What Are the Clair Senses — How to Develop Them

A guide to the psychic senses: what they are, how they show up, and what it means to work with them.

Have you ever walked into a room and immediately felt the tension without anyone saying a word? Known who was calling before looking at your phone? Felt another person’s grief, anxiety, or even physical pain in your own body?

Many people have experiences like these, yet dismiss them because they don’t fit neatly within our cultural understanding of perception. These experiences can be understood through the clair senses: subtle ways of receiving information that extend beyond the ordinary five senses.

Whether you're simply curious, beginning to explore your intuition, or considering working with a practitioner who incorporates the clair senses, this guide offers a grounded introduction to what they are, how they show up, and how they can be developed.

My experience

I always noticed how other people were feeling. Long before I had any language for this, I would feel other people’s experiences in my own body. I'd think of someone I knew and suddenly feel pain in my chest or heaviness in my belly that didn't seem to belong to me.

As a young adult, I trained in Reiki and became fascinated by the experience of feeling energy between my palms—almost like a magnetic bubble that could be sensed and explored.

During my first official Reiki session with another person, something unexpected happened. I became aware of what I experienced as their inner child. I saw them and heard them speaking. Words of comfort flowed effortlessly through me in response. Images and memories appeared that the client later confirmed were deeply significant, despite never having shared them with me.

It didn’t feel like I was doing anything. Rather, I found myself in a deeply receptive state that allowed some other intelligence to move through me and the space between us.

Over the years I've come to understand these experiences and train my clair senses. I now offer 1:1 Embodied Psychic sessions where I integrate the clair senses with energy work, channeling, and somatics to help people explore hidden causes to challenges and create embodied shifts. 

What are the clair senses?

The clair senses are subtle forms of perception that many people report experiencing beyond the standard five physical senses.

The word clair comes from the French word meaning "clear."

Each clair describes a different way information may be perceived:

• Clairvoyance: clear seeing

• Clairaudience: clear hearing

• Clairsentience: clear feeling

• Claircognizance: clear knowing

• Clairalience: clear smelling

• Clairgustance: clear tasting

Although they're often associated with the word psychic, many people's experiences are surprisingly ordinary.

Rather than necessarily dramatic visions or supernatural events, they often arise as quiet impressions, bodily sensations, inner images, spontaneous knowing, or subtle shifts in awareness that are easy to overlook or explain away.

Across cultures and spiritual traditions, people have described these experiences for centuries. Modern language gives us a way to recognise and discuss them, even if we interpret them differently.

The different clair senses — and how they show up

Most people don't experience all six clair senses equally. Instead, one or two tend to be naturally stronger, becoming the primary ways they receive intuitive information.

Clairvoyance (Clear Seeing)

Clairvoyance is receiving information through images, symbols, colours, or visual impressions.

For most people, this isn't like seeing something physically in front of their eyes. Instead, it often appears internally, almost like remembering a dream, imagining a scene, or receiving symbolic imagery that carries meaning beyond conscious thought.

Clairaudience (Clear Hearing)

Clairaudience involves receiving information through sound.

This may be experienced as words, phrases, music, or subtle inner guidance that feels distinctly different from ordinary internal dialogue. Many people describe it as a thought that seems to arrive fully formed rather than being consciously generated.

Clairsentience (Clear Feeling)

Clairsentience is perceiving information through the body.

This might include:

• Feeling another person's emotions

• Experiencing physical sensations that don't seem to belong to you

• Sensing tension, warmth, heaviness, pressure, or expansion

• Feeling the energy of a room before anyone speaks

For many practitioners, this is the most embodied and commonly experienced clair.

Claircognizance (Clear Knowing)

Claircognizance is sudden knowing without an obvious logical source.

Rather than reasoning something out step by step, the information simply arrives whole.

People often describe it as a download, certainty, or deep inner knowing that appears before the mind has had time to analyse it.

Clairalience (Clear Smelling)

Clairalience involves receiving information through scent.

Someone may suddenly smell flowers, smoke, perfume, earth, or another distinctive scent without any physical source being present. This is less commonly reported. 

Clairgustance (Clear Tasting)

Clairgustance is receiving information through taste.

A distinct flavour may appear unexpectedly during meditation, ceremony, or healing work, often carrying symbolic or intuitive meaning.

How do you know if you’re already experiencing a clair sense?

Many people are already experiencing the clair senses without recognising them.

Clairsentience is particularly easy to misunderstand.

People who identify as highly sensitive often assume they're simply anxious, emotionally overwhelmed, or "taking on everyone's energy."

