Book review: The Clairvoyant Path

The Clairvoyant Path: Follow Your Inner Wisdom to Healing, Empowerment & Change
by Michelle DesPres
(Llewellyn Worldwide; ISBN: 9780738730189)
Paperback. 240 pages. $14.95 USD

When I attended clairvoyant school, I had no idea what I was actually getting myself into. I thought I would be going to school and learning to read people without using my tarot cards....However, what I experienced had little to do with clairvoyantly reading someone else, and everything to do with healing myself. -- Michelle DesPres, The Clairvoyant Path

As Michelle DesPres sees it--and, as a clairvoyant medium, she possibly sees quite a bit--our troubled, threatened world is due as much for revelation, re-evaluation and reinvention as revolution. While I'm completely sympathetic to DesPres' concern for our beloved Gaia, I'm still on the hunt for innovative books on psychic development that cut to the chase.

I know that might sound selfish and shallow, but that kind of instruction book is in short supply, whereas, if you've ever just taken a stroll around a New Age bookstore, you're familiar with most of what the Colorado-based author and former radio host shares in The Clairvoyant Path.

Declaring that "peace doesn't actually come by rectifying our differences with others; it comes by rectifying our differences with our self first," she guides the reader through an exploration of self and Self via well-known methods of active imagination, chakra viewing, energy work, past life inquiry and the like. You are instructed to create an inner screen, visualize and interpret symbolic roses, run energy through your body into the earth and vice versa, releasing old, negative baggage--the usual drill. It's mostly a valid and valuable drill but lacking a fresh approach to necessitate yet another book about it.

I wouldn't mind this so much if The Clairvoyant Path were a well-written guide, inviting and even fun to read. However, DesPres's fairly simple, straightforward development exercises actually take up a minor portion of her book. They're surrounded and clogged by earnest declarations like this passage from a section entitled "Envisioning the New Education of Inner Wisdom":

Today I find myself yet again needing to stand up for what is right and fair in regards to education and individuality. With our energetic shifting climate, we are offered an opportunity to begin honoring the innate diversity in every individual by simply re-educating ourselves about our spirits, their connectedness, and the magic of their complexities.

Or this section on free will:

If our soul's purpose is to enact whatever purpose we desire, the it is our sole purpose to enact our free will. The implications of enacting our free will are enormous as this enables us to alter the fundamentals of our lives. In turn, the implications of neglecting to enact our free [sic] can eventually lead to a type of spiritual impoverishment from which we may feel our only escape is death.

My free will inclines me to escape this book and keep hunting.

Learn more about DesPres and The Clairvoyant Path at Llewellyn Worldwide.