When Joanna Kiriaki Alexander was 21 years old and a student at North Shore Community College, she began having dreams of her late grandmother.
She explained that, when her grandmother died, she began wearing some of her jewelry. One night, as Alexander was sleeping, she encountered her grandmother in a dream, and she was wearing a necklace that Alexander had not taken off since her grandmother’s death.
“She walked into the room, and she was wearing the cross she gave me in the dream,” Alexander recounted. “I said, ‘How are you wearing the cross? I’m wearing the cross.’”
She said she woke up from that dream rather confused, understandably so. Alexander explained that she was on a path to become a police officer; she had a 3.9 GPA, but she kept having those “visitations” from her grandmother.
She said it felt like she was living “in a movie.” She added that, shortly after the dreams began, she burnt her thumb and went to the school nurse one day.
“I walk in the room, and she shuts the door behind her, and she was like, ‘You have a gift.’ She was talking to me about my loved ones in spirit. She started talking to me about all sorts of stuff, and I was like, ‘This is so strange,’” Alexander remembered. “But what was strange about it was that there were multiple people doing that to me.”
Alexander said the constant outsider input nudging her to practice her gifts led her to where she is today, now 36, as a psychic medium.
She explained, “I’m a natural medium. A medium is a person who can communicate with an individual’s departed loved ones. That was involuntary for me… A psychic is a person who operates off the six major clairs, which is clairvoyance, clairsentience, clairgust, clairtangency, so on and so forth. And they are so in-tune with their emotions that they can feel and experience the emotions of others.”
She added, “Being psychic isn’t necessarily like I’m predicting that on June 12, you’re gonna win the lottery, right? It’s not like that. It’s just being able to feel and sense things so deeply and clearly about a person, place, or thing — without even knowing a thing about any of those things.”
She said, from that point when she was 21, her “whole life started changing day by day.”
“I’d be at school the next day, and I’d be in a class about domestic terrorism or homicide — because that’s what I wanted to do: homicide — and I’d be listening to the professor talk, and I’d see stuff around her,” Alexander shared.
She said, “It became so anxiety-provoking I’d have to ask people. People started being like, ‘How did you know that?’ And I’d act like they already told me because I didn’t want to encroach on people emotionally, and I also didn’t want to look nuts.”
She quickly added, “I don’t care if I look nuts now, but the more and more I did it, and people were like, ‘Yeah, that’s something,’ I decided that I was going to do readings.”
Alexander didn’t charge at first, but she said her grandmother’s spirit encouraged her to charge for her services because she felt it was her granddaughter’s “purpose.”
“I believe that her death wasn’t in vain,” Alexander said of her beloved Yaya. “Of course everyone dies, but after she died, it’s like she passed me this psychic torch, and if she didn’t die, I wouldn’t have this awareness.”
Toward the end of her educational career, Alexander decided, “I’m absolutely getting hands, knees deep in this work.” She then got certified in Reiki, which she explained was “an ancient, Japanese healing technique that is designed to help treat a person physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally.” Alexander then also started volunteering in hospice and continued to do more and more psychic medium work.
“My whole life shifted,” Alexander said. “I remember my dad wanted me to take the civil service exam, and my school advisor called him and said, ‘No, your daughter has a gift.’”
Alexander later wrote a feature in that advisor’s book “because she had a near death experience with cancer,” and then she began teaching her own night courses at North Shore Community College: spiritual awareness part one and spiritual awareness part two.
When asked what it felt like to receive a message, Alexander asked, “Have you ever experienced having an unprovoked thought?”
She continued, “It’s just like that. And sometimes when I’m doing a reading or connecting with the person’s loved one, the type of blissfulness that comes into my heart, it’s so joyful. Sometimes I get really emotional. I don’t cry as much in sessions anymore, but you just feel the love and nurturance that step in through a departed loved one — because the only thing that spirit cares about is love. They’re not here to tell you ‘Oh my God, why are you wearing that?’ or ‘You should buy this house.’”
Alexander added that she typically doesn’t receive messages about worldly events, but there was one that stuck with her.
“I don’t care about sports at all,” Alexander explained. “I was lying in bed, and my grandmother in spirit woke me up. She just said, ‘Send Reiki or prayers to the marathon runners.’ And I remember being like, ‘Why? Are they gonna be thirsty?’ But I did a prayer, and I went back to sleep, and then I was at my friend’s house later in the day, and my dad texted me saying bombs were going off at the marathon.”
She added, “That was once that I had something catastrophic show up because that would be really premonitory. That happens to me sometimes. My strengths are dealing with the dead, delivering their messages, being their messenger, being their advocate. My thing is to tell people that there’s an afterlife more than impending doom.”
She said she felt that, if the psychic medium in question is actually gifted, “I think they serve as healers, as some sort of chaplains in a way. They’re restoring people’s faith in humanity and people’s faith in an afterlife by proving things with evidential readings.”
Alexander emphasized that she “could be exhausted and still love doing it because it’s helping someone else, and it brings validation to the fact that the afterlife exists and that we’re all here for a reason.”
She continued, “It’s not to have a slamming 401(k). Who (cares)? You could die tomorrow. Love is the only real thing.”
For anyone interested in booking with Alexander, visit her Instagram account @JoannaKiriaki or this link: book.heygoldie.com/Psychic-medium-Joanna-Kiriaki.
