Spiritual Gifts, Mental Health, and Mediumship with Kat Schwarz

In this episode of Closer to Venus, Johnny Burke interviews Kat Schwarz, a Reiki energy healer, complex trauma specialist, and investigative medium. Kat shares her journey from atheism and a career in physical therapy to discovering her spiritual gifts following a personal crisis. She discusses the challenges and misconceptions around mental health for those with spiritual abilities, her work with Angel and Oracle decks, and the impact of her spiritual awakening. Kat also delves into her beliefs about heaven and hell as earthly experiences, her investigative mediumship work, which includes notable cases like Gabby Petito, and the importance of self-love in spiritual practice. The episode provides insight into how combining traditional and holistic mental health services can be transformative.

00:00 Introduction to Kat Schwarz

00:36 Kat's Journey from Atheism to Spiritual Awakening

03:12 Understanding Spiritual Gifts and Mental Illness

08:21 The Role of Intuition and Trauma in Spiritual Development

13:33 Building a Modern Spiritual Advisory Practice

21:12 Investigative Mediumship and High-Profile Cases

26:14 Heaven and Hell: Earthly Experiences

32:54 Conclusion and Contact Information

https://www.katschwarz.com/

@compassionatehealingservices/

Transcript

Johnny Burke: Welcome to Closer to Venus. I'm Johnny Burke, and today's guest is Kat Schwarz. She is a Reiki energy healer, complex trauma specialist and investigative medium. She's also the owner of Compassionate Healing Services, which provides mental health and holistic healing services. In today's episode, we'll discuss why people with spiritual gifts are prone to mental illness and why heaven and hell aren't places we go when we die, but rather experiences we have on Earth. Kat, welcome to the program.

Kat Schwarz: Happy to be here Johnny. Thanks for having me.

Johnny Burke: Okay, so you are a reiki energy healer, and a medium among other things. What, skill actually came first?

Kat Schwarz: Well, actually the foundation was an almost 20 year career in physical therapy in which I was also deeply exploring atheism. So, I was very much focused on the idea at that time that we are only these physical bodies and living this one physical life. And it was my own suicidal crisis that radically changed my perspective on that.

After my spiritual awakening, it was reiki that came first. So, I was attuned to reiki and then through my reiki I always felt compelled to deliver messages and then I would pull cards and realize that the exact messages that I had felt compelled to speak about were the same messages being confirmed by the cards, and I have multiple decks of cards.So it was through that that I started to really understand that I was a medium or a channel for these messages. And these weren't just things occurring to my ego to say, but rather actual guidance from a higher guide.

Johnny Burke: So you mentioned a couple things there, guides and also cards. I imagine you are referring to the tarot?

Kat Schwarz: Actually, I'm not a Tarot reader. I'm a huge student of the tarot, but I'm talking more about Angel and Oracle decks.

Johnny Burke: Okay, so the Angel and Oracle decks are not specifically tarot decks, but they are related, aren't they?

Kat Schwarz: Well there are divination tools in the way that tarot is just a very specific  art form. I think of it. It's a 78-card deck, that each card has a very specific meaning and it's very old. But there are now unlimited numbers of decks from different spiritual teachers and authors whether it's looking for clarity in your love life or your business or your money, whatever it is your guides are wanting to give you clarity on anything you desire. Believe it or not, we're here to get what we want. We're not here to suffer. We're here to move in the direction of our desires and our guides and angels are always moving in this or at least trying to nudge us in that direction.

But it's through our intuition and we have to be willing to take that step into the unknown and let go of the familiar, safe and predictable, which is where your ego is always attempting to keep you.

Johnny Burke: You mentioned a few moments ago a spiritual awakening. Can you tell us a little bit more about how that happened? Because you mentioned that you were I believe an atheist and you were focused on we  have one life. This physical body, and I when we die, we die. We just go into the ground or ashes to ashes, et cetera. What was that like?

Kat Schwarz: Right. Well, that came after 21 years of Catholicism. I was raised Catholic. I was a very faithful Catholic. And then when I was 21, my dad died of lung cancer and our prayers to save him didn't quote unquote work. So I became very angry at God and at the same time, it was right around that same time that some very disgusting truths came out about pedophilia rings in the Catholic church. It was something I turned away from and decided that I was never going to look back and I never have.

