Psychic Babble

In search of her future, our writer asks six area psychics what’s in store.
She might have been better off not knowing.

By Jody Jaffe

Is there a big W on my forehead?

It’s either that or there really is something to this psychic stuff.

I recently went to six “professional intuitives” in Montgomery County to see what was in store for me. I had my birth date charted, my palms scanned, my tarot and Hawaiian Aumakua cards read, my pets communicated with and my guardian angel consulted. Every one of them said the same thing: You worry too much. Worry, with a capital W.

But apparently I’ve got good reason. One of the psychics told me I had 18 years of hell ahead of me because I was entering my demon period, something called Rahu Dasa. Then, when I asked about my health, the concerned look of an undertaker washed over his face and he said gravely, “Rahu is never easy for health.”

No one ever would accuse Montgomery County of being the East Coast’s answer to Sedona, Ariz., the crystal woo-woo capital of the galaxy. Still, there’s enough psychic activity in the area to keep everyone, from the believer to the curious, occupied.

There are two metaphysical bookstores in the Gaithersburg area where you can have your fortune told, a couple of spiritualist churches that hold psychic fairs and there’s Pathways, “the mind, body, spirit” quarterly magazine published in Silver Spring. The latest issue is 144 pages fat with columns like “Assessing Your Intuition” and “Astrological Insights,” along with advertisements for everything from “Awareness Coaching” (“A team of angels will clue you in”) to Real Estate agents (“Helping your spirit find its healthy home”).

Pathways is a sort of guidebook to the beyond. It’s got a dizzying assortment of ads for psychics, astrologers, tarot card readers, healers, intuitives and animal communicators. That’s where I started the search for my future. I scanned the ads, looking for 301 area codes to keep my psychic tour within the confines of Montgomery County. First stop: my house in Silver Spring.

Gena Wilson,
Traveling Psychic
Gena Wilson makes house calls, like doctors used to do. She also does readings at Special Treasures, the metaphysical bookstore in old town Gaithersburg. Her “Inspired By Angels” ad in Pathways promised to “clarify your soul’s purpose and make your karma issues crystal clear.”

Wilson, 52, a part-time social worker in a dialysis unit, has been in the angel business since 1999, though she says she’s had “the gift” her whole life. But as a kid, it was no gift. “It just terrified me,” she said. “My mother died when I was 4 years old. I always felt her around and it scared the bejeebies out of me.”

She showed up at my house on a brisk Sunday afternoon wearing tidy blue sweats and bright pink nail polish. She’s short and a little on the stocky side, with frosted brown hair that falls to her shoulders. Wilson started the reading by pulling a small Buddha, some lavender oil, a crystal and a little bell from a green velvet bag. They’re part of the ritual, she explained. “They signal all my guides and angels that this is the time they are to come work through me.”

Apparently angels are pushy and must be taught boundaries. Otherwise, Wilson said, they’d be talking to her all the time, which would drive her crazy.

After she “cleansed my aura” with some of the lavender oil, she waved her hands around, murmured a blessing about truth and light, then took my hand in hers. “I see the prettiest green,” she started. “Almost lime. There’s a vibrancy about you.” She paused. “This is interesting.”

She paused again. Uh-oh. This is why I don’t like to get my tarot cards read, I always get the death card. But I’d jumped the gun. Her news wasn’t bad.

“Michael the archangel just stepped in,” she continued, eyes closed. “All the angels behind him are males. They’re all clinging to shields.” Turns out the shields were sort of good. Or at least not fatal. According to Wilson, they mean I have a “passion for issues and would fight for justice or for a cause.” She was batting one for one. Fighting for causes had been my downfall when I worked for a newspaper, because, to me, every cause was the one worth fighting for.

She then asked if I am artistic. “You love color and combinations of colors,” she said. It doesn’t take a psychic to figure that out. All it takes is a working set of eyes. My house is painted turquoise, my living room walls are yellow and they’re crammed with a bright mosaic of vivid paintings and sculptures, some of which I’ve done.

She went on to tell me my angel’s name is Grace and my lesson this time around is to learn unconditional love and acceptance. Her eyebrows knotted in concern: “I get the sense you don’t like a lot of conflict, chaos and commotion.” Score two. But couldn’t that be said of everyone?

“Trust your gut,” she said. “You are a good sensor. If you go against it, your stomach hurts.”

