All About Dowsing...
 

First, what kind of question-and-answer would really be useful and interesting to you ? This is a very personal matter, but in classes I usually suggest a few like:
How does my health score compared to perfect ? (You look for a yes or no when trying 10,20,30,40 etc per cent in turn, perhaps using the fingers of the non-dowsing hand and the gaps between them and mentally posting the numbers there. You HAVE to get a response somewhere so it's a good starter. 0 won't be an answer as that will require you to be dead and if you get 100 there's probably a glitch in your system - but never mind !
Or you can test for "vitality" in the same way. "Vitality" as a per cent is the proportion of your total energy available for living rather than fighting current stress factors, while "health" is the same thing, but rolling into account all the possible stress factors you are likely to meet, being the person you are.)

What stresses me ? (Start with classes of things like food, other substance, circumstance, interrelationship, something place-linked, then hunt for detail.)
Does my car/house/TV need attention for anything ? (Then search.)
Is my mother-in-law naturally like that, or do we wind each other up ? (A laugh in the class is never unwelcome.)
There are about 12 discrete -DD systems that I know, so we have to cover four of them in each of the three lessons, so I'll mix the touchy and feely systems to give everyone a chance.

1. Finger-thumb
Think your question, or the section of it (is 40% correct ?) and rub index finger and thumb together gently. A rough feeling = yes. Slippery = no. This system doesn't work well for me so I use the thumb and next finger to have a reverse indication. This is a variant of the radionics "stick pad" which you rub with a thumb to get the knob settings on the "black boxes".
Very popular with "psionic" (dowser) doctors who can hide their dowsing hand in their pocket.
Maybe that didn't work. Let us do a search for a method:

2. Body response
When starting this, you don't know what your body response is, so you ask your question and just remain alert to any noticeable sensation or body part twitch or movement. More than 50% of people have a hand reaction of some kind - two fingers moving apart or together, or a clenching or opening.

One of the messages I saved was from Creeksong on Oct 15 1998, who says in this regard:
----quote
Please know that this energy sensation varies enormously from one person to the next and from one question to the next. We do have to emphasize the wide variety of sensations that can be experienced. Among them:

- Tingling feelings in all of the hand or just part of the hand
- A gentle breeze-like feeling blowing past the hand
- A cool draft of air
- A pressure-like pushing against an invisible barrier
- An edge-like feeling as if an invisible sharp edge is pushing on a large or small part of your hand/fingers
- A buzzing feeling in all or part of your hand/fingers
- A gentle push on the fingertips
- A pronounced tingling or sharp sensation in one finger only or just part of one finger only
- A "thud" feeling in the palm of the hand
- A line of energy suddenly appearing across part of the hand.
Those are just a few of the common ones. Usually they are felt in the left hand, but sometimes also in the right hand, and sometimes in both hands. Sometimes the sensation is very up front and obvious. Other times it is subtle. It's rarely the same for two different questions. It seems to change depending on the question and the answer.
----end quote
In fact I'll make the rest of Creeksong's message my third method:

3. Two Hand Pass
----------------quote
I couldn't find the abbreviated version of this that I posted sometime or other [...] but it is a beautiful way to do body dowsing, (except in a crowd?), so I went and found the original from Olga Nickle, who invented this for use in her Learning Path Technique, and I'm just going to post the whole thing since it's not too long. I used the technique, to find the direction that my radiator cap flew off in. :-)
TWO HAND PASS TECHNIQUE
a) Place the palms of your hands together in a prayerful manner at face level.
b) Lower the left hand to waist level.
c) Intend yourself in the palm of your right hand, which remains in an upright position.
d) Ask a question (which can be answered with a simple Yes or No) of your left hand. Give yourself plenty of space and extend your left arm back as far to the left as you can. Move your left hand away from your back, toward your front, and toward your right side but under your right hand.
Note that the left hand is always more than a foot below the upright right hand at all times. The two hands are NEVER opposite one another at the same level.

e) If the answer is "Yes", you will feel energy, or pressure, or just a strong physical inclination to stop before your left hand gets to the right elbow level. This is the energy we are talking about.
If the answer is a strong "Yes", the left hand will stop almost immediately. A weak "Yes" will be closer to the front. If the left hand stops under the right elbow, it means "Don't know". If the left hand goes cleanly past the right elbow under the right hand, then the answer is "No".

It is wise to practice this exercise over and over so you get used to the sensation in your left hand. The easiest way to practice this is to ask Yes-or-No questions where you already know the answer. Often the silliest obvious questions are the best for this practice.
----end quote

4. Blink
Consciously hold your eyes open and think your question. A blink occurring against your will signifies a "yes". When learning, it often helps to point at the possible answers.

If you're uncertain whether a blink was a natural one or a dowsing one, either repeat the exercise or dowse it, using another system if you prefer. After a while you can tell them apart.
I got into toolless dowsing via this method, which was highly unnatural for me and took 15 months to start ! I needed to find cheap fuel at 70 mph and pendulums aren't too practical for that. I use the steering wheel and the "clock" system where it's a dial reading up to 12. Run one hand round it for direction (12 o'c = straight ahead), mileages (a) away in total and (b) how far along this road before I turn off ? Excellent for radar traps and when is this lady in front going to turn off, etc.
Good luck !
If you haven't had much success so far, you can try limbering up with a sensitizing system I use in classes (that is, if I haven't forgotten it before we started).

Find another person and see if you can "sense their aura". (I put that in quotes because I am an extreme non-enthusiast for auras, as they don't tell me anything I want to know. But they work for this.) This is done simply by extending your palm towards them and expecting some kind of reaction as you enter their aura. Sometimes this is a tingling, sometimes it's an "invisible balloon" feeling. Or one of Creeksong's variants in Method 3.

