(This post was originally published on my Substack, pameladellpalmer.substack.com on March 23, 2026)
Back in 2013, I accidentally joined a psychic support group.
The group met once a week at the local Unity Church and was led by the late Rev. Lowell K. Smith, who wrote the book Growing Up Psychic. In addition to leading his Indigos and Sensitives group, he did readings for individuals, tapping into their Akashic Records to help them understand their lives and their life paths.
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I’d found him through a neighbor the year before who’d learned about her past lives, so I’d made an appointment to get a reading from him myself. At this point, I knew nothing about psychics or non-religious spirituality other than what I’d seen on television, but I was curious.
Now, Lowell only invited the truly gifted to join his weekly Indigos and Sensitives group. And when I met him in 2012, he did not invite me. If I’d known about his group, I’d have agreed that it was not a place that I belonged.
A year later, I booked a second reading with him because by then I’d learned about spirit guides and I wanted to know if he could tell me anything about mine.
During that second session, he said that because I’d asked about them, two of my guides had joined us at his kitchen table. (I certainly couldn’t tell.) And my guides had some advice for me.
Now, I’d already told Lowell that I was a published novelist, and was currently writing a story with a psychic heroine. My guides indicated to Lowell that they wanted me to get out from behind my computer and interact with people directly. “They’re saying, people like those in my indigos and sensitives group,” Lowell said, unenthusiastically.
Two other times during that session, my guides suggested I interact with people like those in his Indigos and Sensitives group. Finally, Lowell sighed. “I guess you need to come to my group. Come check it out and if you want to come back, I’ll introduce you as a writer researching a novel.”
What went unsaid was that this would help him to explain to the others why he’d invited someone so clearly ungifted to attend their group. To say I was intimidated by the idea of going is an understatement. Really, who better than a bunch of psychics to know you didn’t belong there?
There was a meeting the next night and I told him it was probably too short of notice for me to attend (procrastinating here), and that I was going on a trip and would be gone the following two weeks. Maybe I’d make it the following month.
But when I got home, I faced myself in the mirror and knew that if I didn’t go the next day, I probably never would. And my guides had been quite clear that they wanted me there.
So I gathered my courage — no small feat — and nervously walked into that room of psychics the next day, sure I was going to feel incredibly out of place.
Two things happened. During that session, Lowell led us through a long guided meditation designed to help us to see our astral selves clearly, I think. Or our light bodies. Something like that.
Afterward, we went around the room and shared our experiences during the meditation. Each of the fifteen or sixteen people in the room had had an incredible experience, it seemed to me, and I was both impressed and envious, because I’d sensed and seen absolutely nothing.
The second thing that happened that night was that I was welcomed so warmly by this group of mostly women who were so lovely, friendly, and down to earth, that I immediately wanted to come back.
They told me that I was there for a reason, and that we’re all psychic. All of us. We just have different ways of connecting. I certainly didn’t think I belonged in that group, and yet, somehow I felt like I did.
So I went back, week after week, for a good three years. Did my psychic gifts finally open? Nope. Lowell asked us to bring a notebook to group each week to record our experiences and my book remained frustratingly empty.
There were people in that group who saw angels and other light beings plain as day. They shared story after story of incredible experiences – being spoken to telepathically by a baby too young to speak, astral traveling to the Goddess Realm, knowing something was going to happen before it did. And always, always having incredible experiences during our weekly guided meditations.
I experienced none of these things, which my guides have called the bells and whistles, or the overt gifts. However something else began to happen.
One of the senior members of the group approached me early on to say that her guides, and mine, had asked her to help me, if I was willing. Through her, they told me I had a gift for channeling. I scoffed and they replied, “What do you think you’ve been doing when you write your books?”
My jaw dropped. I’d channeled Desire Untamed and the many other sexy paranormal romance novels I’d published? I imagined angels helping me write sex scenes and didn’t know whether to laugh or be mortified.
From then on, this woman sat next to me in those weekly sessions, whispering comments to me from my guides, and I slowly came to realize they were always with me, always communicating with me, if not in easy-for-me-to-notice ways.
