Grief does not announce itself with a single event and then depart. It settles into the background of a life like a change in air pressure, altering everything without revealing its source. Those who have lost someone they love, know the particular quality of that silence. The moment when a familiar presence is simply no longer there, and the world continues spinning as though nothing of consequence has occurred. Most traditions offer ceremony and time as the primary tools for navigating that silence. A quieter tradition offers something else: the possibility that the silence is not as absolute as it feels.
That possibility is the terrain Barbra Banner works in every day. A Psychic, Evidential, and Trance Medium based in Los Angeles, Banner has built a practice grounded in the conviction that consciousness does not end at death, and that the distance between the living and those who have passed is far more permeable than most people imagine. She is certified with Helping Parents Heal and listed on FindACertifiedMedium.com by Mark Ireland, two of the most respected credentialing organizations in the field. Her readings are known for their specificity, their emotional precision, and, unexpectedly, their humor. “I trust what Spirit gives me,” Banner says, “no matter how crazy it sounds.”
That combination of frank trust and disarming lightness has made her one of the more distinctive voices in a field that can tend toward solemnity. When working with a client, Banner’s presence is active and forward-moving rather than reflective. And the path that brought her to this work is, in many ways, as evidential as anything she delivers in a session, a biography so precisely assembled for its eventual purpose that calling it accidental requires a determined effort.
A Life Before the Call
Banner was born and raised in Los Angeles, in circumstances she describes as fortunate and warm, with loving parents, financial stability, and a childhood she characterizes as charmed. The woo woo, as she puts it, was not part of the landscape. She did not see imaginary friends or experience unexplained visitations. What she did notice, at around age 13, was a faint but unmistakable sense that she was picking things up that others were not. Half-jokingly, she told her friends she thought she was a witch. She did not know what else to call it.
The ability was quiet enough that it went largely unexamined for the next three and a half decades. Banner went on to build a full career as an award-winning advertising writer and marketing professional in Los Angeles, exactly the kind of work that demands precision in communication, a read on what an audience needs to feel, and the ability to translate an interior experience into language that lands. She excelled at it for 35 years.
But alongside that career, she was also spending her evenings, weekends, and early mornings somewhere else entirely. The marketing maven was also, quietly, showing up in places most people go out of their way to avoid. It was not a contradiction she examined closely at the time. She was simply drawn. Later, she would understand exactly why.
Decades in the Dark
For 14 years, Banner volunteered on a Women’s Crisis Hotline. She then spent 13 years at one of Los Angeles’s busiest emergency rooms, a Level 1 trauma environment where the pace is relentless and the human cost is visible and immediate. From there, she joined the city’s Crisis Response Team, a role that took her somewhere few civilians ever go: to the scene of a death, with the police and the coroner present, the body still there, and the family or witnesses needing someone to stand beside them on the worst day of their lives.
The team would be called out at all hours. Banner went. She was trained extensively in grief, trauma, and psychological crisis by therapists and specialists whose expertise she now draws on in every reading she conducts. When friends asked why she kept doing it, her answer was simple: “Because I can.”
It is the kind of answer that sounds casual and is actually profound. In the spiritual framework Banner would later come to understand her life through, those three volunteer chapters were not coincidences. They were preparation, a curriculum she could not have designed for herself, delivered over four decades in the language of practical service. The Women’s Crisis Hotline taught her how to hold space for someone in the acute stage of fear. The ER taught her how to stay clear and functional in the presence of trauma. The Crisis Response Team taught her to sit with death itself, not as abstraction, but as a physical, immediate reality, and to remain steady enough that a grieving family could lean on that steadiness.
She would not fully recognize the pattern until much later. But when she did, it was unmistakable. Every placement she had described as instinctive, every organization she had felt drawn toward, turned out to have been pointing somewhere specific. The spiritual world, it seemed, had been building her resume long before she knew she was applying for the position.
