God is not available on speed dial, but his agents can be accessed through YouTube, Instagram and Facebook on demand. The pandemic saw a boom in the following of spiritual influencers. With millions of virtual ‘followers’, they dominate the marketplace of mindful solutions. Click on the follow button for advice through a phone call or email rituals are either done by proxy or directly yourself. There are crystal healers and witches.
Some are quacks, while many digital gurus are trained in specific methods or have spent years at the tarot board. Marketing classes are offering lessons in spiritual influencing. As the coronavirus mutates, a second wave rises and places go into lockdown, memories of isolation and despair stoke fresh fears. The problems of human beings are not original; they concern money, heartbreak, profession and property. However, there is nothing like a free lunch; for a fee the Instragram gurus with USP (Unique Psychic Proposition) will tell you how to lead a mindful life free of troubles. Just log in.
Alyonna Parveen
ALYONNA.ANGELICA, AUSTRALIA
Pick-a-Card Readings
150K+ Followers
This spiritual influencer credits her mixed parentage, multiracial family and exposure to different religions and cultures for her spiritual attraction. Though most popular for her Shamanic plant medicine-based healing sessions using special concoctions of spices and ceremonial grade cacao, Parveen is known on social media for her pick-a-card tarot readings. These made her practice accessible to everyone during the pandemic.
USP: Videos in which she pulls three-four cards from an energised tarot deck, asks the viewer to pick a number and proceeds to give bespoke readings, which are then uploaded on YouTube free-of-cost. This enables potential clients to sample her style of divination and communication skills. Her take: “Social media is a portal to our energy. Clients are able to truly feel me before booking a session.”
Sheelaa M Bajaj
Bengaluru/Dubai
Moon Energy Healing
30K+ Followers
Moonchild Sheelaa M Bajaj took to spirituality at age 15. She is placed among the top three podcasters in the world in the personal development category. Bajaj is the high priestess of the ‘Temple of Miracles’ dedicated to the goddess Elegua in Bengaluru the first Yoruba temple in India. Thus, the YouTuber advices people with problems students to professionals, housewives navigating midlife crisis, to people having affairs. She claims to maximise the energy of the moon during her tarot and numerology readings. She has also started a spirituality startup called Rising Pheonix, which provides access to numerous spiritual healers for different services and at different price points.
USP: Banishing negativity from life through candle services at the Yoruba Temple on new moon nights. She believes lunar energy shifts can solve money problems, professional setbacks and relationship issues by rewiring the brain.
HER TAKE: “Life’s varied problems, whether related to money, professional or relationship issues can be properly solved only by rewiring the brain through energy shifts.”
Seema Midha
Gurugram
Mobile Number Numerology
200K+ Followers
This trained child psychologist started out dispensing free psychological and spiritual advice to wives of defence officers over 30 years ago and went on to became a TV numerologist celebrity. Her eidetic memory was an advantage; she stored in her brain the phone numbers of her tens of thousands of callers. One day she had a startling epiphany repeating number patterns were associated with specific problems, allowing her to predict what the caller was going to ask her about even before it was voiced. You can write to her and take an appointment.
USP: A special secret formula for mobile number numerology corrections. Being social media savvy helped during the pandemic.
ADVICE: “Give something every day, and you will feel uplifted. This is the right time to contribute
to society.”
Anisha Dutt
Zariya Healings, Delhi
Magick
10K+ Followers
Interested in tarot and mysticism since her teens, this Wiccan read up a lot before turning into a professional witch. Dutt explains the ‘K’ in Magick distinguishes the work of witches from magic shows. She conducts tarot readings and healing sessions using akashic records, magick and other occult mediums.
USP: Uses powerful herbs such as cinnamon, chamomile flowers, and marjoram with oils and specific candles to heal relationships, manifest job opportunities or banish negativity. You set an intention wherever you are. She works with specific herbs to heal from her end. She may ask you to keep some herbs on yourself. These can be picked from her premises.
Client CLAIMS: Helped a woman conceive despite having only one Fallopian tube. Exorcised spirits in a new house enabling its owner to settle in.
HER TAKE: “My work has always been relevant but when the energies of the world shifted with Covid-19, people were forced to look within, and discover alternative methods.”
