…well, I didn’t actually pull it out myself with a pair of pliers. But I want to share with you my most recent health journey, so that you can make of it what you will. It begins like this. When I was young, my dad had a root canal. He came home and told me an amazing story: during the highly unpleasant procedure, he had been able to relax and switch off the pain with his mind. The impact this story had on me was NOT ‘Wow! your all-powerful amazing brain can switch off pain!!’ BUT ‘root canals, despite anaesthetic, are massively painful’. My dad’s had four of them. I’ve lived in (subconscious) fear of them ever since. And you know how you attract the thing that you least want…?

April 2012: Miss Psychette’s tooth starts to hurt. (This also happened two years prior. My dentist X-rayed me and declared me a medical mystery. I was like, ‘Duh, that’s because something emotional is going on’. Sure enough, after three days, it cleared up.) Because it cleared up last time, I ignored it this time. And ignored it… and ignored it… until two weeks later I was waking up at 2am weeping from pain with a swollen face. I’m thinking, “WHAT does this represent?” I looked it up (fear, decisions, stagnancy, money, things ‘at the root of the matter’, ‘getting on my nerves’…) I meditated and cried about love, people I hate, lost friendships… I sprayed Earth essence under my tongue, ate more spinach, did NET and random things came up. But the tooth still hurt.

Finally I dragged myself to the dentist, thinking, “He’s going to put me on antibiotics.” (You’re looking at someone who hasn’t taken so much as a cough lolly since I was 15. I had two home births with no ultrasounds or drugs.) Now my saintly record has been broken by evil penicillin, which OK YES helped(?) clear up my gum infection, but also totally knocked my menstrual cycle out of whack (creepy). My dentist announced I would be getting a root canal (AUUUGGHHH!) over the next four visits for $1,200, thank you very much.

I went home feeling YUCK and immediately Googled ‘holistic dentist’. They’re almost completely impossible to find here in Adelaide; apparently mainstream dentistry has pushed them totally underground. I did find an awesome site in California that clearly explained the fact that infections interfere with the breast meridien, and 100% of people with breast cancer in one study have had root canals! I finally found a holistic dentist and visited him. LOVED HIM. Dr Simon Briggs: “Holistic dentists haven’t been doing root canals for over 20 years, you know.” Me: “What happens when your tooth is dead, then?”

Here’s a statistic I personally find horrifying. In the past few years, there’s been a 50% decline of children aged nine to twelve spending time in outdoor activities (hiking, walking, fishing, beach play). Why? Three guesses. Because their brains are completely glued to iPhones, laptops, Facebook, DVDs, Wiis and other devices humming with radiation. There’s no question that these new little alien-type old souls have been coming through ready and willing to take on the Technology / Information Revolution in their stride — but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a great thing.

Here’s some more worrying stats: almost two thirds of babies under the age of one are spending an average of one hour and twenty minutes in front of a TV or computer screen each day; and Generation Z is the most marketed-to generation of children the world has ever seen (it is estimated they are exposed to between 30,000-40,000 TV commercials each year).

This information comes via the amazing Michael McQueen, a Sydney-based speaker, social researcher and three-time best selling author who specialises in educating companies, parents and teachers about Generations Y and Z. He has some great free downloads on his website, such as ‘The biggest myths about Gen Y’ and lots of info on Gen Z (who he calls ‘Generation Y on speed’)! He reminds us that most Gen Z kids have never seen a camera that requires film, much less had to wait for photos to be developed… and says that all this technology overload is causing many, many repercussions, including:

- lower body image / self-esteem from a much younger age (eg. primary school years)
- information overload turning children nto ‘little adults’
- craving personalised attention
- kids feeling like their world lacks authenticity and genuine role models

Spiritually, it’s not hard to see that Generation Z — whether they realise it yet or not — will be desperately craving real MEANING in their lives. Sure, technology can be amazing. But it also distracts us further and further away from what is ‘real’. It projects a big, fake, busy world of materialistic illusion and drives people further away from the feelings in their own minds and hearts. It is the complete antithesis to meditation… something we all desperately need to stay sane and connected to our true essence amidst all this earth ‘noise’!

