Legitimate, Skilled Psychics are the First to Warn About the Frauds in Their Profession by Nomy Lamm

Conscious Choice       -     November 2003

"Psychic," reads the huge flashy sign outside a little shop on the North Side of Chicago. "Palm Readings, Tarot, Crystal Ball, Tea Leaves. Past, Present, Future." Before I even reach the doorway, a woman calls out to me from inside: "Would you like a reading?"

I nod and let myself be ushered in. She sits me down and has me present my palms to her, which she inspects briefly. I’m told to come up with two questions and speak one aloud. She interrupts my question like she already knows what it’s about.

"You are a good person," she tells me, pointing to a line on my hand, "but you have had much sadness. You have a hard time bringing good things into your life." I scrunch my brow, trying to relate to the information she’s giving me.

"I have to tell you, you have a dark cloud hanging over you," she says, looking me in the eye. Her eyes are a strange color — dark, dark blue. Color contacts? Her face is beautiful and intense, her hair bleached blond with dark roots. She seems very concerned. She says my friends are talking behind my back and jealously trying to ruin my relationship with my lover.

"Have you ever had a spiritual cleansing?" she asks. I’m not sure what she means, but tell her I haven’t. For $50-$500, she says, she can light a candle for me to find out relevant information and cleanse my spirit. She doesn’t seem to pick up on the fact that I’m writing this article. When I ask if there’s anything I can do on my own, she says, "Keep quiet about the good things in your life, because your friends are jealous and will try to ruin it for you."

I leave the reading feeling upset and confused. Okay, yes it’s possible there are some jealous feelings between my best friend and my lover, but couldn’t she also see that I’m intelligent, compassionate, strong-willed, and committed to my own spiritual growth?

"The goal of a reading is to be seen accurately, supported in being who you really are," says Sonia Choquette, who could aptly be called Chicago’s "Queen of Psychics." In business for over 30 years, she’s written seven books on the subject, runs her own on-line school for psychics, and consults with noted pop stars and politicians. "You shouldn’t feel thrown into doubt about who you are. Trust your own vibes. You’re going in there as an empowered person seeking support."

This makes sense to me, and rings true from my experience with astrologers and spiritual advisors. But what about the mystery? The revealing of hidden truths and fortunes? The scarves, crystal balls, long fingernails and cleavage? These carnival images pervading mainstream portrayals of psychics are still floating around in my head, and I have to admit they still hold a certain allure. After so many hours spent as a kid huddled under blankets with stories of young girls and their fantastical encounters with fortune-tellers, I still feel the yearning for contact with a real-life purveyor-of-destiny. But after my experience with the storefront psychic, I am looking for someone who doesn’t leave me feeling out of control and dependent on them for a fix.

"I’ve had to clean up a lot of those kinds of psychic spills," Nora Herold tells me when I relay my experience. "I’ve seen people who have been taken for thousands of dollars with that scam. A lot of these people really are psychic, but they play off people’s fears."

Herold, a channeler, has long healthy, witchy hair; her smile is expansive and her manner is down-to-earth. She meets me at the top of the stairs and welcomes me into her home, which is light and spacious with lots of plants. Once in the reading room, she begins with a meditation in which we picture different colors of light coming in through the top of our heads.

"It looks like you’ve dealt with some depression," she tells me, flipping tarot cards and sometimes staring off to the side to focus on what her spirit guides are telling her. "You spend a lot of time out of your body, but you’re working on grounding yourself and bringing your energies here."

Her reading feels like good therapy — without me having to spill the beans first. Her insights are practical and relevant, and she listens to my questions and responds thoughtfully, "When you open up, everything is possible. You can find out anything about your soul, if you choose to believe it’s possible."

This sentiment appears to be at the heart of most psychic phenomena. The tools that psychics use — tarot cards, tea leaves, palmistry, runes, etc. — are only there to help the psychic focus on what’s happening energetically. Tarot cards, for example, are read by tapping into both the psychic and client’s subconscious, and interpreting the images and archetypes on the cards in response to a question. "The only magic of tarot cards is what we attach to them," says Herold. "And therefore they can be very powerful."

Even the crystal ball — a psychic cliché — is just a point of focus to help the psychic clear her mind. "Anyone who tells you they’re actually seeing pictures in the ball, take your money and run," says Winter Wren, an Intuitive Arts Consultant and Tarot Master based in Normal, Illinois.

Some readers, like Ruth Berger (an adorable older Jewish woman whose Web site calls her a "shaman, medical intuitive, psychic, healer, psycho-therapist and past-life regressionist") don’t use any tools at all. Berger began her career 30 years ago as a stand-up psychic, giving 45 readings in 45 minutes. "I use my sight," Berger says, "Anything else just slows me down."

