As part of an emerging workshop series at the studio, we have invited Tysa Goodrich, Intuitive Counselor and Medium, to offer workshops on Crystal Grids, the Enneagram, and other related topics. She also offers individual counseling sessions at the studio. You can learn more about her upcoming workshop on Intuition on our website. Recently, Jai sat down with Tysa to learn more about her and her work.
Jai: For those who might be unfamiliar with the concept of intuitive work or intuitive counseling, can you explain what you do?
Tysa: To begin with—and it must be stated first—intuitive counseling is a refinement (and even a replacement) for an outmoded occultist system of psychics and fortune tellers, which has often propagated fatalistic agendas. Intuitive work includes clairvoyancy and accesses the future, but beyond that there’s little else to compare, at least from my perspective. The world is changing exponentially. Humanity is evolving like it never has before. Old systems are crumbling. Even our own personal systems—how we interact with our world—need to change.
My work as an intuitive counselor centers around healing and growing, as well as the illumination of where one resists change and how to push through the scary parts to discover more of your true path, more of your truer self. I help people connect with their higher self, their spirit guides, and their soul—soul’s call to adventure—whatever that means for each individual. How I do that is through my intuition and my ability as an empath, all of which utilizes my most powerful tool: my imagination.
Einstein said that “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Our past, present, and future exist upon a single fabric of time. Ignoring pain from the past throws it into your future, to be dealt with there. What I do in my work is I look at a person’s fabric and pinpoint areas that need attention: which parts of the story need to change or heal in order to move forward, and what specific avenues of growth can help them toward a more loving reality.
J: When did you first realize you had such amazing gifts?
T: Thank you for that. Well, as I am also a medium—one who can receive communication from departed spirits on the other side—I believe I came in with it, came in with the temporal lobe sensitivity. It wasn’t an easy gift for a child. I can remember as early as three sensing activity: a ghost in a farm house where my family was invited for lunch after church, a dark energy in the second-floor parsonage apartment above a feed store, activity in and around the church where my father’s first pastorship began—rural Indiana (late 1950s). Things were happening to me that I couldn’t handle at that age, so it all got shoved down, mostly through food addictions and my sense of shame—feeling that something was wrong with me. The mediumship aspect of my intuitive work did not wake up again until I was touring as a musician in the late 1970s. At the same time, I began to meditate—my first meditation inside a Holiday Inn closet.
I had a lot of healing to do. The next thirty years were devoted to discovering and opening to my strengths, and to heal what stood in the way. Healing never really stops, our ever-changing and ever-expansion never stops. It’s what makes us human. In the early 1990s I took two years of channeling classes and reawakened my ability to sense thoughts and feelings of others and how to bring in information from others’ spiritual guidance. My ability as an empath became more honed as I worked with opening more to the vulnerability it required, and simultaneously learning how to best protect myself intuitively. It is through the emotions (thoughts and feelings) where my extrasensory perceptions (or psychic abilities) work best. Being empathic requires empathy, and empathy requires compassion—an emotion born out of sorrow. Not everyone feels compassion. It requires being an adult.
I began my intuitive practice in 2000, which at first centered mostly around my medium work, thus the reason for my website name: empathicmedium.com
J: Can you talk a little bit about your workshop on intuition and creativity? What might participants expect to learn in that kind of workshop?
T: I love this workshop. It’s quite involved. I could easily host an ongoing class on just creativity, or a separate intuition class, because there is so much to be unraveled in accessing the power and magic of both. I compare and contrast how intuition and creativity work, suggest the various ways in which we receive guidance, and how to encourage those bright creative ideas to manifest. We all function intuitively, just as we create our own reality from our thoughts and feelings, choices, and decisions, attitudes and beliefs—whether we want to believe it or not.
The intuition and creativity workshop looks at the similarities between intuitive and creative people, and lays out specific avenues to access our intuition, our creativity, as well us what impedes us from both—e.g. the way society “educates” us as children, the veneration of logic and reason and rational thinking. The wisdom and insight of intuition sees beyond the rational, and becomes the vehicle that can move us along our spiritual paths, to that more of who we are. Creativity suspends time and space, and lifts us to where we feel more alive, more real, and tells the story of who we are. Creativity illuminates the journey, and intuition provides the fuel. Both are initiated from beyond space-time. How’s that for logic? 🙂
J: You also do individual sessions. Can you describe what happens in a typical session and what someone might learn by working with you one-on-one?
