What do you think of when you hear the word “psychic”? Maybe a scary movie featuring a Ouija board or a television medium comes to mind. Perhaps you envision a sparkling crystal ball with a person in a headwrap sitting behind it, swirling their bony, ring-covered fingers and freakishly long fingernails around it. You might think of tarot cards and tea leaves, or frauds and tricksters. Maybe psychic work fascinates and intrigues you, or maybe you’re, at best, suspicious about the whole thing. Many people who haven’t had personal experience with psychic work draw from their belief systems and the thousands of cultural references to psychics to inform their perceptions about them. The word psychic holds a certain weight to it, and those who call themselves psychics often carry that weight.

Kathleen Johns is a psychic, and she’s not a fan of what she sees as the “sensationalism” surrounding her line of work. Kathleen has been committed to developing her practice for over three decades, but she didn’t always call herself a psychic. The “dreaded P word,” as Kathleen puts it, can be associated with certain notions that don’t align with the foundations of her work. “Am I pregnant? Will I get married? Divorced? Lucky Lotto numbers? Etc. I believe it’s a common misconception that questions such as these exemplify what psychics ‘do’ and what our work consists of. The work I do, the way I do it, is so much more,” Kathleen says. During psychic readings, of which she’s performed well over 25,000, Kathleen offers her clients insights that can shed light on new perspectives and possibilities. She does so by tuning into energy she feels is coming from her client’s soul, or what she calls Source Energy. “The soul is comprised of a meeting of the head and the heart,” she says. “That’s discernment, and that’s what I hope to bring to my clients, the gift of clarity.” Doctors, lawyers, high-profile politicians, single mothers, college students, people from various walks of life have sought out sessions with Kathleen regarding all kinds of questions. “I never give advice, or tell my clients when to come back—that’s not my job,” she says. The way she sees it, her job is the easy part. Kathleen’s aim is to illuminate opportunities for people; it remains up to them to take the necessary steps toward what they want. “That’s where the hard work begins,” she says.

What Kathleen does can be associated with fortune-telling or soothsaying, but she considers those labels inappropriate when referring to psychic work. She knows full well that her work isn’t going to be one-hundred percent accurate, “It can’t be,” she says. “In this line of work, if we’re talking about authenticity, I want people to know that I’m not this unreachable psychic icon. There’s a lot more to my ability than people putting me on a pedestal and then judging my work for accuracy.” Kathleen doesn’t subscribe to the notion of fate or a future set in stone. She believes in free will, and recognizes that an individual’s choices can always “scramble a prediction.” Kathleen has thousands of clients around the globe, and is regularly booked out four to six months. “I like to tell people, ‘Look, my work is weird. So buckle your seatbelts,’ because I don’t know what’s going to come out of my mouth.”

According to Kathleen, during readings she’ll often bring up information that totally befuddles her but deeply resonates with her clients. She’s spoken phrases and words in languages she’s never learned, and made cultural references she wasn’t at all privy to. Like all of us, Kathleen carries her own biases. She doesn’t consciously analyze anything that might come out during a reading; at the end of the day, she’s hoping to get something across to her clients that only they would really understand. “How can anyone know your own soul better than you?” she asks. Kathleen advises her clients to use their best judgment, and sit with the information that’s provided instead of trying to interpret what she’s saying by the literal word-for-word meaning of it. “Because you’ll be disappointed,” she warns. “When I speak to people, I’m not trying to connect with their thinking brain.” The language of the soul, as she put it, speaks in terms of ‘imagination and the expansiveness of being.’ “Many times people get back to me saying, ‘Ya know, that thing you told me about did end up happening, just not in the way I thought it would.’”

Kathleen is trained in a large number of modalities including tea leaf reading, tarot, natal astrology, and Akashic Records. During in-person readings, it’s up to her clients which modality they prefer she use, if any. Kathleen views tarot cards and the like as helpful tools in her collection, but she doesn’t need them to do her work. She’s done readings for totally anonymous clients over email, and has worked with simply a first name and birthdate. Along with private readings, she’s also trained in mediumship and seance. Here in town, you can catch Kathleen doing live mediumship demonstrations, where she connects with the Source Energy she feels in the crowd, with a specific focus on bringing forth messages from loved ones who’ve passed on. Her next demonstration is October 27th in the Baxter Ballroom.

Kathleen has also “ghost hunted” on numerous occasions, although after saying so, she mentioned she doesn’t like hearing it called that. “I don’t think a soul would want to be hunted. That doesn’t sound very nice,” she says. Psychic work is often associated with evil spirits, ghosts, and unfriendly entities out to harm and scare people. For Kathleen, there is no such thing as good or evil energy. “Energy is energy. A soul is a soul,” she says. As she puts it, each soul is as unique as a thumbprint, and each has its own story to tell. “I’ve encountered souls you probably wouldn’t want to have over for dinner,” Kathleen remarks. “But I don’t understand why a soul that’s transitioned out of the body would want to hurt me. We’re all one.”

When Kathleen decided to start building her practice, she made a promise to herself that if her work ever started to become anything other than “service to souls,” she would stop. The first thing she does each morning is welcome positive energy into her body by smiling for no reason. As she goes into each day, she does so wearing an ‘energetic suit of armor,’ and consciously decides that there’s nothing for her to fear. “I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I felt I was vulnerable to negative energies,” she states.

​Kathleen takes what she does very seriously; at the same time, she is fascinated by her work, and has a lot of fun doing it. She loves people and hearing their stories, and is intrigued with the vastness of knowledge related to psychic work. Every chance she gets, she seeks out teachers and colleagues to engage with; she has worked with recognizable names like Shakti Gawain and Dolores Cannon. “The more I learn, the less I know,” she says. Kathleen doesn’t need to understand the full breadth of what she does, and doesn’t believe she ever could. She thinks her granddaughter said it best — “The Cosmos are never ending” — and she believes there’s always more to learn. Kathleen is proud to say she’s a second generation psychic. But in no way does she think her abilities are exclusive. “We are all psychic, it’s just about training those abilities.” Kathleen feels that, culturally, many of us have been taught that getting into the arts of divination is wrong. “But understanding and connecting to divinity, why would that be wrong?” she asks. Kathleen believes that perspective is key in visualizing the life one wants. “Pay attention to intention. Energy flows where attention goes,” she comments. Each time she does her work, Kathleen sets the intention that “whatever comes forth is for the highest good and growth of everyone involved,” and her hope is that, eventually, her clients will no longer seek her out to provide insights for them. Rather, she hopes they learn to tune into their own psychic abilities and sharpen them, returning to her only to double check their own intuition.

You won’t find much marketing for Kathleen’s work, nor see her on social media platforms other than Facebook and Instagram, which she calls ‘necessary evils’ for her business. “I’m not interested in participating in sensationalism. I want people to have to do a little work to get in for an appointment with me and to find me, because it means they really want to experience my work,” she says. She’s currently in the process of self- publishing her first book, in which she tells stories of her life, and goes into detail about her experiences as a psychic medium. The book will be available on Amazon later this year.

Some people who call themselves psychics don’t use their real names, or they charge folks for online readings that are just pre-recorded videos, according to Kathleen. “There are a lot of frauds,” she says.  She chose to call herself a psychic, well aware of the weight the label carries, with the recognition of the word’s Greek origin. Psychic comes from psychikos, an old Greek word meaning “of the soul.” On Kathleen’s website, the following question is posed: “Our souls speak to us. Are we listening?”   

To learn more about Kathleen Johns, visit www.kathleenjohns.com