Tapping Into Your Own Talents

But how does one become a psychic? Traditionally, it’s a born gift that is passed down and carried on through generations. But in the 21st Century, you can take a class for everything. Here in Chicago there are at least three schools that train people to tap into their own psychic abilities.

"Psychic means‘soul essence.’ It’s Latin," says Zubin Sherring, founder and lead teacher of the Clairvoyant Center of Chicago. "When people say‘psychic,’ I usually wonder what they mean. It’s just the soul’s personality coming through. Every person’s abilities are different."

The Clairvoyant Center in Wilmette teaches students the art of clairvoyance, which is a facet of psychic ability. Students are taught to "see the colors in the energy fields surrounding all living things." In order to do this, they learn practical tools that are useful in day-to-day life — like grounding and protecting themselves spiritually and observing a person’s energy fields while maintaining a comfortable emotional distance.

In my clairvoyant readings both at the Clairvoyant Center and at InVision — formerly the Midwest Psychic Institute — I feel like I’m listening to someone else describe my own dreams to me. In both places, I’m positioned in a white room (white because it’s "clear" both energetically and visually) across from three student clairvoyants, whose eyes are closed. Mine are open. They sniff and sigh and say things like, "You’re at an amusement park, on a gravitron ride, and you’re trying to eat and work but your hand is stuck to the wall and you’re going around and around..."

Yes, that was an image in the fifth layer of my aura (which corresponds to the fifth chakra and represents communication) during my clairvoyant reading at InVision. The students here are taught to read the pictures in a person’s aura, but, importantly, are instructed to never predict someone else’s future or give advice.

To predict the future, they say, would be to program events into a person’s consciousness and eliminate free will. And to give advice would be to take on another person’s karma. The goal, instead, is to give clients information to empower themselves in their own choices. In fact, the aim of most psychics is to share a spiritual perspective in order to help clients see things on a spiritual level.

"You don’t need to go to a psychic, you can learn to do it yourself. It isn’t that there’s a chosen few," says Ken Jones, founder and director of InVision. He illustrates this point by comparing psychic ability to language. "Humans had all the muscles in the throat necessary for speech for hundreds of thousands of years before language developed. This is the same thing. All the tools are in place."

Until my skills are more developed, I cherish my occasional psychic reading. The experience of feeling seen on a spiritual level is intimate and unique. I don’t always click with everyone, but a good reading can help bring life into a sharper focus, and make choices feel more conscious and intentional.

"I believe most psychics have good intentions," says Choquette. "They have no ability to create anything for you. All they can do is see your soul and help you make better choices...it’s becoming a more normalized, natural part of the 21st century."

Nomy Lamm is a Chicago writer, an accordion player and performance artist.

Nora Herold, A Rising Psychic Star

Don’t be afraid if Nora Herold tells you your dead grandfather is sitting in a chair in the corner. He probably just wants to say "hi" and help you heal some of your wounds.

The 36-year-old Herold is a channeler, tarot-reader, reiki master and past-life regressionist, who works from her apartment in West Rogers Park. With the assistance of her spirit guides, she helps clients shine light on past lives and childhood traumas in order to heal wounds in the subconscious.

She has been interviewed on WBEZ (the NPR affiliate), appeared on PBS, and counts among her clients several well-known radio and TV personalities. She worked for a number of years at Chicago’s Healing Earth Resources and Unseen Insight in Niles — both metaphysical book and gift shops — before moving her practice to her home office.

"There’s so much love available to us, I want everyone to feel as loved as I have by my guides," says Herold, who defines channeling as "putting energy into recognizable form." Herold was 29 when she first tried channeling and within five minutes she had found her first guide. She immediately became what she calls a "channeling junkie," until after several weeks of constant channeling she reached a point of overload and asked the voices to shut up for a minute. "What they told me was, they’re always transmitting, and it’s up to me to decide when to listen." She spent the next six months learning to come into balance before beginning to read professionally a little more than five years ago.

Raised Catholic in Mount Prospect, Illinois, Herold’s encounters with spirits have forced her to reevaluate the lessons of good and evil she was taught as a child. She aims to loosen human attachments to the concept of evil by helping us face our fear and feel the love that surrounds us. "I have spoken with thousands of beings," she says. "Every person brings their own personal guides. We have so much help and love and support to raise ourselves to a more conscious reality. They want us to know this." — NL

How to Get the Most Out of Your Reading

Come prepared with 10 or so questions written down.

Great the reading as a dialogue. If you want more clarity, ask.

Take notes or record your session so you can review it.

On the day of your session, relax an hour beforehand and an hour afterward to process the info.

Don’t be afraid to ask certain questions for fear of hearing something "bad." The info you receive could guide you toward making choices for the best possible outcome.

It’s ok to say "that doesn’t feel right." No psychic is 100 percent accurate.

Don’t lie to a psychic. They can tell and what’s the point?