T: It’s interesting that you say “typical session,” because every session is different, and unfolds uniquely depending on the needs or desires of a client in the moment. However, there are themes that crisscross most of my readings. With that idea of looking into the fabric of one’s life (or lives)—the traumas, the methods of survival that become patterns, and how to heal them—I intuitively see places on that fabric that have been torn, and assist people in retrieving the very real aspects of Self that are lost. I also look into how the future is expanding, and help guide or encourage that path—e.g., when someone is on the verge of success. Success is real scary, though many don’t believe it, until they’re upon it. I work with crystals, and I use a crystal pendulum as a divinization tool, so that is consistent in most of my readings.
J: You have such an interesting and diverse background as a creative person: writer, musician, songwriter, medium, intuitive. How do all of these things come together?
T: The function that underlies everything I do is my creativity and my insatiable yearning to explore the mystery and dark crevices of my soul. If you listen to my instrumental music, as well as my songs, they tend to be melancholy, more soulful. It’s the nature of my boundary dweller—the one who takes you to the edge of your reality, to the edge of consciousness, to the edge of space-time, and allows you to see beyond it.
Practically speaking, I cannot do everything at once. Last year I completed a novel (which I am now just beginning to rework), and this month I finished a short story that has taken me a half year to write. The chaos of the pandemic stirred monumental change in the scope of everything I do. Live performances were cancelled, songwriting and composing stopped because of 24/7 neighbors on the other side of thin walls. But it was more than that. The dark chaos of the pandemic stirred change on so many levels—personally and professionally—and definitely shifted my work as a medium and intuitive counselor.
J: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about being a medium. If i understand it correctly, you have the gift of connecting with people who have died. How is this possible?
T: Yes, a medium is someone who can connect with people who have died. It’s a tremendous responsibility to be a conduit for that kind of communication. Unfortunately, there are many out there who don’t respect the breadth of that responsibility. There are well-worn perceptions of mediumship that misdirect people’s expectations, often based on sensationalistic portrayals in TV and film. Not only do I connect people with departed loved ones, but I can also sense historical imprints, do spirit clearing, heal haunted houses or spaces. I have worked in real estate to help clear negative energy in a home that is not selling, and I have had many ghostly encounters (both delightful and foreboding). Always, my intention is to heal.
My boundaries as a medium:
In my sessions, someone needs to ask me directly if they want to connect with a departed loved one. My medium work is unique, in that I need time to shift into a deeper state of consciousness, a different mode of accessing information. It’s not absolutely necessary, but out of respect for this aspect of my work, I do that. I also need an intention from my client, in order to honor both sides of the communication. Mostly I won’t initiate communication unless asked. If there’s an underlying agenda that doesn’t feel right, or the departed loved one has a resistance to connect, I will not force communication and merely tell the client the truth.
There’s also the matter of the grief. If someone has recently lost a loved one, a medium session can be helpful—even healing—but it is not a substitute for the grieving process. I have found that there is consistently a respectful distance given to the one who is left behind, a certain amount of time before expanded communication can even happen. Visitation dreams often come later, after several waves of grief have been gone through. On rare occasions, I have stopped a reading to ask a client if they’ve lost someone, mostly because I’m an empath and feel it. But sometimes an energy will enter the space to say something, mostly to bring a loving message. But like I said, that is rare.
As I stated in an earlier question, being a medium began with my first memories of childhood, and was quickly put aside. After my gift reemerged in my twenties, there were many more years of healing and maturing to do before I could come to the fullness of this work.
J: Is there anything else you would like us to know about you?
T: I moved to Crawfordsville from Los Angeles in May of 2024 in order to help my brother and sister with my 96-year-old father. I don’t know how long I will be here, nor where I will travel to next.
And… since I offer a workshop on the Enneagram, this is what drives the engine of my personality:
I am a #4 that leans (wings) to a #5. A #4 is the one who wants to be special, or sometimes called the individualist, or creative one. The #5 is the thinker, or sometimes called the investigator. The path of integration for the #4 is to do the right thing and inspire others (#1). The path of integration for the #5 is to come out of the ivory tower and show some leadership skills (#8). My path of disintegration (#4) is doing my creativity in order to get love (#2), and my lean (#5) disintegrates to seeking adventure or fun in order to avoid the pain (#7).