For the next 18 years, I very much lived in the scientifically minded, I was a physical therapist with a master's degree. I worked in the medical field, and I was just very focused on if you couldn't prove it to me with the scientific method, it wasn't something that I was going to validate. But then things like quantum physics started to come into fruition and started to expand my understanding, at least scientifically of what's possible. I was under no desire to find God, but what was happening was I was losing my life to mental illness. I was slowly but surely dying of severe anxiety, depression, bipolar mania symptoms, suicidal thoughts. It was so bad in 2017 that I couldn't work.

One of the things that I had discovered that was really impactful for me in a positive way was yoga. And I didn't know that yoga's an inherently spiritual practice, but it was so impactful that I started doing it regularly and then decided I wanted to learn how to teach it because I thought it would be complimentary to my physical therapy license and it would be able to give me an ability to serve my physical therapy clients in a new and better way.

So I went and I studied the science of breath. And luckily yoga was something that was supporting me through my suicidal crisis because not only did it help keep my vibration high and give me tools to really emotionally regulate when I was very dysregulated, but it gave me a community that really helped me feel like belonging. And about a year after the worst of my crisis was over that very same yoga studio announced that they were hosting a spirit medium. And I was very offended by that. Because I didn't believe in spirit mediums.

Johnny Burke: You. Right. Okay. So, you're in yoga class, but you're thinking WTF, what are you bringing a medium in here for, right?

Kat Schwarz: I was highly offended because it was a sacred space to me, and the fact that this man was charging $40 a head to quote unquote talk to dead people, that was just so insulting to me that I bought a ticket thinking that I'm going to expose a charlatan.

Johnny Burke: Okay, that was the turning point then?

Kat Schwarz: And that was the turning point because he saw right through me. I mean, we shook hands. He goes, "wow, do you do reiki? I said, “No, I'm a physical therapist and a yoga teacher." He goes," No, you're just like me and you could do what I do." And I was like, "what? You say that to all the girls?" I was completely dismissing it. When he walked in that room, it was as though the crown of my head opened up and a shower electricity just came flooding into my body with such intensity that I was using my yoga breathing and poses just to tolerate it. And then when he walked close to me, I would sweat and we walked further away from me. I would shiver and I have 20 witnesses to all of this .

Then he told a very relatable story about himself being very mentally ill and on drugs and homeless and really believing that his life was over until mediums came into his path and said that he was special and should hold on for his awakening. And he had an awakening. He's an extremely talented medium, and he got up and he just channeled for all of us, myself included, so accurately where I left that room with no doubt in my mind that I had reconnected with my father after 18 years of him being quote, unquote dead. And he knew what was going in on in my life currently. It was very obvious to me. He had never left my side. And it was an awakening in that I've never been able to see the world in the same way. And I took his belief in me that I was like him and could do what he did. And I studied it as seriously as I did my physical therapy career

Johnny Burke: In one night, your life changed. That's what it sounds like.

Kat Schwarz: In a two-hour workshop.

Johnny Burke: Okay. Yeah. Two hours. So that was obviously a very important moment. Now, you mentioned, mental illness before and one of the things that you believe, from your experience is that people with these skills, mediumship, clairvoyance, energy reading, energy healing rather and so forth, are prone to mental illness. How did you discover that, first of all?

Kat Schwarz: Through personal experience because you're gaslit from the moment that you speak about it. I didn't realize until after my spiritual awakening when I was 39, which was a year after my suicidal crisis when I was 38, that I had had a psychic experience when I was six years old. And I had correctly predicted that my brother would be severely injured in a bike accident minutes before it happened and the moment it happened, all of the focus went to his injury and the medical aspect of recovery. And nobody questioned how 6-year-old Kathleen knew that.

Johnny Burke: Okay. Talk about how you saw that happening before it happened. 

Kat Schwarz: Yes, it is not that I saw it, that it was going to happen. I knew it was going to happen. So I know that my extra sensory perception- ESP gifts are clairsentience meaning I feel energy. It's what I felt in that room with the medium and it's what they called bipolar disorder because energy quite literally moves my body when I'm really high vibrational and tuned into it. And it can be a real curse as it looked with bipolar mania, or it can be an incredible gift when you learn to ground it and understand it and nurture it and develop it. So I feel energy and I also have the gift of claircognizance, which is simply to say I receive downloads of information that I know things that I don't know how I know them. I just know them. So through those two gifts, I have been able to tap into these other realms.