Which brought us to my health. She put her hands a few inches in front of me and started moving them down, running what I suppose was a spiritual body scan. Brain, good, she said. Then she stopped in front of my nose. “Do you have sinus problems?” I had sinus surgery three years ago and still get the occasional pounding headache. She continued down my body. Heart is good. Then she stopped — dramatically — at my stomach. “This is the part of you that catches hell,” she said. “That’s where you hold everything.”

That was a home run. How could she have known about my seven-year battle with Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease, the Ashlee Simpson disease? She told me I had to stop worrying, that it was only making matters worse for me. “You have a long life ahead of you, but you have to love your tummy. It’s so sensitive. You have to learn how to zip up your armor and protect yourself.”

I asked her about my career as a novelist. I’ve got five books in print and my agent is shopping around my latest, a thriller called Kill The Lawyers. She closed her eyes again and concentrated for a few moments. She opened them, an apologetic look on her face. She hesitated. “Sorry, I have to tell you what I see. I see it collecting dust on a shelf.”

Ouch.

Wilson spent an hour or so at my house. Some things she got right, others I hoped were right. Like what she said she learned from my stepfather, Arthur Isaac, who died 12 years ago. I was very close to him and deeply saddened that he never got a chance to meet my second husband, John. But apparently he knows all about him.

“He likes this guy for you,” Wilson said. “He [Arthur] just lit up a room and you adored him. Was he the life of the party?” I’ll let the inscription on his headstone answer that one: “Blithe spirit. He touched everyone with joy, the world will be a duller place without him.”

Even Arthur got his two cents in on the big W. “He says don’t worry so much. You always land on your feet.”

Wilson took my hand again and then said, “Are you looking to buy a horse farm?”

Another home run. We were two weeks away from signing the papers for property in Lexington, Va., with building plans already drawn up for our someday barn. “That,” she pronounced of our future farm, “is going to be a lucrative adventure.”

Strike one. No one but sheiks makes money with horses.

Wilson is an animal communicator, so I asked her about my horses, Roy and Theo. I said nothing to her about their health issues. She told me to put Roy’s name on prayer lists to help his spinal problems. Roy has EPM, a malarial-like parasite that hits the spine. “He’s a candidate for a miracle,” she said. From her lips, to whomever’s ears.

Highway to Hell
Next stop, Rockville, the office of Brendan Feeley, a Vedic astrologer whose Pathways ad promised a professional consultation would reveal among other things: my life purpose, spiritual destiny, career talents and changes, and “remedial measures to overcome obstacles during periods of difficulty and challenge” — like the Rahu Dasa phase I’d just entered. According to the Vedic birth chart Feeley had calculated, Rahu Dasa was going to bring me 18 years of “challenge” — that’s New Age speak for hell. But if I believed that, then I’d have to believe the first thing he told me: “The last seven years should have been the best years of your life.” If you call a difficult divorce and a series of health problems good years, then that would be right. However, it should be noted, I did meet John six years ago, and that, next to the birth of my sons, was the best thing to ever happen to me.

Feeley, 55, is also a naturopathic doctor, which explains the little amber bottles sitting on his desk. He speaks with a brogue — he grew up in Ireland — and he’s got fringy gray hair. The corners of his eyes squeeze shut when he smiles, making him look a little bit like a leprechaun.

But he didn’t smile much during my reading because my chart was so dire.
In addition to this 18-year Rahu Dasa phase I’ve just entered, I also have three nasty malefics in my chart. Malefics are malignant influences. “That’s not easy,” Feeley said of my malefics. “They make things difficult; you come into the world believing the world is a difficult place.”

Has he looked at a newspaper lately?

It only got worse from there. I’m also entering 1.9 to nine years of Ketu Dasa, which, according to Feeley, means health problems. “I have to tell you what I see,” he said. Then I asked him about the novel.

“That Mercury in the eighth house, it’s a killer,” he said, shaking his head. “If you had the Mercury in the first or 10th house, everybody would be reading your books.”

But it turned out I did have Jupiter in the 10th house, which meant I should bring travel into my writing. I told him I was also a travel writer and he nodded in encouragement. A good career choice for me, he said. Finally, something good.

Apparently I also have Rehu — that’s the ruler of the underworld — in my seventh house. That meant my second marriage will be fine as long as “all our passions are expressed to keep things working.” If either one of us starts to withdraw we’re in trouble.

Because I’m going into this annoying Rehu period, Feeley suggested I tailor my writing to Rehu’s taste. Remember, Rehu is the ruler of the underworld. So this is Feeley’s suggestion for my next novel: “Something about the sex industry in America.”