Sometimes this may be true. At other times, what they're noticing is an unusually refined ability to perceive subtle emotional or energetic information.

One distinction many practitioners describe is the quality of the experience itself. Imagination tends to feel like something we're actively creating. Clair perception often feels like something arriving. Rather than constructing the experience, there's a sense of receiving it.

Of course, discernment remains important. Not every thought, feeling, or image is necessarily intuitive information. Developing the clair senses includes learning to distinguish between intuition, imagination, emotion, memory, projection, and ordinary mental activity.

Can everyone develop their clair senses?

A common misconception is that psychic perception is a rare gift reserved for a select few.

In my experience, and in the experience of many practitioners, the clair senses are better understood as natural human capacities that vary from person to person.

Just as musical ability or athletic skill can be developed through practice, the clair senses can often become clearer through consistent attention, embodiment, and experience.

What does it feel like when a practitioner is working with the clair senses in a session?

Every practitioner is different, so I will speak to my own sessions. 

Every session begins by creating a grounded, consensual container. 

We begin with a conversation about what you're bringing, your intentions, and anything that feels important to know. Throughout the session, your consent and choice remain central. You're always welcome to pause, ask questions, or decline any aspect of the work.

Each session is unique. Rather than following a fixed script, I respond to what is present in the moment, weaving together the clair senses, energy work, somatic embodiment and intuitive guidance according to what best serves you.

Depending on what arises, sessions may include:

• Energy work (some clients have referred to this as “psychic surgery”)

• Communication with spirit guides, ancestors, inner child, other aspects of self 

• Womb work

• Belief re-wiring 

• Emotional processing (emotions, beliefs, and memories often show up in parts of the body)
  
  

I may receive images, sensations, words, or intuitive impressions through the clair senses. If they feel relevant and supportive, I'll offer them gently rather than as absolute truth.

Clients often describe the experience as feeling profoundly seen. Something they've struggled to articulate may suddenly be reflected back with surprising clarity.

The session closes slowly, allowing time to integrate the experience, ask questions, and ensure you leave feeling grounded and contained.

How do the clair senses connect to the body?

Many forms of subtle perception are deeply embodied. This is especially true of clairsentience.

Information may arrive as:

• warmth or coolness

• tingling

• pressure

• expansion

• heaviness

• emotion

• movement

• changes in breathing

• sensations in specific parts of the body
  
  

The body can become the instrument through which perception happens.

In my experience, the more fully we inhabit the body, the easier these subtle forms of knowing become to recognise. It also means we can channel subtle information in a way that is grounded and anchored. 

In my sessions, everything we do is grounded in the body. For in-person sessions, touch is a key aspect, and even for remote sessions, clients often bring touch to their own bodies as we are working in those specific areas energetically. The body is our map, guiding us to what is needed. 

Is there a difference between channeling and the clair senses?

The terms are related but not identical.

The clair senses describe how information is received.

Channeling describes the broader process of consciously allowing information, insight, or guidance to move through us from beyond our ordinary thinking mind.

The clair senses are often the pathways through which that information arrives. 
For example:

• Clairvoyance may bring symbolic imagery.

• Clairaudience may bring words or phrases.

• Clairsentience may communicate through bodily feeling.

• Claircognizance may arrive as immediate knowing.

Before every session, I ground deeply into my body, establish clear energetic boundaries, and intentionally create a safe container. From there, I open into a receptive state where information can arise through the different clair senses.

An invitation

Simply reading about the clair senses can be surprisingly validating. For many people, it gives language to experiences they've had for years but never knew how to explain.

Understanding them intellectually, however, is different from experiencing them within a grounded, held, ceremonial space.

My sessions are an invitation to experience these capacities rather than simply read about them.

Together we create a grounded ceremonial space where your body has permission to slow down, where subtle perception becomes easier to recognise, and where the deeper intelligence within you has space to emerge.

Sessions can be a space to explore what is present in your life - uncovering hidden causes to challenges, re-patterning your system, and creating space to embody those shifts. You can bring a specific intention for something you’re wanting to cultivate in your life, or show up and see what happens. 

Sessions can also be a space to explore and strengthen your own psychic channel in an embodied way, cultivating your clair senses with guided support. 

Whether you're seeking support through a particular life challenge, wanting to cultivate something new, or curious to develop your intuitive perception, you’re warmly welcome.

To book in a discovery call or for one of Madeleine Wilkie-Blacks an intuitive reading, or an energy work session, visit her profile. 

This article is written by one of our trusted practitioners on Bodhi Holistic Hub. All practitioners are carefully vetted, and our content follows our Editorial Policy.