What I Learned from Working at New Age Fairs
The psychology of spirituality and finding purpose
So, a confession: Before the pandemic and my pursuit for qualifications in counseling, I ran booths in psychic and New Age fairs in both Singapore and Australia. They are where I sold my first editions of the Self-Love Oracle, a boxed set of illustrated cards you can find in all good bookstores in the Tarot and Oracle section (usually next to the New Age or Mind Body Spirit books). At my booth, I also sold art prints, and offered card or aura readings.
Depending on where you stand on psychics, this admission will either send you running for the hills, or (if I’m lucky) have you curious if I’m going to divorce myself from this unorthodox past. I’m not sure, myself. But, I had loads of fun at these events, and always seemed to have interactions that felt, to borrow a woo, New-Age term, guided.
And I knew all the words of the New Age language.
If you needed to know if someone was your soulmate or twin flame, I was happy to talk. Wondering about your life purpose? I could describe it from your astrological chart. Needed answers on why you felt blocked in life? I would diagnose it from your chakras.
Between 2017 to 2019, 2 decades after topping my classes in physics and astronomy, I found myself in spaces my former professors would have disapproved of. Not least for using the words “energy,” “vibration,” and “frequency” in all the wrong, very wrong, woo-woo ways.
A quick intro to the New Age and Wellness Industry
It’s huge. The wellness industry is valued at $4.5 trillion. Maybe $1.5 trillion if you’re more selective about what you’re including as “wellness”. New Age is also a bit of a chimeral beast occupying part of the wellness Venn diagram, being that it includes complementary medicine like sound healing, essential oils, yoga, and meditation.
New Age also includes higher dimensional aliens and channeling. And spirit guides, shamans, and past lives in Atlantis. Ancestral healing, energy work, and light language. Astral projection, lucid dreaming, and magick with a k. Sage, crystals, and sacred-geometry radiation-blocking doodads for your cellphone. Dragons, fairies, and the honoring of deities you thought long dead.
Before New Age took a hard right turn into QAnon conspirituality in recent years, it was the closest thing to a communal play space for those who called themselves “spiritual, but not religious”. And I found the New Age market a welcoming home for myself and my artwork, especially because I’d inexplicably continued drawing fairies, unicorns, and mermaids for years after adolescence.
If you’re still questioning what the draw is for New Age spirituality and kooky wellness ideas, consider that there are millions of people who feel disconnected from organised religion, and affordable and trustworthy medical help. And perhaps, they just want some kind of acceptance and support from people who just get them.
New age and psychic fairs, especially the humongous ones in Sydney and Melbourne, could comprise exhibitors in the hundreds, drawing up to 18,000 visitors over a weekend.
Were you psychic, though?
Psychic wasn’t a label I wanted to wear, and there are multiple definitions of “psychic” floating out there. Some of the Australian events in which I participated adopt the name proudly, but put forth strict ethical guidelines restricting what Tarot and psychic readers could claim or advise.
If you read up to here hankering for an exposé on psychic pshysters, I may disappoint. Setting aside those selling overpriced water filters or strange gadgets, most people I met working the fairs were sincere small-time players who invested time and money into learning their craft, some willing to lose money on booth or table rental to help others with dream interpretation or Tarot cards. You may question their qualifications for acting as spiritual counsellors, and that would be fair. (Countries like the UK require such services to downplay any predictions or advice as given “for entertainment purposes only.”) And some psychic readers definitely went to the “dark side” —offering “urgent” curse removals or DNA healings for extra fees while the reading the cards/palms/auras of the desperate and vulnerable.
Many of us didn’t doubt that we had some talent for “tuning in” to another person and displaying empathy. Some had even more remarkable gifts that couldn’t be explained merely by practising probability or cold reading methods. An interesting thing I observed were how many readers had an artistic eye — and there is a school of thought that creatives are natural antennae for ideas floating in the ether or collective unconscious.
With me, reading someone’s “energy” at my booth involved using my visualisation muscle in an actively receptive mode. I’d close my eyes, and receive impressions of my subject’s presenting challenges and physical pains, which I would then verbalise. The language of symbols and color from years of painting served in translating what I could see in meditative state. Feelings and words could come into my awareness as well. I could be as surprised as my client in being able to do things like name the university course they were interested in pursuing.
All this was hardly easy. Imagine the pressure to get everything you say right, while being self-conscious that anything too general was probably bullshit. Straight counseling is infinitely easier than psychic reading; You’re not expected to be a perfect mind reader as a counselor. (Having your client spill their own issues out to you? Luxury!)
When I started studying psychology, you can bet I looked into studies about what could make some people more empathic and hypersensitive to subtle cues and subtle energy than others. (Turns out it’s a rich area of research, but that’s for another day.)
The Psychology of Connection and Spirituality
Human beings have many needs, among them the need for belief, the need for meaning, and the need to be seen, accepted, and understood in an authentic connection.
The introverted and self-reflective have rich inner worlds that may never show on the outside or be shared in expression or creative work; And worse for some, their environments and social circles may not be emotionally safe or welcoming of their authentic selves.
Too much invisibility and isolation (as the pandemic years have shown) can be painful and debilitating, at the same time introverts may use alone-time for recuperation. But science shows that the need for human connection is as real and cogent as the need for food and shelter.
Still, displaying vulnerability and being accepted is not equally accessible to everyone. Some people can not even imagine that vulnerability can be safe in the presence of another person. I was one of these individuals.
