LOS ANGELES (PRWEB)
April 08, 2021

Americans are relying on spirituality more than ever before. Metaphysical advisors have emerged as practical sources of support in response to pandemic-related uncertainties. Can traditional wisdom and esoteric practices meaningfully provide wellness to modern people?

Finding Meaning in Times of Crisis

When things happen that cannot be controlled, it is natural to search for the deeper meaning according to Dr. Alana Piper, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian Center for Public History of Technology in Sydney. This trend is not unusual in times of crisis.

One year ago, weekly trips to the grocery store felt like post-apocalyptic Indiana Jones adventures. Shelves were empty of kitchen essentials. Staples like eggs, bread, meat, and toilet paper were either unavailable or being rationed. There were fistfights amongst strangers over cleaning products and hoarding.

Then, only weeks into the pandemic, cities across the United States burst into civil unrest. The end certainly seemed near. People are resilient, but they still look to something greater to make sense of pain and suffering.

As a result of 2020’s turmoil, there’s been a cultural shift toward alternative ways of thinking, living, and operating in the world in response to stress. Herbalists, psychics, and doulas are not just mystical thinkers. To some, they are healers.

A Shift to Herbalism, Particularly for Underserved Communities

There is research to suggest that food affects not just physical health, but also mental health and wellbeing. Within underserved communities and those who grew up poor, nutritional inequality contributes to unequal health outcomes. Jamesa Hawthorne is a gender non-binary herbalist and owner of the L.A.- based online apothecary Jam Haw Herbals.

“I view the herbalist path as a commitment to the plants and my community,” says Jamesa, a student and practitioner of herbalism since 2011. Herbalists treat a variety of physical conditions, illnesses, and allergies through the holistic use of plant-based remedies and food as medicine.

Healers have been concocting herbal potions for millennia. The first known guide to Traditional Chinese Medicine describes 365 herbal concoctions. It was written more than 2,200 years ago. In the United States between 1984 and 2007, 70% of pharmaceuticals produced were derived from herbs.

Hawthorne is among a new generation of African American healers intimately familiar with the unmet needs caused by systemic inequality in black and brown communities. During the protests that erupted in 2020 over the extra-judicial killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, it was Hawthorne’s voice that provided healing and comfort.

Through Instagram, Hawthorne made herbalism feel accessible, even necessary. One post broke down the process of making a tonic for burnout described as “an oatmeal bath for the brain.”

From the pandemic and civil unrest, Hawthorn emerged as a voice not only for justice but for mental and physical wellbeing. Social unrest, rampant disease, and lockdowns put people in fear for their health, job security, and whether they may lose their homes.

People are Turning to Psychics for Certainty

Eighty-eight percent of Americans practice some form of self-care. This figure breaks down as 44 percent of millennials, 57 percent of baby boomers, and 64 percent of the swing generation.

In ancient times, dealing with calamities involved religious-type practices. The ancient Greeks had the oracles at Delphi. Indigenous peoples had their shamans. Insights gleaned by those believed to ritually interact with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness provided foresight, emotional guidance, and methods for coping with the natural world.

During 2020’s most difficult times, people craved certainty. Newspapers from New York to Sydney reported that the psychic business was booming. Psychics seem to provide harmless and even sometimes helpful reassurance, much like their vocational forebears.

“Extrasensory perception is a powerful tool. One that for some is easily acquired but not easily mastered in genuine service to others. The average psychic will make predictions to foster a sense the future is safe and manageable for their client. But a skilled seer who is spiritually motivated reveals the light of said client’s innermost being. They speak with nuance and affection teaching how the client is safe because of their valued presence in the world as it is – regardless of the circumstances,” says Los Angeles psychic Jack Rourke.

How Medical Intuition is Helping People Live Their Best Lives

Rourke is the author of The Rational Psychic™, a skeptic’s guide to extraordinary perception, and a professional psychic in Los Angeles, CA. He provides spiritual coaching and evidential psychic services to Angelenos and clients worldwide. I first heard of Rourke when he correctly identified a previously undiagnosed medical condition for a friend. Her experience was not an isolated case.

Debbie G., a librarian from the Midwest, scheduled a psychic reading with Jack. He discerned a large Brenner Tumor which was verified via CT scan resulting in emergency surgery. A woman from Florida – call her Sara – shared that Rourke’s visions led to a life-saving diagnosis by her doctor. After a lengthy convalescence, she is well.

Michelle from Los Angeles suffered a mysterious and painful abdominal issue no physician could explain. This condition stopped her from sleeping restfully for years. Rourke’s clairvoyance revealed an open sphincter valve causing the discomfort. A follow-up with Beverly Hills doctor Fred Lerner of the Ellen DeGeneres Show fame confirmed open ileocecal and pyloric valves. These issues were resolved with one treatment by Dr. Lerner, ending 15 years of distress.

Psychic Jack Rourke: The Key to His Clairvoyance

Rourke is not a fortune teller who provides entertaining metaphysical experiences. Clients do not go to him to contact the departed. He does not advocate or portray any woo-woo belief system. Clients are actually required to enter appointments how they would with any mainstream professional whose job is to confidentially help them.

The key to Rourke’s success is his compassionate candor as expressed through his finely tuned and methodical extrasensory process. People also seek spiritual counsel from him when dealing with heartache, decision making, career issues, and all forms of uncertainty. Somehow in a dubious field like psychism, Jack Rourke has genuinely distinguished himself as a caring and credible professional.

