The Rock Stars of Spiritual Wellness

When I first moved to Los Angeles from New York seven years ago, nothing about my lifestyle was healthy. I thought working out was pointless, considered rosé a legitimate hydration source, and wrote off the supernatural as super lame. But it didn't take long for the woo-woo fumes of LA to start intoxicating me. Most of the friends I made here were into some kind of “witch stuff,” from charging crystals in full moonlight to collecting their period blood in a jar for future spells. (Seriously.) Slowly, though, the gravitational pull of constant seeking got me. Suddenly, I was drinking enough water, trying to meditate, and going on hikes after work to clear my head. I got sober, went deep into therapy, and became more open to the idea of alternative practices for healing (though I’m still not quite ready to try ecstatic dance). While the scientific data on its efficacy is scant, if people find solace in the mystical, who am I to yuck their yum?

California has always been a haven for outlaws and dreamers, but in LA, where The Industry is a cruel master, many of those dreams end up broken. On my morning commute across the city, I remember being in awe of the many normal-looking houses affixed with signs advertising psychics, fortune tellers, and palm readers. Are people here that desperate for answers? After almost a decade in the City of Angels, I finally understand the need for an oracle.

Not all healers are created equal. But some have powerful lore that trickles from their celebrity clients down to us plebes. Spend enough time in wellness circles and you’ll get shared a phone contact with an exploding star emoji in the name, the key to a psychic who speaks in “light language” for Hollywood’s brightest. You’ll hear of an exorcist who pulls the torment out of actors before the Oscars, learn about a stylist-turned-hypnotist who helps the fashion set declutter their brains, and meet an astrologer who travels the galaxy with her high-powered clients, advising them on the perfect time to make all their moves. It feels like there are more pathways to fixing your life than ever. Could just a few sessions nudge me toward my higher self? Grab your sage and find out.

The Psychic

I get chills as Wendy L’Belle-Tividad, golden-haired and feather-lashed psychic to the stars, rubs what she calls “wolf oil” on my hands as we begin our session. The blend of 10 essential oils, handmade by her mother, is L’Belle-Tividad’s signature scent, and it makes her Mongolian yurt in Sherman Oaks smell like a fairy kingdom in a misty pine forest. She has long pink square-tip nails and sports numerous glittering rings, including a massive amethyst stone on her ring finger that I’d have no problem believing has magical powers.

After leading me in a spiral breathing exercise, she suddenly fixes her big blue eyes downward to the right and begins telling me about my personality (still a kid at heart), my upbringing (difficult and chaotic), my passions (writing, the ocean), and problems I’ve struggled with my whole life (forgiveness). I’m in the process of moving, she tells me (correctly), and that the closets in my new place are a mess (check). “Sometimes I’m so into someone’s life, it feels like I’m in their lingerie drawer,” she says, and I worry she can see the hole-y Hanes I need to throw out.

“I was seeing entities everywhere. At that point I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can shut this down again.’”

But I don’t have time to feel self-conscious — we’re going deeper. I’ve been quietly working on a book, something she couldn’t possibly have known, but L’Belle-Tividad starts unfurling plot details. She senses my current creative block and suggests I add more about a character’s father, something I’d actually been pondering. It’s as if she crawled into my brain to read my Scrivener file in a matter of seconds. “I want to nudge you so much to finish this,” she says. “It is so powerful. It is so important. It is part of your therapy. It is healing, but also, it’s a monumental expression of you.”

Hearing her concise yet profound words of encouragement, I’m not shocked to learn L’Belle-Tividad spent much of her professional life as a greeting card writer. Everything changed for her in 2013, though, when she had a Kundalini awakening — a Hindu concept of divine feminine energy said to be stored at the base of the spine. “It can be activated from numerous things, like breathwork, meditation, sex, chanting, or trauma,” she says. “[Mine] was connected to something very painful that happened in my life so that my heart broke open.” She didn’t realize what was going on at first, but the electric feeling was undeniable: “It’s like riding a wild dragon when it’s first released.”

That’s when she gained the ability to start “deep trance channeling.” It’s not just that she can see energies, look into your past, or sketch out the unknown future — her fondness for wrestling with present-day creative problems has also made her popular among Hollywood’s creative set. “This is actually one of my favorite things to do in readings: I help people with songs, with books, with stories,” says L’Belle-Tividad (who’s also mom to electropop musician Harmony, formerly of Girlpool). “I’m an artist and writer, so I wasn’t looking to do something else. This literally called me. I still don’t think about if I’m gifted at it or not. I just think I’m supposed to be helping people.”

When she’s not doing individual sessions, L’Belle-Tividad hosts sound baths, breathwork classes, and “Goddess” events where she’ll gather upwards of 70 women in her backyard for various healing workshops. She’s also a recurring guest on the Otherworld podcast hosted by Jack Wagner, a former skeptic who found her after meeting a woman who claimed L’Belle Tividad accurately sensed her dad was being poisoned by her stepmom. (Thanks to the reading, she says, they saved his life.) As our time together winds down, L’Belle-Tividad sheepishly reveals she’s booked until 2027, with a waitlist of 2,100 people. I am not surprised — if I was a famous creative, I wouldn’t want to work on anything without her guidance.

