Coming Out Of The Spiritual Closet With Jazz Hands Of Mercy

I’ve written and rewritten this post so many times it’s redonk, and it’s still not where I want it to be, but my 46th birthday is tomorrow, and it’s about damn time that I just spit it all out.

So here’s the gig. Since I was somewhere between two and three years old, I’ve: seen dead people, biofield/aura energy, and spirit beings, had premonitions and pre-cognitive dreams, and felt the presence of angels. I’ve doubted and agonized and tried to wish it all away. I’m a scientist-practitioner, fer Chrissakes. Ghosts are for crazy people and hysterics! The mind creates meaning out of ambiguous stimuli! It sees what it wants!

Why share this now? Simple. The world is going to hell in a rickety, flaming, just pure nasty-assed shopping cart of fuckery, people. We’re systematically tearing the shit out of this poor planet’s resources and fighting endless wars over those same resources. Corporations are screwing us out of everything including the very existence of a middle class, and we’re too asleep or exhausted to notice or care, much less do anything about it. We are breathing and eating and drinking literal poison and wondering why so many people are unwell. Humanity is sorely in need of healing, repair, revision. We need the return of sacred, empathic, and intuitive ways of knowing. All this other stuff is just so much swingin’ dick competition, left-brained bullshit drama, and I’m sick of it.

So here I come, with my spiritual jazz hands, bursting out of what my witchy friends call the broom closet. Baby look - I’m even more idiosyncratic than y’all thought! But here’s an awesome thing about being solidly in my mid-40s: I am all out of fucks to give about what anyone thinks of my fluffy, idiosyncratic ass. It took several weeks to really sink in after first realizing this a few months ago - that I could decide to just stop compartmentalizing myself and hiding half of it away from everyone. All it required was letting go of fear.

I began working in hospice in 2006 and that’s where I saw my first dead person show up smack dab in the middle of a session at a patient’s beside. Standing politely by the foot of the bed, he was very specific about why he was there, and relayed information quite pertinent to the patient’s situation. It happened again, and then again a few days later with a different patient, and then I couldn’t shut it off. There is of, course a lot more to this period of my life, but that’s a story for another time.

In 2007 decided I needed to open up to other realities and approaches; I tried Angel Therapy Practitioner Training, Energy Psychology, Ericksonian Hypnotherapy and The Aspen Psychic Development Program. I eventually became a Reiki master teacher, which frankly sounds redonculonk to me, so I just say that I practice Reiki. I met so many lovely people along the way. Inspired, I did every gallery reading/practice session/playgroup I could squeeze into my schedule, and for a time even read Tarot cards and did intuitive readings at a metaphysical bookstore.

Just as things were starting to take off in 2011, I quit. Why? I got scared. I felt exposed, “outed” and way beyond my comfort zone, even though I only provided readings pseudonymously and making no mention of my other credentials. And it had gone really, really well. I loved being able to freely share information with clients that I wouldn’t in a million years dream of saying in a therapy session; I felt uplifted and aligned not only with Spirit but with my very own soul. Just as word was getting out here in Denver, I stopped, shut it down. Too scary, because I was still living in fear. Happy as I’d ever been in my professional life, but terrified of people really seeing what I am.

A life lived in fear is a life half-lived. 2014 brought many challenges and changes in the professional realm as well as in regards to my health. I quit a position I’d held for four years, having no clear plan in mind, and floundered in trying to figure out what else made my life meaningful and nurtured my spirit. I changed to a less emotionally taxing line of clinical work and threw myself back into university teaching. After a 6-month-long Dark Night of the Soul, I finally decided it was too painful to remain closeted any longer. I reasoned; if it’s good enough for Judith Orloff, Doreen Virtue, M. Scott Peck, and Clarissa Pinkola Estes, it’s good enough for me.

All the abovementioned folks are mental health professionals who at some point realized that there was far more to helping people than just talk therapy; there was the world of Spirit, of the connection to the divine, of the deep need for human beings to have a sense of connection, purpose, identity even beyond the mundane, to account for their anomalous experiences and to explore them in a safe, non-judgemental environment. To work towards deep knowledge of Self and the outer limits of consciousness while not forsaking others, while increasing the capacities for loving and being loved. To find one’s place in the stars.

And now I’m at a point in my life and career where I no longer care if anybody likes what I do or believe or say. I’ve made my bones, gotten my patch. I have nothing to prove anymore by hiding this part of myself, and in fact I feel I now have something to lose by continuing to hide it. I don’t run around touting myself as a medium or clairvoyant or Reiki practitioner, but I’m finally comfortable admitting that these things are every bit as much a part of my identity as being a psychologist, daughter, partner, devotee of Murder, She Wrote, part-time step-mom, auntie, sister, world-class belcher, and Midwesterner.

What I Do Now

What I do now is a stand alone process, held in sacred time and space, for the client to see for themselves, in the words of Clarissa Pinkola Estes what and how and why, according to their own soul’s sensibilities, for strength, knowing and healing. To create a more aerial view of people across the world, a way of looking at our commonalities that helps us see each other and that holy spark in all of us.

So: you can book a consultation. That’s what I’m into nowadays. This is the deal where I tune in to your energy and tell you what I’m seeing. No, it’s not like on The Witches of Eastwick or Charmed or Jersey Shore or whatever. Or Poltergeist. Oh, no fuck that Poltergeist shit. It’s basically a conversation where we invite only the highest energies to speak and drown out my potty mouth.

Anyway. Energy is non-local, meaning I don’t have to be anywhere near a client to have a brief conversation, either telephonically or via email (maybe Skype later assuming its unrelated to Skynet what?). This kind of thing shouldn’t replace going to see other types of professionals for a definable mental or physical condition, duh.

It’s meant to be brief. I don’t want to hear from clients more than once every so often; too much threatens to encourage peeps to not trust their own judgements and intuitions, which I am very much against. Unlike psychotherapy, intuitive consultation involves a far more open paradigm of what causes change. The timeline is therefore open; there’s no pressure to resolve a longstanding issue or problem in a fixed number of consultations. The general goals of intuitive consultation are as follows:

1. to increase understanding of oneself, one’s history, one’s relationships with others, or of the world aka Where You’ve Been

2. to promote a feeling of peace, clarity and calling aka Where You’re Going

3. to foster a sense of interconnectivity and empathy for all sentient beings, by recognizing that animating force shared by all of us, but which is far greater than us and contains everything we need in order to heal ourselves

4. to promote right action - healing the world

5. to increase the higher energies and God/dess’ presence in the world by inspiring one to be his or her best self

6. to bring you right down to the bone of who you are

7. to serve as a clarion to call back your Spirit

8. to help bring balance to The Force - are you paying attention?

9. to respectfully remind us that all life passes by

That’s pretty much it. You can still seek out psychic folk who will tell you all about your lottery numbers or what horse will win the Preakness, or who will promise to cure your bunions using rainbow farts and unicorn crystals. That’s fine, but that’s not what I do. I’m an intuitive who happens to be a shrink. My stance is similar to what I do in my other life; first, harm none. You have the added benefit of hearing my astute verbiage, forged in the rarefied fires of 800 years of graduate school education; that’s the “lagniappe” or something extra part. Well, that and my usual profanity stuff.

I’ll figure out the rates/fees stuff later. Go in peace, my friends. I am who I’ve always been, only more so.