Unlocking Your Psychic Abilities – An Interview with Manna Dabholkar

Join us for a captivating conversation with psychic medium Manna Dabholkar as she shares her incredible life story and powerful psychic abilities.

From her earliest recollection at the age of four, Manna recounts the powerful moment when she becomes aware of her gifts. With a rich spiritual lineage, she opens up about her family’s history of mediums and the initial resistance from her religious mother, who later embraced spiritual experiences before passing away. Discover the distinctions between psychics, mediums, and channels, and how each plays a different role in connecting with higher consciousness. (Interview has been edited for readability.)

Tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you discover that you had unique abilities?

Manna Dabholkar: My first recollection of being a psychic or medium is when I was 4 years old, very young, and it was interesting because we were driving in my dad’s car. We were passing in – through these mountains, and I’m 4 years old. I’m not on my – I grew up in India, so it’s different driving rules out there than what we have here, no baby car seats or any of that. I’m seated in the backseat.

I should back up a little. I was born in India. I grew up in South Africa, and then I moved to LA about 18 years ago. I’ve lived in many different places, but going back to being 4 years old, in my dad’s car, we are passing through these beautiful mountains. There’s this motorcycle that comes by, and there are two men on it, one is wearing a helmet and one is not. We’re talking about what, 25, 30 years ago? I don’t think there were any rules for helmets.

Anyway, so they pass by, and my dad said, “Oh, they’re going way too fast.” I’m 4 years old. I’m just back in the seat looking out the window, and then, few minutes later, we pass by this accident scene. I think that motorcycle had – was in an accident with a truck, and both the men on the motorcycle had – they were dead at point. The guy who was in the front riding the motorcycle without the helmet suddenly came up to my window on the right. I’m 4 years old, and I’m looking at him. There’s no fear. I’m just fascinated by what I’m seeing right here.

I start saying, “Mom, Mom, I see something on my right.” My mom just looks back, and she’s like, “No, you don’t. Go back to sleep.” This guy, the spirit – who I didn’t really see him as a human form. It was more like a white orb coming up, but I could understand what the orb was trying to say to me. He said, “Can you please reach out to my family?” I was 4. I had probably just started speaking, so I didn’t know how to help him. I didn’t know what that was, but it was fascinating.

It made a mark. After that, I had many other experiences. I come from a long lineage of mediums. On my mom’s side of the family, all my grandfathers, uncles, all the men in the family were mediums, not my mom. She was completely against it, so she shut it down for many, many years.

Why was she against it?

Manna Dabholkar: She was very religious, and then she grew really religious towards the end of her life. She had cancer for 10 years, and she really leaned into her faith. It was quite interesting to watch her because then, as she got close to transitioning, which is like two or three months before she was supposed to pass away, she dropped everything that she believed in in terms of religion, and then she became a little bit more spiritual. I think she was receiving spirits at that point because she started telling me of all these beautiful experiences that she was having as she got close and close to her dying date. She would tell me that she would receive spirits at night, and she was very open about it. I never had a doubt. I just didn’t know – I didn’t know what she was telling me because I wasn’t trained. We are talking 20 years ago, so I had never done any kind of training in mediumship. Intuitively, I knew what she was saying.

For those who aren’t educated in this area and throw around a lot of words like psychic and medium and channel, how would you differentiate between those three roles in the healing modalities?

Manna Dabholkar: People use psychic medium as the same – in the same flow of things. There’s a subtle difference between a psychic and a medium and a channel, so let’s just begin with the fact that all three, psychics, mediums, and a channel, are channeling information, which comes from higher consciousness. That’s the similarity between a psychic and a medium and a channel, so they’re receiving information which is being channeled through awareness, something that they don’t know where it comes from for a lot of people. A psychic is someone who would read a living person, or an animal, or a place, so they’re working with the human aura, the energy field, not just human aura. Objects have an aura too. Places have an aura too, but they’re in the human range of receiving things. If I was to read you in this moment, I’m doing psychic reading. In a psychic reading, there’ll be the psychic and there will be the client, the living person, or the object, or the pet.

All mediums are psychics. You have to go through psychic studies to become a medium, but not all psychics are mediums. Mediums will communicate with transitioned loved ones so friends, family members, pets. Anyone who has passed away, mediums will bring messages from those people for you, so when you’re looking at the transaction, as I would say, the communication that happens, there’s the medium. There’s a family, the living family, and then, on the other side, you have the spirit, other spirit.