The Exorcist

Rachel Stavis has cleared plenty of haunted houses in her career, but she’s most interested in what’s haunting you. “People don’t realize that over 80% of the population is walking around with some attachment,” reveals Stavis, who says she’s worked with musicians, politicians, athletes, and Hollywood elites. “I don’t mean to sound scary, but it’s just observationally the truth.”

These negative attachments come in various forms — some of them appear to her “like a Clive Barker drawing” — and can even be picked up from another person, she explains matter-of-factly. One such entity Stavis calls “the Wraith,” as detailed in her 2017 memoir, Sister of Darkness, which is being adapted into a TV show. The Wraith frequently attaches to people dealing with trauma, abuse, or other difficulties, and it often manifests as sleep paralysis.

It turns out I have a Wraith following me, too, or at least something like it. Upon arriving at her enchanting midcentury bungalow in the hills of Studio City, Stavis asks me if I frequently have nightmares. I tell her I’ve struggled with bad dreams my entire life, which Stavis says she immediately picked up on — she’s noticed a creepy-looking figure hovering behind me. I am freaked out, but ready to do the work.

“Hypnosis is not like what you see in the movies.”

Stavis, who’s in her 40s, looks like the Love Witch with long black hair, severe eyeliner, and a flowy ‘70s dress. She asks me to leave my phone, shoes, and jewelry outside before entering her spirit room, which is adorned with vintage art, candles, and an apothecary shelf filled with jars of different potions. I feel lucky to be here; Stavis is pretty exclusive for in-person cleansings, often only inviting referral-based clients into her home.

The exorcist sees her work as multi-denominational, drawing on a number of different practices depending on a client’s needs. She doesn’t share all the details publicly — “It would be dangerous for others to try and do it for themselves,” she says — but our session involves what I imagine is standard ghost-banishing fare: incantations, burning herbs, crystals. She also refers to Akashic records (a kind of archive of the universe’s past, present, and future, according to some spiritual movements) as well as Kundalini. “For you in particular, there were so many deceased people [in the room during the session],” she tells me after, sending a chill down my spine. “So we pulled in a lot of ancestral energy for you, because that’s what came through for you.”

Though she can see dead people, Stavis clarifies that she’s not a medium or psychic and has no interest in extracting information from them. Instead, people come to her for help with any number of personal issues, like grief or addiction, and clearing out whatever spiritual blockages might be in the way. “This is very much part of wellness, because when you come in here and we can take some of that [emotional] pain and trauma out of the body, it makes a huge difference,” she says. “It makes it manageable for someone to go through. And it sounds crazy. I understand.”

Stavis describes seeing entities since she was a child growing up in South Florida. When she’d complain about a monster under the bed or in the closet, everyone would brush it off like she was a regular spooked kid, but for her, the visions never went away. For a long time, she tried to ignore them. Then, about a decade ago, she got into a minor car accident, and — boom — the spirit world seemed to crack open. “Now I was seeing entities everywhere. I was seeing who the person who’s screaming at nothing was screaming at in the streets,” she recalls. “And at that point I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can shut this down again.’”

At the time, Stavis had a career writing for video games, but she started working with a few clients on a word-of-mouth basis. Then she met a public radio reporter, and everything exploded from there. She now has a full-time practice with both in-person and virtual clients, and continues to work on book and film projects.

“My entire goal is to change the way people think about exorcism,” Stavis says, noting that while the Catholic Church has a lock on its pop-culture depictions, many cultures throughout history have engaged in this type of practice. “I want people to think of it as more of a holistic spiritual healing.”

I go to sleep that night and dream of nothing.

The Hypnotist

In any other context, lying down on my bed, covering my eyes, and setting up my laptop so a stranger can watch me on FaceTime would make me, uh, extremely uncomfortable. But I feel safe with hypnotist Morgan Yakus, a self-described “human cartographer” and practitioner of “neuro-linguistic programming,” which purports that we can use language to create new pathways in the brain and override unhelpful thoughts and habits. As a writer, I, of course, believe in the power of words, but I never considered there’d be a way to use language to fix my (somewhat) broken brain.

Yakus and I had already exchanged numerous emails about what we’d work on in our session and zeroed in on my tendency for negative self-talk and my fears about the future. In what is probably the most soothing voice I’ve ever heard in my life, she begins to guide me through a meditation aimed at showing me the patterns my mind creates. “Hypnosis is not like what you see in the movies, and you do not go out or under,” she tells me after I express some nerves about the process. “It’s a gentle way to make the changes you desire.”

Yakus thinks of the mind as “a computer system with a desktop, applications, hard drive, and a trash bin” — periodically, we need to update the software and clean out the junk. People come to her for a laundry list of issues, including low confidence, stress, and insomnia; she works on refreshing your brain by connecting new, positive images and audio to old triggers or negative associations. “The best shortcut technique is to interrupt the negative thought pattern and put a positive visual outcome in its place,” she explains in an email.

