[Andrew Michaels]

Over my life, I've always had good hunches when it comes to to reading people's moods. In fact, sometimes I've been able to predict a person's mood before seeing them or in any way being informed that they could possibly be in a negative mood by intuitively reading body language, etc.

The reason I mention this is that I seem to be getting better at doing this recently. For instance, I just recently started dating a girl who is going through a hard period with another relationship that's being wrapped up. She also gets stressed out by school, family, and work.

When she's in a bad mood, I always know, well before I see her or talk to her. For instance, on Wednesday, I was supposed to meet her in the afternoon. Whenever I thought of her or our meeting all morning, I just had this overwhelming sense of her being withdrawn/unhappy.

It's actually hard to describe, because my gut tells me that those are MY expectations/feelings for our meeting, when I know full well that that's not the case.

When we met, she was trying very hard to act like herself, but I still sensed that something wasn't right. I kept asking her about it, saying that I just get hunches about such things. She avoided it for awhile, saying that she was having a good time, but then came out with all this stress that she's been having, etc.

I've only ever experienced this with people that I'm very close to. Usually with girlfriends. Years ago I read about this yogic breathing technique where you kind of...breath in a person's essence, connecting them with you and making both of you more open. I do this quite often around said girl, and I certainly feel the link more strongly with her than anyone else. I don't really feel it for my family for instance, but did with my best friend of 14 years.

I'm not really one to believe that I could have "powers", but who knows. I did recently do Erin's chakra opening exercise, and I've been working on a lot of meditation/breathing exercises.

So, my question basically is, what is this? Is there any way that I can strengthen or refine this, or perhaps test it somehow?

Any advice welcome.

Also, I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I'm a very calm person, but when I'm in big groups, I always feel somewhat frayed, like maybe I'm kind of feeding off what everyone else is feeling. I especially feel this way when I'm working in an office.

Thanks.