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Description

Do you believe in psychic mediums, or are you a skeptic? Turns out you don’t just have to be one or the other. Claire was pretty skeptical when she first met her guest, Medium Fleur Leussink. But by keeping an open mind, Fleur introduced her to a whole new way to connect to the people she’s lost. This episode’s practice is all about how to get in touch with the people we’ve lost – and those we might be thinking about this time of year.

Resources from the show

• Read “Moving Beyond: Access Your Intuition, Psychic Ability and Spirit Connection” by Medium Fleur

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Claire, Medium Fleur

Claire  00:09

Hi, I’m Claire Bidwell Smith. Welcome to NEW. I don’t know about you, but December and the holiday season in general can be a really hard time for me. Like a lot of us who’ve lost a loved one, my grief can really resurface in big ways at this time of year, I miss my parents, I wish they were here to celebrate with my kids, to do festive holiday stuff and just be part of my present life and not just my past. But here’s what I’ve learned, both personally and in my work as a grief therapist, it’s really important to find ways to stay connected to the people we’ve lost. It’s not necessarily something that comes right away after a loss. In the first months and years. You just want your person here in the physical form, the way they always were. But as time goes on, I think we can find ways to cultivate internal and spiritual relationships with the people we love. And I really believe that this feels better than no relationship at all. Years ago, I went on a journey to figure out how to restore these connections for myself. The process I write about in my book after this, I did all kinds of things, looking for ways to connect to my parents and others I’ve lost.

Claire 

I talked to rabbis and priests I did past life regressions, and I danced in shamanic circles. I also saw probably a dozen psychic mediums. My guest today Fleur is one of those mediums. Fleur writes and teaches about how to deepen your intuition and spiritual connection to yourself. Through her work as a psychic medium, she connects people all over the world to loved ones that they’ve lost, helping them heal and understand their own stories, and even helping them to forgive and feel forgiven. As you’ll hear in our conversation, just one session with Fleur can help us understand that the loved ones we’ve lost are still here with us, communicating and offering support and invisible ways. You can be skeptical all you want. I know that I was and still am most of the time. But what I finally decided is that I don’t really care if I can prove that psychic ability is real. What matters is that I feel a sense of connection.

Claire  02:16

Hi, Fleur, welcome.

Medium Fleur 

Hey, Claire. Thanks for having me.

Claire 

I’m so excited to have you on NEW DAY. This podcast is about how we find meaning, how we move forward in our lives, how we get up the next day when we’re going through hard stuff. And I’m thinking about the last year and the general overall hard stuff, yes, but all of the loss, all of the death. So talking to a psychic medium, while unconventional is I think a really interesting way to look at what some people have been going through and how they move through it. On my end, in my work as a grief therapist, I have just seen so many people who’ve lost someone to COVID. It’s been a year unlike any other in terms of grief and loss in our world and our culture. And I have actually heard people talk about grief and loss more than I ever had, which is heartening, in a lot of ways while also hard. But let’s start with how we met. Because I feel like I want to introduce people who aren’t familiar with psychic mediums or aren’t comfortable with the idea of who just don’t believe in them, to you

Medium Fleur 

I’m here for it.

Claire 

We met when I lost one of my very best friends. Six years ago, her name was Abby and she and I were similar ages with children. She died of breast cancer that came on very suddenly. And it was a really tremendously hard loss for her family, her husband and children and all of us who loved her. And I was also writing a book about the afterlife at the time. And I was talking to psychic mediums and shamans and Buddhism and Rabbis and just really getting into all the different ways that we think about how we stay connected with the people that we lose and love and how we think about what happens next. And I thought I was done with the book. I actually was done with the book. And I was over at my friend’s house with her husband one night and he gets an email from a woman at her daughter’s school who had gone to one of your psychic medium shows in Santa Monica. And Abby had come through and this woman wrote this email to her husband about it. And I said oh my gosh, I have to go see this psychic medium. Maybe I’m not done with the book. And when I booked my appointment with you, you did not have the waiting list that you do now.

Medium Fleur  04:58

I think you got in pretty fast.

Claire 

I did I got in a few weeks later. But it happened to be the day after I got home from Abby’s memorial service on the East Coast. And so it was a very poignant time. And I walked into your office, and the first thing I thought was that you were so cute and young, and it was surprising and you had very cute shoes on. And then we have one of the most amazing psychic medium sessions I’ve ever had. What do you remember about that day?

Medium Fleur

Well, taking it back to the show, I do actually remember the Abby moment because in my shows, I will go to somebody in the audience, and tell them about somebody that they have lost and give details. And all I ask for is yes or no. And in the Abby’s incident, I was giving the information and nobody was really able to take it except for a woman who said, you know, I don’t know this woman very well, what you’re seeing all makes sense, the number of kids the way she was, the way she passed all the things. I don’t know her personally, but I do know her husband and I can pass on the message. And that’s kind of how we ended it that night with me going, oh, thank goodness, we’ve found our recipient, let’s just move on, you know, really not thinking much more about it, other than it had been a little bit uncomfortable, because I couldn’t find the recipient for a little bit of time there. And then I got that email. You know, I don’t really ever remember my readings. So it was quite fun to read about it in your book.

Claire  06:25

Wait, why don’t you remember your readings?

