The Dictionary Inside You
Accessing, Understanding, and Deciphering Your Personal Lexicon
Guest Post By Miranda “Frick” Harrell
The Dictionary Inside of You
“Trust your gut!” A phrase we are all familiar with, by and large. Shared usually in a situation where we’ve recognized we have some kind of reaction to a person, place, or thing. Paradoxically, it’s something we’ve trained away from in society - especially if we have extrasensory information coming to us. Even in just the most basic experiences of the lizard brain and genetic memory, before you even get to the psychic stuff, we in meat suits have intuitions that we get every day, from subtle to more overt ways. And yet there is so much in modern society that either distracts, forces us to ignore or even attempts to invalidate our intuition.
Trying to reteach yourself to listen to something that we do inherently at birth, are trained out of as we grow up, and then coming into ourselves as extrasensory beings can be really hard to navigate. From discerning and defining personal symbol sets, to the spider sense-like tingles of “Don’t go in there” or “Don’t trust that statement” or “I don’t like them” to the increasingly grand scale of premonitions, sensing the echoes of the past, and even ghosts, Intuition is our tool. A language we have inherently, but have to learn to interpret before we can speak to it.
Photo by Aaron Burden
I have had the hardest time learning how to trust my own - and it feels like an ongoing endeavor that will span the rest of my life, really. Mental and Emotional abuse over the years, manipulation from others, traumas both small and complex, having to learn to function in society and maintain a job around mundanes - it's all shaped me, as it has no doubt shaped all of us. Much of my shadow work has been around imposter syndrome, and the healing journey of trauma, that if I feel strongly about something I’m in the wrong… all that programming has removed me from being able to hear my intuition at times. But, with work, healing, and intention it’s gotten much better and we’re still on the up trend.
So how did I come to this? What methods have been learned, absorbed, and utilized to work on? I know I am not alone in these experiences, and that while my journey is unique to me, it is not exclusive in learning to parse those little inclinations and discern what information is useful, and accurate and how to determine what can be set aside as subjective or speculation. How have I learned, and am I still actively learning to better listen to my intuition?
While it feels much more easily said than done, the answer is I have begun the process of deciphering the dictionary inside of me, or developing an understanding of my personal lexicon and symbols.
Photo by Tomas Martinez
Personal Symbol Sets are slippery little things. They are constructed from the moment we are born, until the day we pass on. They are constantly changing, updating, reconfiguring, and growing, like a living language. Because that's what they are. They're a unique language to us, the individual, and our personal experience. Sure, there may be some items that we share with family, friends, culture - White Weddings of the West, versus White worn for Mourning in the East, the color white in clothing depending on your culture could be different. And that would influence your Personal Lexicon. But there will always be things that are unique to you that are a mixture of your mind, and personal experience. The phrase "symbol set" is also a little misleading at first. Personal Lexicon, or personal dictionary also fits since while it's not always words, it functions like a language.
Well, how does one learn to recognize and understand that personal dictionary?
First and foremost, curiosity. It's been a haul trying to come to a place of objectively questioning my experiences. One challenge I’ve run into time and again is the trap of “If it feels bad, it must be bad”. As Humans we learn things that feel bad, we should avoid. If you’ve ever accidentally gotten zapped by an outlet while plugging something in, or touched something hot that burned your fingers, you know that the brain not only goes “Oh okay, don’t do that again”, but then will also provide nervousness, hesitance, or downright anxious feelings the next time we’re in a similar circumstance with the memory of the event to help prevent and remind us from doing it again. This can be an interesting interaction when it comes to psychic senses and experience. If an individual has a frightening or unfortunate paranormal experience, those senses and feelings can get filed away in the “Do not do that again” section of the mind. To complicate things, if the way in which we sense the psychic information feels bad in our mind or body, even without a traumatic personal experience, it can also start to be filed away in that avoid for safety section of the brain.
