I've been encountering many people who sense that they have spiritual gifts but can't quite put a finger on what they might be.

It is for this reason that I developed the Spiritual Gift Inventory below.

It's arranged into three groups of spiritual gifts which are grouped so that one (or several) of the gifts in each group might resonate with you.

By tallying which gifts resonate with you from each grouping, you'll be in a place to get a clear idea bout the nature of your specific blend of spiritual gifts.

And this usually provides a pretty clear sense of your spiritual purpose.

So have fun with it! And afterward (if you like), you can set up a free spiritual gift clarification discussion with me.

But first, let's clarify one thing...

Some gifts just seem innate, right? Like you were just born to do that thing. Like Michael Jordan was born to play basketball. 

And then other gifts seem more developed- like we worked really hard to acquire them.

Almost always there is an element of both innate and developed in each of our spiritual gifts. Typically we come into this life with natural abilities for a spiritual gift and then develop them to create mastery.

Some of the spiritual gifts do seem to weigh heavier on innate dor some people. For example, someone that is just naturally psychic as hell. Or perhaps some that is just really gifted as a writer. But if you look a little deeper, true mastery of the gift comes after working with the gift and developing it.

And similarly, some gifts seem to weigh a little more heavily on being developed. Like trusting yourself (spoiler alert) for example But typically there are some innate traits that allow you to do that at a really deep level.

Since there are both innate and developed elements in our spiritual gifts, I will start by describing each gift to help you recognize the innate part of the gift, then will I list ways to develop each of the twelve gifts below.

So let's dive into the first group...

1. Clarity

You are able to see things as they are. Your ability to detach to be purely objective allows you to see through illusion and confusion. You can see the big picture and are able to see the forest for the trees. You are very perceptive and likely have a developed third eye chakra. In my tradition, we refer to this as “eagle medicine”. 

How this gift affects others:

Your ability to see things with clarity helps people see clealry. When you share what you see, you are showing them how it looks to see clealry. This helps to get outside of themselves to sort out truth from delusion. This can help people see through their denial, fear, and limiting belief systems.

How to develop this gift:

1. Learn to trust what you see. Notice how things look differently when you see from the place of clarity. Then you get a choice. Clarity and confusion are both available at any given moment, and you ultimately choose which to focus on.

2. Practice seeing things as they are. When you enter an experience, let go of your preconceptions and how you need things to be. Ask yourself, "What is the reality of the stituation?"

3. Find relationship clairity in your relationships. Differentiate what is about you and what is about the otehr person.

4. Meditate focusing on your third eye chakra.

2. Discernment

You have the ability to help people sort out the subtle things that are going on in their hearts. This gift is similar to the gift of clarity but delves more into the world of subjectivity and emotion. It is more centered in the heart chakra and relies on feeling, instinct, and intuition.

An example of discernment involves hearing intent which senses the peoples' true intention even if it is not stated in the words and actions.

How this gift affects others:

By using the gift of discernment in your everyday life you model it for other people to discover what it is. It may be a subtle comment you make when they are sharing something about their romantic relationship. Later they may relfect back on it thinking, "Hmm, I never considered that before."

This is an amazing gift to offer as psycotherapist or life coach. You are able to guide people to feel their way through their relationships and spiritual transitions.

How to develop this gift:

1. Learn to trust your intuition. Practice sensing and hearing the subtle things that come to you expreoent with acting on waht coems to you and see waht happens. Learn to distiunguish the different sensation and vibration beteeen your intuition and your intellectual thoughts

2. Work introspectively to see your own emotional issues, relationships, and situations with discernment. Use self inquiry to walk them back to their core of these things. See how they interrelate with each other. 

3. Meditate focusing on your solar plexus chakra.

3. Empathy

You feel things really deeply so much so that you may even feel what other people are feeling. You may have been told that you were a highly sensitive person (HSP) or related to this concept. Empathy is the foundaton of developing true compassion.

How this gift affects others: This can bring amazing awareness of others’ inner experiences that can be used to support them, hear them, guide them and heal them

How to develop this gift: 

1. Find environments and people that are safe to feel deeply with.

2. Develop skills to manage feeling deeply through experience or spirtual coaching. With this gift, you are susceptible to emotional overwhelm and shutting down, avoiding, intellectualizing, or medicating your feelings.