5. Own Aura Sensing
After that you can move your two hands together and command your aura to be there for "yes" and not there for "no". Bingo - you have a -DD system up and running.
6. Hand-jab
Ask your question and thrust your right or left hand down sharply as though trapping a bouncing tennis ball. The hand closing spontaneously means "no", opening out, "yes".
Because of its dynamic movement, this system is excellent for forcing weak dowsing to become stronger - "bursting the paper wall of fear".
The jab can be upwards, as in a class I gave to the Surrey Dowsers in
Surbiton (a suburb of London). As soon as I suggested the method, about fifty ladies were leaping about the room, jabbing into the air and laughing fit to bust. They were dowsing their neighbours, the naughty girls. As one said, "If her fancy man parks his Mercedes round the block and I can check what he's doing in there, it's only like having another pair of eyes, isn't it ?" I don't know if this preoccupation is shared in other great cities.

7. Slinky
A "slinky" is one of those machined spiral metal coils which if you place one at the top of a staircase and push it over, it will somersault slowly down the stairs. Imagine you are holding one upright in your right palm, place your left palm next to it but lower, like a stair, and ask your question. If you feel the "slinky" arriving in your left palm (and/or your hands rising/lowering to match the change in weight) that signifies "yes".
For me this works purely by hand movement. I can't feel the slinky. A variant of this movement is:

8. Wrist Twist
Hold your hand-shaking hand out as though about to shake hands with someone invisible, thumb upwards. Think your question. The hand twists clockwise for "yes", counter/anti-clockwise for "no". Or sometimes reversed, but you can check with a test question.

Now come two methods used a lot by kinesiologists and very similar. These are the folk who get you to hold one arm out, put a test bottle in the other hand and then press your arm down to see if the stuff in the bottle makes you better. Arm goes down = no, arm resists = yes.
Having been acquainted by people like me that this was plain old dowsing, not that some weren't aware of it from the start, they started arm-testing each other for their stock market futures and I am sorry to say that the ethical tone of kinesiology took a bit of a dip.

From there, it was a matter of getting on with the financial research at home, whereupon the lack of a second person was a nuisance. So they started arm-testing themselves, only using fingers:

9. Double Pinch
Gently pinch your right thumb and first finger together, enclose them in a similar left-handed pinch, ask your question and try and open your right pinch against the left one. Success signifies "yes", failure = "no".

10. Chain Link
Again form two pinches, but this time form them like two links of a chain, one looping through the other: ask question and pull apart. Success = yes, failure = no.
These methods are used in a system of personal life enhancement entitled
"Holistic Repatterning". As I say, it includes boosting the bank account in a manner dowsers are apt to get a bit prune-faced about.

11. Opposed Thumbs
Place your hands palms-in in front of you as though sheltering your stomach, with the eight fingers hanging down almost parallel and the two thumbs upwards, pressing hard against one another in an upside-down V.
Ask your question and the two thumbs flick away from you for "yes" and towards you for "no". In my case I find I can get rough numbers out of 10 immediately, because the thumb movements are graduated over a 90 degree range.

12. Whole-Body
Stand to attention in front of (say) the supermarket egg counter. Fix a carton of the type you are interested in with your eagle eye and ask, "are all these eggs good and uncracked ?" A slight bow - "yes", a slight bending back = "no".

A few people who have tried this found that they twisted round rather than bowed, and one man found that his bow was graduated, so if the eggs were very fresh indeed, he did a Japanese bow suitable for the Emperor.
(I didn't ask what happened if they were totally rotten.)

-----
That concludes the methods. In all these cases, the significance can be reversed for some individuals, or by willpower, or against your will when you get tired (this is sometimes called "switching"). You have to find out which is which by asking establishing questions such as "which is my yes ?" Dowsing can be used to find ways of remedying your tension quickly - pressure-points often work well - but it always clears with a rest.

The "clock" system of visualization to obtain graduated responses is very flexible, because you can have logarithmic answers for when you haven't the first inkling of the scale of the answer. The log of anything is the number of times 10 is multiplied to reach it - log 100 = 2, log 1000 = 3. So anywhere in between 2 and 3 on the clock means the answer is in the hundreds. (Example: how many head lice are there living on the present White House staff ? I was expecting an answer of nil, but no, the clock response = 0.7 or about 12.40 in clock terms. Ten to the power of 0.7 is less than 10 but more than 1. In fact the answer is five as the log of 5 is 0.6990, and I believe they're all on one person, a maintenance man.
But without logs, I'd've needed to trawl through rows of numbers.)
The clock system (we're beginning to digress, so I'll stop after this) will if you provide room on the dial for it, also give you a yes stronger than yes - "yes-beyond-yes", it's called, and a similar extra-strong no.
These signify answers which are more positive or negative than you have allowed for in your question. Has my daughter passed her exam ?
Yes-beyond-yes = she came top. Will my train leave on time ? No-beyond-no = it's not running. Etc.

Anyone who is disappointed with their own method hasn't been mentioned, please say so loudly. I shan't overlook it in future.

One snag of dowsing is that you are always slaving with a list of choices you may not be completely in possession of. This is what got me into clairvoyance - I wanted the relevant list presented to me.

I started by using the pressure-point system rather as though I could already do direct-viewing and treated myself for temporary inability to do it. I had a lady client and she was obviously intolerant to something, but what ? I couldn't get at it quickly enough. I dowsed for a pressure-point, applied it, and immediately a silent "voice" said: look up in the top corner of the room. I looked there, and there was a little picture of my client bending over a counter of oranges. Easy when you know how but impossible a moment earlier !

Better still, the great virtue of not setting the list yourself (or better still again, the terms in which the list is presented) is that you are very quickly educated about how things really are.

Dan Wilson, East Grinstead, Sussex, England