Janet Alm has written a book about her experience of becoming a psychic at the age of 50. For almost ten years now, the Mattawan resident has been a psychic medium and animal communicator.
The book is called Woo-Woo: Becoming a Psychic at Fifty. Alm says the term woo-woo has a modern definition of “something that cannot be explained by the known laws of science.” Alm says she was surprised when she began getting telepathic messages from her deceased mother, some 4 years after she had passed away.
“Basically the greatest stumbling block to doing this is, the message that you see looks and feels and sounds exactly like your own imagination," says Alm. “So, after doing this for 9 and a half years, I’ve really come to the conclusion that we all get messages from the other side and messages from our animals on a regular basis, and it’s not that we get the message and reject it, it’s that we don’t even recognize it as something that’s coming from outside ourselves.”
Alm’s solution to that puzzle is to ask the spirit she’s communicating with to, basically, “prove it.”
“Whenever I do a reading for a person, say I have a lady named Donna, who comes to me and wants me to reach her Uncle Henry. The way I start is that I send out a thought and I say Uncle Henry for Donna, will you please send me an identifier? And what I’m hoping to perceive then is something that he can send that will have some meaning to her. So, if I can get a couple of things from him, that she can say, oh yes, I know what that it, like ‘oh yes, he loved parakeets,’ or ‘yes, he had a hobby of climbing volcanoes’, or whatever it is. If he can tell me that kind of stuff that I couldn’t have known in advance, or guessed or looked up on Google, then my client knows I’m not making it up, but it’s even more important to me to know I’m not making it up, because without identifiers, I wouldn’t know…it could be my imagination.”
Alm also leads animal communication workshops. Participants bring a photo of a pet, either living or deceased, and they learn, or try to learn, to receive telepathic messages from the animal. Armed with a picture of WMUK's Lorraine Caron's cat Iris and asked Alm to, basically “prove it.” Not everything Caron heard rang true, but there were some items she found easy to believe.
“Iris,” she said to the photograph, “can you tell me about your least favorite thing in the house?” After a long pause, Alm continued, “I’m seeing an image of a stove or an oven?”
Lorraine Caron replied, “We have a woodstove and she jumped on it once and quickly learned the concept of hot.”
Alm says she wrote her book because she wants us to know that even when we aren’t aware of it, we are surrounded by love from the spirit world.
“All of the hundreds of readings that I’ve done over the past 9 ½ years have been so tremendously positive and loving,” she says. “I would hope that even if you don’t hear from your loved one who’s passed on yourself that you would feel confident that they are in a very wonderful place and they love you dearly and they are with you, sending you love. It’s such a positive, wonderful, loving experience that I want people to know that.”