a black five

Chapter Three of Cosmic Heart

In September 2024, I sent the first installment of Cosmic Heart to my paid subscribers and posted the twelfth installment in August 2025. After a break, I returned to the project, and I'm releasing these revised chapters free for everyone. Chapters One and Two are here.

Cosmic Heart

Chapter Three

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When my father was in college, he was walking across campus toward class. It was winter. He pulled up his coat collar when a vision flashed in his mind’s eye. In the vision, he saw himself entering the classroom and turning to see a message written on the chalkboard dismissing the class because the professor was ill. This was a professor who never missed class, so the vision was unlikely, but when he reached the classroom, he walked in, turned toward the board, and saw the message, exactly as it had been in his vision.

This moment of premonition sparked my father’s imagination. When my brother and I were children, he used us as test subjects. We played ESP games. My favorite was the one where my brother and I would close our eyes and picture a blank movie screen, and our dad would send a number or letter to that screen. We would slowly watch these images appear and yell out, “A black five!” or “A red zero!”

He kept track of the games on a legal pad and our accuracy rate at guessing cards or envisioning images. We also tried a bit of telekinesis. We had seen Uri Geller on TV and were captivated by the notion of bending spoons. A couple of times, we thought we moved objects with our minds ever so slightly, but that was probably wishful thinking.

I have often wondered what life would be like if we were taught in elementary school to listen to our intuition or if we all played psychic games. If psychic ability were acknowledged as simply one of the ways living beings communicate, then perhaps we could exercise it like a muscle rather than pedestalizing those who appear to have extraordinary abilities or shunning those who explore the spiritual arts.

I don’t remember when we stopped playing ESP games at my house, but I was well into adulthood the next time I focused my attention on developing my psychic abilities. I was interested in energy and enrolled in Reiki training. During a psychic development section of that course, I had great luck reading for my partner, someone I’d never met. In response to her question, I saw a vivid, detailed scene in my third eye. When I described it to her, she told me that what I was seeing was the farm where she lived and the nightly routine she and her dogs engaged in. It was exciting to me, the same way, I suppose, my father’s premonition had been exciting to him.

I enrolled in additional psychic development courses with my teacher. She lived on a beautiful piece of land with a little chapel and art all around. We sat in a circle of stones, a bonfire burning in the center. We ate food together and listened to her wisdom, and we engaged in a variety of methods for intuitive reading, like holding objects or envelopes with photographs inside. We tried our hand at mediumship gallery readings and divination with oracles. It was all deeply interesting, but I found I had the best luck when we were put into pairs for one-on-one readings.

I sat with my partner, and we decided I would tune in for him first. Without knowing his query, I tuned into his energy. Immediately, I saw a beach and two people in conversation with the waves lapping the shore behind them. I heard myself describe this to him, heard myself offering information about the conversation and the relationship. I didn’t know where this information was coming from, but he was nodding and smiling. “Yes, that’s right,” he said.

Images floated into my mind’s eye, words and thoughts floated into my head, and I felt a sense of knowing. By this time in my life, I was aware of the idea that we have spirit guides and guardian angels and a whole host of unseen beings hovering around us. Still, when I read for my partner, I did not have the sense that the information I was receiving was coming from anyone, like God or a spirit guide. The information simply appeared in my mind the same way images had appeared on that movie screen when I was a child. I just opened up to it, and it was there, like widening a camera aperture to let in more light.

Our teacher, a professional psychic and medium, called me one afternoon and offered me a paying gig. She was often booked for parties and found herself with a scheduling conflict. She asked if I’d like to go in her place. I never would have attempted to take money for readings on my own, but the fact that she offered this work to me gave me the confidence to do it. She had seen me read, and she thought I was capable of doing it, so I said yes.

The first time I was set up in the library of a mansion on a horse farm. It was a real library with dark bookcases, a rolling ladder on a rail, and high-backed velvet chairs. I sat at a table in the middle of it. Party guests came in one by one, holding their drinks, told me they didn’t believe in any of this stuff, then sat down and asked me questions. They wanted to know about the person they were in love with or the job they were afraid to leave. I told them what I saw, heard, and felt. They handed me cash.