A River of Anxiety
Next stop, a little brick ranch just off Colesville Road in Silver Spring, the home of 69-year-old Claudette Knox who reads palms and Hawaiian Aumakua cards.

She didn’t beat around the bush. She took my palm, examined it with a magnifying glass and pronounced, in a grandmotherly way, “You’re a worrywart. You have so many worry lines that cross over your lifeline.” She showed me my palm under her magnifying glass and sure enough, it looked like a chicken had been line dancing across my hand. There were tracks all over the place.

I told her I thought I had plenty to worry about, given the demon period Feeley said I’d just entered. She told me not to pay any attention to him and his Vedic charts, my palms told another, better story.

“The latter part of you life is going to be the best,” she said. But my lifeline is so short, I said, doesn’t that mean something bad? It’s not short, she explained, it just goes off in several directions. “Mine does the same thing and I’m already 69, so don’t worry about it.”

With her soft gray hair and reassuring manner, Knox comes off like a grandmother from central casting. But her history tells another story. She’s been involved with psychic phenomenon for 35 years, in addition to a variety of day jobs, which include managing the Golden Bull restaurant in Gaithersburg and being the director of resource management for Army and Air Force Intelligence. Knox then said I had the teacher’s mark on my hand and asked if I teach. Yes. Journalism at Georgetown University and fiction writing at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda.

My “girdle of Venus” revealed I was artistic and sexual. I make mosaics — no comment on the other (my kids will be reading this).

My palm is also marked with a writer’s flair that goes in two directions. “Maybe you’ll be writing two different kinds of things.” I hadn’t told her that I write novels in addition to magazine articles.

Judging by the lines on the side of my hand, she said I’d had two marriages. “He’s the good one,” she said of John.

Like Feeley, Knox saw travel in my future. “You have travel lines in the mound of moon,” she said and I wrote it down because I thought that would be a good title for a book.

I also, according to my palms (and anyone who knows me), “have a temper and perceive things emotionally.”

Knox read my Hawaiian Aumakua cards next. Like the tarot cards, these have pictures on them that correlate to tendencies. Guess which card I drew first? The anxiety card.

“You’ve got to let go of worries because you’re drawing it to you,” she said. She placed the other cards I picked in a pattern that revealed: My husband is close to my children. (That’s a definite and happy yes.) I’ve got to quit over-thinking everything. (True.) There was a lot turmoil and pain in my past, but that’s going away. (True, and I hope, true.) I’ve got good friends and I shouldn’t hesitate to call on them. (True.)

Then she looked at the overall pattern to find rivers of color. Each card has a predominant color, and if they run down a line or diagonally, that’s a river.

“Your energies are scattered,” she said and showed how I had no real bingo lines in my cards. The closest I came were five yellow cards that made a dogleg.

Guess what the yellow cards stand for? Anxiety. I’ve got a river of anxiety. Who knew the cards could be so eloquent?

Angels’ Advice: Ditch the SUV
Marcos Perlalta, 42, is a part-time psychic who also works the deli counter at a Gaithersburg Safeway. He does readings at Special Treasures, the metaphysical bookstore, on Wednesday afternoons. While he may have a fine command of the afterworld, his English is spotty and my Spanish is nonexistent.

Perlalta did my reading in a tiny room behind the cash register at Special Treasures. A navy and gold cloth with stars and moons covered the little table, a fake red rose in a vase sat next to a flickering candle. He’d lit a special “prosperity” incense.

“Smells like 1970,” I said when I walked in. Perlalta, a Paraguay native who’s been in the United States for 15 years, looked at me blankly.

I tried to explain that the incense smelled like pot. I wasn’t getting my message across and the rest of the reading went pretty much along those lines. I think he told me that my life has not been an easy one, that I had a difficult childhood. Anyone who’s read any of my books can attest to that.

He said I have a brother. Right. Rick the lawyer in Houston. And that he saw us playing together and something happened when we were young. I asked him, “What happened and why is that significant?” several different ways. He didn’t understand my questions, and I didn’t understand his answers, so I moved on.

Even a language barrier didn’t stop the W word from coming up.

“I see a woman behind you,” he said. “She looks like your grandmamma. She says don’t worry about everything, everything okay for you.”

Apparently there were three other angels standing next to my grandmother who told Perlalta to tell me the following: Get rid of my SUV; light a small white candle every Monday morning next to a glass of water; stop thinking so much; and be more positive. He finished the reading by saying, “Your life is not easy, you do yourself everything. You need to be more relaxed.”

