Psychic & Healing Fest Comes to County

At a glance

What: Conejo Valley Psychic & Healing Festival.
When: 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday.
Where: Palm Garden Hotel, 495 N. Ventu Park Road, Newbury Park.
Details: Author signings, lectures, psychics, clairvoyants, tarot card readers, mediums, healers, massage therapists. The evening will end with a psychics abilities demonstration in which attendees can test their own skills and receive mini readings.
Info: http://www.psychichealingfestival.com.

Two local practitioners and teachers of the psychic and healing arts are launching Conejo Valley’s first-ever Psychic & Healing Festival on Sunday, with plans for future monthly offerings in Newbury Park.

Organizers Lexa Finley and Debra Lynne Katz say they are committed to raising awareness of the benefits of maintaining an inward spiritual practice and exploring one’s natural intuitive gifts.

“When I first came to the area, I thought I was the only psychic,” said Katz, a Moorpark resident and author of “You Are Psychic: The Art of Clairvoyant Reading & Healing.”

The festival is hoped to create a supportive setting in which people can explore abilities such as clairvoyance, telepathy, healing and mediumship, she said. “I am finding so many people with a burning interest in these topics, people who are longing to connect with other like-minded individuals but not knowing where to turn; this is why we are creating these events.”

The daylong Conejo Valley Psychic & Healing Festival will take place at the Palm Garden Hotel in Newbury Park, with future festivals planned for the first Sunday of every month at different sites.

Scheduled speakers at the inaugural event include Meenal Kelkar, founder of Integrative InSight, a Camarillo-based provider of meditation and yoga therapy courses; Patrick Harbula, author of “The Magic of the Soul: Applying Spiritual Power to Daily Living” and founder of the Living Purpose Institute in Thousand
Oaks; Rabbi Ebrahim Neissany, a spiritual and cultural adviser at Chesed Avraham Temple in Los Angeles; and RayNelle Williams of Camarillo, founder of Be Who You Are.
 

How it began

The idea to bring an event of this kind to Ventura County began with Finley, creator of the Spiritual Snacks audio series and a teacher at the Akashic Bookstore in Thousand Oaks.

“I have tried for several years to find an event like this to attend on a regular basis anywhere in Southern California and have not been successful; I finally decided to create my own,” Finley said. “My top goal is to help people see that psychic is a good thing — that listening to your intuition makes life so much easier and peaceful,” she said.

The event offers readers, healers, vendors and classes. “This is a place to come to find answers to your questions, to find even stronger spiritual connections and meet like-minded people,” Finley said. Katz wants to help people discover their innate abilities as well as assist professionals who serve others with the use of such abilities.

“So the festival makes it possible to bring together these professionals with the public, who are hungry for knowledge and direct experience but perhaps unsure or even distrustful about where to find it,” Katz said.
Psychic communication “is the language of the soul,” Katz said, and “is gained through means other then the five physical senses. “Everyone has innate psychic abilities they are actually using all the time, even
though they are often not aware of this fact,” she said.
 

About the event

At the festival, readings and workshops are designed to help raise the skill levels of those interested.

“This is important because these abilities are what help us get through our days with a greater sense of peace and well-being,” Katz said, “not because they help us to see the future but to better understand why it is we are going through what we are going through in the present.”

To Finley, a festival based on the psychic and healing arts revolves around “people who are involved in helping others heal.”

“We want everyone to know that all of the readers and healers involved in the event have the highest ethical standards and come from an inner place of love and healing,” said Finley. “Folks can expect to find out information that will change their lives for the better and help propel them on their spiritual journey.”

This event will benefit from the experiences of Katz and Finley, “who have been through it all,” Katz said. “We know which psychics will be the best fit, which can be trusted, who to look out for, and we have a zero tolerance for any scammers.

You will never come across a psychic at our fair trying to get you to pay them a large sum of money to remove a curse or any other ridiculous things like that.” For those who remain skeptical, Katz suggests: “Just come and check it out. Take some classes where you get to experience your own abilities first hand. Get
a reading from one of the readers so you can gain a whole new picture of what a psychic does.”

“While some can and will see snippets about your future,” she said, “most will focus on your life in the present, confirming what you already know to be true and helping to fill in the blanks with valuable insights.”
 

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- By Alicia Doyle, Correspondent, published in the Ventura County Star on January 28, 2009