Johnny Burke: When you were six years old and you knew that your brother was going to have some kind of crisis, did you know exactly what it was? Even though you experienced this when you were a little kid, you were still an atheist 20, 25 years later. That had no impact on you early on, as far as the psychic world and the spirit world are considered.

Kat Schwarz: I wouldn't say that it didn't have an impact so much as I literally suppressed the memory of it. It was something that everybody else completely dismissed and six years old was not only the time when I had my first psychic experience, but it was also the first time I experienced my real severe first severe trauma, which set off a lifetime of complex PTSD. And when you're being traumatized every day in a toxic, dysfunctional household and your nervous system is bathed in adrenaline and cortisol, your amygdala is firing with fear. You don't store memories. Right?

So it was really a matter of suppression and forgetting. And only after awakening to the gift, again, remembering, wow, yes, I've always had this gift. And then the other thing I would say about it, for those of us who are gifted in this way, because I believe we are all connected to intuition, you can't disconnect from that. You can pinch it off severely as narcissists do, but you're still  connected to that, that source at the end of the day. Those of us that are highly connected to it and highly sensitive to it and always have been, it just is so natural that you don't realize it's special.

Johnny Burke: That's the first time I've heard bipolar disorder being associated with clairsentience. 

Kat Schwarz: Correct.

Johnny Burke: Okay. So does that mean that everyone who's bipolar, is also clairsentient or just a certain percentage of them?

Kat Schwarz: I would say it's a high likelihood, just as I would say that people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia are a clairaudient. They are hearing things that other people can't hear. They're tuned in vibrations, right? I mean, clearly, your dog can smell things that you can't, and yet you don't accuse it of baking. And yet when it comes to other humans, when they say, oh, I can see something or hear something you can't, or feel something you can't or know something, you can't we say, take this pill and get in that straightjacket of crazy, that's very intentional.

It's to keep us away from our true knowing and our true power. I feel very strongly about this when it comes to traditional mental healthcare, it's not the blind leading the blind. It's the blind leading the sighted.

Johnny Burke: Speaking of practice, first of all, you have the complex trauma treatment. You have the reiki, you have astrology, human design, and numerology. It sounds like a modern spiritual advisory, but how hard was it for you to find the right people for your practice? How did you do that?

Kat Schwarz: Well, Law of Attraction did all the work for me. I was connected to incredible people. I handpicked the certified trauma therapist that's in my container, the human design expert and astrologer, who's one brilliant person. She was handpicked by me and then also the numerologist, and they're all incredibly talented at what they do.

I do provide the vast majority of the services to my clients, and I love that you put it as a modern spiritual advisory because I think that's what really differentiates us from traditional mental healthcare in that you have complete autonomy in our container. We're not going to tell you you're not seeing what you're seeing, or you don't know what you know, or you don't feel what you feel or you don't hear what you hear. You're not dismissed and stigmatized because of your diagnosis. The diagnosis is actually irrelevant; we're about healing the symptoms, not just managing them.

Johnny Burke: That's a very good explanation. Good for you. So, is it a modern spiritual advisory or is it a throwback to what maybe our culture had thousands of years ago. Dolores Cannon was saying thousands of years ago, and I believe she was talking about Atlantis, that they could create anything with their mind. Back in that era which was probably at least 10, 12,000 years ago, did they have the same skills as your people do or maybe was it even more advanced?

Kat Schwarz: I have no doubt in my mind that we are in the absolute dark ages on this earth right now as far as our spiritual development . I just think about the pyramids, how they're in existence, right? The technology that allowed the pyramids to be built, which was sound technology, doesn't exist on this planet. We've taken many steps back, especially in the psychological and, psychiatric realm. Like I said, it's the blind leading the sighted. And, yes,  it's definitely a modern spiritual advisory in some ways, but really it's marrying the best of Eastern and Western and I'm never going to tell somebody who comes into my container who's on a medication that's working for them, that they should not be on that medication. That is not what we're doing here. We're adding, we're not taking away.