3. Develop skills on how to manage other people's feelings through experience or coaching with fellow empath. The trick is to feel with them, not for them. You may even mistake other people's feelings as your own. It is vital to not take on other people's feelings and to allow them to have their feelings and lessons.

4. Meditate focusing on your heart chakra.

4. Psychic

You have the ability to experience and communicate what is going on in other dimensions. This includes psychics, mystics, and channelers. You can act as a natural bridge between this world and the spirit worlds

How this gift affects others: You can help people get in touch with their spirit guides and deliver messages their guides have for them to. This often takes the form of the human asking a question and the mystic translating the guide's answers.

People with this gift are often able to communicate with people who have passed away. You can act as an intermediary to help both the living and the dead resolve unfinished business with each other. and issues with people who have passed away.

This is so healing that when I'm working with a client who has unsaid things with a person who has passed, I suggest, “Well, why don’t you tell them?” And I refer them to someone who has this gift. This saves years of grief and therapy.

Also can help people get in touch with their intuition.

How to develop this gift:

1. Learn to trust the subtle senses of things that come to you. It's getting used to the fact that there are others ways of knowing things than through the intellect and the five senses.

2. Learn to manage the fact that you experience things that the people around you do not. This involves interacting with people and a culture that doesn't honor a major component of your reality or even believe that it's real.

3. Spend time with or do coached by someone who found their way with this gift. You can develop skills about when and how to share what you're experiencing with people who are not experiencing it. 

4. Meditate focusing on your crown chakra.

5. Nurturer

You provide love and nourishment for everyone around you. It's part of your spiritual nature. You wouldn't know any other way. This gift may initially awaken when you care for your children.

You are the person that shows up at work or a party with some home-baked treat. You invite people to your home. You feed them, listen to them, hug them, and tell them that it's going to be alright. And they believe you.

How this gift affects others: People feel nourished and loved around you. The way that you interact with them fills their hearts. They may be drawn to you when they are feeling like they need some love and belonging. They feel like they are a loved part of your family.

How to develop this gift: 

1. Care for yourself and make sure you get your own emotional needs met. Find what recharges your batteries and fills your heart, and then make it your first priority.

2. Learn to manage the fact that some people may not appreciate and reciprocate the love that you offer. They may see it as it your role to offer love and their role to accept.

3. Find people who are able to nuture you. They may not be the people that you feel should be abel to do this including parents children and family  members. Find your family of support.

6. Honesty

You speak your truth to people because you intuitively know that it needs to be said. You are honest and tell it like it is. Most contemporary cultures are not very honest. It is a true gift when you are straight with someone.

It takes great courage to speak your truth. You may be the person that tells someone that they have bad breath or that the emperor has no clothes. You have to care about them a lot to overcome the awkwardness and potential reaction. But to you, it's even more painful to not be sincere.

How this gift affects others: People are able to trust you because they know where they stand with you. This grounds and anchors them.

And they can trust that you are being straight with them. Most of the people in their lives are schmoozing them, being nice, or telling them what they want to hear. They come to you when they're ready to hear the truth.

How to develop this gift:

1. Speak your truth for its own sake- solely because you feel it needs to be said. Refrain from speaking your truth you use truth to get a specific outcome.  When your will for an outcome becomes involvied, speaking your truth loses its purity.

2. Allow people to have their pain. If you speak your truth and someone becomes upset, they may make a convincing argument that you hurt their feelings. If you speak your truth in a pure way, the pain they experience is about them. Allow them to have it.

3. Some of the time, speak your truth to be people who are strong enough to honor and celebrate it. While it is a generous gift, not everyone will appreciate you speaking your truth. People who can support you in speaking your truth allow you to hear it and see its beauty.

7. Inquisitive Mind

You are naturally curious and want to know things for their own sake. You have an inquisitive mind. You may be a pure scientist, explorer, or inventor. You are drawn to pure discovery.

You want to genuinely know what it's like for other people. You are naturally fascinated with the experience of other people and the dynamics of things. You want to understand what's important to these people, what they're passionate about, and what their dreams are.

How this gift affects others: Your curiosity naturally engages people. Magic happens when you inquisitively ask questions about what's going on with people. They feel your sincerity. They may be surprised or taken back at first wondering if it's a trick.

They translate it as, "Someone actually cares about what life is like for me." They leave the interaction feeling heard. When people sense that you are genuinely interested in them, it's a big deal to them. They start opening up and sharing things they are not able to with other people.

