus trade or have identified specific tools that work the best for you.
This stage can help you specialize and fine-tune the process to make it more fun.
Stage 5. Assimilation Stage
You now begin to integrate what you have learned in your intuitive development journey in your physical life.
The principles, facts, and beliefs that you have collected, you start applying to your life. You start to walk the talk.
This is the best stage of all as you get to embody everything you absorbed on the journey so far and complete the process of becoming.
For example, if you're an astrologer, you decide once and for all not to sign any contracts or long term offers when Mercury is in retrograde. If you own a spiritual bookstore, you may finally decide that before bringing a new product in, you always consult your Spirit Team. You may start really, truly trusting your vibes.
You apply the insights. You start to feel as though you are exactly where you need to be. In this stage, you are more fully able to see the purpose of all of it and how it aligns with where you are now. You move into a state of acceptance with your journey.
Where do you find yourself in these stages now?
We are all going through at least one stage at any time. If you've already visited one of these stages, know you may identify yourself in one of them again, in some way, in the future. There’s always a new opportunity to grow and level up.
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