I believe that Generation Z, more than EVER, will crave personal connection and genuine, authentic community leaders. We need to teach them to put the phone down, turn off the TV, climb a tree, pick flowers, look at the patterns clouds make in the sky, gather strawberries in the garden with their bare hands and other nurturing ‘slow’ activities. This may also be where kids’ meditation and yoga classes come in… teaching Gen Z how to ‘switch off’ from the media / technology buzz and go within.

Parents, teachers… what have you observed? What do you think?

“a mother’s intuition is so important and undervalued in our Western society. We tend to hand a lot of our personal power over to doctors in white coats, bossy neighbours, nurses’ opinions, parenting manuals, etc etc. At the end of the day, if something isn’t quite right with your kids, or you feel something needs to be addressed or changed within your family’s health or routines, your heart/gut will be letting you know…”

An excerpt from a wonderfully lengthy interview in Care For Kids’ latest newsletter with Miss Psychette about spiritual and natural parenting. Click to learn a little more about how my husband and I raise our kids holistically and cosmically to boot…

You’ve tried angel cards, tarot cards, affirmation cards and all sorts of other spreads… but have you ever seen numerology cards? I hadn’t either, until the amazing Lyn Busuttil spoke at Aurora Circle last month. She brought along her gorgeously packaged Numbers Work card decks ($36) to show us: beautifully illustrated packs of 60 cards (complete with comprehensive instruction booklet) that were created by Barbara Alison as an easy-to-use divinatory tool. The cards are reminiscent of the tarot system, offering intuitive guidance through the characteristics of the numbers 1–9, 11 and 22 as per the Pythagorean system of Numerology. The booklet clearly explains interpretations of each symbol, along with a new spread especially designed for use with these cards, and will bring practical guidance for your meditations and personal explorations. And if you’re looking to experience a mind-blowing Numerology reading using this incredible deck, be sure to catch Lyn Busuttil at Adelaide’s Body Mind & Psychic Expo in June. For more information, visit www.numberswork.com

Pop singer Ke$ha has pyschic powers, is regularly haunted by a ghost in her dreams, and takes a spiritual healer on tour with her to centre her chakras before each show. “We meditate and try to hone in on my psychic abilities, and go to acupuncture, and eat super organic,” Ke$ha told Seventeen magazine. The singer’s “favourite keepsake” is also a necklace made of placenta that she believes improves her psychic abilities. Her mother had been saving it since she gave birth to the blonde entertainer. Kesha says she crushed it up into a powder and wears it around her neck because it symbolises the bond between the child and the mother while in the womb, therefore making her psychic. I’ve never heard of this myself, but it sounds like a witchcrafty / Voodoo-type ritual, which is totally fine by me. Like, whatever works, peoples.

This month, we asked Dr Brett Hill to simplify a topic I personally loathe: exercise. I “get away” with not officially exercising because I’m lucky to have a fast (read: unhealthy skinny) metabolism. This means I look thin, but can’t run more than 50 paces without getting a stitch. As someone who can think of nothing worse than running on a sweaty machine in a stinky gym, I personally find the below article really, really heartening and practical. Granted, most of my fitness at the moment comes from natural cave women movements (picking up heavy toddlers, putting them back down, picking up heavy prams, picking up heavy shopping etc). I think I need to work on the cardio though…  Dr Brett Hill is a chiropractor and wellness expert whose weekly podcast show The Wellness Guys is ranked No. #1 under Health on Australian iTunes. He is also the author of How to Eat An Elephant: Simple Solutions for Lifelong Energy and Vitality ($27.95, Ayni Books). He has zillions of articles on Eating, Thinking and Moving on his website and in his monthly newsletter which are worth a look. Oh, and he’s my husband, but don’t hold that against him

“Many people look at the requirements for ‘how much exercise people need in a day to remain healthy’, and decide it all seems a bit much: ‘Where am I going to find the time to do all that?’ Well the good news is that you don’t always have to set aside specific time to exercise. In fact much of your exercise requirement can be taken up whilst you are at work, while you are doing the shopping and even when you are catching up with friends. The key is to incorporate your exercise into your activities of daily living (ADL’s).

“For example, rather than driving round and round at the supermarket looking for that perfect park near the entrance, why not take that space at the very back of the car park? You will save yourself time and stress and you will get a nice little walk to the shops to boot. There’s five minutes each way of walking!

