Psychic to the Stars Laura Day Has a Lot of Famous Friends. She’s Also Got Some Advice for Surviving Uncertain Times.
It was a dreary spring afternoon, and Demi Moore’s psychic friend, Laura Day, was stuck on my fifth chakra. “That’s very much about voice,” she told me over Zoom, motioning to her throat. “Communication and leadership.” I had spent the last 40 minutes speaking more abstractly about her book, The Prism: Seven Steps to Heal Your Past and Transform Your Future (Spiegel & Grau), which she started writing decades ago and will be released at the end of this month. I had pivoted, preparing to ask a more concrete, moderately personal question in the hopes that she’d point me to a specific part of what she calls “the system.” But I’d only managed to spit out, “I often have a very difficult time—,” when she interrupted. “Actually stop,” she said. “I’m going to show you how The Prism works.”
If I were to go with my gut, I’d guess that during times of particular uncertainty, there’s an uptick in people seeking answers on finding a good path forward. Given the state of the world, it’s not surprising that over the next month, a slate of books will hit shelves promising insight into intuition. Titles range from crisis manager Mory Fontanez’s Higher Self (Dey Street) to Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir’s InnSaei (HarperOne), which focuses on the “Icelandic art of intuition,” to Elizabeth Greenwood’s Everyday Intuition (Harper), in which the author consults neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and ceremonial guides to suss out the uses and pitfalls of trusting that illusive sixth sense.
Those seeking a “system” vetted by Fortune 500 CEOs and Hollywood royalty alike might turn to Day, who burst onto the psychic scene with her 1997 NYT bestseller, Practical Intuition. The Prism collects more than three decades of her work as a self-described “intuitive”—in the form of a structured workbook addressing everything from working through feelings of inadequacy to achieving a sense of ecstasy—and couples it with intimate personal history. When Day was 14 years old, her mother died by suicide. Years later, both her sister and her brother did too. “My template for life was very skewed,” she writes of her childhood, during which she suffered abuse and neglect. “It has been my life’s work to correct my course.”
“One of the things that I really stress in The Prism,” she told me, is “everyone is an adult survivor of something. If I got stuck on my story, I’d be, I don’t know, making daisy chains in some center somewhere.”
Day has, instead, lived in the same Manhattan apartment for 43 years, and has a place in Rome and another in Woodstock (“which we never go to because we are not country people”). She describes her day job as working with companies to predict market moves; one early claim to fame came from “intuiting” the 2008 recession. The blurbs for The Prism and past books come from such people as Moore, Brad Pitt, Deepak Chopra, Keri Russell, and the actor she affectionately refers to as “Nic Kidman.” (Day is married to Stephen Schiff—former VF critic, New Yorker writer, and screenwriter of the ’90s Lolita, among other films—though most of her celeb connections predate the relationship.) Besides advising hedge funders and celebrity friends, she teaches workshops at Kripalu, Esalen, and Omega, and has trained what she describes as thousands of students online.
But back to my fifth chakra. The Prism is sectioned according to “ego centers” and accompanying questions and assertions. For instance, the first, or root chakra, corresponds to “safe structure and foundation” (a question: “Where am I overly rigid and unable to adapt?” and an assertion: “I belong”). According to the book, my apparent fifth ego center bugaboo, “controls your capacity for recognizing, accepting, and working with truth.” Did Day select this one because it’s a no-brainer for a journalist? Is it a coincidence that when she stopped me, I was about to tell her that I have a difficult time communicating hard truths honestly to people I care about? Or that I’ve found my voice to be a particularly overt indicator of my mental state, wobbling or freezing up altogether during times of stress? (Later in the conversation, when we turned off the recorder and she began addressing highly specific emotional and physical concerns with weirdly pinpointed accuracy, I found myself actually speechless.) Or was she just hearing the nasal tones of a latent head cold?
“I don’t require belief,” Day told me. “The reality is—and this is going to sound like a psychic, God, help me: A miracle does take a moment.” Her advice: “Do the questions, do the assertions. I don’t call them affirmations because if your subconscious doesn’t believe in an affirmation, it simply calls bullshit and it does you no good.”
Vanity Fair: In the past, you’ve talked about feeling resistant to aligning yourself with what you’ve called the more “woo-woo” aspects of what you do. How has that shifted for you over the years?
Laura Day: Because of the internet, I can really find the science that proves some of what looks like “woo-woo” until you see the science behind it. I’ve come around to not minding the language of woo-woo as long as there’s real proof behind it. We are vulnerable. No matter how smart or educated or savvy we are, we’re vulnerable. Beliefs are scary things. Beliefs aren’t supposed to have to prove themselves.
