By Michelle McLemore with Photography by Susan Ayer
The year was 2015. We pulled into Washtenaw Community College’s Morris Lawrence Building in Ann Arbor. We arrived half an hour early not knowing what to expect of crowds or the venue as this was our first holistic psychic fair. (Yes, we were psychic fair virgins). Arriving early turned out to be a wise choice as an increasing stream of cars began pulling in. We walked to the entrance and waited, chatting casually with others in line. Anticipation, intrigue, and child-like joy bubbled throughout the line.
Once inside, to the left of the admission line, were holistic practitioners setting up their mini treatment centers. Massage tables, foot baths, colored lights, and technologies unknown to us awaited visitors’ trials.
To the right of the line, vendors were tweaking their displays. Crystals, oils, books, artwork, and more stretched across the expanse. Posters on the wall touted that free lectures and psychic readers could be found down the hall. It evoked a something-for-everyone giddiness.
I didn’t know at the time that this entire event was primarily thanks to the efforts of intuitive Amy Garber and co-founder Christina DePugh. They had built upon a small group’s vision in 2013 and steadily expanded the offerings each year until 2020 when the pandemic put in-person events on hold.
The Ann Arbor Holistic Psychic Fair became the largest of its type in Michigan as it gave a common arena for holistic practitioners and psychic intuitives to assemble in a mutually respected village for one or two days. Many of the practitioners highlighted in Crazy Wisdom articles have had booths, done readings, or attended informative lectures through these fairs.
Though Garber feels 2022 is too soon to risk creating a potential super-spreader event with an in-person fair, she has been far from lax in her continued nurturing, normalizing, and educating of the greater Ann Arbor area on holistic and psychic matters.
In the interim, a prior psychic vision blossomed into a reality: she expanded The Enlightened Soul Center & Shop with a new location on Carpenter Road. Firmly based on Garber’s passion, the “goal is to provide great holistic programming for the community. This includes renting spaces to practitioners and groups to practice the holistic and intuitive arts.” The new center hosts 2,674 square feet with a large event room, a small kitchen classroom, and individual rooms to rent.
The variety and frequency of offerings is impressive. Just a few of their events include lunchtime yoga, sound baths, a queer magic seekers group, Reiki sharing, and channeling demonstrations. Classes offered also cover intuition development, divination, mediumship, nature spirits, tarot, and voice channeling. You can also book a session with one of the practitioners.
In addition to Garber as a spiritual counselor, others offer visionary energy work, medical intuitive healing, art interpretation and oracle cards, psychic mediumship, oracle alchemy, and clairvoyant mediumship.
Additionally, the center hosts online learning events. As other practitioners and holistic businesses had to close their doors during recent years, Garber was able to build a center for practitioners to continue their offerings and expand light working without the financial strain of owning or renting one’s own physical business.
She hopes to eventually add two mini fairs a month—like a mini version of the psychic expos. She envisions vendors in the parking lot under tents with psychic readers and discussions inside.
“I am building on a hybrid model, not just a store. I want to be of help. That’s what I’m in it for,” Garber explains.
How did Garber come to have the courage and passion to support holistic practices and psychic fairs on a grand scale when others had not?
Her story:
Garber grew up in Oak Park, a suburb of Detroit. She attended Berkley High School and then transferred to Southfield Lathrup High School after her parents’ divorce in the mid-1970s. After high school, Garber earned a BA in Fine Arts and Literature and Language from Kalamazoo College. “Though,” she confides, “if they would have had a journalism school, I would have done that.”
Instead of stepping from the waters of intuition into public life, as some life-long psychics may experience, Garber’s was a different process.
Growing up in a “culturally Jewish” family, there wasn’t much discussion about intuition. Though she began doing informal readings for friends in 1993, it wouldn’t be until years later, as an adult, when she met an uncle who had psychic abilities. “He became my mentor. He ended up doing roughly 900 readings in life. The general family today still doesn’t believe in it.”
Yet, as a child, Garber remembers being drawn to the 1970 movie On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. It was an American musical comedy-drama-fantasy in which Barbra Streisand plays a psychic. She also recalls frequently watching the night sky, waiting and hoping to see a UFO. “I’d always had a peculiar interest in certain occult or paranormal things like the Shroud of Turin (which is odd because I’m Jewish). Edgar Cayce was also an early read.”