“In all of your past lives, you were somebody who had to literally be perfect or people died.”

Yakus, who has dark, pin-straight hair and is dressed in a chic black blouse, asks me not to record our session, but we do a number of exercises, including one where I imagine different versions of myself: a new, fulfilled, thriving Alana squashes an old Alana full of pain and trauma. My favorite is the one where I threw every painful feeling, thought, and person into a giant fire and watched it burn.

Before finding her current calling, Yakus spent years working in fashion: styling Lauryn Hill for her Miss Education Tour, doing PR for Gucci, and co-founding and owning the No. 6 boutique in New York. But she always had a curiosity for the healing arts, perhaps because she was raised around creatives, Buddhists, and vegetarians. “I never planned or expected to be doing this specific type of work for the last 10 years,” says Yakus (whose dad worked with rock bands as an engineer — her childhood memories include palling around with Stevie Nicks at the studio). “It was a happy surprise and makes a lot of sense for who I am at heart.” Though her career path is not exactly traditional, she sees a through line: “I can help people make long-lasting changes, whereas before I was helping them feel temporarily good by styling or designing a dress [that] makes them feel confident.”

While I can’t say all my problems were solved in an hour, I did feel a deep calm and sense of lightness — as if she had indeed right-clicked and emptied the trash bin of my mind.

The Astrologer

It’s been hard to track Rosie Cutter down, as she’s been in Glastonbury with her client, Dua Lipa, when I first try to schedule a meeting. In her press photos, she looks like an aspiring country star, but when we finally connect in July via Zoom, she’s back at her place in Aspen, clad in a bathrobe, with an aerial yoga swing behind her. It feels like I’m on a casual Facetime with a close friend, even though we’ve never met. “Wait until I read you,” she says, giddy with excitement. “The system is so accurate.”

Cutter, 39, says her clients include celebrities, large companies, politicians, and even people looking for guidance on court cases or real estate. She uses several practices that are all based around the timing of your birth: Western astrology (what most of us think of); human design (a tool for self-knowledge that incorporates Kabbalah, Vedic philosophy, physics, and more); and destiny cards (a divination method based on traditional playing cards said to predate Tarot).

I send her my birth date, time, and location in advance, and she begins our call by asking me about myself and what I want guidance on. “We can look at the timing and see when things are likely to happen,” she says. “Astrology is kind of like the weather.” In 30 minutes, I’m hoping she can steer me out of the anxiety around my book project.

“Sometimes I’m so into someone’s life, it feels like I’m in their lingerie drawer.”

Cutter tells me there are a lot of “funny things” in my chart. She proceeds to identify personality traits and life events only those closest to me would know: I don’t like doing things I’m not good at (“because of my North Node,” which is in Pisces); my mom is a big influence in my life (lots of Virgo energy); something serious happened at age 6 (my parents got divorced); and I need to be careful with wine (I am five years sober because I wasn’t so careful with wine). According to the destiny card system, I was born on a “really dynamic and powerful” day, and I’m a five of clubs, along with Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, Al Gore, and Monica Lewinsky. I am what Cutter labels a “truth seeker” — as a journalist, this tracks.

Cutter started her own career as a speech therapist for autistic children. That work took her to Kauai, a “spiritual mecca,” she says, where she started learning about different kinds of readings. From there, she pursued music — “My astrology told me I’d be good at music, which, by the way, you would be very good at it, too” — and in between various gigs (folk, children's music, classic rock), she began offering her own readings via Skype. There was a stint in Ibiza: “The founder of human design, who [lived in] Ibiza, died suddenly. I had met a famous Dutch DJ and human design analyst, and we fell in love. He was like, ‘Babe, let’s go to Ibiza. My guru just died.’” She also logged time in Brazil and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, before settling in Colorado, where she works with about 1,000 clients a year.

“Can I just talk some sh*t on you for a second here?” Cutter asks with a laugh, before launching into a perfect summation of my bullsh*t. “In all of your past lives, you were a surgeon, an army general, somebody who had to literally be perfect or people died. So there’s this insane sense of urgency,” she says. “My joke about your placement is that you’re the kind of person that will record an album for 20 years but never release it because it’s not perfect.”

Cutter doesn’t believe her readings are fixed, however. “You have control over your life,” she promises. She identifies these patterns and traits as a means for growth. “I find astrology really useful. I always tell people it’s how I try to fix all my glaring personality deficits,” Cutter says. “It shows you these facets of your personality and which ones tend to dominate, and how to balance that out.”

Ultimately, astrology is about understanding that “there is a loving force in the universe that’s trying to make things easier and better for us,” she says.

And she’s got some good news for me: Although the beginning of my life was challenging, this fall, I’ll be able to finally push through the perfectionist terror that’s been holding me back. “This is a year where you are obligated, on a spiritual level, to step onto this higher path,” she says. “You will find something that you were meant to do from the day you were born.”

After everything I’ve tried, I think I believe her.