Psychic Telephone · 56
Attention
If we can manage to occasionally fall back into the world, if we can find ourselves truly in our bodies, what might we discover? The more I consider this question, the more I suspect it is about attention—where we place our attention and why.
In our spiritual efforts, we pay attention to silence: we pray to hear the voice of God, wait for signs from the Universe, or meditate to tap into deeper kinds of knowing. This feels necessary in a world in which there’s such a shortage of focused attention. The internet tries to monopolize our attention, but it appeals mostly to our basest impulses, the relentless competition for clicks only dividing and dissipating our focus. At the end of any given day, we’ve paid attention to more things than we can count, yet most of them are stupid and forgettable, marking our lives only insofar as they’ve left us feeling scattered.
This void, and the human disconnection it engenders, is what a practicing psychic tries to fill. All ideas about spirits and energies aside, there’s something very basic that occurs between a psychic and a client that simply has to do with attention—with placing a client’s focus on aspects of their lives and their stories that they might overlook or dismiss. Our blind spots. The things we hide not only from others but also from ourselves.
As part of my research for this project, I took one of Tanya’s introductory courses to better understand her ideas. As it happened, the course included a free psychic reading with two of her advanced students. When the time came and I logged on to the Zoom call, they both closed their eyes and—as Tanya explained—began scanning my chakras. The first step was to open up the energy channels in my body. Then they shared with me in turn what they saw. One of the two students, a woman who looked about forty and had straight blond hair, seemed particularly good at it. When her turn came, she stopped at my third chakra—the solar plexus, which Tanya said was the center of confidence and productive activity—and told me that mine was “crumpled, like an aluminum can.”
The image was so vivid and precise that I immediately saw it in my mind’s eye. It appeared as not the bright goldenrod of the chakra in Tanya’s diagrams, but something dimmed and pale, folded in on itself, its edges collapsed. And these visuals felt true. In the past few years, I had cared for my mother as she lurched toward death, then I was hit hard by the loss. At the same time, perimenopausal hormone changes and the onset of food intolerances had brought me pervasive fatigue and dense brain fogs that lasted for weeks. Between the stress, the grief, the exhaustion, and the difficulty concentrating, I’d slowly been drained of my usual motivation. By the time I took Tanya’s course, I had started hormone replacement and was finally beginning to feel better. But I had the sense that something was still missing within me. I had misplaced my ambition and now couldn’t find it. I’d lost my mojo.
The crumpled can made plain that this was visible, at least to one other person. And it was a relief when the woman said, “Let me straighten that out for you.” She held out a hand in the air, concentrating while she opened her fingers as if pressing outward on the inside of my battered chakra. I was touched by the softly matter-of-fact way she performed this remedy. For three years I had been trying to articulate the inchoate way in which I wasn’t quite okay. And now, for once, I didn’t have to.
It occurs to me that when a person visits a psychic, they’re trying to connect—usually to the dead or to the divine, but they’re also connecting with the psychic. There’s a human interaction that occurs, one in which a person may feel seen in ways they rarely encounter in daily life. I’ve often heard people compare psychic readings to therapy. But therapy so often hinges on what the client can verbalize. My encounter was different. It hinged on an image that had appeared not in my mind but in that of someone observing me. And on how the image, painful as it was, made concrete something I hadn’t quite been able to explain, and therefore hadn’t been sure was real.
Looking back, I don’t know that I believe in chakras as such, but I realize that for someone in my position, it doesn’t necessarily matter if I do. Maybe when we ask of psychic ability, Is it real?, what we really want to ask is: Does it help? Because there’s a difference between kinds of real—there’s real in a way that’s scientifically provable, and there’s real in a way that can influence a human life. As long as something exists as an idea, then it can yield concrete change. And maybe this is why, if the psychic’s intentions are good, it may not be necessary to know exactly where their messages come from. Either way, you have two bodies, the psychic’s and the client’s, working together. Attention is being paid, and attention is being shifted.