Medium Fleur 

Well, because first of all, I do so many of them. And secondly, I do think I go into a little bit of a meditative state. So I really walk out. And it might also to be honest, be a little bit of a just way to maintain the work life balance. I don’t ask my mental mind to remember it. So I might remember it for the next day. But then sometimes if I’ve got a lot of readings, if you ask me by 5pm, I do not remember the 10am. Like I have no idea. So I think it’s in a way, just maintaining a work life balance. In a way. It’s also because I’m in a meditative state. And in a way, it’s because I just see so many people and the stories aren’t together.

Claire 

I understand that I’ve seen hundreds, maybe 1000s of people probably 1000s in grief work. And I can’t remember all of it. It takes a lot of energy out of us. I think in order to do good work, we do have to take care of ourselves.

Medium Fleur 

Yes. And so I don’t remember your reading so much. I remember meeting you. And then I remember getting the book afterwards. And we’ve both joked about how we don’t usually kind of make friends in our work in terms of clients and that kind of thing. But we became friends and then I somehow ended up on your porch with a glass of wine and just enjoying your friendship from that point on.

Claire 

Yes. You know, I was at a point in my book process where I had seen probably two dozen psychic mediums. But truthfully, I went into that book and that journey of seeing psychic mediums of looking into the afterlife, I went into it very skeptical. I mean, I really didn’t believe in psychic mediums. And I also kind of didn’t want to believe. And I just couldn’t make it make sense in my head. I’ve never had any supernatural experiences, even though I would like to, I’m open to it, it has not happened. But I went into it really skeptical. But then I kept having these experiences with mediums that really blew my mind, frankly, I remember walking out of when in Chicago that I saw. And I remember walking out and going to a Starbucks across the street. And I felt like the matrix like I felt like I had just woken up and nothing was what I thought it was. Because the things that she had brought through and the connections that she had, just so authentically validated in my life. I couldn’t, I just didn’t know how to make sense of it. But I kept going with the journey. And then I also had a lot of other spiritual experiences. So the whole thing really expanded to the point where I was very open. At the point I met you I was like, okay, even if I can’t explain it, I don’t know if it’s real, I can’t prove it. Something is happening. And I’m changing. As a result, my sense of connection to the people I’ve lost and my thoughts about what my clients were going through. It was changing. But that was a whole five-year journey for me, for someone who’s not familiar with this. And who is probably skeptical like I was, can you talk about what it is to be a psychic medium? What does that mean? Is it real? All the things.

Medium Fleur

Yeah, absolutely. And I and I want to quickly touch on the skepticism part too. I don’t think you have to be a quote unquote believer in anything to go see a psychic medium, I really welcome skepticism. I myself still hold skepticism. I think it’s really healthy. As long as your mind is somewhat open or you’re willing to just have an experience, then there’s infinite possibility on the other end of that, you know, you don’t have to come in being somebody who actually believes in any of it. Just kind of open to an experience. I think that’s all it takes. But the way that people come to see me and really what a psychic medium is, is twofold. Some people come in needing some clarity around their own life. And then other people come in really wanting to connect to people who have passed over. Probably what I’m more well known for is the mediumship side of things. So people who are passed over, and that process for me is one in which I’m reading energy. So it’s the idea that energy continues, consciousness continues in some shape, and still holds intelligence. The connecting them for me to the other side is one in which I’m trying to find somebody’s energetic signal, so to speak. So I like to tell my clients, it’s like, every single one of us has a radio station. I’m tuning into that radio station, I’m finding theirs, I’m bridging the gap. And then through that have the experience of being able to see feel, hear, know things that people go how would you possibly know that you know, and that’s the goal is ultimately to allow that connection to bring closure and clarity and healing and a step forward. So my goal is always you see me once, you never have to see me again. And off you go to other people who can help you in your grieving, in your expansion, I really see myself as somebody who just opens up a different way, maybe a perspective, or shift something about the grief journey.

Medium Fleur 

And this is how you and I have really come to appreciate each other and our work, because in my work as a grief therapist, I can see a client for a year or two years, and sometimes we can only get to a certain point. And that person is maybe stuck in a certain area of guilt, or regret or anger, or just really ruminating on something around the death and one session with you gives them the sense that their person is still here that they are forgiven for things. It’s a really fascinating thing. And then I know on the other end, you have clients who still need some grief therapy after they see you. So we’ve had this really interesting crossover and just curiosity about each other’s work.

Medium Fleur  12:01

And it’s been such a joy to have people like you refer me and other therapists, other I’ve even had, like people come through from doctors. And in the beginning, I thought, oh my gosh, there’s one nutty doctor out there who’s recommending people to a psychic medium. But over time, it’s been many more people. And it’s been so lovely to see that we have this understanding grief is layered, is going to require different modalities. No one can maybe have the one stop shop for grief, it’s going to take all sorts of people in community and I love having people to be able to recommend and also each person’s individual, you know, so like a medium is not going to work for everybody. But that’s okay can be part of the package or not at all. And I find real comfort and being able to take clients and offer them the next step where I can’t take them kind of that continued process somebody to check in with weekly. I can’t do that for them. But you can.

