My month with the justified agents of woo-woo

David Lloyd on whether the city’s wellness gurus might be the saviours we need for troubled times — or if they're making us sick

By David Lloyd

I’m not sure how Kamala Harris cropped up in my crystal healing session, but up she cropped, just as smoky quartz, black tourmaline and amethyst stones were placed around my recumbent body.

“Oh, you mean Kamal? She’s a man. Just like Michelle Obama, or Michael,” my therapist says, gently nudging my legs apart and squishing a polished crystal ball between them, like that scene in Goldfinger. But with rose quartz. 

“They’re descended from the serpent seed,” she adds, lighting another incense stick and wafting it over my third eye. 

“The what seed?”

“Oh David, you’ve a lot to learn,” she purrs. “Some people in this realm are born of light, and some are descended from Cain, and ultimately Satan himself.”

And with that white supremacist bombshell, my crystal healing session began.

For the next hour, White Feather (for that is her crystal healer name; not, surprisingly, Grand Wizard) fretted and fussed around me, calling on her angel guides to attune my vibrational energy to the perfect atomic structure of the crystals. 

“Crystals are the purest form of energy in the physical universe,” she says. “They are conscious entities, just like us.”

If that’s true, I have a passing sting of empathy for the pink ball of quartz shoved between my clammy legs. What must it be thinking? 

“The crystals can help us return to the pure light and love we are all made of,” she says.

Assuming, of course, we’re not male Satanists passing as powerful, inspirational black women. Assuming that.

An illustration by Jake Greenhalgh

What does it say of our troubled times that the wait for a crystal healing session these days is longer than the one for an NHS dentist appointment? What does it say about the state we find ourselves in that self-love is not something we do in private and confess to Father Houlihan on Sundays — it’s something we openly, flagrantly and wilfully practise in public. 

I kind of get it. We’re all fighting for our lives here. We all want love. But we all want reliable heating too. And, unless you know your way around a combi boiler, you’d be unwise to practise self-plumbing. So I’ve decided that self-love needs to be done in the presence of an expert.

For the next month, I’ve embarked on a journey through the city’s woo-woo emporiums and alternative therapy gurus. A session – and a different modality – each week. 

It's not a difficult journey to take. On one road in Wallasey the metaphysical suppliers outnumber the ciggies and booze shops. A huge witches’ spell supply store has just opened around the corner from my house. I’ve tried to visit but it’s a safe space for women only, I’m told, in no uncertain terms. ‘Why don’t you try the Nomadic Raven? She’ll take you.” Not sure whether this is a dark threat or a friendly recommendation, I politely pass.

At the completion of my crystal healing session I feel…absolutely nothing. “You’ll probably get a lot of headaches,” White Feather says. “This is your chakras clearing out negative energy. I had to do a lot of untangling with my quartz wand. There was some really bad stuff in your throat chakra.”

Resisting the urge to ask whether it was Protein Weetabix, I nodded thoughtfully.

“You might even feel emotional for the rest of the day,” she says. 

I do, a bit, when I hand over £50.

Undeterred, I head to Garston for a reiki session the following weekend. I’m in the lounge of a roomy semi – all grey crushed velvet sofas and crystal chandeliers. (It wasn’t immediately obvious how conscious these crystals were, but if they were at all, they’d be pleading for the laying on of a duster).

Affirmations are scrawled all over the walls: The day you were born, the whole world changed for the better, because you're in it says one. I’m fairly sure I saw the exact same thing over Priti Patel’s shoulder in the Home Office.

Chakra crystals and healing gemstones. Photo: Getty Images

While I’m waiting I tune in to tales from a couple of women, swaddled in towels, of shamanism in Stoneycroft. 

“I had an etheric womb healing last week. It was amazing. It was like I was flying up through fluffy white clouds and then floating down into a field of daffodils.”

“Wow. Sounds incredible. Where was that?”

“Old Swan.”

I’m ushered into a slim room, with a tapestry-shrouded couch shoved against one wall. There are Buddhas everywhere; a serene army of them, perched on coffee tables, shelves and window sills. Reiki isn’t, technically, any part of the Buddhist religion, but in the casual pick’n’mix appropriation of the self-help shaman, it’s all about the feels. 

