When I first meet the famous psychic Estelle Bingham I’m in a terrible state. Ten minutes before our scheduled Zoom chat, I receive a text telling me I am effectively homeless thanks to ongoing issues over who is going to live in the flat my ex-boyfriend and I once shared.
The thought of finding, furnishing and funding a home, while working to earn a crust and managing my two high-maintenance dogs, has me panicked and nauseous with stress.
I should really be talking to a lawyer or an accountant, or applying for a bank loan. Instead, I find myself pouring out my fears about heartbreak, money and survival to Bingham. I’m dizzy and breathless. Is this what a nervous breakdown feels like?
I bet Gwyneth Paltrow – one of Bingham’s highest-profile fans – has never had a meltdown like this while chatting to the rock star psychic.
In fact, I wonder how difficult a client I am going to be, full stop. Bingham is best known for helping people ‘manifest’ love in their lives, but I don’t want to attract a tall, dark stranger. I want to attract money.
My plan was to be a poker-faced sceptic who asked questions and gave nothing away, but of course that all flies out of the window. I think Bingham takes it as a compliment. She is used to people collapsing in a puddle in their first session, she tells me, because ‘they subconsciously know they’re now safe’.
The trouble is, I tell her anxiously, I’d let my ex-partner take the strain financially over the course of our 15-year relationship and gradually lost a lot of faith in myself and my ability to support myself.
Unmarried and childless, however, I am no more than a flatmate in the eyes of the law now we have split up, and he is under no legal obligation to do anything for me.
Kate Spicer’s plan was to be a poker-faced sceptic who asked questions and gave nothing away, but of course that all flies out of the window
Famous psychic Estelle Bingham, 53, is a more earthy figure than Day, but she mixes with a glamorous crowd too
But Bingham has my back. We decide that we will work together for a month on my financial situation, partly in person and partly by going through the exercises in her new book Manifest Your True Essence, which has the strapline ‘Clear your blocks, find your joy, live your truth.’
I’ve no idea what that means, but I am willing to learn just so long as she rescues me from financial ruin.
In fact working with psychics for the purpose of attracting money isn’t as unusual as it sounds.
Laura Day, known as the Wall Street Psychic, is retained by corporations who hope she will anticipate problems before they happen, which – it’s claimed – she has done.
Stock market crashes, fluctuating soy bean prices, badly designed packaging – you name it, she apparently saw it coming.
Glamorous, business-like, dressed in Prada, with homes in Manhattan, LA, Rome and London, Day is the official psychic of the 42 Soho House private members’ clubs across four continents. Her other clients have included Euro Disney, the William Morris Agency and a tech company called Seagate. One of her biggest fans and dearest friends is Demi Moore. Her advice for anyone who wants to visit a psychic is to, ‘go to someone who has been referred by someone sceptical’.
‘Ask for real data that can be verified. Not feelings or advice. This isn’t about chanting “Om”, it’s about being hyperaware [of your own sense of intuition],’ she adds.
The latest of her seven bestselling books on how to use intuition is called The Prism, and is also out this week.
London-based Bingham, 53, is a more earthy figure than Day, but she mixes with a glamorous crowd too. Charlotte Tilbury, whose eponymous cosmetics brand was recently valued at £1.5 billion, tells me that Estelle has ‘absolutely been there with me every step of the way’.
When Bingham first read Tilbury’s tarot cards, she told her ‘you’re going to be the next Estee Lauder’, and Tilbury apparently replied, ‘yes, I am’.
That was 30 years ago, decades before she did indeed become, well, the next Estee Lauder.
I am relieved to learn that neither Bingham nor Day believes in ‘the universe’ just delivering what you want into your lap. Bingham says that confident people will just take information from a ‘psychic reading’ away and get on with it.
The less confident of her clients need healing as well, ‘otherwise my information can’t land’.