They get a sense that other people are interested in them- and by extension, they must be interesting. They are accustomed to people choosing their phones, TV, or video games over discovering what makes them tick.

How to develop this gift: 

1. Allow yourself to be curious. Follow things that you are curious about and see where it takes you.

2. Engage people. You ask people how they are doing and really want to know. You're naturally curious about people, so simply ask them what you are curious about. And listen. Then ask them clarifying questions to understand what it's truly like for them. 

The intention of the inquisitive mind is critical. When you truly want to know for its own sake, it feels different. People can sense the difference even if they are not fully conscious of it.

3. Do spiritual inquiry. Don't forget to turn your curiosity inward. Take something about life or spirituality that you are genuinely curious about. Ask spirit or the universe and let the answer dem to you. Ask for clarification. Do this to take your question all the way down to its core essence. Now you know.

8. Trust

You have the courage and skill to trust your heart. You look inside to your intuition for your intention and motivation rather than looking outside of yourself for it. You stay open and being in touch with your heart and intuition provides your orientation and approach to your life. 

You do what you do simply because it feels right and brings you joy. You are not concerned about how others will take it. You act freely and spontaneously. Because you trust yourself deeply, you're not encumbered by inhibition and do not become constricted with conformity. You march to your own drummer. 

How this gift affects others: Trusting your heart and acting on it in your everyday life models this to the people you interact with. It shows them that this is even possible. Your gift offers the possibility of freedom and uninhibitedness.  

And, this is infectious. People around you begin to feel freer. You bring a sense of freedom and energy to other people. This gift is naturally charismatic. You make natural leaders as people look to you to experience and learn how to look to themselves. 

How to develop this gift: Be your natural self. The only way this gift does not work is if you suppress it. People with this gift find a way to figure out how to allow their gift to flow and still function at the work place or school. It’s finding naturally flowing way to be productive and it may not look like other people’s way of disciplining themselves to do things. This is more free flow of following your joy which sometimes irrationally results in getting done what you need to do.

9. Artist

You Include all the creative arts. Reflects beauty and aspects of people’s spiritual nature to people. Include visual artists, writers, musicians, storytellers. Artist touch something dep inside themselves and then are about to translate to the people that experience their art. There is a deep intimacy with their art as they are exposing something that they see are the way they experience of life feels to them inside.

How this gift affects others: People are naturally touched by people with this gift and by the things that they create. They help us see things and feel things.

And by offering their art they give us permission and teach us how to access what we see and feel inside ourselves.

Joseph Campbell speaks to the contribution of this gift to the culture that they are in. “There’s an old romantic idea in German, Das Volk dichtet, which says the ideas and poetry of the traditional culture come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted, whose ears are open to the song of the universe. These people speak to the folk, and there’s an answer from the folk which is then received as an interaction with the first impulse in the shaping of full tradition comes from above, not from below.

Myths must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment in the world.
(Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, p, 85, 1988.

How to develop this gift: Finding a medium that resonates with you and then developing your craft. This may begin by learning the rudiments of your art form. Once you learn these you are free to improvise and create.

Due to the vulnerability of exposing your soul that I described above, there may be a reluctance to share your art with other people. Sometimes an artist will not finish a piece or project because then it becomes open for criticism and there is not the safety net of saying it is not done yet. It takes a great deal of courage to complete your art and release it to have the effect that it naturally has on the people that experience it.

10. Healer

You Physical healing, removing dis-ease. Collaborating with spirit and directing healing life energy to create wholeness, balance, and healing. This can be even more powerful when the person or people you are healing participate in their own healing.

How this gift affects others: a

How to develop this gift: You

11. Teacher

You present things in a way that allows people to learn. create spaces for people to experience and walk with their personal power, truth, and spiritual nature. It’s the space of a teacher and parent. But is not just intellectual of scholastic teaching. It provides a specific type of learning. It’s an experiential learning that happens when you create spaces and orchestrate experiences for people to experience and understand it for themselves. This creates understanding and integration. It boemces theirs It is now a part of them

Hence the term guide and support.

How this gift affects others: a

How to develop this gift: You

12. Social Reformer

Social Reform. You are the catalyst that brings in a new way of being. You combine the gifts of vision and leadership. vso allow ou to se the new way f being. Leadship allows to you carry out the revolution.

How this gift affects others: a

How to develop this gift: You