Are mediums the newest wellness trend?

It was never in my plan to see a medium. It’s not my thing. Mediums, psychics, tarot – all of it seemed very dodgy-tent-at-the-carnival to me; a bit too woo-woo for my taste. Which is why it was certainly a shock to find myself last Tuesday evening in my flat, sitting on my kitchen floor, slightly weepy, wondering what the hell had just happened. Had I actually just been speaking to my late grandfather?

To make this rather odd Tuesday make sense, we need to go back a beat.

"It’s a game changer," my friend told me a few weeks ago. She had just been to see Fleur Leussink, what you might call a ‘celebrity’ medium, who reads for, among others, Emma Roberts and Lana Del Rey, and has a three-year waiting list. "Trust me, she will have you questioning everything." The friend dispensing this insight was one of the least likely people to see a medium. She doesn’t meditate or, to the best of my knowledge, even own a crystal. I think it was sheer curiosity that led her to see Leussink, but when my fellow cynical friend turned to me and said: "she changed my entire way of thinking about life and death"- I was more than a little intrigued.

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"I think cynicism is healthy," says Leussink herself, when I Zoom her on that fated Tuesday afternoon, ready to roll my eyes or have my mind blown. (Either way, I had cancelled my evening plans just in case.) "But having an open mind, when you think about it - that's ultimately the baseline of science; because it is curiosity. For me, the way I approach it now, is this sense of, well, if somebody says it's not possible, then in a way, I don't think you're being a very good scientist, because you have to at least allow for the possibility that it is."

Leussink is not, of course, all crystals and incense. Though she always knew she was a medium, she ignored her skill for years. In fact, she was studying neuroscience at UCLA before she finally embraced her calling. "It was not so much that I didn't know that it existed, I did, but I wanted nothing to do with it," she explains. "I tried to explain all of it away through the sense of concrete awareness and scientific study." It was going to a medium herself, to try and understand her own experiences, that made her change paths. "She recognised that I was a medium immediately, something I don’t think I was ready to admit about myself," she remembers. Now, after years of ignoring her gift, she is in increasingly high demand.

It’s understandable. There has been a sharp rise in spirituality and new-age healing in recent years – particularly during the pandemic, where many of us felt lost and increasingly concerned about the future. In Scandinavia, recent studies show that spirituality is on the rise. Though many people do not identify as religious it revealed that an average of 65 per cent of people in Norway, Finland and Denmark believe they have a soul – with 21 per cent of Norwegians describing themselves as spiritual. Yet, interestingly, not only is it becoming more popular, it is becoming fashionable. Crystals are selling out on Net-a-Porter and tarot has become prevalent at many upscale events, not to mention the defining aesthetic at Dior Couture spring 2021. In London, where I live, the iconic store Selfridges, has even installed in-house mystics, The Psychic Sisters, and one of the capital’s trendiest hotels, The Mandrake, is hosting one of Fleur Leussink’s live shows.

When Leussink and I talk about the rising popularity of what she does which – not too long ago – would have been viewed as an odd, fringe activity, she attributes it to the fact spirituality is increasingly becoming enveloped in that other million-dollar industry: wellness. In short, psychics may have become GOOPified - and in fact, Paltrow’s behemoth offers guidance on the best mediums to use, and some were present at the last GOOP Health Summit in New York City. The spiritual industry itself is worth almost as much as the wellness landscape - estimated to be around $40 million in the US alone. It’s little wonder that Emma Roberts and Lana Del Rey have Leussink on speed dial. After all, we are well versed in celebrities having dieticians and personal trainers, is a medium the latest wellness must have?

"I see what I do as more and more a form of wellness, absolutely," Leussnik tells me. "Throughout history we have put money or time into research of certain aspects of our existence. And then the world shifts. And we can see that now with mindfulness. We can see it with meditation, we can see it in these topics that used to be taboo. My big goal for the next 10-20 years is to teach people to find their own spirit. And, by that, I mean your intuition - that internal compass. I think so much of anxiety is not listening to the self and instead paying attention to external feedback."

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Hearing spirits is, of course, Leussink’s skill. When she reads me, which she does almost immediately on our Zoom call, she describes it as like tuning into a radio station. She may pick up static, or not quite get the right frequency but she’s tuning in. At first, I wonder if my innate cynicism will jam the radar, but then the radio settles and she begins to talk to me about my grandparents – who are speaking to her. At first, I was skeptical, but what came next – though I will not share it here – were things she could not possibly have known. No one outside my immediate family knew some, no one but my parents and I knew others and one comment even I did not know, and had to have my mother confirm.

As I picked up the pieces of my shattered suspicion, Leussink also began to intuit things about me and, though she is loath to use the term ‘predict’, she essentially gave me a heads up on what she sees in my future. Some of this was general - and could easily be discerned from an educated guess or a quick Google. Others were picking up on private matters I had never shared with anyone outside my closest friends, and, on one point, something I had never even said out loud. It was in these moments, compounded by the eerie accuracy of her conversations with my grandparents, that I felt most ‘in tune’ with my own internal ‘spirit’ exactly as she later described.

"Well, on top of that, if you can build a pathway from that inner connection to one with spirits outside of you, there's a peace to that, a feeling of support," she tells me, after our reading, when we piece together the different aspects of her work. "Connecting to these spirits gives a feeling of relaxation that changes how people move through life."

How I felt the week following my reading was, exactly as my friend described, totally different. There was a strange peace to it, a feeling of support and certainty, yet also a feeling I had seen something I shouldn’t and maybe would never want to again. I certainly would only seek out someone like Leussink and would caution people to only visit mediums that have been recommended widely. As to whether this may form part of our next wellness stage, of that I feel oddly confident. For when I confided in friends about my experience, I was surprised by how many medium users popped up.

"I see one twice a year," one friend said.

"You do??"

"Yeah, I mean, I meditate in the mornings and I do yoga every day. Same thing, right?"

I guess so.