In this series, WeWork’s director of digital community selects a WeWork member to get to know better, sharing her fun findings with the rest of the community.
When WeWork River North’s community manager Billy Gurowski told me about Natalia Jones from InVision, of course I was intrigued—for over a decade, she has been teaching others in Chicago how to get in touch with their psychic abilities. Read on to find out all about the WeWork Fulton Market member’s experiences growing up in South America and how InVision’s teachings are “the opposite of what you would see a psychic on TV do.”
Tell me how you got started in this business and how you discovered you had a gift for it.
I grew up in Colombia, South America. My parents are both atheists, very intellectual, and in a very Catholic country. And with that wonderful combination, I had no words to describe the experiences I was having. So I knew very early on that I was having experiences that I could not talk about with other people, and I didn’t pay much attention to it. It didn’t seem important to talk to anyone about—like I could sense energy, I could sense things happening before they happened, but it seemed confusing and a little scary.
I came to the U.S. to study art at the Art Institute of Chicago, and that’s when it really kicked in. I think of so many people who are having psychic experiences, but they don’t know what to do about them, or they don’t even have the vocabulary to talk about them, or who do you talk to? And whether you are a brilliant psychic, or just having psychic experiences, very often you have a sense of “Am I responsible for something because I see it?” That is a very big deal. And the other is a very common experience of “How can I be so brilliant at this, but not have a clue about my life?” So at InVision, what we do is teach people how do you bring that sensitivity, that perception that you can have for others—how you can focus it back so you can help your own life.
We believe that everybody has abilities, that it’s a part of the human condition to perceive at more levels than we thought possible. And we are finding out that young people are growing up with an expectation of it nowadays. But the biggest and most difficult thing is to train people about the bigger, more important journey of getting to know yourself. We teach at InVision how to use these abilities to know who you are and applying that level of perception to your life. So we are bringing a higher level of information to a very down-to-earth foundation, a very human experience.
I started at the school as a student. (I like to say I was one of the worst students ever because I took my first meditation class and I don’t remember a thing! But that’s what makes me a good teacher now.) And I met my husband at InVision—he taught me everything I know.
Who are some of your most interesting clients?
I work with a lot of businesspeople. All kinds of people come to me. You’d be surprised that we have at the InVision school lawyers, programmers, businesspeople. People want to take classes because in their personal lives, they are either having psychic experiences or they don’t even know it, but their problem is a psychic problem—it’s a little bit like, “Oh, I’m so tired. I can’t focus. What is the issue?” And the issue is they are so open, and so sensitive to other people’s thoughts, that it’s overwhelming. So part of what I train people how to do is turn it off so they can function in their lives.
Part of what we’ve been trying to do is reclaim the word “psychic.” We are the opposite of what you would see a psychic on TV do. “Psychic” is the new “creative.”
What attracted you to WeWork?
It’s a very cool story. I am actually taking flamenco dancing classes nearby, and we have a physical school—it’s fairly large, maybe 10 classrooms. And we’ve been there for a very long time, and that building is going to be demolished because the City of Chicago is doing an expansion over it. So my first thought was that I wanted to find an office in the location to know if we like the area.
Little did we know…because once we got in, we just fell in love! It’s been wild! And one of the things that has been wild for us is—in a way, we’ve been hidden and not seen. People who are our students might be in businesses, but they don’t want people to know they come to the school. And all of a sudden, we are in a space that is super welcoming, super dynamic. I walked in, saw people on laptops with big couches, and I said, “These are my people! This is what I do!”
What’s the curriculum like for InVision? Is it a lot of fun?
We have six-week classes, and we have trainings that are six months or so. At the beginning level, we have a meditation class that is designed for people who are sensitive to energy. So let’s say you realize that when your mother is having a hard time, all of a sudden you experience it in your belly and your heart, even if you are miles away. This is an everyday experience for so many of us. We are empathic to a fault. So there are meditation techniques in which you can learn things like releasing energy to someone that you’ve just talked to, so you aren’t left with a headache. And then there are other meditation techniques that you learn about centering, clearing your head, making sure that you get to connect with yourself.
Anything else we should know?
For the WeWork Chicago Carnival, we did a few different fun types of readings—The Entrepreneur, The Psychic, The Creative, and The Dreamer—figuring that people would want to know what their creativity was like or what their business’ energy was. Which one do you think most people wanted? The Dreamer. I was really shocked by that.
We did readings for the community for an hour and a half. But we got a lot of “How do you know?!” We don’t predict the future—more telling you things that you already know about yourself.
Photos: Pretty Instant