So psychic mediums and spiritual healers who offer the potential of bringing in loving messages from all-seeing beings beyond our material realm is heady stuff. (Who doesn’t want powerful friends in high places? Especially if human authority figures in one’s life have been found lacking?)
And if the messages made sense, and were detailed and personal, there had to be truth in them. For myself, long steeped in critical and conforming environments, these empathetic and loving messages were life-changing. It felt like a gift to receive them. Doubly so to be able to deliver them to others at New Age and psychic events.
This was also part of my journey to discover spirituality that was not restricted by fear-based dogma. As someone who had been skeptical in my teens when most of my friends were enfolded one-by-one into charismatic and evangelical churches, New Age spirituality and the genre of mind-body-spirit books allowed me the freedom to explore and make sense of my own experiences, some of them hard to explain. I didn’t want condemnation or hasty explanations from closed, patriarchal systems.
Even opening up to spirituality had been a result of needing to find meaning during a long dark night of the soul. Stoicism and self-denial might have served me for 3 decades, but failed during a long series of overlapping personal, physical, and mental health challenges.
And so I found myself among the number who turn to spiritual support when mundane supports and explanations are inadequate. I needed to be seen and supported in more ways than I’d acknowledged for myself before.
The need for spirituality and meaning isn’t weakness. It’s human.
The Need for Purpose
I used to label the past-and-present witnessing portion of my Tarot and aura readings as the “parlour trick” part of my sessions. I’d give a description of my client’s current challenges from what I could see. From a buyer’s perspective after all, a psychic can’t be any good if they can’t get your past and present right. Because the thing is, anyone can make predictions. Imperfect predictions are made all the time.
But one problem I immediately spotted in the prediction portion of the reading was the power of suggestion, which can be easily abused towards the overcredulous. I steered away from fearmongering and doomsaying, and would always deliberately hark back to my client’s strengths and resources. Perhaps this wasn’t psychic stuff anymore, just my own ethics and a yet untrained approach (at that time) to positive psychology.
Not all my clients liked this. After all, many go to psychics for certainty and clarity. But even I could see that needing our help for every life decision, big and small, could be the sign of a larger problem — a lack of self-trust or self-knowledge, or an avoidance of making decisions, or the inability to spot red flags.
Many questioners also had questions about their life’s purpose, a concept so loaded I personally found it hubristic to think I could answer it for anyone. So I kept on, again, pointing towards their strengths and passions. That could have been enough, but as an ever-curious and investigative Virgo sun and Mercury in 8th House, I also went and spent years studying astrology to answer questions on purpose.
(You can laugh. The joke’s on me. Because I wound up going into psychology anyway, and still find some research papers and books harder to read than metaphysical esoterica.)
The need for a purpose in life isn’t just a spiritual ego seeking a boost. If you want to improve your satisfaction and motivation in life, having a purpose makes huge difference. For those who find themselves needing any reason or point to keep on living, it can make all the difference.
Finding a purpose can also be a goal in itself, if we find ourselves lacking for role models or transformative experiences to inform us. And where once I thought this information exclusively belonging to the woo side of life, as it turns out, psychologists and counsellors study this too.
Their work has shown that having a purpose has many positive effects:
- It keeps adherents on a more even emotional “keel”, so they become less impacted by external challenges, judgments or praise
- Those with purpose are less self-centered
- It enhances self-esteem and can enhance self-confidence
- It provides hope
- It increases motivation to focus on goals and overcome challenges
- It stimulates psychological flexibility and resourcefulness
- It gives a way to organise or structure one’s life, providing meaning and direction across time and context
My own surprise at the field of psychology studying and confirming the need for purpose may have come from a background solely concerned with survival and appearance, one where I’d learned to be biased against my own emotional and mental health needs. Leapfrogging over these needs with “spiritual bypassing,” that is, using spirituality as a way to avoid confronting unhealthy habits and childhood wounds, is not uncommon. And I suspect many self-styled gurus get stuck here, because it is rather attractive to stay in a space of being special or divinely chosen, and therefore able to dictate truths or behave in ways that cannot be questioned by those “less spiritual”.
It was also eye-opening for me to discover applicable mental health tools for defining one’s purpose, and that are much more accessible than learning astrology or channeling higher vibrational beings. (If you want to fault me for taking the evidence-based way out, blame it on my Virgo earth sign.)
Here are the quick and dirty, non-spiritual ways to define your purpose:
- Know what values are important to you
- Know your interests
- Know your strengths
- Know what your ideal life looks like
- Know what activity or pursuit gives you the experience of “flow” — not only where you easily focus your competencies but where your challenges feel like exciting prods towards improvement and learning. Maybe it’s already a passion towards which you’re happy to invest more time and effort.
Notice that money didn’t come into these tips, but not all of us can or need to hold jobs that are directly related to our purpose. But perhaps, once we have our purpose, we can better find more aligned opportunities.
Conclusion
Still here? Thanks.
I’ve socialised with people who love and work at psychic and New Age fairs, and also the people who give them the side-eye. Not all the former group may be sincere or qualified. Not all in the latter group of skeptics are fair in their condemnation either. These fairs and events serve a real need (for meaning, purpose, answers, validation and/or comfort) for those who’ve felt let down or unsupported by traditional sources of support and connection.
For all the faults I myself have experienced in the New Age, psychic, or counselling fields, my own purpose has been to learn as much as possible so as to raise the bar for what I can provide. And because I find it all fascinating, what we’ll do for healing.
Be it our chakras or childhood trauma.