A channel, people talk about mediumship and channeling in the same flow, once again. A channel is someone who would channel the same spirit for a lifetime, so you end up speaking with, as you would say, the higher consciousness. It could be not necessarily one spirit. It could be a group of spirits that you channel, but you work with the same group of spirits for a lifetime. They bring you higher wisdom. They bring you things which would help you help others. A medium would speak with multiple spirits for different families and different individuals, while a channel is channeling one as – I like to call it one higher consciousness.

People throw around the word “channeling” quite a bit. How would you define it?

Manna Dabholkar: You are the tool that higher consciousness will use to send their messages to the people that they want to send messages to, so yes, you could say it that way. I channel a lot of my classes, and when I’m channeling my classes or the content that I teach, I don’t necessarily have someone in the spirit world speaking with – I don’t work with one individual spirit, but I work with multiple spirits who will come and give me information.

A physical channel or someone whose body and voice becomes the channel would typically work with one higher consciousness, group of spirits who would come and communicate with them throughout their lifetime bringing them bits of information, which could then become books. It can become all kinds of things, lectures and workshops. Just to give you an example, Esther Hicks, Abraham Hicks, people know. A much more famous channel would be Esther. She’s channeling what she calls Abraham, which is the higher consciousness, but she’s been working with Abraham throughout her lifetime. Meanwhile, Manna medium works with multiple different spirits who want to send messages to their families.

Do you believe that somebody has to be born with these abilities, or is this something that you can develop? 

Manna Dabholkar: Yeah, absolutely. I believe everyone is born with it, everyone, you and I. Every person I know is born with intuition, and what mediums are using is intuition to connect with that kind of information. As long as you’re able to put in some time and resources and train yourself to receive intuitive messages, anyone can be a psychic, medium. Anyone can be a channel. Channeling is a little bit more advanced, for sure, where you have to put in some amount of time, practice, be okay giving up control of your body, be okay working with another spirit coming through you and speaking, so these are different levels.

If you were to go, let’s say, to a spiritual university, the way I – in my mind, this is how I process it. Your psychic studies would be the bachelor’s, and there are different modalities within it. Reiki, tarot cards would be different modalities of psychic work. Then you go into your master’s, which would be mediumship, and then, once you decide to be in the – take PhD, that would be the channeling aspect of it. These are different layers of the same kind of work.

How did these psychic gifts develop over time?

Manna Dabholkar: From about 4 years old with my first experience, I kept having bits and pieces of experiences throughout my life, but every time I went up to my mom and said that I’m seeing something, I’m hearing something, she would say, “No, you’re not. Go pray,” or “read this,” or “read this Scripture,” or whatever. In her own way, she was also training me on different things. She made me study Sanskrit, made me study different mantras, but she wasn’t thinking that I would become a medium. She was just trying to help me in some way, I think. I don’t know what was going on, but she did help me with Sanskrit, mantras, all kinds of cool stuff.

Then I’m about 16 or 17 when my mom was in her final months of passing, and she started telling me about people that she’s receiving, family members, grandparents, who were coming to her at night to let her know that they’ll be around when she dies. Then my mom passed away, and I was on my way back. My dad handed me a book, and he said, “Your mom wants you to read this on your way back.” I look at the book, and it’s a book on mediumship.

I was like, “That’s interesting. Why would she give me this book?” It was really fascinating for me.

I read the book, and it was about this – a couple, a mom and dad, who had lost their 21-year-old son, and they wanted to speak with him. They studied mediumship to be able to communicate with their son, and they wrote this book about the experience. I was like, aha, so I can actually go study mediumship. That’s interesting. I come back. I come back to LA, and I dove right into it.

The first thing I did was – took me about six months to process my mom’s passing. It was really fascinating. I received a coupon, a mediumship coupon, from a medium, and I’d never been to a medium before. I was like I’m going to take this up and just go and speak with my mom. We’ll see. I show up, and there’s this 24, 25-year-old young woman with a dog in her purse. She walks in, and she gave me one of the best readings ever. She brought in my mom, brought in my grandma, and I just sat there. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.

She was giving me information that she couldn’t have known, and then I was like, okay, I’m going to study because I can see them too. I just don’t know how, so I went to school. I studied mediumship, and that was the start.

What’s the difference in the type of message a psychic gives versus a medium?

Manna Dabholkar: For a psychic message, if you’re receiving a psychic message, my experience with people who receive psychic messages is they’re seeking some kind of guidance or direction in their life. People who are receiving mediumship messages, they are seeking closure. They’re seeking healing. They’re seeking some kind of connection back with their family that has passed away.

