The Truth Is Out There If You Know Who To Ask

In Sherman Oaks, California, lies a doormat that reads “Namaste.”

With outstretched hands and a smile, Wendy Tividad, a highly sought-after intuitive reader and teacher, opens the door. She stands before me in a white floor-length dress with lengthy blonde locks and hot pink acrylics, both shimmering in the Valley breeze. She welcomes me into her home, which is embellished with a myriad of crystals, buddhas, and optimistic artwork. This is where she lives, and by the looks of it, I’m getting the sense that this is where she plays.

Wendy provides intuitive readings in person and over Skype that go for a minimum suggested gratitude donation of $300-600 per hour of reading. Her regulars include well-known creatives in the entertainment industry, including but not limited to musicians, writers, TV creators, and actors, whom she asks I not explicitly name in order to protect their identity. She makes it clear that she wouldn’t refer to herself as a psychic but rather connects more with the description of “a ball of light.”

“I don't even like to call myself anything because it's limiting. There are all these different ‘clair’s’: clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsentient. I would say I read energy, and everything is energy,” she tells me. If she had to define what she does, she would describe it as soul-hacking. As one quite invested in my soul, I follow her to the room in her house where it all happens.

For an idea of the look of her reading room, her website, pureheartsessions.com, is an aesthetically accurate reference. All directions point to pink. Each object exhibits a particular softness—faux-fur sheep rugs, love letters on the wall, plush blankets, and chairs for guests to decompress in, all while bathed in natural light. Gustave Doré's depiction of Dante’s Divine Comedia drawing of Paradiso hangs on the wall. Spiritual novels, signifiers, and mementos line the shelves. The first song written by her daughter, Harmony Tividad and Avery Tucker, of the band formerly known as Girlpool, is framed. A handwritten card on display catches my eye and reads, “EVERYONE WISHES YOU WERE THEIR MOM.”

“Look, just don’t make me out to be some freak, okay?” she asks as I take a seat.

Wendy wasn’t always able to read for others. Before the readings and teachings, she was a former card writer, published author, graphic designer, and is a proud mother. Wendy didn’t gain consciousness of her abilities until around ten years ago. “I definitely have always been intuitive. When I was around five or six, my mom would play a pick-the-card game with all of us kids, and I would say what card it was. She said that my ratio was very high. Then, when my daughter Harmony was growing up, I would know her friends' exact birthdays or exact astrological signs. My girlfriends would always ask me things about guys, and I would just know. I thought I was just a good guesser.”

As for her path, she wasn’t looking to be the ball of light she describes herself as. “This chose me. I didn't choose it. I would say what happened was…I had this experience. It would be considered a spontaneous Kundalini awakening. It was like going from being a one-watt light bulb to a thousand-watt light bulb.”

A Kundalini awakening—according to Tantra, esoteric yogic tradition—is an energy that lies at the base of the spine, pulled upwards towards the seven energy centers in the body, called chakras. According to Bodily Practice in Transcultural Perspective by Liane Hofmann, “Kundalini Yoga is said to form the basis of all life and mental processes, and the deliberate manipulation of this energy is supposed to bring about a fundamental transformation of consciousness.” This sort of awakening, which happened to Wendy over ten years ago, is said to cause energy to break free and lead to a higher spiritual consciousness, leading to greater access to information.

I ask her about this experience. “I would describe it as if you have a small window in front of you, about as wide as your eyes.” she gestures. “You can only perceive within those few inches, right? When you raise your frequency, you raise your vibration. The window begins to open wider and wider. You can see more and more ways of perceiving. What happened to me was my Kundalini awakening happened from my heart being shattered into a million pieces, so the awakening stemmed from trauma. I felt a vibration around my body for about two days. This vibration, I'd never felt that before. lt felt very bizarre. I don't drink, and I don't do drugs. I had never felt anything like that. It felt almost like a buzzing, near electrical. Then I made love to my husband for many hours. I started speaking and saying things. He's read a lot of books on channeling, and he knew. He said my voice sounded different. He said it sounded like me, but me without any problems—a child-like version of myself. From there, I started being able to do deep trance channeling and felt that the energy was moving, but I didn't start reading for others until three years in.”

She started off slow with readings, initially just for friends and those close to her. She still actively reads for family, including her daughter Harmony, whom I ask about what this transition from mother to mother-mystic was like.

As one with certain things I would prefer my mother not be aware of, Harmony feels differently. “I didn't really hide a lot from my mom when I was young anyway, and the older I get, there’s nothing to really be shameful about. She’s just so intimately in my life. She’ll read for me in a legitimate way, but sometimes I’ll just ask, ‘Can you look at this specifically?’ or she’ll just see it, and it will be a 10-15 minute moment between us. I remember one time, I was worried I was pregnant. My mom and I were getting food and I asked if she could look at something really quick. We get in the car, sit down, and she immediately says, ‘Well, at least you’re not pregnant.’ I didn't even verbalize that that was on my mind. It’s so cool. We are so tapped in together—even though she can tap into anyone—we’re intertwined, which goes deep. I think there have been things in my life where she, as herself, has not been able to empathize with or understand and then she’ll go into my field, and she'll see it through my eyes and know how I feel. It's healing,” she tells me.

