Mar 25, 2026

Finding Spiritual Comfort During Chronic Illness — My Journey with Psychic Readings

I want to tell you a story that I never thought I would share publicly. It is the story of what happens when chronic pain strips away everything you thought you knew about yourself, when medicine cannot give you the answers you need, and when you find comfort in the last place you expected.

Three years ago, I would have laughed at the idea of seeing a psychic. I was pragmatic, science-minded, and deeply skeptical of anything that could not be measured in a lab or confirmed by an MRI. Then chronic pain happened — or rather, it did not just happen. It crept in slowly, settled into my lower back and hips like an uninvited guest, and refused to leave.

Over the following eighteen months, I saw four doctors, two specialists, a physical therapist, and a pain management clinic. I tried anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxants, nerve blocks, physical therapy, and enough ice packs to fill a swimming pool. Some of it helped. None of it solved the problem. The MRI showed mild disc degeneration — “normal for your age,” they said, as if that explained why I could barely get through a workday without wanting to cry.

I am sharing this not because my story is unique. If you are reading this, you probably have your own version. Different pain, different body part, different series of doctor visits that led to the same place: a diagnosis that does not fully explain your suffering, treatments that help but do not heal, and a growing sense that something important is being missed.

This is the story of what I found when I stopped looking only at the physical and started paying attention to the spiritual. It is not a story about miracles. Nobody cured my pain with crystals or fixed my spine with Reiki. But something happened that changed my relationship with my illness, and that change has been more valuable than I can easily express.

The Breaking Point

The moment I knew I needed something different was not dramatic. It was a Tuesday afternoon. I was lying on my living room floor because the couch hurt too much and the bed was upstairs. I had canceled plans with friends for the third time that month. My phone was full of well-meaning texts — “Hope you feel better soon!” — from people who did not understand that “soon” was not coming.

I was not suicidal. I want to be clear about that. But I was experiencing something that I later learned has a name in chronic pain literature: demoralization. It is different from depression, though they often overlap. Demoralization is the loss of morale, of meaning, of the sense that your life is going somewhere. It is the feeling that you are enduring rather than living.

Lying on that floor, I scrolled through my phone and somehow ended up on an article about people with chronic illness who had found comfort in spiritual practices. Not cures — comfort. That distinction mattered. I was tired of being promised solutions. I just wanted to feel less alone in this.

The article mentioned psychic readings, energy healing, and spiritual counseling as practices that some chronic illness patients found meaningful. My skeptic brain rolled its eyes. But my exhausted, pain-riddled body said: what do you have to lose?

The First Reading

I chose a platform I had seen mentioned in several places and spent an embarrassing amount of time reading practitioner profiles. I was looking for someone who mentioned health, wellness, or healing — not someone who wanted to tell me about my love life or my career. I found a woman whose profile said she was a Reiki master and intuitive healer who had personal experience with chronic illness.

I booked a phone session and immediately felt ridiculous. What was I doing? I had a graduate degree. I read peer-reviewed research. And here I was, about to call a psychic about my back pain.

She answered on the second ring, and her voice was warm without being artificially cheerful. She asked my name and what had brought me to her. I said, “I have chronic pain and I don’t really know why I’m calling you.” She laughed gently and said, “That’s the most honest thing anyone’s said to me today. Let’s start there.”

For the first ten minutes, she just listened. Not the way a doctor listens — scanning for keywords, formulating a diagnosis, already reaching for the prescription pad. She listened the way someone listens when they genuinely want to understand your experience. She asked questions I had never been asked in a medical setting: How has this pain changed who you are? What have you lost? What are you most afraid of?

I cried. I had not expected to cry. But those questions opened something that I had been holding shut for months. The grief of losing my active lifestyle. The fear that this was permanent. The shame of not being able to do things that used to be effortless. The loneliness of a condition that nobody can see.

Then she said something that reframed everything: “Your body is carrying more than physical pain. You’re carrying grief you haven’t processed, anger you haven’t expressed, and fear you haven’t acknowledged. Those energies don’t just live in your mind — they live in your body, and they compound the physical pain.”

Was this medical science? No. But was it true to my experience? Absolutely.

She asked if I was open to a brief Reiki session over the phone. I said yes, not expecting much. She guided me to lie down, close my eyes, and breathe slowly. For about fifteen minutes, she was mostly quiet, occasionally describing what she was sensing — tension around my lower back and hips, heaviness in my chest (she said my heart center was “guarded”), and what she described as “stuck energy” in my solar plexus, which she connected to feeling powerless over my health.