I bet Gwyneth Paltrow – one of Bingham’s highest-profile fans – has never had a meltdown like this while chatting to the rock star psychic, writes Kate Spicer
Obviously I fall into this second category. Bingham says you have to take a therapeutic approach first, so that the person can actually act on the predictions she makes.
‘At the moment you are at war with yourself and in a state of overwhelm. You never feel safe. Once you’ve unravelled the unconscious bits in the brain, you can activate your own practical intuition and focus on your heart while tuning out mental noise. Then things flow to you.’
Yet again, I’m not sure what that actually means but when it comes to ‘flow’, psychics are certainly skilled at ensuring their own cash flow is sound.
Bingham charges £200 an hour and is so popular people wait as long as a year for an appointment, while Day’s corporate clients pay a $15,000 (£11,600)-a-month retainer.
Her capacity to heal people and give them information about their future, means, ‘I make people feel good, they get addicted to coming to me,’ adds Bingham. ‘I love seeing my clients but I’d much rather they read my book or came on my retreats and learned how to do it to themselves, so they don’t need me at all.’
For a DIY approach, she uses a series of self-regulation and self-awareness exercises, which are in the book, to help people listen to what their heart is telling them, since it lies at the seat of our intuition.
This sounds vague, but is not without scientific rationale. There is a brain-heart connection, she maintains. The 40,000 neurons in our cardiac nervous system communicate information to the brain and affect how we see and feel the world. This link is what neuroscientists call the ‘neurovisceral integration model’.
Bingham took nearly 15 years developing the True Essence process she outlines in her book.
First, you must learn how to move thinking from the head to the heart. Second you unravel who you really are and learn how to manifest what you want. And, finally, you regularly practise what you’ve learned.
You have to put the work in though. I admit I had rather hoped I could just lie down and let her work her magic.
I had pictured her eyeballs rolling back in her head as she started speaking in tongues and that I’d then leave transformed and with the EuroMillions jackpot numbers written on a little piece of paper in my pocket.
It doesn’t go like that at all. Her ‘spirit guide’, which she refers to as ‘Spirit’, is like ‘a stealth bomber’, she says.
It brings her ‘pictures, words, ages and snapshots of places and feelings. Spirit is like a doctor leaving notes at the end of a hospital bed.’
At our first face-to-face meeting, she tells me almost as soon as I sit down on her large white sofa with a huge sphere of carnelian in my lap ‘for grounding’, that all my issues with money stem from when I was six years old.
Uh oh! I’m not up for rummaging through my past. Idiot, I think to myself – you should have just gone on some kind of life skills course. Or hired a financial coach.
‘Do we have to talk about childhood?’ I groan.
The 40,000 neurons in our cardiac nervous system communicate information to the brain and affect how we see and feel the world
‘People always say that,’ she says. ‘But everyone has something from childhood that can cause blocks and stop things flowing towards them. The inner child stuff is fundamental to you feeling truly abundant. We will move that out of your system, but I can’t do it overnight.’
We work on tuning into feelings in my body and out of thoughts in my head. We identify places of discomfort where emotions sit – ‘blockages’ she calls them. I describe the way I feel them: swirling in my gut, tightness in my throat; a pinch in my heart. ‘And your solar plexus?’ she asks pointing to the area at the bottom of my ribcage. ‘Yes, it’s like someone with a broom handle prodding it from inside.’ These are ‘blocks’ she says, ‘stuck energy’, which she sees as black, sticky stuff that has to be moved out.
Really? Or are they just different words for depression, anxiety and the misery of divorce?
The process feels like ‘somatic work’, a kind of psychotherapy, which includes identifying how things that happen to us show up in the body as physical feelings. I say as much to her and she says: ‘Maybe. But it isn’t the same.
‘We are just going deep, releasing and moving on. I don’t want you going over and over narrating the same story.’
Money ‘is just energy’, Bingham says, although she prefers the word ‘abundance’, which is the tasteful spiritual word for getting everything you want.
