Mystic Mag’s Miguel Amado talked this week with Elaine Clayton, author, artist of books for children and about intuitive intelligence, Reiki Master and teacher. Check out our interview.
I found it interesting your spirituality-art connection. Did you always make that connection?
I think innately we are born creators so being in a creative flow is to connect to the messages our soul so easily delivers and so yes I’d say since my childhood making art (mostly drawing and making up people in my head and on paper) was a very spiritual daily experience. I also had very cinematic, intense dreams that to me were highly connected to spiritual messages and so this was, I recognized at a young age, somehow all connected.
What are spirit paintings? What is your process?
Spirit Paintings are creations I do as an offering, really, for people who would like art done specifically to receive a spiritual message through painting. I meditate on the person the art is intended for, and create while in this trance-state. I have no idea what might arrive! I only know that the prayer said is that the art be special and most helpful to the person who receives it. I also charge very little for these, not the usual commission for art that I have in gallery exhibitions. I want anyone who would like one to be able to have one.
I read on your website about your technique, stream drawing. How does that work?
Stream drawing is something that I introduced in my book with Simon and Schuster, “Making Marks: Discover the Art of Intuitive Drawing”. After years of being visiting author at schools, libraries and museums, I realized that people (young and older) love to draw but are very inhibited, self-critical and dismissive of it—even though they recognize something profound is going on when they draw.
So I developed a way to get kids and adults to draw again, like we all did when we were young, freely and with great joy. It is called stream drawing because I emphasize that we get into the “stream of consciousness flow” when we draw, much like being in the dream state when we are asleep, and this is where great intuitive knowing arrives. This is free-style drawing, not rendering—it is drawing so freely, you feel relaxed, excited, thrilled and very connected to your inner knowing. It is like opening a portal into the most psychic center in each of us.
I imagine that your readings aren’t traditional because of your art link. Were some of them surprised by your creative approach?
They are and they aren’t. My psychic readings are very indepth with mediumship and very thorough because I meditate at least a half hour prior to each reading, creating an intuitive stream drawing on behalf of the client which covers the concepts we carry each day—a sense of “past, present, future” and the energies we embody—emotional/energy centers or chakras. This makes for a very detailed reading including past lives and inner children who can make decisions for us if we are unaware.
The way I approach readings is that, firstly—each reading is a sacred endeavor because this is a human being seeking insight. The reading must be to benefit this person in every way. I have strong virtues around what happens in a reading—I will not allow fear or deception, I realized in all my decades of doing readings and having them done for me, too –many super gifted readers use fear and the vulnerability of the client to “hook ‘em”.
When I was young I was told by a talented psychic that someone was out to get me (maybe she was right) but that she could do a “smoke screen” to help protect me. I asked her what that was and she described what sounded like lighting a candle and saying a prayer. I thought to myself then at age 21, she thinks I cannot or do not know how to say my own prayers! Of course this smoke screen would cost me hundreds of dollars! So I knew she was mis-using her gift.
Same with telling someone about their future—I was doing a book signing at Barnes and Noble once and a person came up and said her friend was told at the young age of 17 that he would not live beyond 50. He had to go through his whole young life with that hanging over his head. That is an extreme violation! We have precognition, but the future is also between a person and the Creator. Readers are not God, readers are not to determine anyone’s future.
More so, we are here to help a person create the future they’d most like to live. So, I read knowing that no matter who the person is, and I have a wide range of clients from Ivy League doctors and scholars to new parents to veterans and young adults seeking guidance—all kinds of miraculously beautiful people in all walks of life from aroung the world—and I know that when we seek a reader, we do not have to do go to a psychic as we can say our own prayers and the help we seek is never separate from us. But if a client reaches out to me, the reading is there to strengthen them, to align them with that inner Source they have and are never separate from, and that we are not doing fortune telling—we are doing serious intuitive-psychic sensing for their total benefit.
What is your intuition development program?
In light of the culture of my intuitive-psychic readings, I am here to strengthen and empower anyone seeking help—and in the spirit of that, I teach that we can all develop our own intuitive process so that we simply become more intuitive ourselves. My books on intuition include Making Marks: Discover the Art of Intuitive Drawing and Illuminara Intuitive Journal with Cards.
I have other card decks etc but all are created to help the individual develop their own psychic sensing. It matters more than ever these days as the veil is thinning, our world is shifting and we need to tune inward to know how to move through this new paradigm. I teach also on my Youtube channel and so I try to make myself available in many ways, as to predictions, stream drawing process, dreams and mediumship, etc.
