New Year is the traditional time to take stock of our lives, and if something is wrong, to start taking steps to change it. There are a number of professionals who offer services to help us do this: doctors, homoeopaths, psychotherapists, and life coaches, to name but a few. But one Westcountry woman has added something unexpected to the menu: the chance to get in touch with our spirit guides, which may include loved ones who have died. Nicolya Christi from Penzance offers one-to-one "psychic life coaching" - which she describes as "working with another person's soul" - over the phone and in workshops. It is, she claims, "a perfect combination of medium-istic, clairvoyant and psychotherapy skills". "It's about trying to remember the glory of who we are," said Nicolya, 44. "This gets buried under layers of cultural conditioning. The idea is to peel the layers back and help people reconnect to the truth of who they are." And to help this reconnection are our spirit guides, whom Nicolya can see, and who she claims will help us to achieve our goals. "Most of us are not ill or stressed-out people, but we forget that. We forget all kinds of things. I make the comparison of ourselves to cars: and usually, someone else is driving the car. It could be our children, our inner children, the fear that we are becoming our mothers, or someone else in a relationship.Often we don't even realise it. "I help people to get back to the truth, and regain the driver's seat. We can change our own destiny." Nicolya grew up in London but fell in love with Cornwall when she was in her 30s. She has been having otherworldly experiences from the age of five, when she saw a bee at the window. "I thought: I hope that bee doesn't fly into my slipper and sting my toe. And when I put my slippers on later, that's exactly what happened. I remember having a very strange feeling, as well as the awareness that I made that happen." Growing up she mostly kept her experiences, which included sightings of the deceased, to herself. Later she employed them to offer services as a medium in traditional practices such as tarot readings.However, they came into conflict with her career path in the third year of a psychosynthesis degree she was undertaking in London. "I was under supervision," she said. "When I was undertaking sessions, I kept experiencing spiritual presences in the room. I was absolutely forbidden by my supervisors to tell the client of their presence. "This made me feel uncomfortable and compromised. But it really reached a head with one woman, who was undertaking some 'Gestalt' work, which involved picturing her father, who had passed over, sitting in an empty chair. She said all the things to the chair that she wanted to say to her father. "At the end of the session she said she felt a bit silly talking to an empty chair. I had to think very carefully what I said next, because to me the chair wasn't empty at all. I had clearly seen her father sitting there, and he was telling her that it was all right. "I chose to tell the client. It helped her to release so much tension, but it meant the end of my course." Nicolya took elements of her training and her clairvoyance and spent months developing her methodology of "psychic life coaching".
But what if it didn't work? What if someone hoped that their dead grandmother or brother would get in touch, and during the session they didn't turn up? "Whoever I work with I know what I'm bringing to them," said Nicolya. "For some people it's a family guide or a spirit guide. For some people, I come to understand that it's a past life where they've got stuck. Where people are stuck a lot is to do with karma, and I can help unstick them. "I can't guarantee your loved ones come through, but whatever it is that you need, you will get it." Nicolya offers her methodology in one-hour phone sessions starting at £45 each,over a course of six weeks.

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