In preschool I had an imaginary friend named Kim. She was a character in The Care Bears Movie, and though I’d outgrown her by the time I started elementary school, people tease me about her to this day. But recently I received some unexpected news: Kim could have been an angel.
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After these experiences Channer attended a reading by Doreen Virtue, the creator of a practice she calls Angel Therapy. Formerly an eating disorder therapist, Virtue is now arguably the most famous member of the angel community and has written more than 20 books on the subject. For years, she claims, she’d received unwanted advice on her career and relationships from an angel she routinely ignored. One night on the way to a church meeting, the angel told Virtue to put up the top of her convertible. She didn’t listen. An hour later, two armed men accosted her as she was parking. When the angel urged her to scream, she did. Startled, the men fled.
Virtue had an epiphany. Believing that everyone has a primary angel watching over them–along with other less vocal guardian angels–she started a private practice to help people make their own connections. It became so successful that her services were booked years in advance, so she started conducting workshops to train other people to do what she does. Today thousands of Angel Therapy Practioners, or ATPs, conduct their own workshops around the world. Channer is one of three in Chicago who have led “angel camps” at Ruby Room, a Wicker Park spa that also offers numerotherapy, auratherapy, and pet healing services.
Between the group discussions, the participants break off into pairs to talk about their prior connections with the angelic realm. Vivian first tried to connect when she was laid off from her job a few years ago, and then again after two acquaintances committed suicide. “I knew that there was something more, and I wondered how I could have helped them,” she says. “I was really kind of crying out and searching for like-minded people.”