“The old cliché at work is to take the stairs rather than the lift, but it really does work (assuming you have a multi-story workplace). This simple exercise can easily add 20 minutes of exercise into every day as you head into work, out for a meeting, out for lunch and then home again. If your office doesn’t have stairs, you may consider parking a little way away or getting public transport, and then walking in to get the same effect. There’s another 20 minutes each day!

“And instead of catching up with your friends at the coffee shop for a chin wag, why not meet them at the oval or the beach and go for a nice talk while you chat away? You can easily slide in 30 minutes of exercise and the best bit is, you will be so busy chatting you won’t even notice. There’s a bonus 30 mins exercise! So start thinking about how exercise fits into your daily routine. I am sure you can come up with some good ideas too.”

Visit www.DrBrettHill.com

The wonderful Jillian Exton from Breast Cancer Lessons Learned has helped to co-produce a video starring Yours Truly, offering advice to people who’ve just been hit with diagnoses of cancer. As Jillian’s website best sums it up: Why do I have cancer?  How do I cope with my diagnosis? Recbecca Dettman our hip and cool psychic shares some worldly thoughts on why we might have breast cancer and how we should view our diagnosis. Check it out below — and be sure to share this wonderful website with any loved ones who are battling this disease.

Many doctors aren’t particularly helpful or interested if you want to combine conventional cancer treatment with alternative therapies — partly because they’re unfamiliar with the latest research supporting how they work together. Breast cancer survivor Jillian Exton has used her experience, plus the findings of American naturopathic physicians working with cancer patients, to compile clinical studies for more than 90 natural supplements that can be used to manage the side-effects of chemo and other cancer treatments — and you can learn all about it in her new Ebook, What’s Your Plan?, $27.

I received an email from a psychic history-loving friend last night which read: “I wanted to ask you what you think of this Titanic voyage recreation that’s happening at the moment. My first thought was how crazy to recreate a fatal voyage but then I started thinking about it in terms of healing the past, rewriting the memory/history kind of thing… they’ve got the exact same number of passengers (some of them relatives of original passengers) and will reach the spot where it hit the iceberg exactly 100 years after it happened. Oh, and also, I saw Mystic Medusa post something about there being a Mercury retrograde at the time of the crash – explains why they never got the telegram about the iceberg!”

Of course I realised I totally had to write a spiritual Titanic piece to assist in all this nostalgic commemorating of Death, Disaster and DiCaprio! Yes, there is a ship carrying 1,309 passengers (the exact same number as the Titanic — 50% of whom are actually descended from Titanic survivors) which will hold a special memorial service for passengers above the wreck site on April 14 starting at 11.40pm, when the ship hit the iceberg and another at 2.20am on April 15 when it sank. Many passengers are rising to the occasion with Edwardian costumes, and the food on board is from the original 1912 menus. The cost? A staggering £2,799 – £5,995 per person!

Years ago in Sydney I did a reading for a journalist who had ‘Titanic memories’, and I indeed saw her aboard the ship as a middle- to lower-class mother with two young girls. I can’t remember the exact details now but I think she perished. I could very clearly hear the clanging of a big brass emergency bell. As for ghosts of the Titanic, well, they’re not necessarily lurking in the deep — some of them might still be haunting their original homes, just like Captain Edward John Smith who has been sighted here.

I also remember reading a story about a woman on the Titanic who had a really bad gut feeling about the whole trip right from the start. The moment the ship’s staff alerted danger, she had jumped out of bed, life jacket on with children in hand, and practically the first to  climb into a lifeboat! Honouring her intuition saved her life… and isn’t the tragic story of Titanic, with it’s crew and passengers’ deep reluctance to heed warning, such a powerful metaphor for the way we treat many of our own intuitive impulses? We’d rather stay curled up in our warm beds than deal with the truth of what’s actually in front of us.

Ra Rishikavi Raghudas blogged about watching Titanic-the-movie seven times in 1998, “I felt cleansed, uplifted at film’s end, not weepy or depressed. Why? I wondered. The answer: There is a golden spiritual light at the heart of this film… Titanic’s tragic story embodies so many archetypal lessons and images that Cameron, by re-creating it, also re-created its mythic power. But by framing the sinking in a sacrificial love story, he tapped into something far beyond his intent. And it is this that makes his Titanic spiritual and cathartic, a secular scripture disguised as a special-effects movie. It’s a huge tone-poem, which you cannot comprehend unless you absorb this film on the level of the heart.” And this: “[Character Jack Dawson] becomes Rose’s guru. Later he will become a Christ-figure as well.” Ooh, interesting. After all, it’s true that one of Rose’s lines in the movie is, ““He saved me, in every way that a person can be saved.”! Ahh, the power and deep attraction of unconditional love.

