Answering Your FAQs

I’ve been connecting with lots of new people lately and along with those introductory conversations, I tend to share briefly that I read tarot cards and have mediumship abilities. Once I drop that into a conversation — even if I’m perfectly casual about it and try to blow past it quickly so we can move onto the next topic — I get quite a few questions about my gifts, and they’re usually the same few questions.

It dawned on me today that it might be helpful to answer these FAQs, if you will, in a blog post. After all, many of you reading this blog may have had the same questions and simply didn’t know how to ask. Without any further ado, let’s get into it.

Where/how did you learn to do this stuff?

The short answer is, it came to me. My gifts found me and only became more prominent in my life once I started to give them real attention. The long answer begins in college during my senior year in Manhattan. I opted to live in a suite of 12 single rooms with a big shared common space. I made fast friends with a handful of my suite-mates, all of whom were spiritually inclined: they read tarot, knew astrology, read birth charts, and felt spirits occasionally. I felt at home with them instantly even though I didn’t know much about tarot or astrology at that time. I was happy to just get to know my new friends and maybe learn a thing or two about these occult skills I had always been curious about. I received tarot and chart readings and asked lots of questions along the way, and after I moved out of the suite I kept in touch as I began to explore this new world on my own. Then, I had a sudden and devastating breakup that shook me to my core. I did what anyone would do in my situation: I booked a massage and energy work during it (I’m joking - who the fuck does this lol). Anyway, while the massage therapist/energy worker worked through the energy in my heart space, I communicated with my first spirit as a medium. It was confusing, but somehow felt right; all through my mind’s eye I saw this faceless man and heard his advice to me. After that experience, I opened myself completely to the other side and working with spirits and deities became second nature. Maybe six months after that massage, I bought my first tarot deck and immediately started using it. At first, I used the guidebook some, but also listened to my intuition to fill in the gaps as I practiced reading my friends and family. With more practice, I learned a lot and honed my craft both with tarot and with mediumship, and now I’m here :)

So, when you say medium, is that like the long island medium?

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that I also have great hair and take care of it greatly. No in the sense that I do not aspire to have the largest most obnoxious nails this side of the Mississippi.

All jokes aside, in my experience all mediums are different, so there are similarities and there are also differences, some of which may be due to the fact that I’m much younger in my gift than she is. I do “channel” though, which means that I can call upon and communicate with spirits. Sometimes that means I hear their voice in my head (yes, I can tell when it’s not my own thoughts), sometimes that means I feel them kind of step into my body, and sometimes that means I get information through really strong feelings that (again) I can tell come from an external entity. None of this happens the way it looks in horror movies; my voice never changes, I am always in full control of my body, thoughts, and words, and I do not see spirits as though they are people walking down the street. If I do see them, it’s similar to how it feels when you remember what someone looks like without them being in front of you — you can kind of see them in your mind, though the image might not always be very detailed or totally complete.

Another thing that is different between me as a medium and other mediums you might have seen is that I generally have to be pretty deliberately open to channel, I don’t pick up on all the spirits of everyone in a room or store as soon as I walk in. Usually, I channel through tarot readings because I use a specific benediction at the beginning of a reading that calls any benefic spirits forward to chat if they want to. Very occasionally, I will channel a spirit spontaneously (meaning, outside of a reading or without asking for it) but this usually happens with folks that are close to me.

Have you always had these gifts? Or is the story you told us above the whole process?

I have always been inclined to astrology and tarot, but I grew up in a very strict Christian environment until I was about 15 years old which forced me to repress those interests. To this day, my very Christian grandma doesn’t know that I do any of this stuff because I’m sure she would try to exorcise me. Anyway, as a kid, I loved horoscopes mostly because I loved anything related to love and compatibility. I’m not kidding, in 6th grade I had to make a website for a technology class project and I made a matchmaking site. I liked to read about different sun signs and how they worked or didn’t work with other signs, but I didn’t know much beyond that.

On the tarot front, I didn’t know anything about tarot in any real way until my senior year of college living with those folks who became friends. However, I was always interested in psychics and as a kid I dreamed about having enough money to pay for my cards to be read. When I was 15, my best friend and I took my long-saved Christmas money and walked over a mile one way for me to see a psychic and have a tarot reading for the first time. That moment opened a huge door for me, and I found a place that I actually believed in. I sought out readings a few more times before my experience in the dorms, but those few readings over the course of years had a deep impact on me.

Lastly, when it comes to medium-ship…remember that Christian childhood I mentioned before? Yea, so the church I grew up going to three times a week was actually a funeral home before our congregation moved into the building. Imagine, just for a moment, how creepy that is without being a kid with gifts she knows nothing about. Anyway, there were many moments at that church when I felt, saw, or heard things that were from the spirit realm and they freaked me OUT. I didn’t tell anybody, because of course any group of kids growing up in that building would make a running joke about it being haunted, and I knew that people would think I was fucking around if I told them what I saw or heard. In retrospect, this gift is the one I repressed the most throughout the years — I very rarely felt drawn to it, and I truly feel it came to me.

Okay, so do you believe in God? Are you religious? If so, is this allowed?

Alright, for this one I’m lumping in all of the questions people ask when they’re dancing around what they really want to know, so here’s the thing: no, I am not channeling or working with the devil. None of my experiences in this work have been demonic or dark in that way at all.

To answer those questions more directly:

1) I do believe in God, and I believe that God has many faces/personalities/archetypes to reach us. For example, saints and angels, deities of various cultures, and sometimes, people can all be extensions of what I consider to be God. I also believe that astrology is a language of God, and that the universe is divine.

2) I am deeply, deeply spiritual in that I pray every single day and call upon the many faces of God with devotion. However, I am not currently religious, or rather, I’m currently not Christian. The faith I most closely align myself with is Judaism, and I may be converting in order to formally join that faith soon.

3) From what I understand, many of the practices I currently engage in are accepted in some sects of Judaism, while they are completely frowned upon in the majority of Christian religions including the one I grew up in. Ultimately, I feel that if God has given me this gift, it is for a reason and it is “allowed” whatever that means.

When you give me a reading, can you answer any question?

I could, but for ethical reasons there are certain questions I wont touch with a ten foot pole. I do not answer any questions about death, birth, or what someone else is thinking or doing that you don’t already know. I am not God and I don’t pretend to be, and therefore I am aware that I am nowhere near all-knowing. To even try to be all-knowing would be ridiculous of me. Shit, I’m really just a messenger, and the things I tell you I might not even “know” but I’m relaying to you because you need to know it. Bottom line is that a reading is about you, and not about anyone else or about trying to anticipate every single thing that will happen to you or the people around you.

Have you ever changed the mind of a skeptic?

I don’t know, have you ever tried to get a 4 year old to do something they really don’t want to do? The thing is that maybe I have opened some (third) eyes along the way, but that’s not what I’m after. What I really want to do is help people with the gifts that I’ve been given, and as we all know, the people that actually ask for help and know what type of support they might need are the most likely to take help and do something with it. I’m not in the business of convincing people that what I do is real. What is “real” anyway?

Do you have more questions you’d like me to answer? Hit me up on social media and let me know what I can clear up for you :)