Interview With Popular Psychic Barb Powell

In this interview, Charles Bridges of The Star Phoenix interviews popular Canadian Psychic Reader Barb Powell.

Even before I arrived at her office, Barb Powell knew I was coming.

Powell works full-time as a psychic, but I had also made an appointment.

Powell’s shoebox-size office is hidden in an out-of-the way complex near the airport. Most of the building is occupied by call centre employees answering telephones.

Inside the small room there are no Tarot cards, no crystal balls, no smoke or flashing lights; there isn’t even a sign on her door. The room is simple: A set of wicker chairs, some ornaments and inspirational messages taped to the wall. The air freshener smells like cinnamon.

Aside from the few crystals and candles on the windowsill and the books on the shelf with titles like Growing Up Psychic and One Day My Soul Opened Up, you would be hard-pressed to know you were in the presence of someone who makes a living predicting the future.

Powell is not your stereotypical psychic. She doesn’t wear a long flowing dress, or a jewel encrusted headband. She is married to a former Southern Baptist minister and has three kids. She does look more like your typical mom — often clad casually in blue jeans and a sweater — than someone who purports to read people’s minds and commune with the dead.

“As far as I know I don’t have a quarter slot on me,” she laughs.

It is this “no gimmick” approach that has gained Powell an international reputation. She has clients in Japan, Australia and New Zealand and throughout Canada and the U.S. She has consulted for TV shows like the Ghost Whisperer, The Mentalist and the latest Star Trek movie. She has helped police with missing persons cases.

Between those engagements, the long-distance telephone calls and in-person psychic sessions, Powell is a busy woman. But I did convince her to take some time to predict my future.

During our half-hour session, I was thinking about Lindsay Lohan. On the cab ride over, I had read the troubled star would be appearing in Playboy and the photos had been leaked online. I spent five minutes thinking about that Playboy shoot, just seeing if Powell would catch me. She didn’t. And, while I was a bit disappointed, I was also kind of glad.

Powell admits she was a weird, quiet kid. She grew up in a small fishing community in Nova Scotia and, as long as she can remember she could “hear and see things” other people couldn’t.

“I knew I could hear things, I knew I could see things, but it was just out of the blue,” she says.

Eventually, her mother took her to a psychiatrist, but the doctors could find nothing wrong with her. It wasn’t until her early 20s that she began “feeling pulled to the spiritual stuff.” After years of soul searching, she began working as a psychic full time seven years ago.

She sees an average of four or five clients each day. Many of them are young or middle-aged women, like Cathy White.

I meet White (she asked that her real name not be used because of privacy concerns) for the first time outside Powell’s office. White had her first session with Powell two years ago, shortly after her husband passed away. We meet at her third session with the psychic.

“The first time I went it was a gimmicky thing,” she admits.

Once inside, both of us wait patiently as Powell checks in with her assistant about her schedule — even a psychic can’t do without her BlackBerry.

As White settles in and the reading begins there are a lot of awkward silences. There are plenty of “hmms” and “hahs” as Powell scribbles in her notepad. She scribbles with the same intensity as she did during my session — it looks like some practised form of abstract doodling.

“This is strange,” she tells White. “You seem different.”

White was different from the last time Powell saw her. She switched jobs and is in a new relationship. White says the changes had a lot to do with Powell’s advice and predictions. The psychic had counselled her to move on, to get a new job and a new boyfriend and she did. Powell wields considerable power over this woman’s life.

During her session, Powell does most of the talking. The psychic doesn’t wave her hands over top of her client or do any weird chanting. She simply sits across from her, waiting for something to happen.

Powell asks a series of seemingly random questions and White’s responses are usually brief yes or no answers. More often than not, she is looking at the psychic nodding her head.

On more than one occasion, Powell looks down at her sheet and says “What the heck.” It’s as if she is trying to figure something out, trying to piece together someone’s life out of thin air.

“A lot of people don’t understand the process of mediumship,” Powell tells me later. “It’s not like sitting across from someone and having this huge discussion. It’s almost like a game of charades … it sounds like, feels like, I can get a word or two here and there and (I’m) putting it all together like a big puzzle.”

Powell often has trouble describing exactly what she is seeing and feeling when she is conducting a session with someone. Although she is religious, Powell shies away from words like Sakkara and even God when talking about her practice. She believes it is a spiritual experience, but her thoughts are scattered, her predictions seemingly random.

“Go down to Midtown Plaza and sit on the bench and close your eyes,” Powell tells me.

“All that racket — people talking on top of people talking, footsteps, bangs, cash registers — it’s like that constantly.

“But if you are sitting on the bench and start eavesdropping, then everything else disappears. That’s how I would describe it best, I suppose, being pulled in different directions.”

During White’s session, Powell offers everything from career to relationship to health advice. She talks at length about White’s connection with her mother — apparently she can be overbearing.

“Don’t listen to your mom,” Powell tells her. “She confuses things. She has good intentions, but she confuses things.”

By the end of the session, Powell has told White to dump her new boyfriend, take some online classes and get some blood work done. She simultaneously takes on the role of a therapist, career counsellor and, yes, even an auto mechanic — she told White to get her car’s brakes checked out. That conversation came up after Powell figured out White had been having car trouble.

After her session, White tells me Powell was accurate in almost everything she said — not only was her car giving her electrical trouble, but her mother had been particularly overbearing lately.

“I always walk out feeling flabbergasted. Like did that just really happen?” she tells me.

Like many of her clients, White sought out Powell as a kind of therapy. Powell is not as much gleaming new information as she is teaching her clients about themselves. Her predictions can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies: Powell hears some voice that tells her what your future holds and you do your best to make that future come true, thus proving her prediction.

“She gets at a lot of subconscious things that you don’t really know are there. She brings it to the forefront,” White said.

During my session with Powell, she did get a few things right: She told me my grandmother had glasses, that I have a good relationship with my dog, that I sometimes get frustrated with my partner and that I should quit smoking. All of these things are true, but they also would have been pretty easy to guess, (Whose grandma doesn’t wear glasses?)

She also told me that I will open my own magazine one day — part of a psychic’s job is telling you what you want to hear. According to Powell, the other part is making sure people realize their potential, making sure they aren’t sitting idly by while the world goes on around them. Powell tells me a story from her early days as psychic — before she worked professionally — during university.

“I remember someone coming up to me and saying, ‘Hey, am I going to pass this final in three weeks?’ I stopped, took a look at it and said, ‘Yeah, you’re going to pass,’ ” she tells me. “They came back four weeks later and said, ‘What the hell? I didn’t pass.’ I said, ‘Well, did you study?’ ‘Hell, no, why should I? You said I was going to pass.’ ”

If there is one thing I learned from spending time with Powell, it is that no matter how many psychic predictions she makes, it’s still up to you to make them come true. If she really is hearing the future — and I really think she believes she is — it’s only a potential future. Her predictions are more like a spiritual self-help book than religious fatalism. Which is why, even though I don’t totally believe in Powell’s psychic powers, I can still put up with them.

Article source: thestarphoenix.com