As someone interested in crystal and gemstone meanings, I also find the fictitious ‘Heart of the Ocean’ blue diamond necklace in James Camerons’ Titanic interesting as well. Ancient peoples believed that diamonds were connected to the planet Mars, due to a warriors’ custom of wearing diamond stones in battle for protection and strength. It was thought that diamonds make the warriors invincible. In the movie, Rose kept this ‘invincible’ stone with her throughout the sinking of the great ship and it certainly saw her through some hairy moments!

Here’s a channelled message on the whole topic: “There is an important significance around the remembering of this tragedy that is currently occurring. It is another way in which our planet’s collective consciousness is currently grouping together with love and empathy for a gut-wrenching moment of humanity. There is something very real and raw about the Titanic story which enables many ordinary people from many countries and different walks of life to place themselves into the passengers’ shoes. People have been obsessed with the legend of Titanic for the past century because it taps into their primal fear about ‘Death can happen at any moment, and it could happen to YOU’ as well as the sinking of the very glamorous, romantic, decadent White Star liner as being a huge metaphor for the end of a world Golden Age. Shortly after Titanic’s demise came WWI, the Depression, WWII, atomic bombs, many other wars and certainly no more big hats, lace gloves, fine etiquette and dashing parties where socialites gathered without a care in the world! For the world, it was all a bit like saying goodbye to an innocent, pretty childhood and entering the cold hard truth of the teenage and adult years. Baptism by fire… or in this case, water!”

P.S. This ain’t spiritual, but it is soooooo funny I was actually giggling out loud in a cafe last week reading it on my iPhone. I Re-watched Titanic So You Don’t Have To (You’re Welcome)

P.P.S. There is even a Titanic astrologer – Eileen Grimes has not only exhaustively documented the birth deets of everyone on or linked to that poor doomed boat, but offers Titanic readings for peeps now, to see if you have the astrological signature that means you’re part of the Titanic “soul group”!

OK. If you’re an iPhone nut (like me), and cosmic (like me), this is the app you want. (Also: it’s won awards, Gwyneth Paltrow thinks it’s awesome, and you don’t need an Internet connection to use it — don’t ask me how. It’s sci-fi!!) Star Walk – 5 Stars Astronomy Guide is a reality app that labels all the stars, constellations, and satellites you point your iPhone at. The  360-degree, touch control star map displays constellations, stars, planets, satellites, and galaxies currently overhead from anywhere on Earth (over 20,000 objects in the night sky). In other words, it enables you to track the ISS, find out what constellation you’ve been looking at from your bedroom window — and get a lot of exciting and educative information (teachers are using it with their high school students!) AND ITS CHEAP!

COOL STUFF IT DOES:

1) Time Machine – see what the sky looks like at any moment in the past or future
2) Search – wondering where Jupiter is right now? Arrow will guide you to it
3) Picture of the Day – stunning pictures from deep space

1) Above is of particular interest to me — I’m reading a book right now that’s studying where all the planets were in the night sky when the Egyptian pyramids and Sphinx were built… which is leading the researchers to some fascinating conclusions about their real age (far older than Egyptologists would have us believe).

This week, Miss Psychette featured in the SA Weekend magazine — here’s the full article in case you missed it, or check it out online here!

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?
Psychics are using new ways to connect, but they still find people searching for meaning. Deborah Bogle

———–

REBECCA Dettman’s words tumble forth in a fast-flowing stream. There are no pauses, no padding, none of the usual fillers – the ums, aaahs and you knows of someone playing for time. She’s articulate, calm and assured. If I were poised on the brink of belief of all things psychic and spiritual, Dettman’s impressive presentation would draw me into its warm and fuzzy embrace. She’s explaining to me the source of her psychic powers.

“I was sitting in a park in Sydney overlooking the Harbour Bridge and a girlfriend asked me a question about some troubles she was having with a partner,” she says. “And I just closed my eyes and began to answer her and I didn’t stop speaking for an hour and a half. I’d basically channelled a complete hour-and-a-half answer from somewhere that was from other than me.”