Claire 

I love that that, that there’s no one solution to grief. Or one way to move through the healing process of it. I wholeheartedly agree. What I came to in terms of referring clients to a psychic medium was what I’ve seen in the grief process is the thing that becomes the most healing. And this is not something that people can get to early on in their grief. But the thing that becomes the most healing is for someone to find a new sense of connection with their person. I think we feel an incredible sense of incongruence and pain and angst when we have a loved one that we’ve been so close with and who’s been in our life, maybe a short time, maybe all of your life, and now they’re gone and your whole being yearns to talk to them. And often we have the mindset that we can’t, it’s over, it’s done, they’re gone. That’s it. And so a lot of the work I do is helping people find a new way to commune with their person, a new way to find a sense of connection, whether it’s an internal relationship, whether it’s a spiritual one. And so certain clients, I will absolutely send your way because even if I don’t know if it’s real and can’t prove it, having them feel that they have a new sense of connection, and that they are still in communion with this person that they love so much. That is the most healing thing that there can be.

Medium Fleur  14:20

Absolutely. And I love what you said about it not being available in the very beginning because I do make a point of asking and telling people I can’t read for you until you’re at a certain point because you have to go through that initial phase of sitting with a grief therapist or sitting with your own self and moving through that initial shock and loss no medium can bring anybody back and it does I think really require a certain time period for most people you know, there’s no one size fits all but I really love seeing people at least six months into a loss because then I think the work is able to help them bridge that next step versus right from the very beginning, when you know it’s normal, it’s human to want to just grab on and hold on to something. And unfortunately, medium can’t bring anybody back.

Claire 

It took me years to be able to even think about having a different kind of connection with my mom, I just wanted her here in the flesh, there was no other option. And I was in agony. And it took me a long time to come around to a different place with that. And now I actually feel closer to her now than I did for the first five years after she was gone. And, you know, I see that with a lot of my clients, I think grief is a beautiful process that we go through in our lives, everyone will go through it, there’s no escaping grief, whether it’s the grief of a person we’ve lost, or it’s a job change, or its health, or kids home from school in a pandemic, like we are always grieving something, loss is about change. And we have to move through some kind of recognition and acknowledgement of those shifts. And so grief is this beautiful opportunity to learn about ourselves and see the world in different ways.

Medium Fleur  16:02

Yeah, it’s a catalyst, and it’s not going to let you not change.

Claire

So one of the big things that I have been seeing in my clients who have lost someone during COVID is, so many people did not get to be there, when the person died, they dropped them at the hospital doors, thinking that they would be okay. And they would see them in a day or two. And they never saw them again, they weren’t allowed to be in the hospital, they maybe had a FaceTime goodbye through a nurse or a doctor. I mean, I have chills as I’m talking about it. So many stories like this during the pandemic, and I’m sitting with these clients who just can’t move through that they they’re still really stuck in this in this feeling of just wanting to have been there and feeling like they didn’t show up for their person or something was stolen from them. Just that not being able to say goodbye. And I’m wondering if you can talk about that. And what you see, cuz I know this isn’t specifically happening just during the pandemic, this happens frequently. I’ve had many clients who weren’t able to say goodbye. There’s many instances when that happens to us. But I’m wondering what that looks like on your end.

Medium Fleur 

It’s a very common thing to come through in readings, I would say even before the pandemic, and much more now, this theme of what does my loved one, think about me not having been there? Are they mad? Are they angry? Is there a continuation of division because we didn’t get the last moment. And unanimously across the board, it always comes up in a reading, if there’s been some sort of disconnect there that wasn’t accomplished. And it always comes up in from a perspective of from the spirit side of things really doesn’t matter. Like they’re much more concerned about the people staying behind and their emotions around it. So a lot of that conversation is about, first of all, from the spirit side, you know, I’m fine. I’m not holding on to that last moment, my life is made up of many more moments, not just that last one, we have a connection that surpasses that last five minutes, 10 minutes, 15 hours, we have a whole lifetime together. Like let’s focus on the lifetime, let’s not focus on the end, because the lifetime overshadows the end by so much more love and connection. And the other thing that I find very interesting is once we get to the spirit side of things, time, space, are not limitations. So it’s very often brought up what somebody is saying, doing, connecting with, even from a distance. So I’ve had experience in which somebody in spirit might say, the moment that I passed, you were driving in the car and your dog was in the passenger seat, you know, and I came to like, take that car ride with you. Or moments of, I know what you were doing. I know who you were with, I know how you were grieving. Timespace is important for us, not in the continuation of life. It’s a hard one for us to wrap our head around, because that is our entire understanding and container of life. But I find that to be comforting for people. I also think moving forward for myself even if I’ve ever been ever in a position where I can’t be with someone just knowing that I could energetically be a part of it, I think can be really powerful.

Claire 

What about for people who feel that their loved one really suffered at the end, whether it was suffering to illness, mental illness, suicide? I have a lot of clients really struggling to grapple with how to feel at peace. They just don’t, they feel that their person really suffered and went through some agony at the end.