‘Abundance’ is the sort of word I imagine Meghan Markle chanting in her white cashmere yoga pants. ‘I manifest abundance.’
But how can I tune into abundance when all I feel is the discomfort of debt? I don’t care if I never have a boyfriend again, but I am sick to death of the panic and scrabble at tax time. If I had been better with money, my relationship would not necessarily have been saved, but it might not have ended with me feeling so worthless. Frankly, I am never going near another relationship unless I feel secure in myself financially.
Bingham tells me I have two big blockages. One is the ‘ancestral stuff’, how my family thought and talked about money as something that is always scarce, and that scarcity being linked to sadness.
‘And the second is that you have never felt safe. You’ve not felt safe since you were six. You’ve lived all that time just at a level of survival with no resources because it’s all you know. And you validate all your shame by projecting it into money. ‘You are perfectly capable of manifesting abundance, but these emotional objects stuck in your body are blocking your capacity to be what you could be.’
Learning to think with my heart, she says, ‘will mean you drop into a feeling state rather than a thinking one. You’ll be more aware of blocks that give rise to negativity, fear, stress and worry’.
I sit there, mute. It all feels too much. The incense burning, the large crystal in my lap, listening to her describe ancestral trauma, ‘heart math’, emotional blockages, manifesting abundance and the inner child. I start to think crossly that ‘this is all just new age psychobabbling rubbish…’ and then it comes out very quickly and smoothly, like a snake slithering out of my mouth.
Some crucial and private details about my life, my family. Issues I can see going right back for generations – the inherited shame and distorted snobbery of being ‘poor relations’.
And then some other stuff too personal and uncomfortable even for an oversharing person like me to describe.
In the book, she writes about how when we tune in to the heart and are ‘sitting with the truth of [our] sorrow’ and ‘being a kind parent to [our] inner child’ we can clear blocks and find joy.
And seeing Bingham makes me feel good. Despite the discomfort of sharing some deeply private stuff, which with hindsight was uncomfortable and awkward, I leave her house skipping down the street.
Later still, I feel cross that I wasted my opportunity with her for a reading by needing so much work on my sad and broken self.
I can only hope the healing will help me find ‘abundance’. But I do wonder has something inside me unlocked?
As I left, she told me: ‘Just keep spending moments, however brief, dropped in to your heart and witness what unfolds. Check in with your heart every day and you will be a magnet for love, miracles, and yes, money.’
So I do. I read her book again, do her exercises, and I try my best.
And what has happened since we began working together?
In some ways everything is the same, but… work has picked up. I found a home within a day or two of the Zoom meltdown. I was asked by an editor to try a wacky meat diet that relieved the chronic anxiety that had plagued me for months. I paid the rent and deposit and moved into a new home last week.
How much of this is down to my work with Bingham? It’s impossible to tell. Or that’s what I think…
Then I look back at the notes I made during that very first Zoom, when I was out of my mind with stress and anxiety and didn’t process much of what she said. That first encounter had contained a number of predictions that I had completely forgotten, yet they were here written down.
‘You are going to be fine, more than fine,’ she told me. ‘There’s a book you are working on and you are stressed about it and pouring your heart and soul into. It will be the leading book in its field, the go-to that everyone remembers. Get your s**t together. You’re going to move house soon, and settle down and quietly write that thing and finish it.
‘It’s going to be hard work but it’s low hanging fruit. You are stressed about it at the moment but you will make a lot of money on that book. Once you get it together, it’s going to be game on. That money is waiting. I’m excited for you.’
Wow. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t really remembered any of this.
I thought about what she said about ‘stuff not landing’ with people who aren’t focused or feeling good enough about themselves to hear it. I’d really like that prediction of hers to land. So once again I sat down, closed my eyes, and tuned out of my head and into my heart.
Have I too become a little bit addicted to Estelle Bingham? Ask me again when I’ve made my first million.