Jai Madaan
Delhi
Astrology And Palmistry
500K+ Followers
S he has the touch. She claims that since she was 13, she can know everything about an object or person merely by touching them. Through her popular YouTube channel and Instagram page, she shares information on astrological sciences. Her camera-friendly personality and simplification of rigorous, often expensive, alternative remedies have made her a recognised spiritual influencer. Social media is the best way to reach her for tarot readings/astrology/palmistry and vastu consultant. She also charges for consultation as a life coach.
USP: Bury a piece of paper in the earth and take care of it, watering it daily, while saying one’s desire aloud. Follow this method, she says, no matter how kooky it sounds.
HER TAKE: “I believe people come to me instead of priests or babas, because I look like them. I wear saris, jeans, dresses and am approachable.”
Patrick San Francesco
THE FIRST PRINCIPLE, GOA /CALIFORNIA
Nature Healing
30K+ Followers
Patrick San Francesco could heal his severely ill brother and others around him at the age of four by simply requesting God to make them better. When he turned 30, he began to see the energies of colours and associated each with specific tasks in nature. San Francesco doesn’t charge for his healing services. He can be contacted through his website, patricksanfrancesco.com/bio.
USP: Created a colour energy ‘toolbox’ to cure physical ailments. To stay in touch with his vast following around the world, he uses Apphealing, the world’s first multi-dimensional energy healing. The meditation content he puts out on social media was appreciated during the pandemic.
HIS TAKE: “Often, with temples and priests, results are hard to see. My medium of healing shows immediate and palpable results.”
Hitesh Vashisht & Shubhangi Sharma
LIFE HERE & NOW, GURUGRAM
Astral Travel
20K+ Followers
This medium has the message. Through the popular series
on YouTube, ‘Sundaram Speaks’, Vashisht shares messages he affirms to have received from a higher-dimensional, non-physical being known as Sundaram. Working with his
wife Shubhangi Sharma, he gets them in a state of deep meditation. He conducts personalised healing sessions by employing past life regression, astral travel, etc.
USP: When practiced under able guidance, Vashisht asserts that astral travel—which means going into a deep state of meditation has the power to heal.
HIS TAKE: “These ancient practices offer solutions from within, by encouraging us to tap into our mind-body-spirit connection. Unfortunately, only a handful of people are sincere enough to use the astral level for the greater good.”
Neha Lalwani
THE MODERN MYSTIC, DELHI
Free Remedies
200K+ Followers
When she turned five, her uncanny perception made her aware of a parallel world that taught her that certain actions could solve life’s problems.
USP: She has used ‘energised’ numbers written on a slip of paper and pasted on a comb to reduce hair loss, tied a pink thread on the ring finger to attract a soul mate, cast spells to reduce acne and aid weight loss. Her services are free to her multitude of followers on social media. By sharing such tips, Lalwani helps people who cannot afford personalised sessions or paid workshops, especially during the pandemic. However, she does not believe social media is a serious medium for growth.
Her TAKE: “The internet is fickle, full of negativity and overrun by fake ‘healers’. Anyone with a good PR company can grow online. It does not guarantee their effectiveness.”
Neha Kare Kanabar
M.O.M, MUMBAI
Money Manifestation
25K+ Followers
Think, do and make it happen. Kanabar first became aware of the laws of attraction when she was an engineering student. She extensively studied the quantum physics behind this principle and evolved the ‘Magic of Manifestation’ programme. Find her on Facebook to enroll for a paid manifestation workshop.
USP: Her workshops focus on money manifestation using personalised blueprints that claim to make followers wealthy, help pay off their debts and grow their businesses. She designs a step-by-step process unique to every person. Her workshops are described as ‘life coaching combined with spiritual magic’.
COVID TAKE: Through the pandemic, her live sessions on YouTube and Instagram were immensely popular and she credits this popularity to, “The feeling of alienation and isolation that people felt. This emotion was best addressed through spirituality, which empowered and helped them to manage stress.”
Dr Newton Kondaveti
QLU GLOBAL, HYDERABAD
Past Life Regression Therapy
20K+ Followers
The doctor has carried on. Reading Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull one day put him on the spiritual path. Kondaveti proclaims that past-life regression therapy works on the body, mind, emotions and spirit. He has a spirituality website called QLU Global (through which he can be contacted), and is also the founder of Pyramid Valley International, both big in the business of spirituality.