Dettman’s eyes are closed, as if she’s channelling that same unseen source. Sensing her moment, perhaps, her one-year-old daughter Charlotte makes a bottom-up beeline for the door. Her mother’s eyes remain closed. Should I go after the baby, I wonder?

“Excuse me,” a woman calls from across the stafflounge in The Advertiser building. “Your child has just put something in her mouth.” Dettman’s eyes snap open. “You know what,” she says, turning to look at the woman. “I trust her completely.”

Dettman has learned to trust her feelings. Three years ago she took a giant leap of faith and ditched her job as a journalist to focus full-time on motherhood and a career as a psychic. Until then, she’d been moonlighting, giving psychic readings to colleagues – “hidden whispers at desks, in various corridors, the rooftop, bathrooms” – while performing her “straight” job at the Adelaide* magazine in this very building. “More and more my heart wasn’t in it,” she says. “I was starting to get pains shooting up my back every time I sat in my office chair. I didn’t get them at home, only here. So I knew I had to let go and surrender to what was calling me.”

I was not among her colleagues who sought Dettman’s counsel, nor would I call myself SBNR, even though, she tells me “it’s what everyone calls themselves”.

SBNR? “If you’re at a bar,” Dettman says in explanation, “and you’re asked, ‘what do you believe in?’ the reply is often, ‘oh, I don’t know, I’m just spiritual but not religious’.”

Years of yoga and meditation have given me flexibility and comfort, but alas, no goddesses, no guiding lights or shining auras. Years of journalism have wedded me to facts and evidence, and I’ve never seen anything yet to convince me about the existence of life beyond the earthly plane.

Part of Dettman’s struggle was with those same conflicting demands of the professional detachment required of a journalist and her desire to surrender to what was calling her. Her interest in the spiritual world was awakened in her early 20s when she visited a psychic and had what she describes as a profound experience. “I saw sparkling lights, had a past-life regression and all sorts of strange, full-on experiences which began to lead me on this path,” she says. It wasn’t until that day in the park in Sydney, however, that she discovered her gift.

Dettman, 32, is typical of a new wave of psychics – most of them women – adept at harnessing the real-world power of the internet and social media to bring other-worldly insights to an international audience increasingly hungry for answers to questions that can’t necessarily be solved by a Google search or a visit to a GP. On her Psyched in Stilettos website you can read her blog, listen to her weekly radio spot broadcast to SA regional listeners on Power FM, sign up for her e-newsletter (more than 400 subscribers), buy one of her e-books and book a psychic reading, either face to face or via phone or Skype.

Of the same ilk (although with a vastly higher profile) is New York-based Gabrielle Bernstein, a former heroin addict whose second book, Spirit Junkie: A Radical Road to Self-Love and Miracles, was released last year. Her book promo clip features the author with big blonde hair and ripped leggings, skateboarding down grafitti-lined back streets. In the UK, Anna Hunt has branded herself the Shaman in Stilettos. She’s another former journalist who burned out and found salvation in spirits. And Wall Street brokers are apparently turning to clairvoyants in an attempt to read the vagaries of a volatile market. In her online video, US psychic Mary T. Browne, looking eminently sensible and corporate, sums up the mood of her clients: “Nowadays (they) go to see a psychic as fast as anyone else because everybody is so confused.”

Television shows like The One, which aired on the Seven Network last year, Psychic TV on Seven’s digital channel, American John Edward’s Crossing Over, Psychic Detectives and Sixth Sense are just a few TV shows that have popularised the paranormal.

In Adelaide, there’s a lively scene that includes psychics, spirit mediums, clairvoyants, healers, ghost whisperers, astrologers, witches and tarot readers. Check the directory at city bookshop Cosmic Pages, or log on to the net and you’ll get a sense of the vast network out there. Psychic expos are held about once a fortnight in various locations, each drawing between 200 and 300 visitors and 20-30 stallholders.

