Psychic Telephone · 20
Joanie
Joanie first learned she could act as a medium after she started offering services as a reiki healer. The idea with reiki is that it is an act of channeling energy, of becoming like a drinking straw or a hollow reed. You, the ego of you, steps away as far as possible so you can become like an open channel, getting out of the way of basically God coming through. In this way you can remove stagnant energy from the body’s electromagnetic aura and then blast it back with fresh energy from the universe—the Universe. Or call it Light, or Love. Beautiful Thing, the Force, or whatever you want to call it. Grace—she likes thinking of it as Grace.
What she found as a reiki practitioner was that, by the end of the session, she often had something to share. Messages coming through, like she had become a channel for not just Grace but other voices as well. She found herself saying things like, There seems to be this older woman named Sally who wants to know… Feeling like a crazy person, asking, Does that make any sense? And then the person would burst into tears or whatever, saying her grandmother Sally just died, and how did Joanie know that? And she was like, I don’t know. I don’t know.
Eventually she wondered if she could skip the reiki and go straight to the message-giving part—wondered what would happen if she just sat with a person and tuned in to them and invited their ancestors, guides, guardians into the room as well as all of her own guides and guardians. So she asked a friend if they could try it out together, and she just started saying the most ridiculous things, things she couldn’t possibly know. Describing a backyard, a swimming pool, these wood-paneled walls. All these things she had no business knowing, coming out her mouth with crazy accuracy—something about a grandfather and a schnauzer named Mitchell. And she looked up and saw the shock on her friend’s face. It just blew her mind, blew everyone’s minds.
They practiced a few more times, and then she invited other people to come, and word got around and soon people were paying. A client would refer her to three more clients, and she would work on them and they’d refer her to four more clients. All word of mouth. Within a few months there were celebrities sitting across the table from her, in her shitty little apartment in Prospect Park, crying as she told them things, things she didn’t know how she knew, things she didn’t necessarily know at all. It was just really crazy.
But there was a feeling that whatever she said was right. This also relates to when she started teaching in real classrooms, teaching writing and other creative disciplines as well. When she teaches, it just feels like whatever she communicates, whatever she explains, it’s right. Like all she has to do is be herself and that’s what people want. And it was interesting, because, you know, she had been trying to be the Great American Playwright for a really long time, with varying levels of success, but none of them satisfying in the least. It had always been unfulfilling, always difficult, such a hardheaded journey. And it felt like she had been banging her head against a brick wall, and nothing was budging, and she was only getting more and more hurt.
And this was such an easy path, a much more natural path. The doors were all unlocked, in a way they never had been for her as an artist. And it became this thing where it was just like, why was she beating herself up about writing plays when it felt like the universe was leading her in this other direction? What she started understanding was, her creative practice, in all its many forms over the years, was actually a placeholder for this. So that one day she could use those skills in this other way, this clearer way of changing the world for the better.