When Spirit Knocked
The event that changed everything happened at home, during the pandemic. Banner’s house, as she describes it, became a paranormal hot spot. A clock flew across the room. Orbs appeared on video footage she filmed. Ceiling fans in two separate rooms switched on simultaneously, their lights flashing wildly, including, notably, one fan that had no bulb installed. Then her mother-in-law’s photograph came off the mantle on its own and the glass broke.
Banner was not frightened. She was fascinated. Her husband could not believe what he was seeing. But she had already made up her mind: the other side was calling, and she had better answer. She signed up for a mediumship class with Suzanne Giesemann.
She had never meditated before in her life. For her first practice, she locked herself in a dark closet. In that silence, she saw her deceased father. He was peeking over a wall, showing other people that his daughter was doing it. Within seven months of that first session, Banner had hung a shingle and begun taking clients. The pace of it still surprises her when she reflects on it.
The explanation she received, from multiple channelers she encountered in those early months, was that she had been doing this work for centuries and had simply been reactivated. In Banner’s telling, it seemed as though Spirit had put her on ice for all these years and then decided to bring her back when spirituality became more culturally open. She does not say this with grandiosity. She says it the way a person describes a commute, matter-of-factly, as the only version of events that explains what actually happened.
The family thread confirmed it. During the pandemic, Banner’s mother was 103 years old. Banner decided to tell her what she was doing, unsure how her mother would respond. Her mother’s answer was a confession: Banner’s grandmother had dragged her to psychics, tea-leaf readers, and card readers throughout her life, and had been deeply intuitive herself, someone people sought out for guidance. The gifts, it turned out, had always been in the family. Banner’s mother had simply never mentioned it. “I don’t know what she was waiting for to let the cat out of the bag,” Banner says.
The moment she knew without any doubt that she was destined for this work came from the first week of that first mediumship class. She describes it as blinders coming off. A whole new world opened up. She felt, she says, like she was smack in the middle of the movies Poltergeist, Freaky Friday, and Alice in Wonderland.
The Making of a Medium
Once Banner knew what she was, she pursued it with the focused energy of someone who has waited a long time to find their work. She took classes and workshops from the leading figures in her field and attended the Arthur Findlay College in England twice. Known as the foremost institution for the advancement of psychic science and the study of mediumship, Arthur Findlay is the place Banner describes as the real Hogwarts. She also joined VerySoul, an organization that provides mediums with a supported environment to practice and develop their gifts alongside peers.
In those early months, she was doing five or six practice readings a day. She pushed herself to the edge of burnout before she understood that self-care was not optional in this work, that the instrument requires maintenance, that a depleted medium is not a useful one.
The other lesson took longer. Banner describes it as the ego lesson, and she is precise about what it cost her. In the early period, there were readings that did not measure up, moments where what she delivered fell short of what spirit was offering. She learned that spirit will keep a medium in line when they are feeling invincible. The correction was clear: this is not about her. She is the vessel. She is the reporter.
But the deepest challenge was trust. The kind of specific, granular information that can come through in a reading, details that seem impossible, images that seem too precise to be credible, sometimes required her to override her own disbelief before she would pass them on. She overcame that skepticism gradually, through accumulated evidence. “I finally overcame my skepticism,” she says, “and trusted whatever they give me.”
A mentor once told her to cool her lighthearted, humorous personality, suggesting that readings were sacred and solemnity was the appropriate register. Banner’s response, at the level of heart and instinct, was immediate: don’t even think of it. She stayed the course. The humor, she has found, does not diminish the evidence. It elevates it. She has never stopped taking workshops and classes from respected teachers, continuing to take what resonates and leave behind what does not serve her.
Inside the Reading Room
Banner’s approach to a session begins, deliberately, with laughter. Within the first two minutes of any reading, she says something that makes almost everyone smile. This is not warmup. It is strategy. Grief is physically and energetically heavy, and the quality of a connection, the clarity and specificity of what comes through, is directly related to the vibration in the room. The lighter the energy, the better the information flows.
