Psychic Telephone · 54
Joanie
Not sure what Psychic Telephone is all about? Check out our first and second posts for an introduction to the project. And read our first post about Joanie here.
A sitting with Joanie can look like one of several things. It always starts with—she likes to offer a cup of tea. And then she asks, in a preliminary conversation, What are your expectations? What do you want this to look like? One option can look more like a classical reiki session, and then through that come these messages or impressions that she’s talked about. The next option is, they sit across the table and light candles or like a more formalized thing where they call upon ancestors, guides, guardians, angels.
And the third way it happens is, frequently, when someone schedules an appointment to do this work—she doesn’t know, something is like sealed in the psychic atmosphere, like a contract is made, an agreement is made. And as soon as she enters the appointment in her calendar, things will start talking to her. And especially the morning of a sitting, she will start hearing people’s family members talking. So by the time they arrive at her door, she already has a few messages to deliver. And she already has impressions of the main person who seems to want to come through.
Some of her impressions are purely symbolic, and that becomes a starting point for the conversation. Often it’s a circle, for example, the idea that there is no distinction between life and death. That’s a core principle of evidential mediumship, the lineage she has worked with the most. Life is life, there is no death, it’s all one thing. It’s like the moon—there’s the dark side that we can’t see. And death is just the side of things that we don’t have access to.
And what she thinks now is that where we really live is there, not here. Here, we’re just passing through. Because from medium after medium, she hears again and again the same things. Those who have made the transition we call death have only a very limited set of things they want to share with the living: We’re still here. We love you. We’ll be together soon. That’s it. That’s all they have to say. The message is love. Because they’re having a happier, more complete, more substantial experience than we are in these bodies. The living just don’t understand that. So she tries to provide evidence so the person sitting across from her can actually believe and hold on to that message. Because people will listen to that message, will hear it more clearly, will accept it better, if she can tell them their grandmother wore a green coat and their grandfather had a schnauzer.
And she does think that, being an artist, being a writer, a creator, she can tap into these things more. Of course. Because she is detached from reality in many ways all day long in different areas of her life. Although creativity involves building something, making something, and this isn’t necessarily that. In some ways as a medium she’s just a secretary, just the interpreter. And ultimately the result is not a beautiful object. It’s energetic, it’s intangible. It has to do with feelings, it has to do with history, it has to do with a sudden shift in the air in the room. So the project isn’t creative so much as it is simply human, taking place within some mind or spirit or the human heart.
But she thinks if you zoom out, one level or two levels, the impulse is the same. The way she approaches everything is, it’s all from the good of her heart. She believes that the role of an artist is to heal the world. That by articulating experience, by processing emotion and translating feelings into tangible objects, into beautiful things, artists can raise the vibration of the planet in a way that heals. And she feels this, like when she does a comedy performance, how it raises the vibration of a whole room. Her work as a medium similarly seeks to help, to heal trauma, in this way. And if it’s about stopping her own intergenerational trauma, Jesus Christ, she’s doing it. Because she’s trying to figure out ways to spin it into beauty and love.