Channeling, when you go for a channeling workshop and you see someone physically channel, it’s not really directed to one person. It’s universal wisdom that applies to everyone. With that, it brings in a huge amount of healing, but what happens with channeled messages is people are going to receive it based on where they are in their life. You may receive a message differently than I do, but the mediumship message, it is for you. It’s from your family. It’s for you, and the spirit knows the best. They understand how they can communicate with you and what they can bring to you. I think all those three things will either give you guidance, direction, and/or some kind of healing, trauma healing

As you started offering your services as a medium, what was the response from your family or friends?

Manna Dabholkar: Yeah, it’s interesting. I was very quiet the first couple years, which most psychic mediums would understand that, because you just don’t know how to express it. You don’t know how to tell people, especially if that’s not something that you’re doing for a living. I run a non-profit too, and it’s like, oh, I run a non-profit and I’m a psychic medium. You know what I mean? I was very quiet for at least couple years, two or three years. You can’t be quiet about it because it’s who you are, so I decided that I needed to look into or work with scientists who are working on psychic mediumship. Something as simple as remote viewing has been researched by the CIA for the last 50 years. There are many modalities within the psychic mediumship world, but there’s so much research to back it up so as long as you can do your research and back up the data.

If I’m speaking with someone who is non-believer, there are a couple of things in my mind. One, well, it doesn’t matter what I tell him. If he’s a non-believer, he’s a non-believer. I may not be able to change his mind, so I need to not be obsessed about changing people’s mind. What I need to focus on is that I’m able to express who I am, and that should be good enough for a psychic medium. To do that, you need to back yourself up with studying it, understanding how you do it. I started working with some neuroscientists who are working on a phone to connect with loved ones on the other side. It helped me understand the science behind mediumship. Just for my own sake, it made it a little bit more – less wackier. It was a little bit more science based, and I found it much more comfortable to speak with people when I knew that what I’m talking about is backed by science and research. 

How would you describe this process of connecting either to higher consciousness or to a loved one who’s passed? How would you describe that in a scientific way?

Manna Dabholkar: You have to be in your body. That’s number one, completely in your body. Most people are outside of their bodies, which is why we miss signs and symbols coming our way. The second thing would be there’s something called universal consciousness. Universal consciousness is like this ocean of information that exists out there. Each one of us, you and I, come from that ocean, and we go back into it. You are contributing to that ocean of information. Every single lifetime that you have, every experience that you’re having in this lifetime, this exchange that we’re having right now, it’s all a contribution that we are making to universal consciousness.

We have something called the pineal gland that sits in the back of our head. That’s your satellite. That’s your cell phone tower. As long as you stay in your body, as long as you have a good diet, good lifestyle – you’re not drinking. You’re not doing drugs. You’re good with your boundaries. You should be able to work on your satellite, your pineal gland, to then connect with the internet, which is the universal consciousness, and download information. That’s just in a nutshell how mediums work. The information is freely available. Spirit is omnipresent, so even if someone has reincarnated, doesn’t mean you cannot speak with them. You can speak with them with that same process.

The first time I saw you do a platform reading was at Behind the Lids in Southern California, and I was blown away by how you clearly articulated names and even birthdates of loved ones in the room. People literally gasped. 

Manna: It takes practice, I’ll tell you that, and not every medium out there can bring you names and dates. Everyone has their own way of doing mediumship. When we do our classes at Behind the Lids, I really stress on names. I would like my students to really practice getting names, or dates, or months because there’s just that wow factor to it, like you mentioned. Now, if I was doing a one-on-one reading, it was just you and I, those things are important, but I would focus a little bit more on memories because I have – we have more time. If it’s a platform session and you’re moving so fast, there are 50 people in the audience, and you cannot just stay with one person. You have to move quick.

In those situations, then you need to be really good at wow factor, which is names and dates and how the person passed away. What did they do for a living, and what’s their name? What day was the day of transitioning? Those things will help you move fast as a platform reader. It really depends on the medium if they want to specialize at being a one-on-one medium. Some people find it much more cozy and okay to do that, and then there are people like me, which is okay with – I’m okay with one-on-ones, but I feel like my strength is with platform reading. I really like platform sessions, yeah.

Do you sense any loved ones with me right now?

Manna: I see an older woman around you, and I’ve seen her before. She’s a little bit stockier. I would say a grandmotherish feel to her, feels a little bit more ancestral, so could be grandmother or great grandmother. She’s a little stockier, a little short. I see her in a white outfit. The white outfit has a blue – almost like a blue border to it. I’ve seen this woman around you before, so this is not the first time. She’s never like in your space. She’s behind you all the time. I don’t see any glasses on her. She’s not wearing any glasses or anything. The hair’s tied back.

