Psychic Telephone · 7
Julia
Julia thinks intuition is built into the human body, one of those abilities we all have. Like our physical bodies were born to be receptive to the signals around us. The literal weather signals, the animal signals. To survive. Also maybe the signals you’re getting from your own tribe. And she thinks women are more naturally intuitive—that female bodies are basically more receptive. And culturally we’ve been encouraged to be that way, more than men have. Because you’re supposed to be nurturing. You’re supposed to be able to walk into a room and know what’s going on. So she thinks women have had more permission to explore it, to have it, and to talk about it.
And she did get training. After college she was at the Berkeley Psychic Institute—the mother ship. That was like thirty-one years ago. She hung around for about two years, and they had higher and higher levels that you could be part of. Her parents probably didn’t think it was such a good idea. But she thinks they knew there wasn’t going to be any way to make her do something different. They knew her well enough. Like if she has an idea she feels strongly about, there’s no way to get her off it. Until she finds out—goes and explores it.
BPI had some pretty rigid ideas. It was a discipline. So they would correct you if you were doing something not right. And in their minds, something not right was overthinking it, getting stuck in the analytical thing. Like asking questions. Why does it work, how does it work. It’s like, who cares? It works! So they said don’t be analytical. And don’t let the client get analytical. You don’t want to get stuck on them asking technical questions.
And also, don’t get too into your emotions. Stay detached, and neutral about it. Get out of your feelings. Because otherwise it’ll be too taxing. And you’ll get weirded out or whatever. They were really into the whole idea of chakras, that you have these energy centers in your body, and they were constantly like, Get up in these upper chakras. Where you don’t have feelings. Where you’re more neutral. Really emphasizing the sixth chakra, which is your third eye. And in that space, you don’t judge anything. You literally are just looking at stuff. That was a big thing for them.
And she thinks that’s been beneficial. Like if she’s giving you a reading and you’re involved in a really disturbing, torrid affair that’s probably going to destroy your marriage or something, it’s her job to be neutral to that. To talk to you about all of the dynamics without applying her own judgment about it. And she’s actually really good at that part. She’s very curious about people and has always been a good listener. But it’s not always cool. She might be a very permissive-type person. She’s so nonjudgmental that maybe sometimes she should be like, Stop doing that. Whether it’s heroin addiction or—something really destructive. She’s more like, Go explore it! I’d love to hear all about that. And she’s done that a few times, where later she felt maybe she should have taken more of a stand.
But the school did feel a little culty. They definitely had an undercurrent of You need this. To evolve yourself. Like you have to keep doing this or something terrible is going to happen. That’s how she felt, at least. A couple of her teachers would say things like This is all to prepare you to have a clean death. Because you just keep dying and getting reincarnated and going through these cycles and working off stuff and—you can go faster to some enlightened place. And if you use these tools they’re teaching you, these energy management tools, you can actually leave very consciously when you die. You can take that awareness into wherever you’re going and blah blah blah. So they talked a lot about dying.
The other thing she thought when she was young was that if she did enough energy work, everything would be great. All the time. And it wasn’t true. So that was a little bit immature, the idea that somehow, if you just meditate enough, you’ll never have a problem or physical pain. That was silly.