USP: Has cured insomnia, panic attacks, claustrophobia, depression, asthma, obesity and other patently physical problems through past life regression therapy.
COVID TAKE: The pandemic is a great teacher. “It made us aware of the limitations of conventional methods. Our linear minds failed to understand it. It was the other part of our consciousness, our intuitive intelligence that enabled many of us to transcend our fears and overcome our limitations in these difficult times.”
Divyaa Pandit
WHITE LIGHT HEALING CENTER, MUMBAI
Energy Healing
300K+ Followers
Claiming to be a clairvoyant since childhood, the founder of the White Light Healing Center talks of realising her special abilities only at forty. She claims to help her clients access their subconscious, where debilitating curses of jilted lovers and suppressed memories of childhood abuse block chances of marriage, and strained relations with parents act as blocks to pregnancy.
USP: Most popular offerings on YouTube and social media include crowd-pleaser videos such on the ones on art of manifesting money, removing negativity from various aspects of life, and live meditations on Facebook, which were watched globally during the pandemic.
Her take: “I feel that spirituality gives instant peace and happiness that people need these days. It offers a steady solution to all kinds of problems and provides you with an anchor.”
Shruti Nada Poddar
VEDAARANYA HEALING, SHEKHAWATI, RAJASTHAN
Vibrational Healing
10K+ Followers
Having grown up in a home where Vedic chanting and havans took place on a daily basis, the power of vibrations came naturally to Shruti Nada Poddar. Her Nada Vibronics vibrational healing ecosystem claims to help followers access their inner forces and planes of the self through sound, mantras, yantras and shakti. These can then be used to heal through yogic breath work, as well as by focussing on nadis, mudras, visualisation techniques and mind sciences. Write to her on [email protected] to take an appointment.
USP: Poddar claims that vibrational healing allows people to achieve personal wellbeing and empowerment, and is also known to cure disease.
Covid Take: “People have a deep need for psychological wellbeing. My programme is popular because it offers cultural learning that is informative and scientific.”
Urvasshi Behla
ASTROURVASSHI, DELHI
Astrological Predictions
30K+ Followers
The stars were with her since childhood. Hailing from a family that consulted the stars for every important decision, Behla was inspired to explore spirituality to understand its merits. After extensive study she concluded there were merits, and made it her mission to simplify and explain the precise science behind ancient methodologies to others. She praises the power of social media that connected her to a wide audience across geographical and cultural boundaries during the pandemic. Yet, she feels she does not classify as a spiritual influencer.
USP: She uploads Zodiac predictions and remedies for difficult astrological occurrences and tips on her prominent YouTube channel.
HER TAKE: “Even though I am spiritual, I do not try and influence anyone, and my posts connected to spirituality will always have an astrological context as a solution or a remedy.”
Tamanna Chandhok
TAMANNAC.PSYCHIC, London
Angel Therapy
50K+ Followers
This angelic soul sensation says her third eye opened when she was just nine. She believes that every person is born with at least two guardian angels that send messages in the form of ‘intuition’ or gut feel. Chandhok specialises in accessing her own guiding angels and those of others. For people going through setbacks like divorce or serious illness, these angel messages will tell her whether the blow is karmic and unpreventable or just a bad phase that needs to be tided over.
USP: Her 101 live sessions on Instagram, where she answers generic questions on spirituality, have become particularly popular during the pandemic.
HER TAKE. “People turn to spirituality not just for predictions but also to learn how to handle their emotions and navigate difficult situations.”
Sidhharrth S Kumaar
NUMROVAANI, GURUGRAM
Numerology Based on Tibetan Sacred Texts
30K+ Followers
This fifth-generation astrologer and numerologist is faithful to the tradition of his forefathers. He insists that spirituality must be treated as a way of life. Hence, drive fast when the times are good and drive with caution when danger is afoot, all the while ensuring that risk of potential losses remains low. You can reach him through Numrovani.com.
USP: He has created a proprietary method of name correction that follows Chaldean numerology principles, supplemented with sacred yantras and mantras he learned in Tibet. This is meant to accord specialised energy to corrected names.
Covid Take: “The coronavirus helped people look within themselves to identify what is essential and what they merely desire.”