When Mari Omori was about four years old, she saw something that even an adult would find frightening.
She was headed into the backyard — a fenced area without outside access — when she saw a man facing her in the window. He was transparent — she could see through him — and he had only black sockets where his eyes should be. She ran back upstairs and her parents investigated, but found nothing.
Now, she says, she realizes that was her first memory of having intuitive abilities, to experience spirits and receive messages from beyond the physical world. At the same time, Omori says, the trauma of the incident probably blinded her to seeing spirits visually.
“I think that fear really shut down my physical ability to see spirits,” she says. “Now I do see them, but I see them in my mind’s eye. I see flashes of people.”
This is not a unique gift, Omori says. Everyone has spirit guides and there are methods to quieting our minds so that we can receive messages from them, a series of practices she offers at psychic development workshops out of HeartQuest Holistic Wellness on Commercial Drive. She actually prefers the term intuitive reading, but the public is more familiar with the word psychic, so she alternates.
“Intuitive reading is basically whatever I receive intuitively… something that feels like it’s outside of myself,” she explains. “We all have spirit guides and those spirit guides used to be human, here on this earth, and they were just very evolved beings that, when they crossed over, they were spiritually evolved enough to be spirit guides.”
Omori receives messages from them, she says, and can help other people do the same.
“How they communicate with me is that they send me images, words or feelings. Sometimes they give me a sense of smell.” Omori might describe a scent of perfume to a client and the client might recognize that as a sign of a particular individual.
“It’s almost like Pictionary,” she says with a laugh. “They send you images and you have to decipher it and deliver that message.”
She also uses divination techniques, using gem stones, among other tools.
“Each stone has its own lines and specks and dots and you just look through it and allow images to pop out for you,” she says.
Like a crystal ball, tea leaves or even clouds, these are just tools through which a reader who is open to receiving messages might do so.
“You need to soften your eyes. You can’t look at it with your physical eye or you’re thinking about it too much and you’re letting your physical eye try to make sense of everything,” Omori says. “You just need to soften your eyes and let your eyes slowly draw out any images or feelings or thoughts that might come through the tea leaves or through the gemstone. The spirit guides are trying to deliver the messages through the gemstone or through the tea leaves and then the reader, the intuitive reader, does their best to read them and give the message to the client.”
She offers a few caveats. No psychic medium is 100 per cent accurate, she says.
“At the end of the day, we’re human and no human is perfect so we just do our best to deliver the message.”
And if a person gets news that makes them uncomfortable or frightened, they can change things.
“It’s not set in stone. Everything is a choice. We create our own future,” Omori says. “If someone receives something in a reading that they don’t like or they’re not comfortable with, they do have the power to manifest and change that future.”
Is she ever afraid that she might arouse something unknown that she doesn’t want to face or can’t control, I ask. Fear, she says, is rooted in the unknown.
“When you don’t know anything, you fear it,” she says. “I set the intention that only good spirits can come through.” Through meditation that includes surrounding herself in white and gold light, she says she keeps negative energies away.
Likewise, she uses First Nations-rooted techniques like smudging, with a feather fan she makes herself.
“You burn dried white sage, which is great for clearing negative energy and it’s great for just clearing it on yourself or around your space or around an object that you feel can use a bit of energy-cleansing or an energy refresh,” says Omori, who also performs reiki, which she describes as a Japanese energy healing modality in which the practitioner “channels healing energy and flows it out from their hands and gives it to the receiver.”
Omori is emphatic that everyone has potential psychic skills, but how do we develop them?
“It is often through meditation you’ll see visions,” she says. “I do guided meditations where everybody’s spirit guides will present them with something and later on there will be a time when we share or talk about it.” Divining with stones and clouds is another easy entry point, she says. “I’m really nature-based, so I do things like aeromancy, where you do divination through the clouds, and try to get messages from the spirit through the cloud formations.”
The people who come to Omori’s classes or one-on-one readings cross all boundaries of age and background, she says. And she welcomes people who may not be fully on board with the whole idea.
“I get what I like to call healthy sceptics,” she says. “I think being a healthy sceptic is a good thing. You question it but you’re also open to experiencing it and from there you make your own opinions about it, which is great.”
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