More Tests to Come
Next I talked to the Rev. Marcus Capone of Bethesda. He’s the director of the Institute for Spiritual Development, one of the area’s metaphysical churches. I consulted him at the Institute’s January psychic fair on a surprisingly mild winter night. At 7 p.m, I was escorted into the chapel, where tables were set up throughout the room for the various readers.

Capone, 47, talks with a comforting gentleness. If you had to have bad news, he’s the kind of guy you’d like to hear it from.

He asked to hold a piece of jewelry I was wearing. I gave him my wedding band. He closed his eyes, said “thank you” to someone I couldn’t see, then said to me: “The first thing I want to say to you is that worry sends absolutely the wrong energy.”

He got that from my wedding band? Because he sure didn’t get it from any clues I was sending. I’d just said hello to him. There’s no hidden anxiety in that.

Capone’s been getting these kinds of messages since he was kid. He says he’d know the answers to teachers’ questions about things he hadn’t even studied. His parents were Catholic, so mediums and psychics weren’t a topic of discussion in their Bethesda home. It wasn’t until he got to college — Georgetown — that he started to “investigate the intuitive phenomenon.”

After getting his master’s in music composition at Catholic University, Capone delved further into the spirit world. Eventually, he became a minister after a completing a four-year course at the Institute.

Capone prefaced what he was going to say next with, “I’m not a doctor.” I guess everyone, even psychics, has to be concerned about lawsuits. “Don’t worry, because it’s affecting your health.”

He also said he sensed a little anemia. I don’t know, I haven’t had a physical in a few years. He also told me my hormones were fluctuating wildly and recommended herbal answers to estrogen. It doesn’t take a psychic to figure that one out. I am, after all, a woman of a certain age (51).

He said I should look to finding the evenness in my life, not the drama. I do love drama and wasn’t nicknamed “Sarah Bernhardt” as a kid for nothing.

Like Feeley and Knox, Capone saw travel in my life. “Associated with your work,” he said. I told him I write travel stories for the New York Times and other papers. Like Feeley, he nodded in approval.

As for the fate of my novel? Forget it. There will be “delay, delay,” Capone said. “The test there is not to get frustrated.”

Easy for him to say.

I asked him about the dire predictions from my Vedic charts. He said I did, in fact, have a few more “tests” in front of me. “But you have to project where you want to be and you’ll get there. And learn how to manage your worry.”

The Best Year Ever
Next stop, the other end of the chapel for a tarot card reading with David Gleekel, who runs the Reiki Center of Greater Washington from his Rockville home. The center offers Reiki classes and clinics, and shamanic crystal healing sessions, workshops and Reiki/massage tables.

Gleekel, 43, a soft-spoken man with salt and pepper hair and goatee, used to be a manager with Kaiser Permanente. In 1994, a friend in his meditation group read Gleekel’s tarot cards. “What I noticed,” he said, “is that the cards didn’t so much tell me my future, but they told me what I needed to pay attention to in the present. And it was very accurate.” Intrigued, he took a class in psychic development at the Institute for Spiritual Development. He’s been reading cards ever since.

I chose 13 cards from a pile he’d scrambled atop a pink tablecloth. He laid 12 of them in a circle, each representing a house in an astrological chart. He placed the final card in the middle. Nearby were two large chunks of crystal and a straw basket with his business cards.

Gleekel moved through my cards quickly and efficiently. Once an MBA (1989 from American University), always an MBA. The first couple of houses suggested I was a good starter and that I take a high moral position. I do start a lot of things, it’s the finishing that gets me. If a high moral position means I’m intractable sometimes, guilty as charged.

According to my third house, this is the year to get better organized financially. My fourth house showed a “new beginning.” Renovation, he said, more than moving. “Storage is a real issue for you,” he said. John always tells me, “We need a lot more space or a lot less stuff.”

My fifth house revealed that my partner is appreciating me more. Hard to tell, he’s very appreciative to start with.

Uh-oh, I pulled the 2 of Pentacles for my sixth house which means money’s tight. Unless I sell that book, it’s only going to get tighter.

Then, of course, the W word came up. He told me to focus on the positive and not the negative. And I should stop worrying because — dramatic drum roll here — of the final and central card in my hand. He lifted it up and showed it to me. It was a cherubic little baby boy riding a beautiful white horse. The Sun card.

“You’ve had some difficult times and you have had to worry about many things. But this is going to be the best year you’ve ever had.”

I’ll leave it on that note. That way I can stop worrying.

Writer Jody Jaffe, author of the Nattie Gold mystery series, teaches journalism at Georgetown University.