The experience fundamentally shaped the way she understood intuition. Rather than seeing psychic perception as something separate from ordinary human awareness, she began to recognize how intuition could operate alongside observation, empathy, pattern recognition, and interpersonal sensitivity. Each reading became an exercise in listening: to what a client said, what remained unsaid, and what emerged through the symbolic language of the cards.

Kristi approached readings with the belief that divination should ultimately return people to their own lives rather than make them dependent upon external authority. She encouraged clients to consider what would bring greater happiness, connection, friendship, love, stability, and meaning into their circumstances. Difficult periods were acknowledged without treating them as permanent states, and readings became a way of exploring how someone might move through uncertainty with greater clarity and resilience.

As her practice developed, Kristi began working throughout Eastern Massachusetts in entertainment and event settings, experiences that required her to read for many different personalities and circumstances while maintaining concentration in busy environments. One of the most formative periods of this work brought her to Salem, Massachusetts, where she worked alongside established members of the city’s witchcraft community during the Festival of the Dead.

Her growing involvement with esoteric traditions represented a significant departure from her upbringing. Kristi had been raised in a conservative Protestant household, but as an adult she began exploring a much wider spiritual landscape. Her studies eventually included the Rosicrucian tradition through AMORC, alongside continued exploration of divination, symbolism, meditation, and esoteric philosophy.

Over time, she developed a practice incorporating Tarot, Lenormand, runes, pendulum work, psychometry, and other forms of divination. She also explored experiences she understood through the language of clairvoyance, clairaudience, telepathy, and heightened intuitive perception. These practices became less about mastering isolated techniques and more about developing a broader symbolic vocabulary through which impressions, images, patterns, and experiences could be examined.

The work was rewarding, but it also taught Kristi about the limits and responsibilities of an intuitive practice. Clients frequently arrived during emotionally complicated periods involving relationships, family, work, relocation, grief, uncertainty, or major life decisions. Remaining receptive to another person while maintaining appropriate emotional boundaries required discipline. Long hours, late-night readings, weekends, and the intensity of repeated one-on-one sessions could be exhausting.

There was also the challenge of working within a practice that remains culturally contested. Skepticism toward psychic phenomena meant that Kristi became accustomed to people questioning the legitimacy of what she did. Rather than eliminating that tension, her experiences encouraged her to become more thoughtful about interpretation itself: what an impression might mean, where symbolism ends and assumption begins, and how intuitive information should be communicated responsibly.

Her time in Salem brought those questions into particularly sharp focus.

During the Festival of the Dead, Kristi conducted a daily rune reading and drew Algiz reversed. Upright, Algiz is commonly associated with protection, defense, and guardianship. Initially, she interpreted the reversal primarily through that symbolic framework. As the day unfolded, however, she experienced what she understood as an intense spiritual encounter that made the rune feel considerably more immediate.

Kristi perceived the experience as an unwanted spiritual attachment. During it, she temporarily felt disconnected from the intuitive perception upon which she had come to rely. The sudden absence was frightening enough to provoke panic, particularly because intuition had become deeply integrated into the way she navigated both her work and her everyday life. Another practitioner helped her regain her sense of control, and Kristi later associated physical marks she discovered on her abdomen with the intensity of the encounter.

Whatever interpretation is placed upon the event, it became a turning point in her spiritual practice. It confronted Kristi with the psychological and emotional consequences of treating spiritual experience seriously. The reversed Algiz ceased to be merely an abstract symbol of compromised protection; within her personal symbolic framework, it became associated with vulnerability, boundaries, and the responsibility of knowing when to disengage.

The experience also changed how she approached psychic work. Spiritual practice could not consist solely of remaining perpetually receptive. Discernment, grounding, boundaries, rest, and the ability to close oneself off were equally important. What had initially seemed like a frightening disruption ultimately became an education in the limits of openness.

Other experiences demonstrated a different aspect of intuitive work: its capacity to produce unexpected symbolic correspondences.

In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, Kristi and a coworker occasionally experimented with readings about unfolding public events. During one of these sessions, Kristi used the Medieval Scapini Tarot and drew the Eight of Pentacles. Rather than focusing primarily on the young man depicted in the card, her attention was immediately drawn to the dark-haired woman holding a child beneath him.

Kristi interpreted the imagery symbolically. The child suggested to her the bomb itself, while the woman appeared connected to something occurring behind or around the male figure. The act of painting within the card further suggested construction, fabrication, or the creation of an appearance whose underlying reality was not yet visible. She recorded and discussed the interpretation with her coworker.

Several days later, after Kristi had described the reading to her mother, news reports emerged concerning investigators’ examination of DNA associated with Katherine Russell Tsarnaev in connection with bomb-making materials. The development immediately reminded Kristi of the woman she had focused upon in the card.

The episode did not provide a definitive explanation of what the reading meant, nor did Kristi regard a symbolic reading as a substitute for factual investigation. What made the experience significant to her was the correspondence between an image that had unexpectedly captured her attention and information that subsequently entered the public story. Experiences like this reinforced her interest in the way intuition can sometimes operate through symbols before their significance is consciously understood.

That distinction has remained important to Kristi’s practice. Psychic work, as she understands it, is not simply an attempt to predict a predetermined future. It is an engagement with patterns, symbols, impressions, relationships, and possibilities whose meanings may become clearer only with time.

Today, Kristi’s psychic practice remains integrated with the rest of her creative and intellectual life. Tarot, meditation, symbolism, intuitive perception, and esoteric study exist alongside her artistic practice rather than apart from it. The same sensitivity to patterns that informs a reading can inform an artwork; the same attention to symbolism that appears in divination can become part of a larger creative language.

Her years of reading professionally have also left her with an unusually intimate archive of human experience. She has listened to people confronting love and separation, career changes, family conflict, relocation, uncertainty, hope, disappointment, and transformation. Those encounters taught her that intuition is not valuable simply because it might reveal something hidden. Its greater value lies in what someone can do with the insight afterward.

For Kristi, psychic practice has therefore become both spiritual discipline and a form of attentive listening. It asks her to remain perceptive without becoming overwhelmed, receptive without abandoning discernment, and open to mystery without assuming that every mystery has an immediate explanation.

What began at the Tremont Tearoom as professional psychic work ultimately developed into something much broader: an enduring investigation into perception itself—how people recognize patterns, how symbols acquire meaning, how intuition interacts with conscious thought, and how unseen or difficult-to-articulate experiences can become part of a meaningful human life.