Garber explained, “When I teach, I give people hope—you didn’t have to be a psychic child. We all wake up at different times.”
“If you’ve ever shared information with someone and then said, ‘I don’t know where that came from!’ then, you may have already gotten ‘inspired’ or ‘channeled’ messages! Each person has their own timing. It’s our energy—everyone has some type of intuition. It can help guide us and make choices.”
For Garber, intuition comes through the means of hearing (clairaudience) and seeing (clairvoyance). “The challenge is to be aware of it and listen to it. When I am clear, I hear it. Sometimes I argue with them [guides/spirit]. But I am sorry for it later. I can’t imagine living life without it.”
Metaphysical training for Garber started in 1993 with Spiritualist ministers Rev. Shala Kilmer, Revs. Edward and Annette Jones, and Rev. Ken Nowaciewski, among others. Eventually, Garber helped found the Center of Light Spirituality in Oxford, Michigan and later served on the Board of Trustees of the Interfaith Center for Spiritual Growth in Ann Arbor.
In the 2000s, “I took a freelance editor job for the Washtenaw Jewish News as a side job, copy editing. Also, I reached out to Bill Zirinsky at the Crazy Wisdom Community Journal. It was like an intuitive download—I should get paid for reading something I’m interested in!” Working at CWJ also created the opportunity to do readings in the Tea Room.
Laughing, Garber reminisced, “I don’t know how I did it in the Tea Room. I would offer readings at night when the live music was going on just across the room.” Her eyes twinkled admitting, “It definitely helped me hone my focus. I never adapted to using any tools. That was too much work—not my thing.”
So, what is a psychic reading like? “I often work with my eyes closed when I am ‘tuning in.’ The reading is more of a conversation with you. The information comes in the form of feelings and pictures instead of a flow of words or thoughts. As always, however, I rely on Spirit to direct the form and function of the reading. I strive to translate the client without interpretation on my part.”
In an April 2021 Crazy Wisdom ezine article, (crazywisdomjournal.com/weekly-48) Garber also emphasized the importance of the client’s participation. “I understand clients may want to hear ‘proof’ and therefore may wish to withhold facts from the reader until the reader has confirmed these details. However, it is detrimental to the reading for the client to be passive and unresponsive throughout the entire reading. If the information doesn’t sound right, it is important for the client to bring this up immediately, so the message can be re-worded, clarified, and explained if necessary. Usually, misinformation is just a misunderstanding, or a problem of semantics.”
In tracking Garber’s intuitive and career development, she acknowledged one main theme: “The universe finds ways to push me to get me to go where I need to go—sometimes like Noah, like the Bill Cosby sketch.”
Garber’s own facilitated group started with a grad student saying a metaphysical group, “sounded like fun.” They used Meetup.com. This led to renting the back room at Crazy Wisdom once a month. Then, two Sundays a month. The momentum kept building.
“In January 2012, I co-founded a group named Intuitives Interactive for intuitives, adult indigos, empaths, and other lightworkers. (This group would eventually fold into the Enlightened Soul Center’s offerings in 2018).
Also in 2012, the HGTV show “House Hunters” contacted Crazy Wisdom Bookstore for a psychic that would be willing to participate for an Ann Arbor episode. Bookstore representatives chose Garber. She recounted, “I accurately described the house that the client would ultimately choose, and it was confirmed when the show aired on April 8, 2013.” However, they didn’t tell her anything regarding her accuracy at the time of her interview nor up until the airing. Since that time, Garber has added home buying/selling consultation to her repertoire of services.
“People may know they have a feel for a new place, and I see a map in my mind of where they are being drawn to. It might be two places and Spirit tells the differences between them. Or, if local, it may feel in a certain geographical direction and looks blah, blah, blah. I can get colors, shapes of houses, and more.”
In tracing her rise as a holistic center director, Garber’s eyes grew wider, and she gasped slightly. “Wow, 2013 was a big year! I had the vision of the center in 2013. One of the regulars at the Interactive Sunday group said, ‘I think you are going to be famous for something—and it’s not your readings.’” They both laughed. The friend hadn’t meant anything derogatory about Garber’s psychic abilities.