What’s fascinating is I don’t see her in a Western garment either, so she’s not wearing a Western outfit. It feels more Eastern to me, so that could be someone like a guide as well, a spirit guide. Yeah, she’s definitely not in a – not a dress or anything. It feels more like an Eastern outfit to me.

Are there good spirits and bad spirits? Do you protect yourself in this process? Help us understand your perspective on light and dark.

Manna: For a medium, we are looking at energies as energy. They could be in a body, and that would make them a living person. The energy could be outside a body, and that would make it non-living, a dead person, a post-material body. Depending on the energy’s vibration, they could be a troubled spirit. I don’t mean troubled in a mean way, a troubled spirit, meaning someone who is not conscious, someone who is filled with anger, resentment. All kinds of negative emotions are dominant in their aura, or they could be a very enlightened spirit based on their vibration.

Now, it doesn’t matter to a medium whether that vibration, that energy, sits in a body or does not sit in a body, so the way they reprocess the world is there are living people who are troubled. There are living people who are mean and nasty and narcissists, and then there are dead people who are the same as well. Then there are wonderful living people, very positive, enlightened spirits, and the same thing applies to the other side. Just the way you would protect yourself from living energies, you wouldn’t hang out with someone who is draining you, depleting you. You’d have strong boundaries with your family and friends. Those same rules will apply to the other side.

I want people to understand two things about dead people. The first one is just because someone passed away does not make them wise and kind and compassionate. It just makes them dead so same rules will apply. If they were a narcissist on this side, they’re pretty much a narcissist on the other side too. The second rule is they are not frozen in time, meaning when someone dies – let’s say your mom was a narcissist, and she passed away. She’s not going to stay a narcissist on the other side. She has enough help. She has spirit guides. She can go to school. She would receive all kinds of guidance and direction to upgrade her energy, so if you think that your mom was evil and passed away and she’s always going to stay evil, that’s also not the right way to approach things.

Those are the two things that people miss about dead people that, oh, yeah, I mean, there are troubled and good ones, and the troubled ones not necessarily stay troubled. They can change, just like living people can change. If you go see a therapist, if you go see a doctor, if you go receive help, you can be a better person, a better, healthier person, right?

I know that you help families navigate the death of a loved one. How do you approach the question of…where is my loved one going to go when they die?

Manna: We start working with those families months ahead of time just for that very reason, so most of my clients who are transitioning are people who are transitioning through a long illness. There’s enough time before, maybe three or four months before, when you start talking to them about what to expect, talk to the family about what they can find on the day of, the day after the person passes away. The two questions that commonly come up for me is the idea of Hell and Heaven. People often ask about the fire on the other side, and they say, “Oh, do my – does my family member, who is not such a great guy on this side, does he – do you think he’s going to go Hell, or does he have to go to that fire?” I say to them, “The fire, as we think of it, isn’t such a bad idea. It’s a purification process.”

What that tells you, that even on the other side, doesn’t matter what kind of person you were, the one consciousness, the source, the god, however you see it, is there to purify you of whatever needs to be purified. It’s actually tempering. It’s actually making you a better version of yourself on the other side, so that’s a nice way of explaining the whole idea of the fire. I really believe that the Hell and the Heaven isn’t so much a place. It’s a state of mind. It’s really your vibration that decides whether you are going to be in Hell or Heaven, and that applies to us in our living bodies as well. You could be abundant. You could have everything in your life, but if you don’t have a good state of mind, you may think you are in Hell. That applies to the ones who die as well.

When you’re giving messages, how do you handle the desire to be accurate with what you’re sharing?

Manna: You have every medium is striving to be perfect with their communication, but what you come to realize – I’ve been doing it a long time now, about 17, 18 years. There is nothing called perfect communication, whether it’s on the other side or on this side. You can only do your best and receive the information as best as possible and bring it to the family. There are a couple of things in there that you could – that could help you. One is something called clear empathy, which is you are very clear about the emotions and feelings in the space, but they’re not impacting you. The minute the family’s emotions impact you, if they’re crying and you start crying with them, it’s going to breach that link, and then you’re not able to do your job right.

There are things which could make the communication better, but it’s never going to be 100% perfect. I would ask you, think about the person you love in your family. How many times do they really understand what you’re trying to say? Not many times and that’s going to apply even on the other side. The medium can make themselves a healed vessel where they are almost insulated by things around them. There are less triggers. You’re a very healed vessel to then channel information the best way possible and bring it to the family, and let them decide if it resonates with them or not.

If people want to work with you beyond just an individual reading, which I know that you offer, what are some of the training programs that you’re offering that you’re excited about?