Much larger is the annual event run by husband and wife team Bob and Heather Perry at Small Miracles Event Management. Since their first expo in 1995, numbers have swelled to about 10,000 people visiting up to 300 stallholders at the Adelaide Showgrounds at Wayville. About half of the stallholders are from interstate, with one or two coming from as far afield as the US and India. Up to 200 are psychics or readers of some kind, the rest sell wares such as crystals and clothing, or services such as massage and reiki healing. “Last year, when all the talk was about doom, doom, doom, no one’s going out, no one’s spending money, we had one of our best years,” says Bob. “People are searching,” adds Heather. “Everyone’s saying money’s tight, and they want to know what’s going to happen. And they’re superstitious. They’ll tell you they’re not, but most people are.”

Dettman agrees that the pressures of modern life and our growing attachment to the virtual instead of the natural world have fed a hunger for a more spiritual connection. Her sessions include a good deal of what she calls “intuitive counselling” of people who are at a crossroads in their lives and are seeking guidance on the way ahead. “But you wouldn’t be a psychic if you couldn’t do the extra amazing stuff,” she says. “So I will deal on an average day with everything from past lives, deceased relatives, spirit guides, angels and people who ask really out-there questions about the universe. They want to know about astral travel or where their souls come from, or other planets, dimensions, parallel worlds. There’s a real thirst for a deeper spiritual knowledge out there.”

So where does this wisdom come from? Dettman can’t really identify its origins, but she’s quite clear that it’s from “somewhere other than me”, a higher source that’s more intelligent than her, and that she can clearly differentiate from her own intelligence.

So does she see dead people? “Sure, of course, absolutely,” she says. “You can’t run a session without that sort of stuff because that’s what being a psychic is. You go above the earthly layers to communicate with other beings.”

When she launched Psyched in Stilettos, Dettman was inspired by her years working on fashion and beauty magazines in Sydney. “It was pink lip gloss, rainbows, red carpets, reality TV, glamour,” she says. “I took that and meshed it with what had previously been a bit daggy, a bit purple crushed velvet, a bit incense, a bit tarot, and I tried to facelift the image, to re-brand what psychic was for the 21st century.”

She eschews what she regards as Victorian-era trappings – crystal balls, Ouija boards, “séances and all that table-rapping” – in favour of coffee-shop readings and cosy phone or Skype chats. She’s tall, slim and stylishly dressed, the kind of girl who wouldn’t be seen dead in a tasselled shawl or a mirrored caftan.

Which is exactly what you get at the Isis Mystery School in Adelaide’s southern suburbs. Elisabeth Jensen wears a long white caftan and a crystal pendant, and her consulting room is crammed with books, DVDs, magic cards and statues. We sit across from each other at a card table covered in crushed purple velvet.

A former nurse, Jensen became convinced of her psychic powers after she bought a crystal which she says healed overnight an open wound on her then-partner’s chest wall, and rid her of a pituitary tumour. “(Trevor) wouldn’t go to a doctor so I just dressed the wound twice a day,” she says. “The next day I went to do the dressing and the wound was completely healed over. There was just a tiny scar. So it was like, wow! And then I could see auras, and spirits and angels, from that moment.”

On a trip to the Great Pyramid in Egypt Jensen says the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis appeared to her. “I had a very powerful experience … receiving a lot of blue light,” she says. “I started to work with that light. I did a lot of healing with it and found I got very powerful results working with goddess Isis rather than just working with angels.”

Jensen is vice-president of the Australian Psychics Association and was named their Psychic of the Year in 2010. Although she prefers to work as a healer and teacher, she says that when times are tough, people want to know the future or be put in touch with dead loved ones.

Neither Dettman nor Jensen go in for spooky predictions, focusing instead on the positive aspects of a client’s future. Dettman’s mantra is “self-responsibility, free thinking and self-empowerment”. She’ll have no truck with dark forces and negative influences. “If someone is paying you over $100 for a reading and you don’t send them out that door walking on air, feeling the best they possibly can about themselves, you’re doing humankind a disservice.”

THERE’S no sign of dark forces or malignant spirits on a hot Sunday afternoon at St John’s Spiritual Church in Carrington St. The 50 men and women in attendance are bursting with bonhomie. Many have brought cakes and snacks for the tea that will served afterwards.

There are chirpy hymns with upbeat, recorded accompaniment and birthday wishes. Although Christian in its orientation – with prayers and hymns, especially, that would be familiar to those baptised into mainstream religions – St John’s has no ordained clergy and is run by a committee elected by the congregation. Its foundation stone was laid in 1924, but there’s evidence of earlier activity in framed photos that line the walls, including one of an “occult study class” dating from 1913.

