The upstairs of a haunted hair salon is an inspired location for Trish Poole, an angel therapy practitioner.
She’s set up in the new spa area at Yikes Salon, 114 S. Broadway, Green Bay, offering angel readings to help people get in touch with their good angels and loved ones who have “passed.”
With angel, fairy and mermaid cards ready, incense burning and the lights dimmed, she gets the mood just right to connect with the other side.
As a reporter, I was leery. And I sure wasn’t ready to hear any bad news.
But that’s the good thing about angel readings. Poole, who is also a hypnotherapist and reiki practitioner (a method of natural healing through life energy), is asking the spirits for messages of love, healing, comfort and insight. She’s not reading palms and making suggestions on the lenth of one’s lifeline.
Poole believes in the healing powers of angels. She says they work in mysterious ways: through a tingling sensation that means they are near; through dreams or a “sudden knowing” that helps you in some way, or through someone who says just what you need to hear “as if an angel is speaking through them to you,” she said.
Poole calls on your angels to help you through difficult situations. She calls on the departed — perhaps Mom, Dad, Grandma, a friend — to help, too.
For my reading, she summoned my dad and a reluctant mother. Nothing new there. More exuberant was a curly-haired woman with an old typewriter. One of my early newspaper mentors? None of them offered advice.
But Poole did offer eerily on-target insights on a loved one who is recovering from health problems, and she did so with no information from me. This news of recovery received from the “other side” was cheerfully welcomed.
Poole didn’t set out to do this work. She’s spiritual herself, with a strong belief in God. That combines with her reiki healing and the hypnosis. Formerly an international business manager, she said, “I never thought ‘Oh yes, I’ll be doing angel readings.’”
She believes she’s a message receiver due to finely tuned intuition, guided imagery and an openness to new ideas and otherworldly voices.
Poole also does hypnosis in a home setting, offers stress-reduction exercises at Green Bay Heart Care, uses hypnobirthing techniques at hospitals, hypnotizes breast cancer survivors at the Green Bay-De Pere YWCA’s Encore Program and puts on programs at A Woman’s Place at St. Mary’s Hospital Medical Center.
Jeri Olm, owner of Yikes, believes in Poole. Olm has angel readings frequently, she said, “just to help me know where I’m going, for guidance, to clarify things in my life. She tells me things there’s no way she could have known.”
Poole offers readings on certain days at the salon. “Everytime she does readings here, she’s been booked throughout the day,” Olm said. “A lot of people definitely want the service.”
An inspiring experience
Rhonda Lamers, 33, of Kaukauna had an angel reading that she said put her in contact with her late grandmother. Lamers said it gave her great comfort.
“It was the most inspiring thing I’ve ever done,” she said. “It made me a more spirited person. I pray more now, and I look at things differently with my family and my kids.”
Her husband, Lamers noted, “was the biggest skeptic. But he was like, ‘Wow!’ He was totally a believer after that.”
Lamers said she always was aware of a presence in her home, and Poole told her it was Lamers’ late grandmother, “just checking in on you and the kids.”
The day before her reading, Lamers took several items that had belonged to her grandmother to a consignment shop. During the reading, Poole said Lamers’ grandmother’s advice was to get a statue of the Virgin Mary in the house and plant roses in it. Among the items Lamers had discarded was a Mary planter.
“I went back the next day and bought it back,” Lamers said.
Back to this reporter’s reading: Skeptical by profession, I went into it with reservations. But some of her information struck close to home, too close to discount.
And then there was that prediction of a good something — or someone — heading my way in the next three years. I’ll be waiting.
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