When the session ended, my pain had not disappeared. But something had shifted. I felt lighter, emotionally, in a way I had not felt in months. The constant background hum of anxiety and dread had quieted. For the first time in a long time, I was not bracing against my pain — I was simply existing alongside it, and that felt different. Better.

Becoming a Reluctant Regular

I did not immediately book another session. I sat with the experience for about two weeks, noticing that the emotional relief from that first call lingered longer than I expected. The pain was still there, but my relationship to it had changed slightly. I was less combative with it, less consumed by it. I started to notice moments during the day when the pain was present but I was not suffering — a distinction that sounds trivial but felt revolutionary.

Two weeks later, I booked a second session with the same practitioner. This time, I was less nervous and more open. She began with a chakra reading, going through each energy center and describing what she sensed. Some of her observations resonated deeply. She said my root chakra — associated with safety and security — was depleted, which she connected to the instability and fear that chronic pain creates. She said my sacral chakra was blocked, which she related to the loss of joy, pleasure, and creativity that pain had caused.

She then performed another distance Reiki session, this time focusing specifically on the chakras she had identified as imbalanced. During the session, I experienced something I had not expected: a vivid mental image of myself hiking, something I had not been able to do since the pain started. The image was not wishful thinking — it felt more like a memory from the future, a quiet assurance that this would not be forever.

After the session, she taught me a simple self-Reiki practice: placing my hands on the area of greatest pain, breathing slowly, and visualizing warm light flowing from my palms into my body. She said it would not replace professional energy work but could help between sessions. I started doing it every evening before bed, and it became a ritual that I genuinely looked forward to. On difficult nights, it was the only thing that helped me relax enough to sleep.

Over the following months, I settled into a pattern of biweekly sessions. Not because I believed in any particular metaphysical framework, but because the sessions consistently made me feel better — emotionally, spiritually, and sometimes even physically. My pain levels did not dramatically decrease, but my ability to cope with them dramatically increased. And that, I learned, is its own form of healing.

What I Found That Medicine Could Not Give Me

I want to be careful here. I am not criticizing my doctors or the medical system. They did important work. They ruled out serious conditions, provided treatments that reduced my pain from unbearable to manageable, and monitored my health with competence and care. I am grateful for all of it.

But there were things they could not give me that I found through psychic readings and energy healing:

Acknowledgment of the whole experience. Medicine treats the body. Therapy treats the mind. But chronic pain lives in both simultaneously, and it also touches something deeper — call it the spirit, the soul, the essential self. The psychic readings and energy healing sessions were the only context in which someone addressed all of those dimensions together. My practitioner did not separate my physical pain from my emotional suffering from my spiritual crisis. She worked with the whole tangled mess, and that integrated approach felt more true to my actual experience than any single medical or psychological intervention.

Permission to grieve. Nobody in the medical system told me it was okay to grieve. To grieve my former body, my former abilities, my former self. The focus was always on solutions, treatments, and forward motion. My energy healer was the first person who said, “Before we can work on healing, we need to honor what you’ve lost.” That permission to grieve — to sit with sadness without immediately trying to fix it — was profoundly liberating.

A sense of meaning. Chronic pain can feel meaningless in the worst possible way — suffering without purpose, endurance without reason. My practitioner did not claim my pain had some grand cosmic purpose. She did not say I chose this or that it was karma. What she did was help me find my own meaning within the experience. She helped me see that my pain had made me more compassionate, more present, more attuned to the suffering of others. Not as justification for the pain, but as recognition that even unwanted experiences shape us in ways that have value.

Tools for self-care that actually felt good. The medical system gave me exercises that hurt and medications with side effects. Necessary, but not nourishing. Energy healing gave me practices that felt good to do — meditation, breathwork, visualization, self-Reiki. These were not just therapeutic activities; they were acts of self-love during a time when my body felt like an enemy. They helped me rebuild a positive relationship with my physical self.

Hope without false promises. My practitioner never told me my pain would disappear. She never claimed to cure anything. But she consistently communicated hope — not hope for a specific outcome, but hope as a state of being. Hope that I could find a good life even with pain. Hope that there were dimensions of my experience I had not yet explored. Hope that healing comes in many forms, not all of which involve the absence of symptoms.

The Hard Truths

I would be dishonest if I did not share the less comfortable parts of this journey.