She reads the room. If a client arrives in tears, the humor adjusts. But the principle holds: she wants everyone to leave lighter than when they arrived, because that is what their loved ones on the other side want for them. The guilt that people feel about laughing during a reading, the sense that enjoying themselves is somehow disloyal to their grief, is one of the things she works to dissolve. Their loved ones, in her experience, are frequently the ones making the jokes. If someone was funny in life, they keep their essence.
A session moves through distinct phases. After the opening, Banner asks who the client would like to connect with. She describes the physical appearance and personality coming through until she and the client confirm they have the right person. From there, she delivers evidence: memories, recent events, specific details that demonstrate presence and awareness. She often receives what she describes as visual images that correspond directly to photographs in the client’s personal albums. The smiles that follow, she says, are one of the things she loves most.
The Q&A section follows. Clients can ask questions, address unfinished business, seek confirmation of things they already sense. Banner also invites the client to hold a silent question in their mind without sharing it. She does not want to know what it is. The answer comes from spirit directly. Some of the responses that come through in this phase are simply hilarious. Unfinished business gets addressed. Apologies that needed recognition get recognized. Spirit, as Banner understands it, gives you what you need to know today, which is not always what you want to know.
For select readings, Banner offers a closing that takes place in trance, a personal message from the loved one, channeled in an altered state. She remembers virtually nothing of what she says during trance. It is, in her description, always the most fascinating part of the session, and the class that made the biggest impact on her accuracy and on the energy of a reading was, without a doubt, learning trance.
The session does not end when the messages do. Banner closes every reading with an exercise designed to teach the client how to maintain their own connection to the person they have just heard from. She believes that everyone has the tools for this, that it requires only intention, meditation, and the soul. Clients send her emails and photographs afterward about their experiences. She remains accessible and genuinely interested in their progress. Her certifications with Helping Parents Heal and FindACertifiedMedium.com by Mark Ireland reflect a particular commitment to serving the population she finds most important: parents who have lost children. Those certifications, she says, deepened her already extensive compassion and empathy and hold her to an ethical standard she carries into every session.
Laughter as Medicine
Banner does not treat humor as a stylistic quirk. She treats it as a clinical tool with a physiological basis. According to Banner, laughter increases the release of endorphins, the body’s natural painkillers, while also reducing stress, anxiety, and blood pressure and raising immunity. It actively interferes with the grief response, offering the nervous system a temporary reprieve from the physical weight of loss. “One of the tasks of grieving,” she says, “is to learn to laugh again.”
She is also committed to a fundamental shift in how clients approach the question of connection. Most people grow up with “seeing is believing” as a kind of operating system, a commitment to empirical proof as the precondition for trust. Banner has inverted that entirely. In the spiritual arena, she says, it is “believing is seeing.” The willingness to remain open, to suspend the demand for prior proof, is what allows contact to occur. Skepticism closes the channel. Openness is not naivety. It is the prerequisite for the kind of experience that renders skepticism irrelevant.
She is also clear about what she is not here to do. Certified mediums, in Banner’s view, do not perform for applause. The work is sacred and carries serious responsibility. Some clients arrive wanting to test a medium, asking for specific passwords, lotto numbers, or details designed to catch the medium out rather than open a genuine connection. “It is the job of an evidential medium to provide evidence and validations that spirit gives us,” says Banner. “We do want them to believe that life goes on and know that their loved ones are still around them trying to give them guidance and love.”
The Butterfly Reading
Among the thousands of readings Banner has conducted, one stands apart as the moment that crystallized her sense of purpose and led directly to her certification with Helping Parents Heal.
A mother came to her who had lost a six-year-old son. It was her first time with a medium. During the reading, Banner found herself making a funny face, re-creating an expression the boy used to make. Then came the Q&A. Banner invited the mother to hold a silent question for her son in her mind. She told the mother nothing of what she was receiving. What came through was this: her son, in heaven, flying on the back of a giant butterfly, dive-bombing, laughing, having the best time.