“She said it was something else, so I sat and went within. I saw a center, like a director of a holistic center. That night I did a meditation and took notes. I drew out a schematic. Spirit was giving me this information. It would be a combination of readers and healers. They would work together and refer to each other. It would have a café, and events gathering space, and a gift shop.” She beamed. “That was the dream. I was led… and pushed.” And the center today is bringing the dream to fulfillment.
Garber’s Intuitives Interactive group also helped nurture her to begin teaching. In 2015, after repeated requests, Garber began teaching intuition development classes. (Today, she offers three levels of such classes). She also founded her private business, Metafizzy LLC, at that time.
Garber became certified in Medical Intuition through Living Aware Inc. with Tina Zion. Additional training came from Constance Joy Hart in Past-Life Healing. These can be done in person or over the phone. “I love doing readings for individuals, couples or pairs, groups, and parties!”
Garber explained, “I’m a skeptic. So, if I have direct experience and can validate it, then I can bring it in. I trust my own experience. Along the way, I had a profound experience, and so I remind everyone, Einstein proved it. Time is a continuum. We can go back and go forward.”
She shared one experience when past life healing made a world of difference to a client and her three-year-old daughter. The daughter was petrified of taking a bath. The mother knew instinctively the child had drowned in a prior life. So, during the mother’s past life regression session, she witnessed the child (who was also a family member in the prior lifetime) begin to drown. This time, however, the present mother stepped in to save the daughter and reassure her, she was fine. Post session, that night when the client went home, the mother found her daughter was suddenly no longer afraid of the water. Not a bit.
The universe kept prodding, and in the spring of 2016, Garber co-founded the Enlightened Soul Center for the Holistic & Intuitive Arts. Meanwhile, she continued training. Garber became certified to perform personal clearings and space clearings through Diana Burney of Earth Release . In 2016, she was ordained into the Priesthood of the Order of Melchizedek.
In 2018, she would add graduating from the Shamanic Healing Program by Marjorie Farnsworth of Spirit Assist LLC, and Shamanic Practices with Kate Durda and Stephanie Tighe of Spirit Weavers to her repertoire. Certification as a Reiki Master teacher and Rahanni Celestial Healing (Pink Ray 5th Dimensional Energy Healing for the New Age) soon followed. Garber wanted to clarify, “I don’t call myself a healer. I was more like a kid in a candy shop—an attunement junkie.” She was excited to learn about everything metaphysical.
In addition to offering channeled readings, by 2017, Garber added classes for others to learn how to channel. Mediumship, to Garber, is different than channeling. “During a mediumship reading, you may ask me to call in certain persons who have passed on, but I will not channel a deceased loved one by inviting them to share my body nor energy.”
One idea, or message, that kept coming up in our interview was a strong belief: “There are no coincidences, we are never alone, and we are always loved.” Garber said this underlines every reading. That being said, Garber doesn’t believe in fate necessarily. “Synchronicities occur by being aware and in the flow of the Universe, not by blocking things. I believe in reincarnation, recycling of souls, time as a continuum (nonlinear) because of the dense vibration of the Earth plane. It’s like a circuit board. Some things are fated like soul agreements—certain people will meet, but the minutiae are left to free will. If it was all fated, what would be the point?”
Today, at 64, any downtime is shared primarily with two feline daughters: Esmeralda, 9 (named by Spirit) and Tabatha, 10. “Es” and “Tab” both come like dogs when they are called. Container deck flower gardening delights her in the spring/summer. Other times you can find her among the flowers reading. She also enjoys taking walks and visiting coffee shops. (Pre-pandemic, Starbucks was a favorite spot to visit and meld with the many other quirky patrons). An occasional historically true movie or “chick flick” also brings her delight.
Garber describes herself as “basically a work-a-holic,” though the work of the Center brings her immense joy. As an ordained minister, she performs ceremonies for all life transitions. With psychic channeled readings, she assists clients with relationships, health, business, career, life path and patterns, prosperity, soul purpose, past life exploration, spirit guide connection, intuition development, and spiritual growth.
For more information, explore enlightenedsoulcenter.com or call Garber at 734-358-0218 .The Center is open Tuesday-Saturday, 12:00-7:00 pm except holidays. It is located at 2711 Carpenter Road, Ann Arbor, MI. You can also learn of events at meetup.com/Enlightened-Soul.
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