Medium Fleur 

Absolutely. Well, suffering is a condition of course of the human form. And so it’s always a memory and I feel that there are certainly times in all of our lives where we’ve had some experience of pain, and then we look back at it and think, oh, I have a memory of how bad that was, right, but it’s not a continued experience. So I certainly as a medium can’t say, oh, no one felt any pain at the end of their life, that’s just not the reality of it. But the spirit doesn’t hold the memory, or really experience doesn’t get carried over transferred to the other side. And a lot of times, I will say, it feels to me or my vantage point of it, when the spirit knows they’re passing. There’s a deep intelligence in that, and there’s a deep sense of, okay, well, if we’re not staying in the physical bod we’re going to go. So even though the physical body might still seem to be connected, there’s already an untethering, a disconnecting. And so that pain, that experience isn’t nearly as heightened nearly as present, they’ve got one foot out the door, so to speak.

Claire  20:55

And I’ve seen that up, you know, personally, with my father, with my mother with hospice patients I’ve worked with, and they’re not there in a way that they normally are, and it’s not in a medication kind of way, they just aren’t there anymore. And I take comfort in that, in what you’re saying. And I, I hope others do as well, because I know it’s something that just, it’s like, we’re the ones that suffer, you know?

Medium Fleur 

100%, if there is one through line of this work, it’s the sense of sometimes sitting in front of somebody, and I’m connecting to their loved ones on the other side, and I’m in full conversation, and we’re connecting, and it’s wonderful, it feels blissful, and lovely. And they look at the person sitting in front of me. And they are, of course, like really emotionally overwhelmed. And there’s almost this moment where I’m like, oh, I wish I could have you feel what I’m feeling because it’s a party like we’re good. Like, if you could know, the freedom, connection, bliss of this feeling, we wouldn’t grieve nearly as much. Knowing that our loved ones we’d still, of course, be hard, they’re still disconnect. There’s still a severance of the physical connection, but it doesn’t. I don’t have any way to translate that to somebody unless I’m able to teach them how to feel it, which is possible.

Claire  22:20

That was my next question. How can we do what you do? Even if on just a small level?

Medium Fleur 

Yeah, well, I think everyone can. And the reason being, is because you are a spirit, soul, lifeforce consciousness right now, in the body, you have all the parts that you need, in order to make the connection to someone who is only the spirit, you just have a differentiation of your container, so to speak, the idea that we are spirits living in a physical body, not you know, having a completely physical life, like we are spiritual beings, by our very nature. And so we have all the parts we need. It’s simply a moment of then being able to quiet our minds and start to witness, pay attention, and kind of believe, ultimately, that we can do it, I think that’s the biggest thing I see with my students is, if you don’t believe you can do something, you can’t do it. Even the physical feet of that guy who ran the four-minute mile, you know, it was considered non-possible to run a four-minute mile. One guy did it in that same year, 12 other people did it. Like there’s this belief about this. And I really feel like it’s so interesting to watch Gen Z, for example, it was so much more open and so much more available to emotions and spirituality and all this stuff. I’m thinking that in my generation, I will see people become more mediumistic than we’ve ever had before more psychic, able to stand in their power in a way that right now we don’t even know that’s possible, because our own belief systems are holding us apart from it. So that’s the biggest jump is the sense of, can I get out of my way long enough to have the experience, not immediately rationalize it away, give myself the benefit of the doubt. So I can have another experience so I can grow and expand on this.

Claire

How did this happen for you?

Medium Fleur

Yeah, so well, from quite young. I think when people ask, where did it start? How did it start? The answer is always. I don’t have much memory of it. My parents were the first ones to take notice. I think when you are that young and you’re having these kinds of experiences, you think everybody else is seeing what you see. You don’t have an understanding at that age 3, 4, 5, that your world is different from anybody else’s world. This is just your world. So my initial experiences were very just part of my life, I guess, you know, I can’t really say what the first one was. But I do have many stories from parents and family that say you were just very strange, like you knew things that you were not supposed to know. There was no way around it. They were factual.

Claire 

Were people freaked out?

Medium Fleur

Yeah, I think so. I got quite lucky or if you want to call it synchronicity, or destiny, or whatever you want to call it, but I got oddly handed to an Indonesian nanny, who was also a psychic. And so she came to my parents and said, listen, your daughter’s a psychic medium. And they were like, you’re a great nanny. But then I think that kind of stuck in their head. She had some set some things amazingly to my family, that turned out to be super true in a way that my engineer dad just really couldn’t rationally discount. They didn’t go for a psychic reading. But she said some stuff that he was like, How did she know that? For example, when I was seven, we moved to Texas. And she had said years before that you guys are going to move to a tropical land, it’s going to be so humid, and so like lush, and tropical. And my dad who, you know, my parents have always lived in the Netherlands. Nobody has ever left the Netherlands, there was no job on the horizon. There was no way we were ever leaving the Netherlands. And we get to Texas, and it’s 110 degrees outside, we moved in August, the humidity is 100%. I mean, you cannot get more tropical feeling weather, you know, and so little things like that. Because they seemingly came out of nowhere, and there was just no way she could have predicted that it just seemed completely out there. Made him go hmm, maybe there’s something to this. He then got very intrigued and interested in crossing over with John Edward.

Claire  27:01

That was the first psychic medium I ever saw.

Medium Fleur 

Yeah, yeah. And it was on TV. And I remember sitting on the couch, and he looks over at me. He’s like you do that. And so it was kind of a moment of full circle moment. Now when I’m on stage, but I think those early days, I got so lucky. There were I had a lot of weird experiences as a kid where wherever we went, somebody would come up to me and tell my parents, oh, you know, your daughter, she’s a medium or she’s a psychic.