There were sessions that did not feel helpful. A few times, a practitioner said something that felt off-base or generic, and I left the session feeling like I had wasted money I could not easily spare. The chronic pain financial burden is real, and spending money on something that does not deliver is frustrating.

There was a period where I relied too heavily on readings and needed to recalibrate. I was booking sessions whenever I had a bad day, using them as emotional crutches rather than tools for growth. My main practitioner actually called me out on this. She said, “I’m here to help you develop your own resources, not to become a resource you cannot live without.” I respected her enormously for that honesty.

I also had to navigate the judgment of others. When I mentioned to a friend that I was seeing an energy healer, the reaction was a mix of concern and barely concealed derision. “You don’t really believe in that stuff, do you?” I learned to be selective about who I shared this part of my journey with, which felt uncomfortable — another form of the invisibility that chronic pain already imposes.

And I had to repeatedly confront my own skepticism. Even as the sessions helped me, a part of my brain kept insisting that it was all placebo, all imagination, all wishful thinking. Over time, I made peace with that internal debate. Whether the benefits came from “real” energy healing or from the relaxation response, the therapeutic relationship, or the power of focused intention, the benefits were real to me. And in the end, that is what matters.

What I Would Tell Someone Considering This Path

If you are living with chronic pain and considering exploring psychic readings or energy healing, here is what I wish someone had told me:

You are not betraying science by exploring spirituality. Using energy healing does not mean rejecting medicine. It means supplementing it. The most scientifically rigorous approach to chronic pain is one that explores every avenue of potential relief, including those that fall outside conventional frameworks.

Start small. You do not need to commit to a package of ten sessions. Book one reading, see how it feels, and go from there. Many platforms offer introductory rates that make a first session affordable.

Choose your practitioner carefully. Look for someone who specifically mentions health, wellness, or chronic illness in their profile. Read reviews from other clients. And most importantly, find someone who respects your medical care and frames their work as complementary.

Keep seeing your doctor. I cannot stress this enough. Energy healing is a supplement, not a substitute. Continue all prescribed treatments, attend all medical appointments, and keep your healthcare team informed about any complementary approaches you are using.

Be patient with yourself. If your first session does not click, try a different practitioner or modality before writing it off entirely. The right practitioner for you makes an enormous difference. My first session was powerful, but I know people who needed three or four tries before finding someone they connected with.

Track your experience. Keep simple notes about how you feel before and after sessions. Over time, patterns will emerge that help you understand what is most helpful for you.

Do not expect miracles. Energy healing and psychic readings did not cure my chronic pain. They gave me better tools for living with it, a richer understanding of my experience, and a source of comfort that I treasure. If you go in expecting to walk away pain-free, you will be disappointed. If you go in open to whatever form of healing presents itself, you may be surprised by what you find.

Where I Am Now

My chronic pain is still part of my life. Some days are hard. Some days are harder. But I am no longer lying on the floor wondering if this is all there is.

I still see my energy healer twice a month. I still do self-Reiki before bed. I still use the breathing and visualization techniques she taught me. These practices have become as natural a part of my pain management routine as my stretches and my medication.

I have also expanded my exploration. I tried a chakra healing session on a different platform that introduced me to a new practitioner whose approach complemented my regular healer’s work. I experimented with crystal meditation after a session where my practitioner suggested specific stones that might resonate with my energy. Not all of it stuck, but the exploration itself has value — the act of actively seeking comfort rather than passively enduring suffering.

The biggest change is internal. I no longer see my body as broken. I see it as challenged, adapting, and carrying more than physical weight. I have compassion for it in a way I did not before. That compassion did not come from a doctor’s office or a pharmacy. It came from a woman on the phone who told me to put my hands on my own body and send it love. Simple as that. Unscientific as that. True as that.

If you are in pain and you are searching for something you cannot quite name — comfort, connection, meaning, hope — I want you to know that it is out there. Not in a cure or a miracle, but in the willingness to explore the full breadth of the human experience, including the parts that science has not yet learned to measure.

You deserve comfort. You deserve to be seen — all of you, not just the parts that show up on an imaging scan. And if a psychic reading or an energy healing session is what helps you feel seen, then it is worth every minute.

Disclaimer: This is a personal account and should not be taken as medical advice. Psychic readings and energy healing are complementary practices and are not substitutes for professional medical care. If you are living with chronic pain, please continue working with qualified healthcare providers. If you are experiencing feelings of hopelessness or thoughts of self-harm, contact your doctor or a mental health crisis line immediately.