“I love this little Buddah,” Cheryl says. “He's so cute, isn’t he?”

“Lovely house,” I say, swerving the Buddha: hot or not? dilemma.

“Thanks, I manifested it,” Cheryl tells me. 

I lay on the couch and close my eyes. I’m told to imagine a fist-sized ball of white light glowing over me. Cheryl’s hands hover over my head, my limbs and my belly, levitating up and down, like a pesky drone. 

I’m not dead set against Reiki. Lots of my friends swear by it. But whether it’s tapping into some universal energy to reduce stress and remove harmful blocks from the spinning wheels of life force, or prana, within us, or whether it’s just a way for us to access the internal pharmacology of the placebo effect, I’m less sure.  

As my session comes to a close, Cheryl looks perturbed.

“I was getting a lot of heat from your right shoulder,” she says. “And I wasn’t getting any from your left shoulder. That could mean that you’ve got too much anger, or yang energy. But it could be because my arms can’t reach the left side of the couch.”

As we leave, I spot a man building a shed in the garden. 

“That’s my husband, he’s making a garden studio,” Cheryl says. “It’s all systems go since his mum died and left us this place.”

Huh. So that’s how it works. Dial M for Manifestation. 

Clearly I’ve been tinkering around the edges of my astral plane for too long. I need to call in the big guns. There’s only one thing for it – I  need my Akashic records analysed.

As you probably know, the Akashic records are a ledger of all events, thoughts, words and emotions that have ever occurred, or ever will occur. A bit like Wikipedia edited by Derek Acorah. 

Frustratingly, you can’t pick up a copy of these in Childwall library. They’re encoded in a non-physical dimension called the mental plane, which is out past Switch Island way, I think.

Chakra crystals and healing gemstones. Photo: Getty Images

Accessing the records, I’m told, can provide valuable insights into my past lives, my soul’s purpose, and why I’ve never really liked team sports. But you need to know where to look. Fortunately I do. It’s above a card shop in Heswall.

It’s here I meet Melissa, in a storeroom filled with boxes of birthday banners and balloons. She’s shuffling an oversized deck of Soul Oracle cards, her spiritual iPhone connection to the Akashic records’ cosmic librarians.

“I’m getting electric shocks from the cards. That’s Archangel Metatron’s energy coming through. He’s telling me your creativity is stunted,” Melissa says. “Have you ever tried writing?” 

“I have, but I’m not very good,” I tell her.

“He’s telling me ‘fake it til you make it’,” she says.

Thanks a million, Metatron. 

“We’ve all been here so many times, and on these journeys we can encounter bad energy that stays with us in the next life,” Melissa says, telling me she was a phoenix in her past life. Of course she was.

“What we’re going to do today is clear away those old contracts that don’t serve us any more.”

I have, Melissa tells me, a dusty old contract from a past life that’s made me feel that it’s not OK to have money. That poverty is all I’m worth. It must be the jeans. I knew I should have scrubbed up after walking the dog. 

Melissa tells me she’s going to connect to my akashic energy field. “This is just the quantum energy field that’s around us,” she says, making the word ‘just’ feel like it’s been given a whole new meaning. 

She swings a crystal over the cards: “I’m way better at alchemy than I am at dowsing, but let’s see what happens…” 

“Angels, masters, teachers and guides, come forward to support us in accessing the Akashic records of David Lloyd, from the Wirral,” Melissa says, so as not to confuse the guides, and get me mixed up with the David Lloyd who used to own the gyms. 

“Allow us to receive information with 100% truth and accuracy, releasing any negative contracts in all parallel universes, bringing in prosperity and banishing insecurity and shame.”

It all sounds very serious. Or, it would have done, were it not set against a huge bobbing helium balloon behind Melissa’s head, proclaiming ‘60! Welcome to the old farts club’.

Wouldn’t it be great if this were all real? If, with a whisper into the ears of your better angels, you could be rebooted, remade; born again? It almost sounds like…religion. It’s as seductive as it is duplicitous.

To have that power and be shuffling cards above a shop, stroking the bruised egos of the worried well who are –  as the inimitable Sparks said so perfectly — crying into their latte, when you could be in Liverpool, helping Rachel Reeves to banish poverty and prevent pensioners from freezing to death this winter, seems — at the very least — like a priority glitch in the matrix.

