I'm Italy, happy to meet everyone around here. 

My road to a more spiritual existence started with my mom's unintentional subliminal messaging in the form of a book on tape called “The Tenth Insight”. I used to listen to it a million times a day, while I slept even. The ideas became a part of my mind, for better or for worse. 

As a young child, I spent a lot of time fascinated with the super natural–ghosts and the lock ness monster and so on. During this time I started getting “stories” from what I thought were dead people. These stories were usually about the last few days of the person's life, and just kind of forced their way into my mind. I also saw shadows and had strong gut instincts about things, mostly dangerous.

Then high school came around. Ah, high school. I was in theatre, back stage, and this boy and I met, talking briefly. He left, and I closed my eyes and with my eyes closed I could see a kind of yellow glow moving through the theatre. For a while, I could locate his color, I guess you could call it, no matter where he was, no matter how far apart we were. That quickly evolved to channeling his emotions, which wasn't so good. I would be happy with life, but if he suddenly wasn't, I would be depressed as well.

That grew into “seeing” colors for everyone, and knowing their emotions. Kind of.

Then, Junior year I was looking through one of my teacher's books and found this one on Taoism, which I knew nothing about at the time. He saw me thumbing it, and told me to take it. This was on the first day of school and I didn't dare refuse. It took me a week or two to actually read it, but once I did I was totally hooked. The way that the author explained Taoist principles and how to incorporate it into your life, I knew that it was exactly how I had always wanted to live my life. I embraced it completely. 

I embraced this, and also met this other guy who is some kind of power beacon, or something, because my “knowing people” thing ballooned immediately. We weren't dating or anything, we barely even talked, but he was in one of my classes and I was drawn to be near him, and the more I was, the more precise things got.

As of now I no longer really see colors, though if I'm explaining it to people, I will tell them that I do–it's easier then trying to explain how it really works. It's more intuitive than that. The “fun” part is I understand basically everything about a person once I meet them, and accurately predict the course of their actions time after time (though they usually ignore my advice, even after they've acknowledged that I'm right). I also have a habit of knowing some of their memories or thoughts on things that they never actually voiced which can get me into strange situations…