Another time, I sat at a table in a crowded Mexican restaurant. I was the entertainment for a bachelorette party. The future bride came and sat with me while her friends ate chips and drank margaritas at a long table nearby, occasionally glancing over to see if anything interesting was happening. She had real questions, too, and I did my best to answer them. I thought about the strangeness of it all, holding space for someone’s personal life in the middle of all that noise.

I started seeing clients for Reiki sessions, but I noticed that almost everyone who came to see me was interested not only in the energy work but also in intuitively gleaned information. I ended up giving readings to almost all of my Reiki clients.

I slowly, steadily, built a little business. I gave readings over the phone. I recorded video readings. I joined up with a monthly mystical fair where I gave readings all day long from inside my little booth, decorated with a salt lamp and crystals.

The prominent belief within the spiritual community at that time was that if a person could do readings, they also had a responsibility to do them. The ability to do them was a gift bestowed by God (or the universe) and was meant to be shared for the healing and betterment of others. I often heard readers say, “I just tell it like it is,” or “If it comes through, it’s meant to be shared.”

This made me uncomfortable. I didn’t then, nor do I now, think that psychic ability is a special gift. It’s a form of communication that is available to anyone who wishes to learn how to utilize it. Of course, some people are more skilled at it than others—just like anyone can learn to play the piano, but only some people are piano virtuosos.

At the mystical fair, I got to know a variety of interesting people who did this work professionally. I learned from them and was encouraged by them. But I had a push-and-pull relationship with the work that I couldn’t shake.

A woman came to my booth one afternoon who was clearly grieving. I could feel it before she said a word. She wanted a mediumship reading. She wanted to contact someone she had lost, and I told her honestly that mediumship wasn’t something I did. She nodded, but she didn’t leave, so I stayed with her for a moment, and into my mind came an image: a white nurse’s cap, crisp and slightly old-fashioned. I told her what I saw. She shook her head no, and I felt the familiar lurch of uncertainty, the floor going slightly soft beneath me. We ended the session gently.

I learned later that she had come hoping to reach her sister, who had been a nurse.

I thought about that woman for a long time afterward. I hadn’t been wrong, exactly, but I also hadn’t been able to give her what she needed. I never felt fully in my skin with words like “psychic” or “intuitive,” and I didn’t want to tell people outside the community that I gave readings, which made promoting a business rather difficult. But it was more than branding. Something in me resisted the full claim of it, the public identity, the booth with all the trappings, and the sign with my name.

At the end of a day of readings, I was always relieved that it was over, and while I admired those who were committed fully to their work and had no problem claiming public identities as psychics and mediums, I wasn’t one of them. I struggled to describe myself and my work in nuanced ways so that I could work with the people who wanted the work but would remain invisible to those who feared or mocked it.

I once heard a prominent psychic medium say that when he did readings, he saw his guides sitting around a table, as if he were in a board meeting. I always wished to have experiences like that. There was a part of me that wondered if the way I received information meant I was doing it wrong, or that I hadn’t gone deeply enough, or that some door that had opened for others was still closed to me. I knew that other readers I worked with saw and heard—knew—their guides. For me, spirit guides were a concept that I believed in, but when I did readings, I saw, heard, and felt information. Although I did sometimes have the sense that I was communicating with guides, that was not primary to my experience.

It took me a lot of years to realize that I read that way because that’s how I was taught. As a child, sitting at the kitchen table, I learned to exercise my third eye, my intuitive knowing, by opening to the transmission, opening to the field, sensing the greater reality, and experiencing it in an instant rather than a conversation.

I also realized, finally, that the discord within me when it came to working in the psychic world was itself a message, and I stopped doing it.

I am a spiritual explorer, and I enjoy listening to metaphysical teachers and sitting with psychics. I enjoy getting readings and find it a helpful practice. I’m also aware of the danger of turning over my inner wisdom to someone else. I am always my own best authority.