Sorry, angels, masters, teachers and guides, but it all feels a little reductive. How about you stop worrying about my bank account and look at the bigger picture here. 

Weighed down with the crippling self doubt and ennui that I still appear to be burdened with, I decide to give it one last shot, and book myself in for an Egyptian cord cutting ceremony.

The 12th Ray Mystery School’s temple offers a sacred portal into the realms of our soul creations, just next to Halfords in Wallasey. It’s here I meet ‘adept and Initiate’ Karen. She’s convinced that my travails are best met head on. None of this angel-whispering appeasement. Karen’s going straight in with her trusty sword. 

“Each time we meet someone, a cord attaches to us,” Karen tells me, “and sometimes these attachments can be toxic.”

Harnessing the power of an ancient Egyptian ceremony, Karen promises to sever what she calls the ‘emotional and energetic attachments’ in the spiritual realm I’ve unintentionally made with every bad guy I’ve ever met. 

A tarot reading to remedy ills. Photo: Getty Images

“It might not be someone close to you. It could be the woman on the checkout at Sainsburys,” she says. She’s obviously been to the one in Prenton, I think.

Karen slips out of the room, and returns, backlit in purple robes, brandishing a gleaming six inch dagger, its jagged edge catching the light and throwing angelic orbs around the room. I feel like I’m an extra in a Toyah! video. 

“Oh, right,” I say, trying to disguise a rising frisson of fear, “you’re going to actually cut them?” 

“Oh, don’t worry, I won’t pierce the skin, I’m working on your aura,” Sharon says. “You’ll hear me make some strange noises as I do, but it’s just me contacting the god, Isis.”

As long as it’s not ISIS Isis, I think. 

I close my eyes. Sharon starts making a sound like the All Blacks warming up for a match. I can feel the breeze of the knife’s slipstream on my cheeks as it makes a close fly by. Terrified, I calculate the odds of the lads in Halfords hearing my blood curdling screams over Ken Bruce’s Pop Master.

Within a couple of minutes, it’s all done. I feel lighter. Energised. But that could be because I’m not having a six inch blade waved at my neck.

“There was a thick cord in your throat that was really hard to sever,” Karen says. “But you’re cleared. The only cord you have left is the one attaching you to god.”

“I don’t believe in god,” I say. 

“That’s OK,” Karen says, “there are 72 words for god. You can choose any you like. It’s all energy, basically.”

The Mystery School’s teachings, Karen says, can be traced back to King Soloman’s times, two thousand years ago. “We believe they date back to the fall of Atlantis, 12,000 years ago. But, for obvious reasons, we can’t verify that,” she sighs.

I know how she feels. I was livid when I accidentally dropped The Mayor of Casterbridge in the bath last week, so to lose your entire religious doctrines in a probably-mythical cataclysmic flood must be just awful. 

But I warm to Karen. She has a kindly, beneficent…oh I’ll just say it…aura. The more we chat, the more I sense a shifting of gears; of my body moving from its adrenaline-fuelled sympathetic nervous system to its restful, parasympathetic alter ego. I feel safe; comforted even. Her conviction – her talk of how I have one of the purest hearts she’s ever met – threatens to untether me. It’s almost spellbinding in here. 

It doesn’t last too long. As I leave and turn on my phone, real life hits me like a freight train. A parent is ill. Suddenly I’m plugged into reality again. My month of me time makes me feel ashamed, stupid. Selfish. 

The present moment is a vulnerable place. Stress hormones run amok through our bloodstream and nerve chemicals bombard our neurotransmitters. The chaos of life creates the tears into which religion, crystal healers and wellness gurus all-too-willingly rush in. We like to think it's a way to take back control. But maybe we don’t notice the darker spaces we’re moving into. Maybe this growing obsession with our inner work risks us othering everything – and everyone – else. 

Maybe, no matter how many times we shuffle the deck, or invoke the laws of attraction, the universe doesn’t give a fuck about us after all. 

I call a GP to make an appointment. As far as I know, he has no direct contact with powerful ancient teachings, nor is he on first name terms with a cosmos-spanning army of angels and guides or the pure, unwavering healing power of the crystals.

But, you know, fake it til you make it.