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.

‘The Prism’ by Laura Day

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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.

I really am committed to tools. My story is in this book and the tools that have come from the woo-woo—the tools that have come from non-local perception, from a sense of the future, from telepathy, from all of these things, really saved my life. I want to offer tools to people. It’s very important for the individual to try something out, document it, see if it works, and decide if you want to believe. The trampoline under a burning building—that should be stress tested if you’re going to jump onto it.

I also, though, have really seen that ritual—all of these things, altars—that our whole life is made of these things. Everything we do is a ritual. I see these people, everyone’s drinking a green juice. I’m thinking, What is that self-hating ritual? Some people love them, I guess. But our rituals of feeding and loving and interacting and grooming and setting out a table for dinner, those rituals, we need to notice their meanings, and we need to make sure those meanings sustain us.

In the book, you write about your own enormous personal losses. What are some of the tools that were the most meaningful for you in working through them?

Some of them are so simple. My brother committed suicide—my mother had committed suicide many years before, and my uncle—and then my sister, two years later, commits suicide. I was so close to both of them. I go into this really wonderful psychiatrist, and I’m thinking, the crazy person is always the last person to know they’re crazy. So let me just check this out here. I’m really serious and I’m heartfelt, and I sit down and I say to him, “Listen, it happened again, and I want to be realistic here.” And he looks at me, he goes, “Oh, you’re fine.” There’s always one. It’s always the one who had responsibility early, had a goal, had to organize themselves. He said, “You are fine.”

It was really interesting because what came out of that so strongly for me is: You don’t have to look for your trauma. Your goals guide you, and let those goals change if they need to. Believe me, the first person to the party will be your trauma. You’ll have an opportunity—as an adult, and in a functional way—to work it out. There’s a little too much going back and trying to find all the things that hurt us. Why wouldn’t we find the things that help us in this moment? That’s why I write self-help, because you can’t think outside the box. You are the box. What the Prism is, wow, you didn’t get this [from] conception to age seven? Here’s how it’s done to get the result you want. We all have to try it on. I remember the first time I read Ram Dass, and I realized other people were afraid, and it meant so much to me. Other people felt they had lost everything. It meant so much to me to have a context and then have advice from someone older who had moved through it.

Your fans include Demi Moore, Keri Russell, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, people anyone would call very successful—

James Watson. I mean, he only won a Nobel Prize.

Right, the list goes on. Why do you think your work and the systems that you’re creating are still so useful for people who are at the top of their fields?

Do you know how far a fall it is from the top? I wrote a book called Welcome to Your Crisis, and the harder you go, the harder the fall. I think Demi Moore is the most brilliant example of resilience. Her book Inside Out is a great place to start.

One of the things about celebrity is that it’s incredibly confusing. Everyone has something to say about you, there’s always someone bigger than you are. It also makes the world a little more dangerous. When my son was little, when we would go on vacation with celebrities, I would be like, I’m sorry, your security is going to take care of your kids first. I’m my kid’s security. We walked out different doors. I used to go to Barney’s with someone, and we’d go in a group or we’d go to a tea room, and I’d walk out a different door.

Demi and I have been friends since our 20s, and the meanness—I’ve had some meanness directed at me, and I’m just kind of a minor author. The meanness directed at her has sometimes just taken my breath away.

Is the work that you’re doing with somebody who is so in the public eye markedly different from someone who isn’t a household name?

I work with everybody differently. That’s what intuition allows you to do. Everyone is really a celebrity in their own world. And everyone’s a business, everyone’s a corporation, everyone has contracts. I would say that part of the problem with celebrity is that you are a tasty piece of steak, and there are wolves all around you. There’s a different level of caution that I need to help them integrate into their systems. They don’t have the blessing of anonymity.

Do you think that anybody who is successful has to have been operating from some level of tapping into intuition?

We all tap into intuition, but our intuition can also help us find the next disastrous investment or relationship. The more consciously you use your intuition, the more effective you are. But [in] my day job, as I work with these billion-dollar companies, they are incredibly intuitive and in many ways, what they use me for is to confirm those out-of-the-blue things that no one else had thought of.