Manna: We do Mediumship Level 1, Mediumship Level 2, which is a year-round program. The Level 1 is 12 weeks, and it’s hyper-focused on mediumship. By the time you’re in the fourth week of Level 1, you’re already speaking with spirits. It doesn’t matter what your background is, who you are. Maybe you’ve never meditated in your life before, does not matter. By the time you get to Week 4, you are a pro medium, as I would call it.

Then the Level 2 is 14 weeks. In the first six weeks of Level 2, it’s a lot of shadow work, so you just work on yourself, exploring your belief system, exploring the block that you may have in channeling and getting information. Then the remainder of that six weeks is on ancestral healing. That’s where we start prepping people for physical channeling because you want to have your lineage cleaned out, making sure everyone is in good place, so if you decide to channel, you could potentially channel your own family, your ancestral spirits. That’s Level 2, which is 14 weeks, and then the Level 3 is physical channeling. We offer all three at Behind the Lids, so anyone interested can just go on Behind the Lids website. 

Talk to me about the Bio-Well scan device. What is it? How do you use it? How could it benefit people?

Manna: I actually started using it two years ago, but I wanted to understand and study it before I can help others with it. It takes a little bit of time to go through. There’s so many different bits of information that it’s throwing out at you. Bio-Well is measuring your energy field, just simply put. What it’s doing is measuring your aura, your auric health, to show you what could potentially become a physical problem at some point. For instance, you could have rips and tears in your aura which show up in that scan. It also shows you your stress levels. It will show you how much stress you’re putting on your organs, what organs are disbalanced in your body on the left side, on the right side.

It also goes into what you could do with your biorhythms. Our body has a biorhythm. It has a physical cycle that goes up and down since the time you were born until today. About 23 days, it goes up and down. You have an emotional biorhythm, which goes up and down every 28 days, and then you have the intellectual biorhythm that goes – every 33 days it will go up and down. The machine shows you if your biorhythms are crashing at the same time. If they do crash at the same time, you’re emotionally, physically, intellectually down, and that’s not a good thing. You know what I mean? You have to space it out.

You can actually look at it and say, oh, I can plan my month better. If I’m physically down on the 16th of the month, which has been the case since I was born, okay, then, on the 16th, I need to be a little bit more careful about what kind of events I’m planning. Am I traveling? Am I around people? My boundaries need to be a little bit better. I need to have a good self-care routine around that time. It gives you so much information on your auric health.

The stuff that shows up in your report may or may not show up in your blood test or blood panels immediately, but they will manifest those things. If they’re not corrected, will manifest in something in your body, maybe six months later or a year later. I’m a perfect example of that. When I started using Bio-Well about two years ago, my thyroid levels would spike. They were really high, and report after report I would see it. They were spiky. I went to my doctor, and I said, “Hey, my thyroid levels are spiked.” Then she said, “Okay, let’s do a blood test.” We did that, and the blood test was normal. She said, “Everything looks normal.” I’m like, mm, I don’t know how to explain to her that it’s in my aura, so I was like, “Okay.”

Three years later, last year, actually, I had thyroid cancer. Report after report it was showing me that I’m putting so much stress on my thyroid, wasn’t showing up in my blood panel for a very long time, obviously manifested in the form of cancer, which was detected real quick. I had it. It was first stage, and they found out. Immediately it was found and was corrected, but I really believe that anything that’s going to show up in your body physically will show up in your auric health way before, way before. It will give you enough notice, in a way, where you can change, make changes to your lifestyle.

If people want to get a reading or follow you on social media, what’s the best way for them to connect with you?

Manna: Instagram will be the best. My Instagram handle is @mannamedium, very easy to find me. If they want a reading, they can just send me a message on Instagram, and I’ll get right back to them.

If people are reading and wanting to take a next step in their spiritual development, would you tell them in terms of encouragement to move forward?

Manna: I would tell them that there is something called an electromagnetic field around you. I would tell you that there is biologically relevant information sitting right in that empty space around you, and if you are able to develop yourself enough, put some time into getting a little bit more intuitive, not – we use a lot of our instincts because it’s so attached to our body. Becoming intuitive will help you tap into this incredible wealth of information which is in this empty space all around you, and it’s backed by data. It’s backed by science. It’s not weird. You’re studying quantum physics and physics. 

We are going to very soon – for all my students, we are going to host the scientist who has been working on consciousness for many years. He has built a device that measures consciousness, and he doesn’t speak to the media, just behind the scenes doing his job. I want to bring him to our students because everything we do in these classes is, really, be intuitive because it is intuitive science, but then also back it up by science and data so you can speak more confidently about it to your family and friends.