Sandra Singleton is a spiritual motivator, a label which encompasses a range of abilities from psychic adviser, numerologist and clairvoyant to registered spiritualist healer.
For many, that conjures a mental picture of a certain kind of person, one perhaps slightly removed from "normal".
But Sandra has her feet well and truly on
the ground.
"You've got to live in the normal world: you've got to live in what we've chosen," she says.
Sandra believes everyone is psychic in its intuitive sense. "It's your gut feeling, your survival thing, and you should listen to it."
Sandra has "abilities", rather than a gift. Her skills, while innate, have been honed and polished under the tuition of experts in their field. One such ability is the clearing of spirits from dwellings.
"When I do what I call 'ghostbusting', I don't charge," she says. "Because I'm working for the spirit, not the people who live there."
Sandra has built a list of regular clients since she and her husband John moved to Whanganui 12 years ago. They are originally both from the UK.
"When we first came down I had two or three people ring and ask if I used to be in Auckland." They were former Aucklanders who had encountered her there.
It was in Auckland where a clairvoyant saw her surrounded by numbers. At the time she was working in accounts so saw nothing unusual in that, but when a short time later she saw an advertisement for a numerology presentation, things fell into place.
"This was choice; I didn't have to go." But she and a friend went. Her friend thought it was "rubbish" but Sandra went to three classes a week. There were 30 people in the psychometry class alone.
"We didn't fit into a classroom: we had to be in the main hall. Psychometry is holding an object that belongs to somebody else."
They sat in a circle and partnered up with the person next to them.
"It was a bloke. I held his watch. I said, 'All I'm seeing is you on a path going towards a front door and this dog keeps bouncing up and down, but that's as far as I can get'."
He explained that when he goes to his girlfriend's house, her little dog on the other side of the door barks and jumps up and down.
"I did numerology, psychometry, tarot, meditation ... everything! I couldn't get enough. I was there for about five years and ended up being a teacher and a [private] consultant."
This was at North Shore Parapsychology School — the only one of its kind in New Zealand. Before Sandra attended the first of the workshops, she had no idea of the extent of her "abilities".
"But I was intuitive," she says. "I was very sensitive, and if you want to develop you have to be 'a sensitive'. There is clairvoyant and clairaudient which have been around for a while, and in more recent times they've been using another term — clairsentient (clear feeling). I was like that from a kid."
