Jane Anne Thomas

Jane Anne Thomas, Seer

Animal medicine and guided meditation are two of the powerful ways this Los Angeles-based seer lends her healing talents.

Intuiting messages from the universe wasn’t necessarily a path Jane Anne Thomas, a seer living in L.A.’s Koreatown, would have chosen. But often these gifts simply choose their recipient. “The more I tried to shut the door in the beginning, the harder it would swing open. And the trippier and scarier the experiences were,” she says. “So I learned to eventually open the door myself. And to very clearly announce what I was and was not willing to experience in that place. And once I learned to do that, everything shifted.” Now, she uses her gifts to offer experiences more like personal ceremonial practices than traditional readings, as she explains here, that help people heal in ways they may not even expect.

How would you describe what you do?

It’s a blending of guided-meditation healing practice and a formal set of callings. Then I move into what could be called channels work. It’s not like altered voices are coming out of me or anything, but I have a couple different forms of clairvoyance. I see, feel, hear, and experience in my body various messages. My main interest is someone’s soul growth. A lot of traditional seers will give you that old-fashioned, gypsy-style reading where they give you a bunch of facts about your life. I’m really interested in helping a person manifest their soul’s dream in this lifetime. When I work I’m calling to that, to those beings and ancestors and lineages who are there for you in this way.

How do you work toward that in a session?

A lot of people, when they’re reaching out for readings, are in a place of needing deep healing. I take it very seriously. At the end of the day, the questions they think that they’re coming to answer become irrelevant when in the healing process you connect them back to themselves. Because a lot of times questions will be about other people, or about other circumstances. And you realize that their mind and their emotional body has been trained on something outside of them. My goal oftentimes is to give them back to themselves.

How did you realize you had the ability to channel?

I learned the hard way. I had no training, no background, no family that did this. I grew up in a very conservative Christian, Bible Belt Texas environment where you’d never even see a tarot card in the house. It was considered very taboo. I always had things happen as a child. I thought it was something I would grow out of.

I moved to Santa Barbara for college, and I took my first yoga class, I laid down for savasana at the end of class, and when I opened my eyes and sat up, I could see through the walls. I was like, Oh my god, I’m insane, or I ate something weird, or I put my hands in the photo chemicals too long. All the molecules in the room were vibrating really hard, and I could see through them. For the whole four-week introduction to hatha yoga that I took, the same thing happened. Then the hauntings started. It was like a circus in my house. I was being woken up in the middle of the night, and all this crazy stuff was happening. At the end of the yoga class series, I went to the teacher and I broke down crying. She said, “This is a gift. I practice with a shaman. I can give you a few techniques. You have to learn how to claim your space.”

I continued through art school and moved to L.A., and it kind of went away for like three years. And then I had what’s called a quickening, where everything started coming in rapid-fire again. It became abundantly clear that I needed to learn how to ground and protect myself. I ended up living in the home of a healer; it was a kind of apprenticeship. I went into a space of being visited again but having positive experiences, where it wasn’t frightening and I didn’t feel like I was in a horror film. That was when I was like, “Oh, this can be beautiful. I can actually have exalted, life-affirming, love-affirming, healing experiences.”

Animal medicine is a big part of your work. When did you start giving readings, and how did that become an element of them?

I decided to pull out this animal-medicine deck of cards that I had been given, and I did a reading for myself. I didn’t understand any of it. Once I put it deeply away from my consciousness, the dreams began. In them, this one very intense, very specific animal came forward from the spread. It was the size of a house, and it would chase me. I woke up realizing I had accessed something that was real, that was beyond my understanding of what was going on with nature. At that point, I didn’t think of animals [as having] the same level of sentience [as people]; I didn’t think of them as beings that could meet you in the psychic world, much less teach you. So I was completely blown away. I started doing readings for friends. I was like, “I feel like everyone needs to have this experience. They need to connect to what this is because the natural world is all around us, actually trying to help us, to heal us, to connect, to teach us.” I realized over time that [a reading] was like an experiment in telepathy. That the person would sit in front of me, and after establishing what we were holding space for, the messages would come.

In 2012 I became an apprentice to [a shaman in Santa Barbara] and have learned more formally how to work with the amplified things that are happening for me, traditional ceremonies to learn how to work with the other side.

How do you feel about your abilities now?

I definitely didn’t plan to be doing this, and I really just started my journey out of personal survival and healing. Then it kind of surprised me, like, “Oh, this could actually help somebody? Awesome!” That gives it a point.

Text by Lisa Butterworth
Photos by Heather Culp
Jane Anne Thomas