This week we had the opportunity to talk with Mark Howard, a Psychic Medium based in Cape Town, South Africa. We talked about his gift and a great reading experience involving a skeptic turned in the spot. Check out!
Can you please present yourself to our readers? How did you discover your psychic gift?
My Name is Mark Howard and I’m what they call a mental medium: someone who has the ability not just to talk about the future but also to things such as physical mediumship and to also connect to a spirit. I also do a lot of trance work, which is to bring a spirit for connection through you.
I was born with the gift of mediumship and didn’t know I had it, to be completely honest. As a child, I thought the things I saw and heard was what everybody saw and heard. I didn’t know I had anything different right until I was 12 years old. I was doing out of body work at the point, which is a very frightening experience because I come from a very strict Christian family.
It wasn’t something I could discuss with anybody. I saw visions of people’s deaths and people passing, I started getting people visiting me in my room, which was very scary. Then, by the time I was 16, I started to do trance work. Again, it was a strange experience: it wasn’t something I planned to do, it just happened.
My spiritual journey into mediumship didn’t actually happen much before I was 35. I was talking to a friend, who is also a spiritual medium, and he said to me: ‘Mark, did you know you are a spiritual medium?’ To fast forward, a few years later I was invited to a paranormal investigation group.
It was quite funny because it was in the music room at a castle and I could see this small girl sitting on the edge of the bed. And I just thought the other guys had set up some projector just to wind me up. I was laughing at them, thinking they set up some kind of joke. And it turned out they hadn’t, they kept saying ‘what are you seeing?’ And then, there’s when I started taking spirits’ pain.
What is the most important detail in maintaining a relationship of mutual trust with customers?
Trust is paramount in anything you do. To certain degrees, we actually are therapists, we are counselors. So, you’ve got to have that client-patient confidentiality implied – I can’t even share the content of readings with my wife. It is very important that the client has that.
Likewise, one thing I encourage, especially face to face, is for people to record the reading session. You could come back to me and tell me something I’ve read has come true, and I won’t have any recollection of doing your reading.
All my readings now, even the distant stuff, is done in a MP3 recording. I do it straight and then send the MP3 record. Because then the person can hear me, get that visibility, trust, transparency and that’s really what I’m trying to give my clients.
It’s important that the professional in this area is not judgmental, but I believe sometimes you have to warn your customer about a bad person/habit/behavior. How do you navigate this?
There are certain things that I really can’t talk about. We can hint about them, but not talk. We are not allowed to tell people when they are going to die, for example. Likewise, we are not allowed to tell what your life path is.
If someone is in a toxic relationship, to be fair, a lot of the time they already know they’re in a toxic relationship and just need confirmation. That’s what I’ve always found.
Also, I get people that have been abused and I pick up on all of that. And that’s very difficult because I’ve got to approach it in a way that is not necessarily blunt. Because if you do it that way, you can create more damage than good.
What is the most popular type of reading that customers are looking for? What are the most common concerns that interest them?
Relationships, health, money tend to be the top ones. The top one is normally relationships. I do a lot of readings for business owners too. I’ve done a lot of work for the police, I’ve done a lot of work for the government as well, which I’m not allowed to talk about unfortunately.
The variations are quite interesting. But at the end of the day, a lot of it is, as I say to people: if you are forearmed or forewarned is better than nothing at all.
Can you share with us a reading that was out of the usual? That you will remember forever.
This young man got hold of me telling me he wanted to get in touch with his wife, who passed away. He turned up to the session with his brother. As he’s walking in, I see this guy is a huge skeptic. Everyone has got a right to their ideas and opinions, but I sat and thought: ‘oh no, this is going to cause a problem…’
So, I was thinking to myself how I could get this guy out of the room. We sat down and I said: listen, I’m going to be honest with you, I know you are a skeptic and understand that you are here to make sure I’m not fobbing off. But from my point of view, can you please be a little bit open?
Then, I sat back and we began. Sometimes you can get more than one person coming through. In this case, the first person that came through was a man, not the person I expected. I asked who wanted to talk to, and he pointed at the guy that was a skeptic. And I’m sitting thinking ‘oh crap! What do I do?’
So, I said to him that this guy had come through and wanted to speak to him. The spirit started giving me very specific information about how he died and he said something quite interesting: ‘you are really crap at fishing’. This guy’s face just dropped and he said ‘you are talking about my cousin, he always said I was crap at fishing’. Apparently, they were really close and he died in an accident.
Do you have a special message for our readers in these difficult times?
First thing you’re going to do is to be more open about what is going around you. Don’t take things at face value – a lot of people do that and it is not right. Everyone needs to listen to their instincts more, and what I say to people is: the one thing that comes into your head is normally the right thing. Stop second guessing yourself.
During this time, this coronavirus brought in a lot of issues for a lot of people in the world right now. It was something that unfortunately I predicted about a year before it happened. What I should say to people: it’s not going to go forever. You’ve got to live your life as best as you can, every single day doing everything to live your dreams and still go forward. If you carry on doing that, you’ll succeed. If you just stay behind and do nothing or sit around and wait for things to vanish and it takes two or three years, in this time you can be no further fore than you are right now.
If you want to schedule a reading with an experienced medium, browse through our top online medium sites here.