Johnny Burke: Now, the intuitive skills that you have, you and your staff, how does that treat the complex trauma where maybe traditional western medicine is not as effective?

Kat Schwarz: The idea of talk therapy in and of itself isn't very effective. You're far more likely to recreate problems in your current reality by talking about them than you are to transform your life, right? What we talk about, we give it power. So, rather than necessarily talking about the trauma, it's really talking about the stories that came from that trauma, the beliefs that came from that trauma and where my intuition comes in. I had a good example just the other night where I was speaking to a woman and I said, " we could meet, and I can help you figure out why you feel so stuck. “And she said, that's so funny that you use that word, because I was just telling my husband how stuck I feel, how stuck I feel. And that's just a good example of how my intuition kind of tells the person that I'm speaking to that, I really am the one for them. I don't know if I'm mimicking their own words, but my intuition does.

Johnny Burke: You also describe yourself, in addition to those several modalities that you're also an investigative medium. How did that opportunity come up?

Kat Schwarz: Well, this one was really fun. The idea that I'm a channel came from my reiki and the messages came through. But when it came to actually reconnecting with my father, really with is where it started, and I have a lot of other family members that are on the other side now, my mom included . What I started to notice was they were sending me really obvious signs, but the signs were external to me. They weren't just coming into my mind. It was obvious to my eyes and ears and my senses that they were sending me these signs.

As I started to become really good at it with my own people on the other side, and I would watch a Dateline episode and I would realize that the person I was watching the episode about had been communicating with me all day long. 'cause once I know something about a spirit and I can kind of call that energy into my attention, that's when they can send me signs. I need a little bit of information about them. And those cases started to become more and more high profile until the murder victim, Gabby Petito actually started sending me signs. And that was something that I was able to connect with her mother on. And she and I have been very good friends ever since. She's an incredible person.

Johnny Burke: Gabby Petito. Really? Okay, so did you work with law enforcement or in what capacity were you helping them with your mediumship?

Kat Schwarz: It's really a service I provide to my clients and my friends too, just to help them really see how spirit communicates and that even though they’re physically dead, their spirits live on, and even their personalities live on. I mean, my father is just as able to crack me up with a dad joke from beyond the veil now as he ever was before his physical passing.

Once you understand the language of spirit, they can use pretty much anything but words to communicate with us. And when you become as adept at observing and capturing the signs, it can really move the needle with someone's grief because it re-establishes that connection and you realize that they're not really gone. And in fact, honestly, they're more with you than they ever could have been when they were physical.

Johnny Burke: Okay, so you're saying you did not work with law enforcement or, how did you connect with these people that needed the service?

Kat Schwarz: So just to give more clarity to the example of Gabby Petito, I had nothing to do with the law enforcement aspect of the case. What I did was I was just somebody who was interested in the case as somebody who watched the media. The morning after Brian was found dead I was re acquainted with some of the details of the case. One of them being that the body cam footage happened in Moab, Utah.

 I was at my office that day and I opened my door for my client and a New Jersey license plate that says Moab, Utah is sitting directly in front of my building. And when I took the photo of the license plate that said Moab, Utah there was another car that was passing in the frame that turned out to have two of Gabby's birthday numbers, as well as her sun sign letters on it. So it was just an unmistakable sign at that point that, that was the spirit of Gabby Petito coming through. And she started flooding me with signs and I eventually gathered a bunch of them and sent them off to the Gabby Petito Foundation and her mom contacted me.

Johnny Burke: Oh, so her mom did contact you. Okay. Interesting.

Kat Schwarz: Yeah, we're good friends. 

Johnny Burke: So, the communication beyond the veil, is it clairaudient? Do you actually hear words or is it more like telepathy? 

Kat Schwarz: It's a voiceless voice, is what I call it. There's also an aspect of confirmation always for me externally, I don't necessarily trust what I hear or that voiceless voice until I see a confirmation. So for instance, I might receive a message from my mom and my dad and have that intuition, but then my phone will light up. This happened the other day where it said 9:46 PM and my mom died nine four, and my dad's birth year was 46. So the confirmation of those numbers at the same time that I'm getting that message is how I trust it. That's exactly the type of sign that I can then capture to a family member and a client and pass it on to them.

Johnny Burke: And you noticed your mediumship skills or ability, late thirties? 