Claire 

But were you like seeing ghosts? Like were you at school seeing like your teacher’s grandfather?

Medium Fleur

No, it was really very clear to me very early on. When I was elementary school very early on, that this was not somebody, something anybody else was seeing. I was very observant. As a kid, I was very quiet, was very shy. So I immediately thought, this is not something we’re going to be sharing. And it was something that my parents would ask questions about and kind of allowed in the house, it wasn’t discouraged. But outside, I have very little memory of that, because I really did not want to be a psychic medium. And so part of it was, I think, maybe a little traumatic, and I don’t have any memory of my childhood. Most of it is due outside, you know, regular things, but not of that. It’s mostly stories. But I do remember being hyper alert to the sense that I needed to be observant of what other people were seeing and doing and how they were acting. And then I would just fall into line. And especially we moved to the States when I was seven, eight and didn’t speak English. very observant foreign child, you know, who was just going to kind of observe. So I don’t have that many memories of that time. worked really hard in my childhood to get rid of it just really did not want it at all. And really, by the time I was 10, had completely grown out of it. And I was very proud of this. Didn’t want to talk about it would have like intense anger outbursts. As my parents brought it up. My mom had bought a tarot deck for me when I was 10 as a Christmas present, and I think I like threw it against the wall like it was a bit I was like, why me? This is stupid. I’m not a psychic. And my parents were like, well, you know, when you were a kid, you were really worried. I wanted nothing to do with it. I was so angry

Claire 

So they had embraced it at the same time that you were trying to get away from it.

Medium Fleur

Because at this point, it was kind of a You sure you don’t want to hold on to it a little bit. You know, like, are you sure? It was kind of crazy. It was kind of cool. And I just did I was a teenager; I would have nothing to do with it.

Claire 

So what changed?

Medium Fleur 

Yeah. So I went to UCLA. I went in with a neuroscience major, very much wanted to be a surgeon, had all my sights set on that. And then in the first year, I became incredibly ill and it was like taking my entire identity away from me, because I couldn’t go to school anymore. So I had to take a six month leave I was on sports team, I was an A+ student couldn’t go to class anymore. So everything was stripped.

Claire  30:06

So this hits, do you know what this show is about? That sounds like a very difficult time.

Medium Fleur 

It was, it was really hard for me.

Claire

Were you scared?

Medium Fleur 

Very, very, very, because my body wasn’t working in the way I wanted it to. I became almost monastic, in my sense of trying to hold on to any control. At the time, I had no tools, you know, I’m 19. I am not used to meditating, I have never meditated before. I don’t have a yoga practice. I’m just a college student. And this is not in a time where all of this was as accessible or done. You know, I grew up with a mum who’s like, I can’t meditate. And I was like, yeah, me neither. I have too many thoughts.

Claire 

My mom couldn’t use the VCR. So I couldn’t either.

Medium Fleur

Yeah, exactly. It was like, no, we don’t do that. And so I, at the encouragement, really, of my parents who were quite desperate at this point, because no doctor could figure it out. I was getting worse and worse, I looked like I just, you know, my, especially for my parents.

Claire

What were your symptoms like fatigue.

Medium Fleur 

I could, I could sleep for 14 hours, eat very, very, very clean. Didn’t go and do anything college based pretty much was in bed by 8:30. And I went home for Christmas break, and I could barely walk from the car to the movie theater. And my mom, like was like something is not right. And then would sleep the rest of the afternoon. Like, if we did anything, I needed a six-hour nap.

Claire 

And something like that inevitably brings on depression.

Medium Fleur 

Exactly. Yeah. And so I was super depressed and super isolated. And I didn’t feel like I was having a college experience. And I had a really hard time with it. You know, couldn’t go to restaurants and my friends couldn’t go to the cafeteria, couldn’t go to the party, couldn’t drink, couldn’t go to class really even at that, you know, and my whole identity had been straight A student. So now we’ve also stripped away the sense of not doing well on tests, can’t remember it. Like it was a whole thing. So I took six months off. And in that time period, I had my dad go, oh, maybe at this point, go sees like go see somebody, anybody. So yelped when I found this lady, and it showed up in her tiny little Hollywood. because where else are you going to find a psychic medium? I don’t know, at 19.

Claire 

But after all those years of pushing it away and resisting it was this had to have been a big deal.

Medium Fleur  32:33

Oh, yeah. I was not happy. I walked in. I was like, this is stupid. Maybe they were all right. You know, maybe at this point, I should just at least go to one of the crazy people that have been telling me I’ve done this my whole life just to get some answers. Maybe they can just help me. Well, it was kind of the idea. I walked in there going, okay, what do I want to know? I wonder how to fix my health. And I want to know how I’m going to become a doctor.

Claire

I felt like that’s about going into therapy for the first time. And now I’m a therapist.

