Nobody talks about how awkward the beginning of any spiritual practice actually is.
You sit down, pen in hand, notebook open, trying to “receive guidance” and your brain just serves you a grocery list and some secondhand embarrassment about something you said in 2014. That’s the reality of starting automatic writing. And honestly, that’s fine. That’s exactly where most people begin.
But stick with it, and something starts to change.
You write without thinking. You let the pen move without controlling where it goes. No editing, no pausing, no rereading mid-sentence. Just movement. And what comes out on the other side is often nothing like what your conscious mind would have produced on its own.
The real block in psychic development isn’t what people think
Ask most people why they don’t trust their intuition and they’ll say something like “I’m just not psychic” or “I probably made it up.” That second one is more honest, and also the thing automatic writing directly addresses.
The analytical mind is fast. Faster than most people realise. Something lands intuitively and before you’ve even properly registered it, your brain has already filed it under “imagination” and moved on. You never even gave it a fair hearing.
Automatic writing interrupts that process. When you’re physically writing and your intention is to not stop, your logical mind gets occupied just enough that the intuitive part gets space. Information comes through before the inner critic gets a chance to dismiss it.
Over time you start noticing: Wait… I wouldn’t have thought that. That didn’t come from me in the usual way.
That noticing is everything. It’s the beginning of genuine psychic development, not the dramatic kind you see in films, but the real kind, which is quiet, gradual, and built on learning to trust what comes through.
What it actually builds
Clairvoyance, claircognizance, mediumship, working in the Akashic Records, all of it rests on one foundational skill: the ability to receive information and not immediately talk yourself out of it.
Automatic writing is one of the most direct ways to build that skill because it gives you evidence, black and white on the page, words that came through your hand that genuinely surprised you. You can’t easily dismiss something that is already written in front of you.
Sanskritii Sethi brings automatic writing into her teaching specifically because of this. It’s not a side practice or a warm-up exercise. It’s the thing that makes everything else work better.
Students who develop a consistent writing practice come to their Akashic Records work with a cleaner channel. They’re less in their head. They’ve already learned what it feels like when real guidance is coming through versus when their mind is filling in blanks.
That distinction takes time to develop, but automatic writing is often the fastest path to it.
Starting without overthinking it
Ten minutes. Morning if you can, before your brain is cluttered. A notebook you keep only for this.
Write a question at the top, something you actually want to understand, not something vague and safe. Then write. Don’t stop.
Read it back afterwards and pay attention to what surprised you. The sentences that felt like they came from somewhere else. The answers you didn’t consciously construct. Those are worth sitting with.
It won’t feel psychic at first. It’ll feel like journaling with slightly looser rules. That’s okay. The channel builds quietly in the background, and one day you’ll read something back and realise there’s no way your ordinary mind wrote that.