Photo by Annie Spratt
Curiosity is the best tool to combat this when trying to develop a deeper understanding of how we sense things. This is by no means a permission slip to yeet thineself into dangerous situations, but instead, a charge to listen to your body, mind and intuition and challenge why something might feel bad. What about the experience feels worrisome, or dangerous? Peel it apart to understand.
A personal example; I get a twisty, uncomfortable feeling in my solar plexus in a very specific way when someone hits on or speaks to something that is a fundamental truth. sure, that's "gut instinct", but it's a very specific feeling to it that tells me there's a deep truth to what is being said. For years and years I interpreted this as “Something bad is happening/going to happen around this statement”. It wasn’t until years and years and years after I’d started noticing this happening that I started to dissect it. I’d begun to notice that it would happen, but then bad things didn’t necessarily follow. So, I started making notes in my journal. I started saying when it happened out loud to those who share my occult interests. Through drawing my attention and focus to it, and recording when it happened and when I could, what followed if it was ever revealed, I discovered something interesting; That feeling occurs not when something said is an ill portent, but instead when some kind of fundamental truth is being expressed. Anything from “I think this person is good/abusive/important” to “I think I lived in Medieval France”. It’s become a very useful compass for when something important or fundamentally true is being spoken and whatever is being said needs to have attention paid to it.
Photo by Chris Ensey
Additionally, in visualizations and past life meditations, I personally have come to recognize that certain details that don't fit in a given memory, might not be accurate to having been there, but are telling me something else - so I take note of things that feel "not right" to the memory. At one point I remember a fan and skirt but the fan and the skirt didn't fit the setting; but the fan and skirt looked like that of an RPG character I used to play. The fan and the skirt were NOT accurate, but it told me details about things that I did, that ended up relating to that game character.
This brings me to the next best tool for learning the shape of your personal lexicon - Journaling.
Photo by Prophsee Journal
Journaling is a subject I could go on about at great length. The value for both day to day mundane as well as paranormal and psychic experiences cannot be overstated in my opinion. Do you want to know yourself better? Do you want to start to see and understand patterns? Do you want to document, or offload thoughts and feelings that you don’t want to fall away to the aether? Journaling is your solution. Be it a document in your personal Google Drive, a notebook you keep in your purse or a bougie, leather-bound journal with marker-friendly paper filled with everything from scrawled chicken scratch to acrylic marker masterpieces of a thing you saw in a dream (she says calling herself out because I’m the bougie journal girl), a personal record can be integral in trying to figure out how your mind interprets the world.
While I’ve journaled for years on and off in different ways, means, and places (meaning that my own little personal library is more than I little chaotic and somewhat all over the place), if you’ve never heard this before, allow me to be the first to say; There is no wrong way to journal. You don’t have to do it every day. You don’t have to have nice handwriting, nor do you even have to write it by hand. I have documents upon documents in my personal cloud storage of things that I have recorded, from past life recalls to specific experiences or analyses of my intuition. Personally, I prefer hand writing things, because it engages different parts of the brain that I find helpful in the process - but that’s not always a viable option. One day, I will probably go through and print off things I’d like to have physical copies of the digital information, but the important thing is that I got them down at the time it needed to be recorded.
Photo by Estee Janssens
If time, location, and circumstance are no worries, I get fancy with it. As an artist, I like to draw things and use all kinds of mediums - nice acrylic markers, watercolors, watercolor pencils, high-quality ink pens of all varieties, even stickers, Happy Planner sets, and scrapbooking materials. Not a drop of that is required for the process, but it is certainly a means by which I keep myself entertained and invested in the process as someone with ADHD who can have a hard time remembering or motivating myself to be consistent with the practice.
I share, because the most frequent response I receive when discussing the practice of journaling has been “I'm bad at remembering” or “I’ll do it for a while and then fall off” or “It’s boring and hard to make myself do it”. Big same, folks. I have been there and felt that in my bones. It was not until I saw the value of keeping a personal journal for things like deciphering my personal dictionary that I started problem-solving ways to help myself be more consistent. And even still I’ll go through spells of journaling once a day or more, and then spells of not doing it for months.