It’s obviously such a strange time, economically. You “intuited” the 2008 crash. Were you consciously trying to tap into what the markets were doing?

I was working for a fund at the time, so on my screen was the market. It’s not something I personally care that much about. I like earning my living, I have a wonderful investment person, but I think in part because I was working for this fund—and I don’t retain information, it’s part of the way my brain functions and doesn’t function—I just woke up and I felt like I should sell everything. [My investment person] said, “Oh, don’t, the market, blah, blah, blah.” And I said, “It’s just making me uncomfortable.” A very short time after, there was that huge crash. I told my fund, “This is what I did.” When I do something, people look more closely at it. I also, by mistake, and this is so unethical, it was an absolute error, because I could have been wrong. On an Irish radio show, someone asked me about the market, and I said, “It’s going to crash.” Normally, I would never ever have done that. I think I was very tired. I had a teen at the time. I don’t predict for civilians. I predict for companies who are smarter, more educated than I am, and who, as my son says, know the difference between when I hit my target and when I’m just batshit crazy.

We have a president who had very few qualifications or experience in politics and yet won two elections. Obviously, Trump tapped into something. Would you call that intuition?

Yes, certainly. I would call that intuition. People who sold pet rocks and made a profit, they were intuitives. They tapped into a need in the market. People often attribute good or bad to intuition, and it’s not. It’s like electricity. Electricity is great when it turns on a light. It’s not so great when you lick your finger and put it in a live socket. So yes, I would say that Trump is intuitive because it’s not just the presidency. I’m 66 years old. Trump was a hot item way back when.

You often hear very successful people across all industries saying that they reached the top of the mountain, and then either it wasn’t what they expected, or it wasn’t enough. How do you work with people through that?

The people that I work with, especially in the last decade, have been doing the Prism. So what they go for is what will satisfy them. On the other hand, you’ve reached the top when you want something else. We’re creatures not of dissatisfaction but of growth. Dissatisfaction, disappointment happens to all of us, but dissatisfaction as a chronic issue is much more a function of boredom. There’s so much research on purpose, and it is the number one indicator of longevity in older adults. When you are purposeful, you tend not to be disappointed. Then again, nothing ever looks like the way you imagined it, you imagine from a past paradigm. What you create is based on you and a world that you haven’t met.

When you were onboarding the new CEOs at the company, did you do a personal reading with them?

Not at all. No. They’re not interested in personal checks. First of all, they’re men. Second of all, they’re billionaires and they run at least one multibillion-dollar company. They want prediction, and that’s what I tell them: What will happen or what a competitor is doing. If you listen to it, it’s really boring, and you’d have no idea what I was, and I have no idea what I’m talking about, by the way.

I love working with people because when I say I feel your pain, I actually do. Boundaries are not my specialty. And the path out of pain is never inside ourselves. You need something that’s outside of yourself. So, for example, [the assertion] “My voice is a gift to others.” Practice that for a day. “My truth is a gift to be judiciously shared.” That’s one I have to practice. Because, as my husband says, not everyone needs to know what you see, even if you’re right.

Have you run into issues with telling people things—

My God. It did not make me popular at the third-grade lunch table. I absolutely have no right to impose my sight, but my testing of where I am in time is not always good. So I will say something that hasn’t occurred, not knowing that it hasn’t occurred. So yes, I run into issues all the time. As my dearest friend says, your knowing the consistency of my morning bowel movement is not something I need to know.

You’ve said that for decades, you have been friends with people who you have to walk out a different door when you’re going shopping with them. How did you end up in those circles?

When you do something that’s unique, word travels. To be honest, the most aggressive people who have people who can get to people who can get to people are business, politics, and entertainment. When I was in my early 20s, before I had a “no” in my vocabulary, I kind of just went with who showed up and kept showing up from all directions. And entertainment was one, business was another, politics was another. I no longer do anything with politics. Way, way, way too scary for me.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.