The mother began to cry. The question she had asked, silently, was: what are you doing in heaven?
She then told Banner something that neither of them could have anticipated. After her son had passed, she had bought a children’s book intended to help his younger sibling understand death. In that book, the author had described the kinds of joyful things children can do in heaven. The illustration showed a little boy riding on the back of a giant butterfly. The mother had read the book aloud to the younger sibling. Her son had been there when she did. She sent Banner a photograph of the illustration afterward.
For Banner, the reading confirmed everything she had come to believe about why she does this work. The people who come to her arrive desperate to understand something. They leave at peace. The connection is real. Consciousness continues. And a six-year-old boy, on the other side of the veil, was still making his mother smile, still showing up for the moments that mattered, still there when she read his little sister a book about where he had gone.
A Mission That Reaches Further
Banner began appearing as a podcast guest in late 2025. Since then, according to Banner, she has appeared on more than 100 shows. Her episode on Next Level Soul generated 340K views in its first 30 days. She is also set to appear on Mayim Bialik’s BREAKDOWN podcast, an invitation that arrived in the way most things seem to in her life: as a direct consequence of having already shown up where she was supposed to be. A producer who saw her on Next Level Soul reached out. It was, as Banner puts it, meant to be.
Her social media presence across Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram features what she describes as funny and outrageous 20-second clips: moments from readings where the information that comes through is so specific and so unexpected that it leaves both Banner and her clients in a state of mutual astonishment. She is, she says, just as blown over as they are.
For those who are just awakening to a spiritual path of their own, Banner’s advice is practical and generous: take classes, watch podcasts, read books. Everything is free and available. Decades of articles, radio interviews, free classes, documentaries, and ebooks are there to be explored. Whatever you need to know is there. And, she adds, feel joy. You are in for an exciting adventure.
She loves what she does. Every session, every day. She sees no reason why she cannot keep doing this until she is 100, or until her memory goes, whichever comes first.
Legacy: They Just Went a Little Ahead
The question of what she hopes to leave behind is one Banner has clearly thought about. Her answer does not center on recognition or reach. It centers on independence.
What she wants, above everything, is to help people learn to connect on their own. To give them the tools and the belief that they do not need an intermediary every time they want to feel close to someone they have lost. To show them how to raise their vibration with feelings of love and gratitude so the connection becomes easier to sustain. To remind them that the person they are missing is not gone. They just went a little ahead.
She finds philosophical companionship in two voices from outside her own experience. Dr. Brian Weiss, whose book One Life Many Masters was the first spiritual text that blew open her perceptions of what was possible. And Edgar Cayce, the American mystic who offered what has become, for Banner, something close to a personal motto: “When we die we are not gone, we have just gone a little ahead.”
Her father, who passed before her work began, has been her primary guide on the other side, teaching her about unconditional love, humor, confidence, and how to navigate challenges. Her daughter, very much alive and present, has been her primary teacher on this side, teaching her what matters, how to love others more than yourself, and what unconditional love actually looks like in practice. She describes hitting the jackpot in this life, and the phrase lands without irony, coming from someone who spent decades showing up at other people’s worst moments for the simple reason that she could.
When clients come to Banner asking what their purpose in life is, she tells them that the answer is already inside them. There is something in your heart and soul that makes you excited when you think about it. If money were no object, what would you want to be involved in? Go look. Ask your loved ones on the other side to help with clarity and intuition. You already know the answer.
It is, at bottom, the same thing she is always saying. That the connection is real. That the distance is smaller than it looks. That the people we love are not somewhere unreachable, but somewhere very close, paying attention, knowing everything that is going on, and wanting nothing more than for us to feel that, to carry it forward, and to choose, in spite of everything, a joyful life.
