Psychic Telephone · 19
Joanie
When she was young, Joanie didn’t think of herself as having her father’s intuitive gifts, but she was fascinated by them, especially after he died. It happened that her first real boyfriend came from a family of psychics and mediums—a family very much infused with the natural magic that is in the population there. Her boyfriend’s grandmother in particular was a professional energy healer, which he could do too. And his family could talk to the dead, as well as to one another inside their heads. Very, very strange stuff. It was a weird time for her, discovering her queerness, falling in love, living as a gay man in Appalachia, grieving a parent at twenty years old. A time of trying to understand how we fit into a larger picture, where we go when we die. So when she met this boyfriend who could do that, and his whole family could do that, it was just really wild.
A sort of neo-spiritualist revival was happening at that time, in the early 2000s, with a lot of books coming out, and TV shows—people like Sylvia Browne on Montel. And the two of them read everything they could about the history of spiritualism and the lineage of mediumship in America. They became steeped in questions like: Is it possible to receive messages from those who have made this transition we call death? She asked all kinds of questions about it, asked her boyfriend to speak on behalf of her father. Still, it wasn’t something Joanie could do. Just something that interested her and that she supported in her boyfriend.
It wasn’t until she was in her thirties that something changed. One year, her birthday was coming up and she decided she wanted an energy healing. Kind of out of the blue. She wanted to learn reiki, though she didn’t even know what it was exactly. Just that it was a laying-on-of-the-hands kind of thing. At first the whole thing felt a little bit like a 1970s pyramid scheme. You pay the reiki master and he spends all day giving you the knowledge and teaching the symbols and you practice and the whole time you’re wondering, Is this even—? And the guy was, not sleazy but just very sweaty, and his whole place was covered in cat hair, you know, and she was thinking, I just paid four hundred dollars.
So she and her friend were rolling their eyes, sure they had wasted their money, until finally it came time for the culminating ceremony, the attunement. When you receive an attunement, she says, it recalibrates specific chakras in your body to receive and pass along energy from the Universe—from God, if you want to call it that. And the moment the teacher laid his hands on her, she felt her third eye unblock, completely, like a cork popping out of a dike. It was as if her body was filling with water, this energy pouring inside her. She heard a sound—zhoop!—and then she heard a voice. Like a being had suddenly stepped into place, just behind her and right in her ear, and began talking. Her primary spirit guide, she calls it now. That day it started to talk. And in all the time since, it has never stopped.
Sometimes she ignores it. Sometimes she’s listening and other times she’s too concerned with material matters, the stuff of life. But this figure showed up in that moment and changed everything for her, and the whole course of her life. Because what happened was that she never doubted her psychic impulses again. The moment between feeling something and knowing something was no longer mediated by her personal ego interrupting and saying, That’s wrong, that couldn’t possibly be, you’re making it up. Instead it was like, Nope. That’s the knowing. And what she has tried to do ever since is eliminate that gap—in her intuitive work, her teaching work, her creative work, in everything she does.