What she didn’t know was that she was to be the bride!

“He came to me for a reason, but at the time I told him he was going to be getting married, I had no idea he was going to be marrying me!”

But it wasn’t the first time Joanne was to be in for a surprise.

On the eve of the couple’s wedding, Joanne fell downstairs and broke her leg.

Joanne – originally from Swansea – had done readings for some of the staff at the Aberdeen hospital where she was treated, and they joked that she should have seen the break coming.

But as she explains, though she knew there were some problems ahead, she was glad to be spared knowing she’d break her leg – and end up going down the aisle on crutches.

Joanne defines what she believes mediumship to be.

“It’s different to psychic guidance, everyone is psychic and everyone has intuition some would call the sixth sense,” she explained.

Joanne calls hers psychic vibes.

“Mediums are channels for the spirit world to use. Just like a telephone is needed for two people to communicate to each other – the medium can hold a conversation on behalf of both parties.”

Joanne and Jock, who moved to Inverness from Aberdeenshire just before Christmas, are both psychic mediums and have trained in the energy healing system, Reiki. Both are now Reiki masters and together they hope to open a spiritual and healing centre in Inverness.

Joanne is planning what she calls a “psychic vibes” course, to help anyone to tune in better to the intuition Joanne insists all of us have.

Joanne said: “We all have guidance available, when we need it all we have to do is open our minds and ask.

“This can be directed to God, the angels or loved ones in spirit, there is no certain way to do it other than asking from the heart.”

Joanne has been psychic since childhood.

At eight she realised she was psychic, though she remembers before that being frightened to go to bed because people were speaking to her.

“I’d ask them not to speak to me again.”

From palm readings, she moved on to train as a professional medium. As well as studying at the Stansted College of Psychic Studies in Stansted, London, Joanne trained as a hairdresser too.

“My mum said as long as I had a career I could study my spiritual work.”

Since then, Joanne has also gone on to spend five years training to be a Reiki master. Along the way, she has met top UK TV psychics Colin Fry and Derek Acorah and worked alongside Diane Lazarus, the winner of last year’s Channel Five series Britain’s Psychic Challenge.

After their wedding, they headed to America for their honeymoon. But the couple ended up staying longer than first planned and went on to appear on radio and TV out there and offered their services to police working on a missing person case.

Both are also authors. Jock’s book The Power Of The Sixth Sense, showing how to use our intuition to keep us safe, will be published next year, while this year Joanne will publish her second book, Depression: A Spiritual Sickness, a book on depression, based on what she’s learned, particularly over four years practising Reiki one day a week based at a health centre in Inverurie .

Reiki healing is a universal life force energy that helps to balance the mind, body and soul.

Joanne had her own experience of the power of Reiki when she broke her leg and ankle.

“One hour of Reiki is like having three hours of deep sleep,” she said. “Healing is wonderful and is never seen as a cure but a helping hand to either prevent future illness or ease pain and discomfort.

“Reiki can speed up broken bones by kick starting your own natural healing process. I received Reiki and I think my leg healed a lot faster than the other patients who were attending hospital with me.”

Jock had been working as a medium before he met Joanne, a million miles from an earlier period of “undercover work” he still can’t talk about.

“I have a bit of a past where I’m involved in undercover work and I’ve got a bit of a background in that, so I wasn’t really open to talking about things.

“I thwarted an attempt at being kidnapped by psychic intuition.

“But if you’d have said to me all those years ago ‘You’re psychic’, I’d have laughed in your face. I was a total sceptic, but I could always tell things about people.”

Joanne said: “Everyone’s got vibes, it’s like a policeman saying ‘I’ve got a hunch’.”

Jock added: “ I was very intuitive if I was working on an undercover job and if something was going to go wrong, I could always feel it. But I didn’t now I was a medium or anything.”

The undercover work left its scars.

Joanne and Jock Brocas Trevor Martin

“Joanne helped me heal through a lot of hurt,” he said.

Developing his psychic awareness, Jock had got to the point where he was using it. But he became aware that there were times he felt out of his depth.

“I gave readings for people, but I had a horrendous physical experience I had no understanding of.”

He realised he’d got to the point with his own mediumship where he needed training.

“I had also been teaching and dealing with crystals and crystal healing and I went along to a specialist crystal supplier to find a particular mineral. Joanne’s card was there and there were lots of cards there, but this particular one jumped out at me. I kept it in my wallet for quite a long time.”

It was while trying to help a couple of people who were heading off to Africa to help children affected by war to set up an evening of mediumship to raise funds, that Jock decided to invite Joanne to take part and ask about training at the same time.

“I’d already planned to go to Colin Fry’s place to train, but it went so well with Joanne on the phone, and she was telling me about the course she was running, that I decided to go on that instead.

“I went on it and it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve done because Joanne is amazingly tough.

“It’s all very well someone coming and you can give them a reading and bring them together with their loved ones.

“But Joanne was asking me to do double blind and triple blind readings.”

A blind reading is where neither the subject nor the experimenter is aware of key features of the experiment, to test and push the psychic abilities of the person being tested.

But however tough Joanne was on Jock, it couldn’t stop the inevitable.

Jock smiled: “We just kind of fell in love from there really. I met my soul mate. It’s like someone’s energy overlaps the other person’s energy.”

His first major test came when he joined Joanne for a demonstration of mediumship – something he had never thought he would be able to do.

“The first time she met me, she said ‘You’ll be doing the demonstration of mediumship in September with me’ and I just said ‘No way’. But September came, and we did the demonstration together.

“And I proposed the next day!”

Joanne believes we all have our different and individual paths in life and we should strive to help others who are struggling along their way.

In her upcoming book, Joanne looks at depression and how to help cope with it.

“People’s thoughts and feelings affect their outlook on life, whether they are a positive or negative person affects their life choices which affects their future choices.

“It’s getting people to believe in themselves and to expect better lives. Then they start seeing a new path and if they change themselves, they actually change the world around them It’s about taking control of your life and taking responsibility.

“There are people who think ‘They are much luckier than I am’, But it’s got nothing to do with luck. It’s got to do with taking responsibility and waiting for things to happen.”

With her experience of helping people with depression from her time in Inverurie, Joanne hopes she will have something to offer the Highlands – where depression and suicidal thoughts have taken a tragic toll, particularly on men.

“A lot of the clients who came to me suffered from depression. When we came up here I looked things up and did some research and found that the Highlands has some shocking figures, the worst suicide rate for men in the UK.

“A lot of men – and women – hold everything in. In Inverurie, I did have a lot of men coming to me who didn’t really believe in Reiki, but they noticed the difference in their life and that it was working,” revealed Joanne.

“Some would start off saying they came for physical problems, like a bad back. But then I would find out that they were also suffering from depression. They didn’t want to open up at first.

“I saw lives turned round. A lot of the men worked off shore.

“I was amazed by the knock-on effect. People rang me up from Glasgow and Edinburgh because they’d heard word of mouth that the treatment had helped. They worked alongside people for whom it had made a difference.”

Joanne – whose first five-week psychic development course is due to begin at the start of next month – also helps people tune into their own instincts.

She said: “Lots of different kinds of people – including accountants, doctors and nurses – have come along before because they want to develop and strengthen their intuition.

“It’s about learning to trust your own ‘vibes’.”

* To find out more about the centre, the workshops and courses or to book a healing or psychic reading then you can contact Joanne and Jock on 07817 838801 or email jopsychic@btinternet.com

m.chrystall@highland-news.co.uk

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