Medium Fleur 

Like, this is really stupid, but maybe it works. Like well give it a go. I’m desperate, you know? So I walked in, and she had this little, little office in just in her bedroom really, like it was, you know, tiny, little apartment. And she said, I sit down and she looks at me and she goes, Oh, you’re a psychic medium, you’re not living your purpose. And if you don’t live your purpose, your health will get very bad and you will die. And I was like, well, that is not what I came here. It’s just, and I left very mad. I had like, I remember sitting on the curb in Hollywood. And thought, this is very unfair. I just want to be a doctor. Just let me be a doctor that is helping people, please. Like I don’t understand, why is this constantly, you know, following me, but then at the same time, you’re 19 and you just want your health back. And you think, okay, what’s the worst that can happen? I will sit down and meditate.

Claire  34:06

What do you think it means to have a purpose in life? Like what was it’s such an easy thing to throw out there? You know, you’re not you’re not in your purpose in life. What does that mean?

Medium Fleur

I think it’s an alignment with who you are at the deepest sense of yourself. I don’t think most people it needs to be a job or theme. I think off sorry, it doesn’t need to be a specific job, but it’s often the matic. So when I talk about purpose these days, I refer to it as being the spirit core, which is the connection that you will hold to divinity to all that is to your higher self, if you want to call it that sense of how you’re showing up in the world and what you want to accomplish. And I think for certain incarnations, if you want to call it or journeys that we have in our physical bodies, sometimes it is a job, often it’s a theme. So it can be through parenthood, it can be through the arts, it can be through service, it can be through communicating your own sense of self even, you know, like a purpose could be, I’m going to figure out what I want to do.

Claire 

Do you think we all have a purpose?

Medium Fleur 

Absolutely. I don’t believe anybody comes into the world in a hazard way. Or that there’s absolutely no connection to a sense of you wanting to come into the world and expand in some capacity. And I think that sense of expansion is the connection to purpose. We look at things in a super linear way. So we like the construct of well, is it to be a writer? Or is it to be a movie star? You know, what’s that sense of purpose. And I think it runs so much deeper than that.

Claire 

I think it’s hard for some people to realize that they’re out of alignment. I think some of us get it. I know, there’s been times in my life, when I’ve really known I was out of alignment with who I am or what I wanted to be doing. But I think also, there’s times when we blame it on other things, you know, we blame it on our environment around us or a person or circumstance or something that’s happened. And those are also often valid, and it’s hard to tease them all apart and figure out, am I living my purpose? You know, it’s been, I feel like it’s such a broad thing. But it’s also important, and I do think that we need to be thinking about this idea of purpose.

Medium Fleur  36:13

Yeah, I think a great place to start is learning to receive your own internal feedback. We are really almost addicted and dependent on external feedback. And very few people that I see in my office, and it’s one of the things I like to teach as a very basic building block of how do we do intuition and spirit connection? Is the sense of, do you know what your own voice sounds like? Do you know what you want? Do you know what you desire? Do you know where your energy is tethered? Do you know how to pull it back to the self? So that what you’re looking for is the internal feedback of I like this, or I don’t like this versus immediately looking towards well what do you think I should do?

Claire 

How do you think we become so disconnected from that just the external feedback which I these days is so prevalent in social media and television, and just everywhere we look, there’s so much external feedback, just looking at other people’s lives all the time that we compare to, I can see how we just take more and more steps, what something small we can do each day to kind of counteract all of that external feedback.

Medium Fleur

Yeah, we can get really simple, and then also super difficult. All of this is simple, but very hard at the same time, so baby steps, but I became very convinced that the spiritual practice is not outside the body. So we actually have to, like really get embodied and really make friends with our body and have the sense of like, does this make me just very basic? Does it make me feel more expansive? Or does it make me feel constricted? Like this choice, this thing I’m doing, this behavior? That very simple question of do I feel expanded when I’m doing this? Do I feel constricted when I do this, and it’s your body speaking to you, but it’s also your spirit speaking to you, ultimately, the body is always the bridge, like we live in a physical body. So before we try to get into the idea of well, what is the intuition? And how’s it speaking to me see how your body speaking to you first. Because that’s the bridge, you know, and I think for most people, you can get there. And then you can get to the deeper layers of are they your thoughts? Are they intuitive thoughts?

Claire  38:26

That’s Amazing. I think that that’s such an overlooked thing. You know, it’s so simple and obvious the body, you know, watching both of my parents die of cancer, I hated my physical self, I was so afraid of everything. At that point, I had seen the two most important people in my life, waste away to illness. And so I spent a lot of time not thinking about my body. But my healing really began when I started to do yoga. And it was similar to you. It was like a last ditch, I was. Didn’t know what was left to do at that point. And I was like living in Santa Monica. So of course, you do yoga, and I dragged myself to the yoga studio. And it was the hardest thing I had done all that time just to sit in my body to be present to my body. And but that was where the healing began. And I think you’re right. From there, I was able to access a lot more about myself and about the world.

Medium Fleur

Yeah, it’s an interesting things spirituality for the longest time, has this subtext of woowoo. And out there, like the farther you can get out of your body, the better. But I find that that’s really not the most powerful and for myself, even I felt like I hit a point in after I’d been doing this work for quite some time, where I just hit a point of, oh, I can’t go much farther if I don’t actually get back into my body right now. Like this is a limitation because we cannot live a spiritual life here without the physical like that is just not possible.