Rourke’s clients include Fortune 500 CEOs & billionaire philanthropists, medical doctors, psychotherapists, professional and Olympic athletes, law enforcement, and countless recognizable faces – including high dollar name brand self-help gurus. Kaitlyn Herman of Big Brother fame credits Jack with helping her with a medical issue as well as accurately predicting she would be cast on the hit CBS show.

According to psycho-physiologist and biomedical engineer turned parapsychologist Dr. Barry E. Taff, “Jack Rourke is perhaps the most talented psychic I have ever encountered.” Taff questioned my motives for profiling Rourke by playfully chiding, “Jack does not suffer fools. He takes his work and the people he cares for very seriously.”

Has the Pandemic Forced Society to Reach for Clarity?

At the height of Covid-19, getting an appointment with Jack sometimes took six weeks. Fortunately, arranging a meeting at a downtown Los Angeles hotel late December 2020 happened more easily.

From afar, Jack Rourke is a more edgy telegenic professor than prophet. A wool sport coat, timeless wingtips, and dowdy leather briefcase are not the norm for trendy Los Angeles. Upon actually speaking, I waited for Rourke to ingratiate himself by attempting to demonstrate his psychic gifts. Surprisingly, this never happened. Absent were the attention seeking charms and spiritually flavored humble-bragging typical among self-proclaimed psychic gurus. I expected a pop-culture new ageist sowing magical feelings. Instead, what I felt from Mr. Rourke was an aversion to praise, genuine warmth, and dare I say humanity? Here was someone who could speak authoritatively on the esoteric without accidentally-on-purpose inflating himself and triggering a well-deserved eye-roll.

Jack’s clients are spread throughout the English-speaking world. To manage the demand, he has only worked by telephone since 2009 with few exceptions. The pandemic has had little impact on business.

“Over the past year, very few clients actually asked about the virus – even amidst the surges. Primarily people were concerned about their relationships. This was true even when the folks I was speaking with were infected or recovering from hospitalization. People are far less selfish than it may seem. Or, perhaps a brush with the virus awakens what really matters most – the love of family and friends.”

Big picture is that all the suffering and change in the world is serving a greater good by bringing us back to what really matters.

“Clairvoyance is spiritual alchemy when it turns fear into certainty,” according to Rourke. “Any ‘wow’ moments during a psychic reading are not the point. The sole focus when in service is how the extrasensory process provides actionable insight and supports meaningful transformation in terms of awakening an empowered state within the client. One where their inner wellbeing is no longer dependent on the outer world. Spiritually, this is the way. The road within can be challenging. It is less traveled. But it is the actual path.”

Jack Rourke might be a modern American mystic. After a devastating pandemic and widespread civil unrest and a contentious presidential election, Americans need his fearless optimism. The reality, however, is that the rest of humanity is still holding its breath waiting to exhale a collective sigh of relief.

Death and Dying: It’s an Inevitable Part of the Human Experience

Politicians predict that an actual end to Covid-19 is not far off. But history suggests diseases fade but are almost never truly gone. Pandemics are not historically rare after all. Truthfully, no one can predict when or how anyone will die. Not even a world-class master psychic like Jack Rourke. So, the best tool for avoiding a disaster is to be open to having difficult conversations and preparing ahead of time.

The Ancient Greeks treated death as a ritualized rite of passage to help people transition to the world of the dead. Modern people fear death, however, making it difficult to plan for both the inevitable end and one’s legacy. Fortunately, there is a new trend on the rise in the funeral industry. This new trend is called a life-celebration.

A life-celebration is a ceremony that is designed to commemorate the life of someone who is no longer living. It does not follow a particular religious format. Instead, what takes place is explicitly tailored to the wishes of the deceased.

Jill Schock is a death doula and the owner of DDLA. A “death doula” is someone who serves as a navigator, advocate, and experienced professional for the dying and their loved ones. Jill received a Master’s Degree in Ethics and Theology from Vanderbilt University Divinity School and was trained and certified as a Clinical Chaplain, or Spiritual Counselor.

Schock is a Los Angeles native with over a decade of experience in end-of-life care. Her core values are to honor and advocate for options and choice for ALL humans at end-of-life. She believes in empowering her clients to step away from the imposed traditions and negative stigma around death and embrace personal choice and style as the chapter of life comes to an end.

“I think the more information one can get about death, dying, and health care choices ahead of time, the better. I help people lay out their options, create an end-of-life strategy, and then go from there. The hope is that as more people find out there are professionals who specialize in end-of-life care are available, planning will become more common, and more crises can be avoided.”

Returning to Traditional Wisdom Offers Peace and Harmony

Social isolation during 2020 mixed with disinformation and the lack of a top-down response to COVID-19, in its darkest moments, fostered a primal aloneness. Thankfully a toxic pull-yourself-up-by-the-boot-straps indifference didn’t fully tear the fabric of society to shreds.

Human beings evolve in communities. As a species, holistic wellbeing within humans requires the inner certainty that comes from feeling valued via an empathic connection with other people. Maybe this connection is something all spiritual advisors provide? And perhaps their services are really only meaningful by making us feel safe being more fully human?

When facing hardship, times when direction and certainty are needed most, could there be something in human DNA that calls people back to the old ways? Is it mystical to imagine a cellular longing for an ancient kind of security like gathering around a fire with one’s tribe?

Herbalists, psychics, and doulas are not new age. They are old-age. Throwbacks to a time when village shamans would teach which plants were food and which were medicine. A time when spiritual mentors might clairvoyantly reveal what dreams mean, or how to live soulfully without fear, in harmony with Mother Nature. And, ultimately, how to die with dignity – trusting that every life has meaning because everyone is part of something much greater than what can be seen with the naked eye.