If you’ve taken a look at this month’s issue of AY Magazine, you’re probably already familiar with my interest in professional psychics, three of whom I interviewed in this article. Those three, while fascinating, by no means constitute an exhaustive list of Arkansas’ surprisingly substantial psychic and spiritualist community. One group that only recently came to my attention is Psy-Chics, a professional psychic practice operating in Russellville.

 

Last Friday, the Psy-Chics hosted a Tea & Tarot event at their store. Wanting to capitalize on the timing, I scheduled a phone interview with the three psychic chicks, Gypsie, Ginger and Krista.

 

Question: Did you know each other before Psy-Chics began?

Krista: Well, Gypsie is my mother and Ginger is my aunt, so I’d say we’ve been acquainted for awhile.

 

That’s right, unique among the psychic practices I’ve visited, Psy-Chics is a family business. The fact that they were all related and all psychics raised an interesting question: Are psychic abilities inherited? Are certain people able to see ghosts for the same reason that others have brown eyes or high cholesterol?

 

Question: Do you think psychic abilities are inherited?

Krista: Not really, I think we were just raised in environments that were more accepting so we could learn it. I consider myself to be extremely intuitive. Intuition is a gift we can all tap into. I’m reluctant to say if it’s hereditary; I’m sure there are things that run in families like that but I don’t know, that’s beyond my scope of understanding.

Gypsie: I think some is hereditary. I can hear and speak to the other side, I get intuitive visions like a TV screen in my third eye when I work with clients, visions of the past and future.

Ginger: I’m the same way, I can communicate with earthbound spirits, I can see things in my third eye, they give symbols of past events in my clients’ lives so we can work through them. I think anybody can do this work, it just depends on if they’ve been raised to believe it’s okay to do it and how open they are to it..

I decided to lean into the metaphysical turn the interview had taken, because over the past few months I’ve also developed a real fascination with the unconventional spiritual beliefs of psychics. So far, every explanation about life and death given to me by a psychic, medium or spiritualist has been unique, as there’s no governing body or dogma in the world of professional psychics. This tracks, as entry into the psychic profession itself pretty much requires a certain nonconformist attitude. Looking over my list of questions, I went for the big one:

 

Question: You mentioned communicating with the dead. What happens after we die? 

Gypsie: The soul never dies. When your body dies, your soul either rejoins back to the Source, which is the divine, or it comes back to earth, or it bounces back and forth.

Krista: Sort of like different planes of existence.

 

One common theme among all but one of the psychics I’ve spoken to is a belief in some form of reincarnation. Gypsie explained that we can choose to reincarnate, that life is like a game and we can come back from the Great Beyond to play if we want. Apparently this replaying can result in some negative residual psychic buildup, which the Psy-Chics can remove in one of their Past-Life Regression programs, one of the many services they provide. 

 

Adding to their qualifications, evidently Krista and Gypsie hold bachelor’s degrees in psychology and sociology. According to Krista, “The name Psy-Chics actually came to me in a lecture, and I realized that what we’re doing is bringing science and spirituality together.” In pursuit of that, they began life-coaching, where they “Like to bring the more mundane psychological aspects of life-coaching and reconnect people to the magic and divinity in that mundanity,” says Krista. 

 

Last Friday, the Psy-Chics hosted a Tea & Tarot workshop, where they paired types of teas to different tarot cards, which sounds fun, but hopefully they didn’t get too carried away with the theme when it came to the Death and Devil cards. Other than pairing the cards and teas, the main thrust of the night was teaching their visitors about how to perform their own tarot readings. “We’re trying to give our clients the opportunity to come forward and learn how Tarot works, to empower them to do what we do,” says Krista, who went on to explain that they believe a good measure of a purported psychic’s legitimacy is if they’re secretive about their practices and won’t teach other people. This follows the essential mission statement for the Psy-Chics: “Tonight [at Tea & Tarot] we want to provide a legit, authentic place for people to come together and learn Tarot,” says Krista. “We want to create an intentional community where people can be themselves, where science and spirit can coexist.”

 

If you live in the Russellville area and have somewhat supernatural inclinations, the Psy-Chics  run events throughout the year. Their next event, appropriately enough, is a Halloween party, for kids and adults. You can find them here.

READ MORE: A State of Fear: Arkansas’ Most Haunted

 

Image courtesy of Psy Chics