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Winnipeg Free Press

From soprano to psychic

Michelle Minke was a successful opera singer for more than 20 years, performing on stages across Europe and North America. Based in Calgary, the 43-year-old is a graduate of the Opera School at the Royal Academy of Music in London, England, the Solti Te Kanawa Accademia in Italy and holds a masters in a masters in vocal pedagogy from​ ​the University of Toronto. Minke's evolution from singer to psychic medium came about after the stillbirth of her son during the COVID-19 pandemic. She says that his passing was her spiritual awakening. Supplied Calgary's Michelle Minke transitioned from opera singer to medium during the pandemic. Minke will be conducting a group mediumship reading Tuesday at the Park Theatre. A medium is… a translator for the spirit world. As a medium I connect to people who have passed… to spirits on the other side. I do one-on-one work, in person and via Zoom and I do group readings which are on a bigger scale. People have described the group readings as grief counselling. I hate it when people ask me what I do… even when I was an opera singer I hated that question. People would be like, 'What, how do you become an opera singer? Oh my God, that is crazy.' And now it's even more wild. I am working on saying… 'I am a medium and I hope it brings some curiosity to you,' instead of things like, 'It's kind of out there, it's really abstract,' and apologizing for it before I say it. I am also psychic… I can perceive information about a person, their energy, what is coming up for them, their emotional state and sometimes their health as well. There are so many stereotypes around psychics… people think we Google people before we read them. People are skeptical. Women will ask me if I can tune into their husband's energy… and see if he is cheating or thinking of divorce. This is always a very thin line for me. I believe any psychic or medium out there needs to be working in integrity, which means only tuning into someone if you have their consent. Otherwise it is witchcraft. I used to run an opera company, Cowtown Opera… we made fun of opera so we sang everything in English. I was so well known in the Canadian operatic scene. I had a huge community. It was brand suicide when I made the switch… I couldn't have chosen anything more controversial. People were saying, 'Michelle is crazy now, she has lost her mind, did you hear she thinks she's a psychic?' It has been very humbling… I have to trust the truth within myself. I have been called to do it and I have to live how I am supposed to. Supplied Calgary's Michelle Minke transitioned from opera singer to medium during the COVID-19 pandemic. Spirits are people, animals and guides… co-existing with us. We just cannot see them. They want to be contacted. People who love you want you to know they are OK. When we pass our spirit resonates at a very high frequency… we are a very low frequency here in the 3D world. For me to be a medium I have to raise my energy to connect with them and they have to lower theirs. It's almost like I have to dial into a certain radio station for us to connect. At live group readings… spirits are waiting to speak to people in the audience. Every audience member brings around 10 spirits with them. It is a very crowded room for me. I have to ask the spirits to step forward one at a time. I have met spirits that really screwed up here… people who have murdered, people who have raped. People who made really bad decisions here. There are some people who… don't want to hear from someone or don't want them to come through. People who have hurt them. There are a number of ways spirits can communicate to us… clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience and claircognizance. Clairvoyance is clear seeing… so having really vivid dreams or being able to see things in the imagination space of the mind. Clairaudience is hearing… people who will hear messages or voices through their ears. Music is a huge thing. For me I will hear people's names or I will hear a song. Clairsentience is the feeling… when we get goosebumps. That's really spirit communicating to us. Claircognizance is clear knowing… the gut instinct, that intuition when you are driving and you feel like, 'I have to take a really different way home today.' I have a very strict regime with the spirit world… I only connect to them when I say. They are not welcome to come to me in my dreams or the day before or when I am playing with my son or when I am grocery shopping. They know that's not the time to communicate with me. I have boundaries in place. Supplied For group readings, Minke says every audience member brings 10 spirits with them. One of the biggest things I've learned… is that we are all born good. Every single person is born good. When we die our spririt returns to the actual essence of our soul, which is good. We let our ego go, things that we were angry about, things we were guilty of, things we feel shame about, all that disappears when we return to our home. This is really complex to think about… because so much evil happens here. Whether it is who influences us or how we were raised or how we were abused. Our trauma, usually in childhood, really ends up defining us. This ability came to me in five years ago… during COVID I had a stillborn child. A few weeks after he had passed… I woke up, three nights in a row at exactly 2:38 a.m., to the scent of lilies. I started to feel like I was losing my mind. The second time it happened I told my husband I might need professional help. I was so worried I was googling things: 'What does it mean to smell lilies at two in the morning?' The third night… I woke up to a grown man at my bedside to my left. As soon as I looked at him I knew he was my son. He looked like me and my other son. I held his face in the physical form and said, 'Oh my God, it's you.' He just said, 'Yes.' Shortly after that I felt a lot of spirits come to me… I started having faces flash in front of my eyes. Everything about spirituality is an intention… I am creating an intention to connect to a spirit right now. I am creating the intention to communicate to the loved ones who have passed. It's like a prayer and then something that happens on an energetic level where I expand my energy to try and blend with that spirit to receive information. I wish the spirit world would communicate in English… and say, 'I am here, this is what is happening,' but it doesn't really work like that. Instead I see flashes of something or I will hear something or I will feel something with my body and then I do my best to translate that. I realized I am supposed to be communicating… on behalf of people who have passed but I didn't know to take the abstract things that were happening to me — I mean it sounds like mental health issues — and make it into something tangible. I had to learn how to strengthen my psychic abilities… from mediums such as Danielle Searancke from Squamish, B.C., Sean Collyns from Australia and Joanna Shipley who is based in the U.K. This all happened for me during COVID so it was all virtual. This summer I am going to be studying with Tony Stockwell in Bali. I think with any psychic or medium your journey is never over… you are constantly trying to improve and learn. Our soul is so complex, and the spiritual world is multi-layered and multi-faceted, that I am already looking for my next teacher. Supplied Michelle Minke admits some people are skeptical about her abilities. I was intuitive as a child… as children our minds are very open. We are all born with psychic senses. The veil is very thin and we can see both the physical world and the spiritual realm. These abilities are within us from very young but society and religious structures take some of that away. Then usually in later life… these abilities are awakened in people who have endured great trauma. I feel like that was the case for me. I was brought up very religious, very Christian… I think a lot of people are praying for my soul. During Elections Get campaign news, insight, analysis and commentary delivered to your inbox during Canada's 2025 election. Christianity teaches you not to connect with the spirit world… it's evil and you are going to bring in the devil, all of those kinds of things. It doesn't work like that. My dad ended up living with me after my mom passed away… and he is very curious about all of it. There is not a lot of judgment. The spiritual conversations we have are amazing — what are you doing? How does this all work? — that has been really interesting as well. I don't feel a lot of fear in this world… I only work in the light. If I feel a negative spirit has come in with a client, I say, 'You are not welcome here.' You can say a big eff off to anything that freaks you out. The spirit world listens because we are all equal. I am not interested in being entertainment for people… I want to make a profound difference. AV KitchingReporter AV Kitching is an arts and life writer at the Free Press. She has been a journalist for more than two decades and has worked across three continents writing about people, travel, food, and fashion. Read more about AV. Every piece of reporting AV produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press's tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press's history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates. Our newsroom depends on a growing audience of readers to power our journalism. 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