Claire 

I remember the moment my father died, and I was at his bedside and I just hadn’t I had never seen dead body, I had never seen someone die. And he was gone, like his body was still there. But my father was not there anymore. It was. There was no question that my father was gone and there was his body. And I had this realization that we are something more than these bodies. Like we’re talking about right now how important the body is. But we are also something so much bigger than this. And I can’t really explain it other than to have had that experience of watching someone I loved so much and leave their body. And knowing that he didn’t die, His body did.

Medium Fleur  40:36

And that gets reflected. So many times, I worked in hospice for a little bit, actually, when I took that break, I been the type A personality that I was, I was like, well, I can’t do nothing. I’ll just sit beside people who are also apparently dying. Like, just so I went into hospice work for a summer. And I, without people knowing that I was doing this, it was an interesting time, because I was deciding whether or not I wanted to do the psychic mediumship still kind of running away from it. And having nurses reflect back to me every day, these moments of these spiritual encounters, very rational, Texas based religious nurses who are telling me every day about their spiritual experiences, not knowing that I was on the fence, and me experiencing as well, just by being in the room. And I think that’s so true. Anyone who’s kind of been in that space has this moment where you’re like, what is the body? You know, what is the soul consciousness, lifeforce? And I think it’s a brilliant place even to start for people who are skeptical, because science has yet to find an explanation for that, like, we don’t know what consciousness is, it doesn’t exist in a certain part of your brain. It they cannot find like a single point, you know, it’s this sense of being and we don’t know where it originates from.

Claire  42:17

I’m going to go from there to ask you some really silly questions. Okay, thinking about our loved ones on the other side. Can they see us all the time? Like, I always hear this question at your shows that I’ve been to, like, can they see us when we’re going to the bathroom? And they see us when we’re having sex? Like, does my mom know like this about me?

Medium Fleur 

Yeah, well, I think when we leave the physical form, we are continuing to be as tethered to our loved ones, as we are here. And that doesn’t mean if you had a terrible relationship, that somebody isn’t other to you. That’s not what it means. But none of us go through life living as Siamese twins, unless we are a Siamese twin. So there was no relationship that you have in your life where you don’t have time to yourself, or you don’t just like have space to be your own person. And we will never know somebody, as well as they kind of know themselves, right? Like, we can’t crawl into somebody’s body. And it’s similar. I think those on the other side, from what I gather, are really not interested in that the other day like not an important part of their mission their life. If you need them, hey, they’re showing up. If there’s a celebration, if there’s a grief, if there is something to be shared. Outside of that. They don’t really care.

Claire 

What is your day-to-day life? You are this young, beautiful, vibrant woman. Like, when you go on dates, are you? Are you seeing the dead grandparent? Can you can you tell if you’re going to end up with this guy or not? I don’t know. Tell me?

Medium Fleur 

Yeah, it was really interesting. I tend to turn off when I’m not working. So I’m certainly not going out into the world fully blasted open..

Claire 

I think Theresa Caputo kind of ruin this for all of us. All, like she gave us this idea that you’re at the grocery store, and you’re seeing everybody’s dead people.

Medium Fleur  44:04

I have some big moral issues with it. But also, it’s just not sustainable. I think I do better work like anybody does. When your top isn’t on all day in. Ultimately, we’ll just like run out of water. You know, I think in my case, I like to turn it off and turn it back on so that when I do work, it’s powerful. And it’s there.

Claire 

You know, I’ll sit next to somebody on an airplane and they’ll ask what I do. And I’ll tell them I’m a therapist, they immediately get all freaked out. And I’m like, you know what, I’m not on right now. II don’t want to analyze you.

Medium Fleur

Don’t have my therapist hat on not looking at you from those, you know, from those eyes. Yeah, so it’s really not. And I do like to differentiate that because I do also just like to live a normal life. I don’t think that’s the interesting thing about psychic mediums is we don’t live on a mountaintop. We don’t get to be monks like we have to be with people who live real lives. And in order for us to be able to bridge the gap. We know we need to know what a real life is and So I certainly live a very real life with all the ups and downs that come with it. But you know, it’s funny because for the longest time, I would have friends look at me and go, literally everyone could see that, and this is your job. So I’m not quite sure how you didn’t see that one in your day to day. And my answer to that initially was because I really severed it. I was like, okay, I’m a psychic medium, I can’t use this in my day to day like, I will not look, I will not see. And now I’ve kind of become to this place of going no, actually, I want to be a very intuitive person in my own life, I want to bridge that gap, maybe not in full work mode, but I use it much more now. And I do really like trying to live a life in which I’m actually always asking my intuition, what it thinks before I take in external feedback, or when I’m looking at things in the way that they seem, I like to check in a little bit, for me, right? And that’s the thing. It’s like the intuition for me about my choice, not necessarily doing somebody else’s reading.

Claire

I have practices that I’ve been cultivating for years that are like this, meditation, mindfulness, checking in with my intuition. But sometimes I get hit with something in my life, or, you know, the world gets hit by something. And I just don’t feel strong enough to use those like, I’m not there. And I’ll just really struggle. How do you get back to those places? Or what do you do in those moments when you can’t do those kind of higher practices? Yeah, I

Medium Fleur  46:26

Yeah, I go simple, I go really simple. I turn actually the neuroscience stuff, mostly because ultimately, what we want is the nervous system to settle down. And when we’re in that space of activated fight flight, I think like that, for me is the place to start. So a lot of simple neuro-based practices that we can do, which is like fluttering, the lips totally relaxes, the nervous system gets you out of that flight state of panic, or even breathing in twice as long as you breathe in releases the parasympathetic nervous system. And ultimately, we can’t do any kind of intuitive work unless we are in a calm mental space. So that’s always my first is like, I just really start to, and I actually, really, for me, it feels like a toolbox. Like sometimes if I can’t even remember to do that. I go back, I’m like, okay, what are the tools that I’ve used in the past? Let me just write them all down. What do I want to do right now? Like, what is the one thing?

