What Psychics Can Teach
Us about Grief, Dying,
and Our Own Intuition

How do you cultivate your intuition?

“We all have a knowing,” says LA-based intuitive Jill Willard. “It’s really just a question of whether we’re willing to acknowledge and honor what we know and act on it in a positive way. Often we let our fears get in the way, or we shut it down because we don’t want to believe there is another way and we don’t want to listen. I have been there, too. Trust me. I have completely ignored what I knew to be true because I didn’t like the truth—it wasn’t what I wanted.” Sound familiar?

For intuitive Laura Day, honing your intuitive abilities is about maintaining healthy energetic boundaries. Too often, she believes, we have thoughts that we identify as our own even though they come from other people. Understanding how to tap into intuition to achieve what we want in this lifetime, she says, is a power tool we all deserve to wield for ourselves.

If you’re looking to learn these skills more formally, we’ve rounded up the best online classes for developing your own intuition.

Are we all psychic?

Laura Lynne Jackson, one of the most incredible psychic mediums of our time, believes we all have psychic abilities. We just have to learn how to see what’s all around us. She talks to Elise on The goop Podcast about how we can change the trajectory of grief, where we can find an endless source of love and connection, and what she thinks we’re meant to learn here on earth.

What do messages from the other side look like?

Jackson wrote the book—it’s called Signs—on teaching others to receive messages from the other side. She says that the key to getting in touch with your team—a spiritual cheerleading squad made up of spirit guides, god energy, and loved ones who have crossed—is establishing a set of signs as a means of communication.

You can watch Jackson channel a loved one here.

Are mediums real? What’s happening inside their brains while they work?

For those who are intrigued by the work of mediums, the Windbridge Research Center is an invaluable resource. As Windbridge’s director of research, Julie Beischel, PhD (whose doctorate is in pharmacology and toxicology with a minor in microbiology and immunology), explains it, the center’s mission is “to ease suffering around dying, death, and what comes next by performing rigorous scientific research” and sharing what they learn widely. We interviewed Beischel about how she tests Windbridge’s certified research mediums, what they do (and don’t) know about what happens when mediums connect to the other side, and how this might change the way we think about the survival of consciousness beyond the body—and provide some comfort for our time here, too.

How do you navigate grief?

There is no right way to grieve. And there is definitely no prescribed, or normal, amount of time for it. In this essay about grief, psychologist Karen Binder-Brynes quotes Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not get over the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.”

Of course, the universality of dying—and grief—is one of the things that connects us as humans. Here are the books and poems for grief that remind us of that.

What is a good death?

Talking about death is hard. And usually it’s really, really hard. Maybe it’s because—much like the process of dying itself—it requires us to be vulnerable, to be honest, to come to terms with a denial we engage with, to varying degrees, our whole lives. “Death happens to everybody, yet somehow we’re surprised by it,” says hospice and palliative care specialist BJ Miller, MD. “I’m shocked at how many patients and family members have not only had to deal with the pain of sickness and loss but, on top of that, they feel bad for feeling bad. They’re ashamed to be dying, ashamed to be sick. There’s a horrible unnecessary suffering that we heap on ourselves and each other for nothing.”

The more intimate we get with the idea of dying and the closer we come to folding it into the fabric of our daily lives, the better off we’ll all be, Miller says. Advice on how to die well is really no more than advice on how to live well, with that unavoidable reality in mind.

And on The goop Podcast, Miller tackles more of these big questions about finding beauty in the end: How do we plan for the one inevitability in life? How do we help our loved ones find comfort? How do we make room for grief? How do we make meaning of it all? And how do we feel the wonder, the joy, along the way? (We also loved what Miller had to say about processing our regrets when he sat down with GP at In goop Health.)