This week, the medium on the platform (which, with the huge cruxifix painted on the wall behind it could easily double as an altar) is 99-year-old Rose Penn, well-known in Adelaide spiritual circles. Penn opens with a prayer that becomes a homily about the healing power of love. Later, she gives the psychic readings her followers have come to hear. All have a common theme: that we’re on the cusp of the Aquarian age, “a time of dynamic change” and a great spiritual awakening. Her messages are positive and encouraging, her predictions for better times ahead, the spirits she sees benign guardians.

So much of what I read and heard in my research for this story had the flavour of New Age psycho-babble: the power of positive thinking, vague, feel-good advice of the kind dispensed by any number of self-help books, life coaches and popular psychologists. So what can these paranormal practitioners provide that couldn’t be found in a secular or medical setting?

Dettman says it’s an ability to go deeper. “I can penetrate back down into childhood or in utero or past life experiences which may be affecting them subconsciously in ways that they could never articulate, yet when you tell them, there’s these huge ‘ah-ha’ moments,” she says. “With psychologists and counsellors, their techniques can only take them so far. Psychics will pick up where they left off, to go much deeper emotionally, energetically, spiritually.”

Jensen was still a nurse when she took a course in “therapeutic touch” and applied the method to some of her patients. “I really wanted to do healing and thought that the medical model didn’t have all the answers. Sometimes I’d be looking after patients and they’d have a lot of pain, and I’d be giving them morphine, morphine, morphine, and it wouldn’t really help. Say it was back pain. And I’d do one short healing and they’d feel better. And I thought, well, why am I being a nurse?”

As Dettman sees it, medicine simply isn’t equipped to deal with her clients’ deep-seated malaise, and their need for emotional support and guidance that she feels able to provide. “I think a lot of people are just getting a bit tired of the traditional medical world, because it wasn’t set up to be an emotional healing service,” she says. “It’s not for, ‘how do I get rid of the fear I’ve had of being on the water since I was seven years old?’, or, ‘how do I process the heavy negative feeling that I’ve had with my father that we’ve tried for years to breach but we can’t'? Who answers these kinds of questions?”

To my suggestion that a psychiatrist or a psychologist might usefully address these problems, she counters: “Well, maybe they do with some success, and maybe some of them don’t.” Seeing a psychic is “another option”.

Rather than being a special gift, psychic powers are within everyone’s reach, says Jensen. Even mine. “Come along to my courses and I’ll teach you to see angels and auras … it’s not that hard.” My aura is “a bit out of balance”, Jensen tells me. “You could do with some healing,” she says.

I had asked her for a demonstration of her clairvoyance and she’d used her magic cards and channelled the goddess Isis to give me a pretty upbeat forecast for the year ahead. I’d do well to adopt a more spiritual path, the goddess advised, and “to clear some karmic issues” that have been holding me back. It is my busy journalist’s mind that is the obstacle, says Jensen. That and my out-of-whack aura.

The good news is I have some spiritual help. Jensen goes quiet and looks into the middle distance beyond my right shoulder. “There’s a lady in spirit with you. She says she’s your grandmother, you mother’s mother.” My dear old Nan, gone to God (or perhaps not) more than 20 years ago, has a message for me, apparently. “She’d like you to speak to her more,” says Jensen. My busy journalist’s mind baulks at this suggestion. “I’m asking her to prove who she is,” Jensen continues. “Have you got some letters? She’s showing me a box and there are some letters in there. And they’re tied up with a ribbon.”

Eerily, my phone pings, announcing the arrival of an SMS. Is there mobile phone coverage in heaven? But, no, I tell her, there’s no stash of letters. “They might have been love letters or something like that,” says Jensen. “Probably your mother’s got them. And she says sometimes I see that you’re sad and I just want you to know that when you get over here, it’s very beautiful. I’m very busy over here, I’m going to afternoon tea and I do many things and we all have a lot of fun. There’s no great pain or suffering over here.”

If I were SBNR, I could take some comfort from that news, since my grandmother endured her share of pain and suffering when she was alive.

It’s only later that I recall the bundle of documents my mother gave me before Christmas. Among them were my grandmother’s birth and marriage certificates. No letters, but here’s the rub. They were tied up with ribbon.