Claire 

One thing at a tie. Not overwhelming yourself.

Medium Fleur 

Not overwhelming, and then not holding like a huge expectation. I think maybe I’m in a little bit of a category that I do have to sometimes push through it, because I have to go do a reading and you’re therapist. So sometimes we just have to shift into it. And I at this point, know the practices that will get me there. But they always start simple. And if I am having a hard week or something that’s just debilitating, just simple, simple, simple.

Claire 

I think that’s so that’s so smart. I think sometimes we just take on too much, we think we have to do too many things in order to get to a better place. But starting with just little tiny things, is so helpful in the way to kind of move through that, those hard moments. What have you in kind of wrapping up? What have you learned in all this work about humans?

Medium Fleur  48:13

Oh, what have I learned about humans? Well, nobody’s going to skip grieving, that’s just not going to happen. Read for pretty much every kind of person on the planet now, you know, read for one of the top three most rich men in the world. And I have read for people who couldn’t afford my services for free. And the commonality is we’re all looking for meaning. We’re all looking for connection. It doesn’t matter what package that comes in. It’s just the truth of the human experience. And I really feel like at this point, I believe life continues in some capacity. Do I know the exact way that it does? No. But I do really believe that. And I feel that if we as humans can connect that to ourselves, we can have an experience or a moment, a time in which we touch spirituality. And even that scientific Brené Brown says this, you cannot have resilience without spirituality. It’s impossible. And I love that sense of like it actually is innate to who we are. We can’t do life without it.

Claire 

This is why I love talking to you.

Medium Fleur 

I love talking to you.

Claire 

Lastly, you have a book that just came out. Tell us a little bit about that. How can we find it?

Medium Fleur 

Yes, called Moving Beyond: Access your intuition, psychic skills and spirit connection. And it is about doing this yourself. So it is written through stories and experiences, ways to validate the theories and the practical kind of point of view. I bring on all of this. You can find it on my website. You can find it on my Instagram, there’s links everywhere, but it is called Moving Beyond.

Claire 

Thank you. We will put that in the show notes. Thank you so much, Fleur. I look forward to many more conversations with you.

Medium Fleur

Same, I love having them. Thank you so much.

Claire  50:04

I think one of the things that I love most about Fleur is that she’s also skeptical, or at least curious about her own abilities. However, this conversation landed to you, I want to reiterate that what I really believe is important here is opening yourself up to the idea of connecting to your loved one, no matter what you believe. In all my years of working with people who are grieving, what I’ve come to understand is that we must develop new relationships with the people that we’ve loved and lost, we don’t have to let go of them. Instead, we find new ways to hold on to them. So for this week’s practice, I want you to open up to the possibility of cultivating a new kind of relationship with someone you’ve lost. Here are some things to try besides seeing a psychic medium, which you could do as well. Write them a letter, and you’ll be surprised by how moving and profound it can be to sit down and just write Dear Dad, and then tell him how you’ve been since he died. Or ask him questions or apologize. Or simply tell him how much you miss him. Create a weekly ritual that incorporates your loved one, cook something or have a meal each week that they loved. Watch a movie they liked or go for a walk somewhere they enjoy it. Talk to them about other people. Tell your children about them or ponder in conversation what they would think about how you’re doing. Talk to them in your head, ask them questions or tell them things. If you were close with someone, I guarantee you can think of almost any question to ask them. And if you close your eyes, you can hear the answer. For instance, I can ask my mom what she would think of my husband or the top I’m wearing. And even though she’s been gone for 25 years, I know exactly what she’d say. She would hate my shirt. We never get over the loss of someone we love. Instead, we learned to live with that loss. But living with it doesn’t mean letting go it means holding on. Thank you for listening. I’m wishing all of you a peaceful holiday season and I look forward to spending time with you in the new year. If you want to reach out I’d love to hear how you’re doing. Send me an email at newday@lemonadamedia.com. Talk to you next year.

CREDITS

NEW DAY is a Lemonada Media Original. The show is produced by Jackie Danziger, Liliana Maria Percy Ruiz and Erianna Jiles. Kat Yore is our engineer. Music is by Hannis Brown. Executive producers are Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer, Lily Cornell Silver and Claire Bidwell Smith. NEW DAY is produced in partnership with the Well Being Trust, The Jed Foundation and Education Development Center. Help others find our show by leaving us a rating and writing a review. Follow us at @LemonadaMedia across all social platforms, or find me at clairebidwellsmith.com. Join our Facebook group to connect with me and fellow NEW DAY listeners at facebook.com/groups/newdaypod. You can also get bonus content and behind the scenes material by subscribing to Lemonada Premium. You can subscribe right now on the Apple podcast app by clicking on our podcast logo and then the subscribe button. Thanks for listening. See you next week.