Kat Schwarz: At the age of 39, I.

Johnny Burke: Okay, so we're going to switch gears, and talk about how you believe heaven and hell aren't places we go to when we die, but are experiences we have here on Earth. So can you tell us about that?

Kat Schwarz: Absolutely. Yeah. So I'll start more generally by saying that we don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. And this idea that we're going to believe something once we see it as a total misnomer; you're never going to be able to see anything that's beyond your beliefs. Cause we're creating our reality, whether we believe that or not. We are creating our reality through our thoughts and through our subconscious beliefs with the law of attraction.

So until you believe that miracles are possible, you're never going to see miracles. When it comes to the idea of heaven versus hell, I truly believe the vast majority of us are currently living in hell. Which is to say that we believe that we are tiny, powerless humans on a spinning rock hurdling through space that seems very unsafe, very random, very chaotic. That all our power lies in the government bosses and corporations that don't give a shit about us and that we have to delay our happiness until after we die. If we follow very specific rules by, you know, religious men that aren't even following the rules themselves, that's hell. It doesn't get worse than that, right? When you are basically in survival mode at all times, heaven is the opposite. Heaven is understanding that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, that this is all temporary, that this is an illusion, that we are united by the force of love, and it is the most powerful force in the universe.

When we connect to love and we stay in the present moment, we're going to see, not after we die -signs of our divinity, but right here in the present moment through divine signs and synchronicities. They're very real, miracles are very real. And you're never going to see them until you open up and believe them. I believe that when we die, it's simply a homecoming. I don't think that we're judged for the lives here we live on Earth. 

Johnny Burke: You brought up a good point. The homecoming, several people including those that work in hospice, some will actually attest to the fact that they've literally seen spirits get up out of bed and cross the other side and their waiting party is there to help them cross over. Now, you don't really have past life memories, but you do believe that there is the in-between space. Did you ever get a glimpse of this space during any of your mediumship sessions or when channeling, for instance?

Kat Schwarz: No, but everything that I believe about this comes from the teachings of Abraham Hicks and, to even further, soften the blow, they describe the moment of  death as the greatest orgasm you've ever had in your entire life, because it's a moment of pure alignment of the soul with the fullness of who you are and who that lifetime has caused you to become.

Because every lifetime, no matter how short or tragic by the ego standards, has a purpose and it does contribute to the soul's growth and expansion and that of the entire collective. So when we leave our bodies and we immediately span into the fullness of who we are. I mean, it feels incredible. And yes, I believe that there is then a pretty quick, effort to plan the next lifetime because I think being eternal beings who literally have everything and know everything, it's pretty boring after a while.

Johnny Burke: So if I understand this, the difference between someone reading a book and thinking, this is true, does your clairsentience or your cliarcognizance take in the teachings of Abraham

Kat Schwarz: Well, I think as Abraham says all the time, words don't teach, experiences teach. So can speak all the words in the world, but unless you have an experience that matches it, you're not really going to resonate it as truth. So, at the end of the day, it's my intuition that knows what's best for me. No one can give me a map of where they've never been and where they're not meant to go.

Johnny Burke: What are the most important things you've learned about the spirit world and channeling and your mediumship experiences as well?

Kat Schwarz: I think that it all comes down to self-love. The more you really understand that you're not here to please anybody but yourself, that you are worthy of all of your desires and no matter what other people think of you and your life and your choices that you are able to create the life of your dreams with source.

But it does require a tremendous amount of courage, especially in a world where we're really punished for being our authentic selves. It does at this point, really cost us belonging and both are necessities. Authenticity is a need and belonging is a need. So I'm proud to be among the people and leaders who are creating communities where we can be our weird, spiritual, authentic selves and be accepted and celebrated for it rather than, you know, burned at the stake,

Johnny Burke: So, in other words, the sighted leading the sighted. Right.

Kat Schwarz:. How about we let the sighted lead blind? Imagine that.

Johnny Burke: And that as well. All right, Kat, thanks for joining us today. In the meantime, how can our listeners find you online?

Kat Schwarz: Thanks for having me, Johnny. Yeah, I'd love to connect. It's Coaching.kat schwarz. That's S-C-H-W-A-R-Z no t.com and kat Schwarz. And that's @katschwarz.chs is where you can find me on Instagram.