How I Became a Psychic Medium
On Following a Feeling You Can't Explain
This is the story of how I became a psychic medium and animal communicator — not through years of study, but through a series of moments I couldn't ignore.
When It Got Loud
I had been walking for five days when it arrived.
Sand does something to you over that kind of distance. Every step sinks slightly. Your legs work twice as hard. The path along the Alentejo coast winds close to the cliff edge and there is nowhere to go but forward — the Atlantic on one side, open scrub on the other, almost no one else out there. By day two the noise had started to fall away. Not dramatically. More like a tide going out.
On the last day I stood at the edge of a cliff in Portugal — dark earth dropping a hundred feet straight into the ocean below, no railing, no one in sight. The wind was tangling my hair. The sun was on my skin. I could now breathe.
Looking out across the horizon, I felt the way I had every day of that trip. An old familiar feeling, the explorer's feeling, of wanting to know what's out there on the other side.
And, underneath all of that — quiet, certain and not dramatic at all — something became clear.
Something needed to change.
Not from a crisis or a breakdown. Just the particular clarity that arrives when you've walked far enough, and the noise has finally gone quiet enough, to hear what's been there all along.
The voice, when it finally came, wasn't subtle.
Why are you building a business around group travel when you prefer to travel alone?
That was it. Loud, clear, and a little unflattering. But underneath it was something else, something closer to the real question: You built this for everyone else. When did you stop asking what you wanted?
For nearly two decades I had a professional career in design and marketing. The travel business — BonViage — was an attempt to build something new — that felt more like me. But something still wasn't quite right.
The thing is, I'd known it from the beginning. As a feeling I kept overriding with logic. I loved what travel did to me, what it cracked open, what it showed me about myself when in a place I didn't know. By that point I'd traveled to nearly forty countries. On paper it made complete sense.
But I was building the idea of the thing I loved, not the thing itself — something that looks right from the outside but sits wrong on the inside.
So I returned home. And quit my travel business.
People ask me sometimes how someone becomes a psychic medium. For me, it started here.
The Not Knowing
There was relief in quitting. More than I expected. Not because I knew what was coming next. Because I didn't.
A few doors opened in that time. I walked through some of them. And then one day I found myself signing up for a psychic meditation class.
I couldn't have told you exactly why. It was a feeling. The same kind that had gotten loud on a cliff in Portugal — quieter this time, but the same quality underneath it. Something pointing in a direction I didn't fully understand yet.
What began as one class became several years of training in psychic school. That was the first thing that made sense — not on paper, but in a way I hadn't experienced in so long. It felt like a path to remembering.
The first time I learned to scuba dive I was in Hawaii. On my first dive I jumped without looking, sank ten feet and panicked. I immediately came back up to check that the world above was still there.
Then my guide took my hand to assure me. We descended slowly, forty feet down to the ocean floor. A school of a thousand fish circled around me. And I felt the quiet that can only be experienced underwater — my awareness of breath in my body, the world above gone, something vast and alive all around me.
My first clairvoyant class was like that — a guide took my hand as I descended into unknown territory.
The initial disorientation. The instinct to check that the ordinary world was still there. And then — the descent. An inner world opening up that I hadn't known was there. The awe of it.
Clairvoyance and psychic readings became the first place for me that felt like genuine exploration — not outward, across geography, but inward. A place where things I'd always sensed but couldn't explain could finally be seen. And resolved.
I didn't need a plane ticket anymore. The most interesting territory had been here all along.
What Was Already There
The path kept opening. And so did the moments of clarity.
I was on a hike — early in my first animal communication class — when a crow swooped down and landed directly in my path. Not nearby. In front of me. Close enough that I stopped walking.
He stopped too.
We stood there facing each other. And in that stillness, he delivered his message.
Get rid of that jerk.
That was it. No room for interpretation.
I hadn't been listening before. Now I was. And apparently that was all he'd been waiting for.
This is what I love about animal communication. Animals are direct. Uncomplicated. They say exactly what they see. The question is whether you're willing to listen. I learned that most fully after Stanley, my miniature schnauzer of seventeen years, died — when a trip to swim with humpback whales in Tonga became something I never expected.
What I've come to understand is that a psychic reading isn't just a way back to what you already know. It can reach further than that. Images, information, connections that come through from somewhere else entirely. Things you couldn't have gotten to alone, no matter how long you walked.
I think about the people who find their way to me. Something hasn't been sitting right — a feeling they've been carrying for a while, close enough to the surface that it's hard to ignore, but without a clear shape yet. A grief that won't quite resolve. A situation that makes sense on paper but feels wrong. A sense that something needs to change. Sometimes they've been hearing it for years.
That's what I try to offer in every psychic reading and animal communication session. A voice for what you are ready to hear. If you've been carrying a feeling you don't yet have words for, that's enough to start.
For some people one session is enough. Others find that going deeper — returning over time — is where the real shifts happen.
If you're ready to connect, or simply curious about what a session might open up, I'd love to hear from you. Book a session.
If you're curious what makes a session with me different, I've written about that too: I'm Not Your Typical Animal Communicator. Here's Why.
Lesley Ames is a certified animal communicator and psychic medium based in the Pacific Northwest, and volunteers at her local animal shelter. She works remotely with clients in Seattle, Chicago, and worldwide — including the UK, Europe, and Australia. Find her at lesleyames.com.
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