Ethical Psychic - Dr. Jennifer Lisa Vest

 Applying a Psychic Physic to a Pretty Sick World - 

One Relationship at a Time?                 January 26, 2023

The Ethical Psychic: A Beginner's Guide to Healing with Integrity, Avoiding Unethical Encounters, and Using Your Gifts for Good by Jennifer Lisa Vest
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

 Spiritual workers like Matthew Fox, Jean Shinoda Bolen, Vicki Noble and Joanna Macy have been working for decades on unifying mind, body, spirit and community; as well as cultural, religious and arts workers breaking down the pyramidic hierarchies of power-over dominance that have been stunting our growth towards a viable, healthy omnisphere. 

     Indigenous healers have been doing it for millennia. Dr. Vest lays it out, plain, simple, with clear explanations of colonialist, culturally appropriative, disrespectful, “arrogance and inauthentic claims of authority” named for the “exploitation” that they are. The Ethical Psychic: A Beginner’s Guide to Healing with Integrity, Avoiding Unethical Encounters, and Using Your Gifts for Good. 

     Maybe due to the ongoing asocial disembodiment of pandemic isolation, you are now entering the Twilight Zone of Berkeley literary arts. “Woo-woo” means “(derogatory slang) based on or involving irrational superstition,” which is how various people define everything from centuries-old organized religious and dietary traditions to the latest totally whacked-out online conspiracy theory. Depending, of course, on where we fall on the infinitely long, linear, shifting and nuanced rational-irrational/fact-superstition spectrums.
     

     Dr. Jennifer Lisa Vest spoke on zoom to the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists last fall and this weekend (November 2022), and North Atlantic Books of Berkeley sent me Ethical Psychic soon after. NAB is a “nonprofit publisher committed to a bold exploration of the relationships between mind, body spirit, culture, and nature…aims to nurture a holistic view of the arts, sciences, humanities, and healing.” This is where humanity and the planet need to go, and the sooner the better.      

     I was skeptical at first, but had already heard Afro-Indigenous mixed-race Dr. Vest, Bachelor of Science in Physics from Hampshire College, Ph. D. in Philosophy with a dissertation on “Critical Indigenous Philosophy: Disciplinary Challenges Posed by African and Native American Epistemologies,” and felt convinced that this scholar with life experience and multiple apprenticeships was the real deal. I was not disappointed. 

     This is not only for intuitives and brujas, but ALL kinds of healers, and frankly, government employees, physicians, nurses, (MIDWIVES!) social workers, therapists and others who work with the public in both regulated and unregulated service professions. It wouldn’t hurt the Mayor, City Councilors, police officers etc. to start thinking of thOur community as somewhere that absolute authenticity, financial and resource transparency, integrity, “sensitivity to client needs,” privacy, humility, clear interpersonal boundaries, “focus and attention” are respected; where “intuition and rationality must be combined” “that will assist the client on their own chosen path.” 

     An entirely ancient and incredibly do-able metamorphosis and evolutionary step homo sapiens could take right now with our amazing brains, technologies and creativity to truly relearn how to resuscitate a thriving world community and geosphere once more. If it can be dreamed, it can be done?

     Neo-paganism, women’s support groups and Jeremy Taylor, Cecilia Engelhart and Stanley Krippner’s dream groups have been marvelously enlightening from 2010 to the present for me here; to say nothing of Donald Rothenberg, James and Jane Baraz’ meditation and other Spirit Rock sessions and retreats, gamelan concerts and partaking in the sumptuous international cultural, culinary, intellectual, arts and spiritual feasts available in Berkeley and the Bay Area in general. There IS “gold rush” speed, greed and flash here, but a lot of cutting-edge human potential support, innovation, experimentation and longing to return to profound health, traditional values and culture happening, too. 

     I felt humbled and honored to dance in the post-pandemic return of the Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park Indigenous Peoples Day Pow Wow, but in the same way, Solstice Berkeley Times "Critter Divination," for example, one human being does NOT “make sacred” space. “Sacred space” exists everywhere, and can be called up through respect, ritual and attention. 

     The vocal and ritual calling out and naming of spatial interrelationships, animate and inanimate powers and beings by a spokesperson aware of their own flaws, omissions and background submitting to a respected group of humans gathered for that purpose merely focuses attention on the sacredness that's already there.  

     A wise healer (artist, storyteller, mayor, teacher, medical professional) knows VERY WELL, FIRST AND FOREMOST, “It isn’t about me." "Matter and energy are neither created nor destroyed.” We protect our “own health, traditions and values,” are “able to acknowledge and learn from mistakes” and be “guided by something larger than yourself.”

     As in astrology, “the stars impel” or “incline” occurrence, “they do not compel.” At the same time, there are neuro-biological tides that have been working in ways we “understand” only in “irrational” ways coming to us over thousands and thousands of years. We have done our best to track, chart and delineate them in language, literature and custom; as well as in storytelling, ritual and song.      

     What’s going to work to save Mother Earth? One relationship at a time? Right now? Do we have the answers already in the neuro-biological recesses of ThOur body/souls? Beyond habit? Beyond the “old normal?”

https://drvestmedicalintuitive.com/
 

A short version of this review was first published as "Ethical Evolutions" in Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times, Wyndy Knox Carr.


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