And that’s okay too. But just starting the process, putting your mind and intent to it, and finding ways to troubleshoot your personal challenges can be useful steps towards getting the ball rolling. Don’t ever let anyone tell you there is only one right way to do something unless it involves chemicals, medication or heavy machinery - and journaling is no exception.
Now with curiosity and a journal by our side, what do we do next to start understanding not only our personal lexicon, but how it applies to our psychic experience?
Honestly? The first steps can be anything that speaks to you and a fun exercise in exploration. Ask yourself some questions
What feelings, images, memories or definitions do I associate with the colors of the rainbow? Does red mean love and passion? Is yellow Joy or something else? Don’t worry about looking up these things or what they’re supposed to mean; think on or even look at a color, and see how it makes you feel, what pops into your mind - be curious about what your mind associates with that color.
What inspires emotion in you? What images, colors, symbols, books, characters, and movies make you feel Happy? Sad? Angry?
What makes you feel powerful? Weak? Tired? Energized? Comforted? What images, ideas, and thoughts accompany these things?
Photo by Yeshi Kangrang
The list is endless of the questions you can ask yourself and write about. The process of discerning when started with these prompts will unlock a new perspective and way of looking at the world around you, and cultivate that perception and analysis when you turn your eyes inward as well. This brings me to my final tool in this practice; Objectivity.
Actual objectivity is very much impossible to achieve, and that’s okay. We can all work to be as objective as possible, and you might be far more objective than the person sitting next to you over all. They may also have an experience or subject that they are actually more objective than you are, despite being far more buried in personal experience and filters than you function in everything else. The best we can do is try. Sometimes, our best isn’t going to be very good. That’s okay too. That’s not a reason to not strive for it, and as long as you’re trying and working to get better, you are bound to make progress - on anything. Everything. Objectivity included. Sometimes, you’re trying so hard to be objective, that you can lose compassion. For others, and for yourself. That’s also not good. We’re not robots. We are a weird kind of organic machine that is fallible and subject to emotion, which defies logic. True objectivity is not only a lack of favoritism towards a side but a true freedom from bias. And there’s the rub.
It is impossible to have a human experience without bias. Even if you are able to process to a more objective space, your initial experience, impression, and therefore the processing itself, will have that flavor of bias. Bias is how we learn, and shape our reality. That individual, unique convergence of personal experience, intuition, impression, recall, and perspective is what makes us all exceptional. How I perceive and engage with reality, is not how literally anyone else who will ever read this engages with reality. We can have similar experiences, similar traumas, and similar ways in which those things manifest within us, but they are only ever similar. They are not, cannot be, and honestly are lucky to not be identical. Even Identical twins have two different experiences of the exact same event or occurrence.
The world would be very boring if we all processed and experienced things identically.
Photo by Juliana Kozoski
Suffice to say the process of learning to decipher, interpret, and understand your personal lexicon is not something that happens overnight. It’s more like the ongoing self-analysis of how we interface with reality, and ever-changing. It can be obvious in places, and insidiously buried or subtle in others, but very much a worthwhile process for a soul looking to hone their psychic perceptions and understanding.
I am of the belief that every human has the capacity and ability to tune into and strengthen their psychic abilities. Each individual will have a different interplay of how that manifests for them - what senses are innate and stronger, what senses they struggle with or may have as a detriment. However the practices to assist in that process can be similar for us all, and understanding our personal lexicon and the dictionaries inside us, written by lived experience, culture, and individual preference is a deeply useful tool in your toolbox.
Go forth with curiosity and objectivity, write it all down, and I wish you luck and prosperity in your endeavors, friends. Never forget, that there is always more to learn.
Frick (Miranda)
Special thanks to Frick (Miranda) for their contribution to AetherBody. You can find more of their work over on their TikTok or listen to their podcast over on Spotify.
Frick (Miranda)
@vampireauntspooky on TikTok
That Spooky Life Podcast on Spotify