Somewhere in Chicago, a woman called her shaman in a panic. A spiritual practitioner she trusted had just told her she was possessed by a demon. That a dark entity was attached to her energy field and was the cause of every hardship hitting her family. The woman was terrified. She believed it.
The shaman she called was Rachel White. And Rachel, in the middle of her corporate workday, had to spend twenty minutes on the phone walking this woman back from the edge of a full psychological spiral, armed with nothing but the truth: sometimes life just sucks for a while, and that is not a demonic event.
Within hours, the same practitioner who had caused the panic emailed Rachel asking her to explain, step by step, how to perform an exorcism.
We did not see that coming when we sat down to record this episode. And honestly? That moment told us everything we needed to know about why Rachel White wrote The Business of Woo.
We Thought We Were Talking About Business. We Were Actually Talking About Survival.
When we first picked up Rachel's book, we expected a kind of spiritual MBA. Value propositions, client funnels, pricing strategy. And yes, all of that is in there. But what we didn't expect was how deeply personal and genuinely urgent the conversation would become.
Rachel spent nearly two decades as a Senior Vice President at a global corporation, quietly doing tarot readings out of her Chicago apartment on weekends, building a client list one referral at a time. In March 2020, the same week the world shut down, she walked away from corporate life for good. Today she runs TOTEM Readings in Austin, Texas, serves thousands of clients, and has just released what we think is the most grounded, practical, and laugh-out-loud funny book ever written about psychic work as a profession.
But here is the thing that genuinely stopped us mid-conversation and sent us back to re-read that chapter: the better you get at this work, the more vulnerable you become. Not the other way around.
The Princess and the Pea Paradox: Why Skill Doesn't Build Armor
Most people assume that as a psychic practitioner develops their abilities, they build up a kind of spiritual immunity. More protection. More resilience. A thicker energetic skin.
Rachel calls this the Princess and the Pea Paradox, and she flips that assumption completely on its head.
"The better you get at it," she told us, "the more you put the reps in and you level up psychically, spiritually, energetically, the more sensitive you become. Actually."
This is backed up by what researchers in the field of sensory processing and high sensitivity have long documented in non-spiritual contexts. Elaine Aron's foundational research on Highly Sensitive People, published in her 1996 book The Highly Sensitive Person, established that roughly 15 to 20 percent of the population processes sensory and emotional data with significantly more depth and intensity than average. That sensitivity doesn't diminish with experience. It refines. It expands. And without the right structures around it, it can become genuinely destabilizing.
For practitioners who work in energy healing, psychic reading, or shamanic work, the implications are practical and immediate. Rachel describes having to tell herself out loud, several nights a week before bed, that she will not leave her body in her sleep. That she needs rest. That tonight is not for big dreams or astral work. The first time she did it, she felt, by her own admission, like a complete crazy person. Then she had the best night of sleep she'd had in months.
We found that oddly moving. And extremely useful.
🎧 This is one of those episodes you'll want to listen to twice. Find it wherever you get your podcasts, or head to skepticmetaphysician.com.
The $38 Billion Industry Full of People Who Skipped the Business Part
Here is a number that surprised us: the wellness and spiritual services market is currently valued at approximately $38 billion in the United States alone, with projections pointing toward $81 billion by the early 2030s. This is not a fringe economy. It is a rapidly maturing industry, and Rachel argues it is at an inflection point where consumers are getting smarter, grifters are getting exposed, and the practitioners who have done the real work are finally positioned to take serious market share.
But most of them are getting in their own way. And Rachel does not sugarcoat why.
The most common mistake she sees? Practitioners who beta test their gift on three enthusiastic friends, get glowing feedback, and conclude they are ready for market. They are not. "Those two or three people in your life aren't gonna pay your bills," she told us plainly.
The clients who show up in a real practice are strangers going through divorces, job losses, health crises, and ego deaths. They are vulnerable in ways your friends never will be, and they need consistent, boundaried, skilled care in return. Building that capacity, and the systems to support it, is the actual work.
What Actually Works: A Practical Breakdown
Rachel gave us several concrete tools we have been thinking about ever since.
On pricing: Start lower than feels right. Not insultingly low, but accessible enough that a referral becomes a no-brainer. Think of early-stage pricing as a paid internship where you are working out the operational kinks while building your most valuable asset, your client list. Raise your prices deliberately as demand grows.
On marketing: Podcasting and long-form written content consistently outperform social media for converting spiritual service seekers into paying clients. Social platforms are built to keep users on the platform. Podcast listeners, by contrast, will binge your back catalogue on a long walk and then book a session. Evergreen content compounds. Instagram posts have, in Rachel's words, "the lifespan of a fruit fly."
On scheduling: Group your woo work and your administrative work into separate blocks. Do not toggle between a client energy session and your email inbox in real time. Rachel calls this Feng Shui-ing your day, and the underlying logic is sound. Context switching between deep empathic work and operational tasks is cognitively and energetically costly. Build your calendar to protect against it.
On the day job: Do not quit until the demand for your practice is so overwhelming that continuing to hold both becomes physically impossible. The universe does not only back you when you have nothing left to lose. That advice, Rachel notes with characteristic directness, is what subprime mortgage brokers sound like.
What the Fake Exorcism Actually Teaches Us
We keep coming back to that story. Not for the shock of it, although it is genuinely shocking, but for what it reveals about the structural vulnerability of people who seek out spiritual support.
The woman at the center of it was not naive or fragile. She was a functioning adult who trusted a practitioner and got manipulated with fear. It cost her weeks of psychological distress and very nearly cost her a significant amount of money. Rachel estimates she has worked with over a hundred clients who came to her in the aftermath of similar experiences.
The protective factor, in every case, was the same thing: information. Knowing what predatory behavior looks like. Knowing that a legitimate practitioner will never manufacture urgency, never diagnose possession in a first session, and never make their fees contingent on the severity of the problem they have just invented.
That is what Rachel's book is, at its core. Not a business manual. A field guide for navigating a space that has never had one.
The Big Picture
Talking to Rachel made us realize we had been thinking about psychic development backwards. We assumed that mastery meant protection, that skill meant stability, that getting good at this work would make it easier to carry. What Rachel showed us is that it actually makes you more open, more permeable, more impacted by the people and energy around you. And that the only real answer to that is structure, not armor.
Structure in how you schedule your days. Structure in how you price your work. Structure in how you set boundaries with clients, with social media, with the very abilities that brought you here in the first place.
And apparently, with yourself, out loud, before bed.
If you are anywhere on the spectrum of spiritual exploration, whether you are building a practice, considering it, or just trying to understand why this work keeps leaving you exhausted, this is the conversation you did not know you needed.
🎧 Listen to the full episode with Rachel White at skepticmetaphysician.com, or search The Skeptic Metaphysicians on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
Loved this episode? Share it with someone who is thinking about taking their spiritual gifts into the world. And if you haven't subscribed yet, now is a really good time. We have a lot more of this coming.
Rachel White is the founder of TOTEM Readings in Austin, Texas, and the author of The Business of Woo. Her Etsy shop, Totem Readings ATX, carries flower essence blends, oracle decks, and her new clothing collaboration. Find her at totemreadings.com.
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