At one point, Lowell told me that I was getting the information that everyone else was, but that not only didn’t I understand the language, “You don’t even recognize it as language.”
I groaned. It felt like having an 8-Track cassette with all the knowledge I needed, and absolutely no way to play it.
One of the greatest compliments Lowell ever gave me was when he said to me, “You’re really connected.” I still wasn’t gifted, not in the way he, and most of the people in that group were, but I was connected. And connecting is, after all, the whole reason for psychic gifts.
It’s taken me a long, long time to learn to trust the almost constant nudges and inspiration and feelings that I receive, and to trust that the voice in my head, which is my voice, is also more, especially as it’s shifted from speaking with the ego’s fear and judgement, to the love and kindness of those who have been guiding me all along.
Where does the human stop and the spirit begin? As humans we think these are two entirely different things. A soul. A human. A spirit guide. Source. An angel.
All different. All separate.
But they’re not. Ultimately they – we – are all one. Literally. We can experience existence individually while we’re in human form, but we are not separate.
I’ve learned to flow with this knowledge, to feel for the truth instead of trying to quantify it. These words are coming through me, through my fingertips, onto the keyboard.
But whose words are they? Are they Pamela’s? Are they the angels’? Or maybe a combination of both, and more besides?
Honestly, I don’t know any longer and I don’t care, because it doesn’t matter. It feels light and true to me, and that’s all that matters.
I talk about what I see as if I’m finally getting those visions I envied for so long. And I am, kind of sort of. I still get nothing when I meditate. It’s like I stare at a television screen that hasn’t been plugged into the wall.
However, just recently, I’ve found that I can tease out an image pretty regularly by sitting with my eyes closed and asking, “What wants my attention?” and then intentioning that an image will come.
It’s a small shift, from waiting to intentioning, but it’s making a rather miraculous difference for me. It’s almost like I’m pressing my face through the wall of fog to see something that I need to see rather than waiting for it to come to me.
Now these images are quite unimpressive, from a clarity standpoint. They’re small, sometimes tiny, and barely formed, like sketches seen in bad lighting. But my inner vision isn’t working alone. It’s part of the team.
My mind grabs the image and fills in the blanks. Then my intuition explains it. And if I’m still not clear what it means, or simply want to discuss it further, I place my fingers on my keyboard and ask my guides to more fully explain. And they do.
It’s all subtle. But it’s a flow that I’ve been learning to dance in for over a decade, now, and I’ve come to trust it, and trust my own inner compass to tell me if it’s off.
I don’t channel like the gifted channels I follow online — Lee Harris, Suzanne Giesemann, Sara Landon, and Daniel Scranton, to name just a few. Each of them steps out of the way and lets the words come through them.
I don’t exactly do that. They call themselves conscious channelers. I consider myself more of a conversational channeler. I don’t get out of the way. I talk with whomever I’m channeling, and they with me, and I record the entire conversation through my fingertips.
This is very similar to how I write novels, moving from the point of view of one character to another, hearing their dialogue in my head and writing it down.
When I channel, it often feels like I’m playing the part of both the human and the one communicating with her from the other side.
I’ve been told by my guides that that analogy is not incorrect. I am, in fact, part of their collective consciousness. I’m just the one with the fingers, the one typing. I’m the one in human form.
Bottom line, I still envy people who can astral travel or remote view, or see angels and hear the voices of their guides as distinct voices outside of them. Someday, I really hope those things open up for me, too.
Nevertheless, I am, as Lowell said, really connected. I am in constant contact and communication with the universe. In my own unique way. A way that I’m coming to realize is probably more powerful for me exactly because it lacks the bells and whistles.
I’ve had to listen so closely to the whispers, attune so carefully to the most subtle of vibrations, and open to every possible source of communication in a way I simply wouldn’t have if the messages had come through in the clear, living color visions I’ve often wished they would.
And I’ve come to unequivocally know the truth of what I was told at that first meeting back in 2013. We’re all psychic. We all have the ability to connect with spirit. We just don’t all connect in the same way.
Which is precisely as it’s meant to be.