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| Jessica Brodkin at Carolines on Broadway on July 20, 2016. Photo: Phil Provencio |
“I have a past life memory of being a psychic in the Roman government. My best friend from the CIA was a general who I worked for … and they used to parade us around the Colosseum.”
Jessica Brodkin used to be a CIA analyst. Tonight, she’s enthusing about the healing powers of crystals and divulging stories of her past lives, complete with run-ins with Saint Thomas Aquinas and interdimensional travel.
On the heels of her 35th birthday, she has an infectious laugh and the ability to, she claims, talk to spirits. She pays her bills by performing stand-up comedy and practicing as a Reiki healer — a practice in which she claims to enter people’s energy fields to transform negative feelings into healing ones. Her clients, the first of whom was “Million Dollar Matchmaker” Patti Stanger, are looking to get their chakras aligned, not necessarily hear about what their dead grandmother thinks of the new guy they’re seeing, so she tries to keep the beyond-the-grave chatter to a minimum unless they asked for it.
Brodkin hasn’t always been a professional psychic. She was recruited by the CIA as an undergrad at MIT, and hired as a weapons of mass destruction analyst shortly after the invasion of Iraq. She was totally fulfilled by her work at the beginning of her 11-year run. (The CIA declined to comment when asked by The Post about Brodkin’s status as an employee there.)
She and her co-workers had to keep even the most basic details about their jobs a secret from outsiders, so she describes the camaraderie as “intense.” The agency’s security was “terrifying,” Brodkin recalls. As she drove into work every day, she was surrounded by men in uniform carrying AK-47s, she said. “It’s hard. It’s hard on the brain.”
At work, she would read data and try to make sense of it. Her job was almost all research, information and trying to make sense of that information. As time went on, Brodkin began feeling “trapped.”
“I went to Starbucks a lot, I meditated in the library … I don’t know how I didn’t get fired,” she jokes. Beyond just disliking her job, Brodkin became “massively depressed” and had a full mental breakdown, after which she took medical leave from work.
She returned, but her passion for her work was gone, and Brodkin knew she had to find that happiness someplace else. She started frequenting stand-up comedy nights around Washington, DC, and realized she’d finally found something to keep her sanity intact. Around the same time, she says, she discovered that she could “channel spirit.”
Brodkin started becoming distracted at work by what she called “peaceful … massive downloads of information.” She would feign writing work reports, but would instead, she claims, be involuntarily contacted by spirits with something to say. You can imagine how telling her CIA co-workers she was hearing voices from the beyond went.
“It’s completely hated,” she says. “[Being intuitive] is kind of something you have to be ashamed of.”
As the information transfers started becoming more frequent, Brodkin began meditating in the woods surrounding Langley, the facility housing the CIA. “There was one time where I saw just a sea of spirits,” she says. “It was very interdimensional.”
It was there that she began communicating with two spirits whom she now refers to as her “guides”: St. Thomas Aquinas, and Nicodemus, a contemporary of Jesus.
In June 2014, Brodkin decided to leave the CIA for good and take her medium status large.
There’s no message too big or too small for a spirit. Brodkin says St. Thomas has told her to do things like check her bank balance (she was nearing overdraft), and also informed her that her beloved dog did not have cancer.
She’s heard from dead people she knew as well, but their advice isn’t quite as sage. “When human guides guide you, they don’t have as much information as the ascended masters,” such as St. Thomas and Nicodemus. “They are still their human selves.”
However, Brodkin’s deceased grandmother gave her perhaps the most poignant piece of advice she has received thus far: to leave her now-ex-husband.
Brodkin’s now-ex-husband married her while she was with the CIA. He didn’t sign up for all the “woo-woo,” she says. Raised in a Fundamentalist Christian home, she claims he said the Bible didn’t approve of psychics and that he was uncomfortable with Brodkin charging money for Reiki, even though it was the couple’s means of financial survival. Channeling spirit was the last straw.
“I was taking a bath in June of last year while we were still married and I actually had a vision that his father came to me and said, ‘I’m immobile. I can’t walk anymore. Please come heal me,’” she said.
Her husband, who was not speaking to his father, brushed off her pleas for him to get in touch. Two months later, they found out that her ex-husband’s father had become wheelchair-bound.
“I think when that happened, it really sealed it for [him] because he said, ‘I’m scared of you.’”
Spirituality and comedy have helped Brodkin through the heartbreak of her divorce. The latter of those brought her to the “yin-to-my-yang,” fellow comic and life coach Sara Armour. The women met after one of Armour’s shows in Washington, DC, when Brodkin insisted, “You don’t know me, but we’re from the same planet.”
When Armour left DC to pursue comedy in New York, Brodkin wasn’t far behind. The two ended up living down the street from each other in Park Slope and found themselves dumping their baggage on each other every month around the time of the full moon, which always aligned with both women’s “time of the month.” It was too much of a coincidence to ignore, they thought.
Armour describes the moon as a “divine, feminine” icon. It exists on a 28-day cycle, like a woman’s menstrual cycle. Plus, the moon controls the tides, and our bodies are 70 percent water.
Taking everything she had learned into account, it only made sense to Armour to make the women’s monthly relief sessions accessible to more people, and provide an audience with the very tools — including self-deprecation — that have helped Brodkin and Armour cope with all the hard stuff.
Hence “The Moonual,” a monthly comedy show and full-moon ritual at Caroline’s on Broadway, was born. Complete with a pre-show palm reader, Astro Tarot reader, madame of crystals and female comics, the show offers up some out-there “self-help” tools. For example, you can write down your insecurities on a worksheet (e.g., cellulite-y thighs, awkward work encounters, bad dates) and have them ritualistically “released” into the universe by Armour and Brodkin at the end of the show.
The night before a show, Brodkin wonders aloud, “Don’t you think we heal people by making them laugh?” Armour pauses, then responds.
“I think that humor and spirituality just both happen to be our tools,” she says. “You know, some people are great at doing hair. They help people feel beautiful. I definitely don’t make anyone feel beautiful, but hopefully I can make you laugh … I think it’s all different ways that you just learn how to cope.”
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