As a creative person with a background as an artist and novelist, Wendy’s insightful abilities are often utilized as a form of guidance with her clientele of musicians and artists for projects. Harmony, who has gone out on a solo project since Girlpool, encourages her mother’s involvement and intuitive reading in her creative practice.

“With music videos—which is my favorite thing to work on with her," Harmony tells me, "—she’ll say, I see this, I love this, and so on. In the 'Good Things Take Time' music video, I was asking her about it and she said that she saw a mermaid, and so we ended up putting a girl in a mermaid dress. Asking my mom feels like I can access more parts of myself.”

Wendy’s ability to tap into one’s field leads me down a path of questions. Does this mean you constantly pick up on people’s inner monologues in public? Can you ignore this ability? Does it ever shut off?

“I have to drop in to read someone. It is like there's a field of information that everybody carries around them, and I'm reading what's in the field,” she tells me. “That's why people sense each other all the time. You know when you think about a friend, and then they call you? It's almost like you've gone into their field for a minute,” she says. “Whatever is in someone's field, that's what I'm going to read. I never know what they will bring, because everyone brings a different energy. So, to answer your questions, some people jump into someone’s field in public. I would feel that that's so invasive. I don't walk around open. I put myself in a place I drop into within a few seconds. I just start the session by breathing and purposefully focus my intention. Then the information comes in, and I allow that to be what it is. I don't question it,” she explains.

Wendy performs up to seven readings a day—unless her daughter has a party in her backyard yurt, then she does up to 16—and teaches guided intuition classes every other month. She believes that everyone can be intuitive, and some probably even have the ability to read others. “I think that this is a telepathic universe and that we're all intuitive, but we just don't use that part of ourselves,” she says. “People read each other all the time. When driving on the freeway, you can sense when someone will pull in front of you, even if they don't have their blinker on. You sense what other drivers are doing. We use it for survivor instincts, it seems.” she says.

All readings happen in a state of deep trance and light trance. I ask her for intel on what’s going on in her mind when reading. “When I go into a deep trance state, my higher self-energy takes over. I'm like a receiver, and I'm receiving information very quickly. I cannot edit this information,” she explains. Light trance, however—which she performs daily—is mutable. “When I'm reading in light trance, it feels like I can edit the information I’m receiving because I'm present as Wendy, but when I go into a very deep state, my brain waves are altered. It feels almost like the information's pouring through me, like I'm downloading, just like you would download something on your computer.”

Wendy recommends the seeker come prepared with questions to ask her during their reading. So, with an abundance of questions on the tip of my tongue, I was prepared when it was my turn. Each session begins with the sharing of Le Labo Patchouli essential oil, and each reading ends with the statement: “Thank you for letting me read for you. Thank you for your beautiful heart. I now close this session. What belongs to you belongs to you, and what belongs to me belongs to me. You are very blessed. Namaste.” As for what happened during the reading, I’ll keep that to myself and let time do the rest.

She clarifies that it's not about whether the information being relayed is accurate. “I'm not attached to this information being correct. Some people come to me to see future events, of which I have predicted a lot of different things. But I always say I could be wrong. I'm not attached to being right or wrong, and I don't want to act like I'm an expert. I also don't want to be the decider of anyone's life. What it really comes down to is intuition, believing that opening your heart is a step in the right direction. We are raised in a world where it's just normal to judge. We judge ourselves, and we judge others. It's hard to be in an open space when we're judging it. When you are detached from being right, you release the ego, and there lies a space of openness. I am here to help the fellow human sitting in front of me from my heart. From there, information begins to flow,” she states.

If you ask me, intuitively listening to one’s internal thoughts and answering questions for up to seven sessions a day makes her stamina comparable to that of a professional therapist. I wonder if there’s a physical toll and all that assumed absorbed trauma from session after session. “I've never had any issue with carrying the weight of others with me,” she tells me. “I'm very good at not carrying any of it with me, just like when the readings first began. It wasn't something I worked at. It all felt very natural to be able to receive information. So many readings involve people's family members dying, or losing a partner, or they are in pain, whatever it may be; I can't carry all of that. So in the session, I have a way of saying that what belongs to them, belongs to them. I leave it, and I don't take it with me.”

Though booked out for months with notable clientele, I find what separates Wendy from others who work in the industry of transcendent experiences is that she doesn’t care to be all-knowing. She comes off just as curious as the one asking questions. “I think what’s most important with the readings is that people really feel seen and that they can have a different perspective than the one that they've been dealing with. A lot of it is programming. You run a program, you keep seeing things the same way. So you continue to make the same mistakes,” she says. “Whatever the programming is, i.e. something you learned from your parents or whatever, having a new perspective and having someone shift things for you and show you another way of looking at it or rather, a broader way of looking at it, is helpful.”

An interview and reading later, I leave Wendy in the Valley with more questions than I came with, which isn’t a bad thing. Definitive or not, being provided with a different perspective may send you wandering down a path of something unimagined. To seek out the future and consider the ways in which you exist in it. It’s only human.