Picture a Zoom call. Two women are working on an advance directive, the kind of conversation death doulas have every day. Partway through, the doula's left leg starts to twitch and won't stop. Then she hears a voice, clear as day: "Tell her Uncle Charlie is here." Johanna Munson said it out loud. Her client's eyes went wide, and then her shoulders relaxed, like something heavy had been lifted off of her.
Johanna is an evidential psychic medium and intuitive teacher, and she's been my friend for a few years now. She came to spirit work through end-of-life planning. In this episode she tells me about the losses that brought her into this field, what a reading looks like, and why she believes the capacity to connect belongs to all of us, not just to mediums.
How her parents' deaths brought Johanna to end-of-life work
Like so many of us, Johanna came to this work through the deaths of her parents. Her mom died at 74 of leukemia, five weeks after a sudden diagnosis, with no conversations ahead of time. She died in the hospital, and the family couldn't bring her home. The guilt and regret lingered for years.
Her dad lived eleven more years, and he was the one who wanted to talk about his own end of life. (Johanna admits she was still saying "nope, not going there.") At 86, in a lot of pain and starting to experience dementia, he chose to stop eating and drinking voluntarily, and a death doula from Seattle came to be with the family in his last weeks. Johanna was so inspired that she trained with that doula. When COVID made in-person work impossible, she pivoted to advance care planning.
Her dad was a humanist who didn't believe in anything after death. Even so, just before he went into a coma, Johanna watched him look up into the corner of the room, and she believes he was seeing his spirits arrive. I compare those last few days to the week between Christmas and New Year's, when you don't know what time or what day it is. Holding that liminal time is a real skill.
Uncle Charlie and hearing a voice on a Zoom call
First came the leg twitching, then the voice. Johanna was on camera, so she ignored him at first. He would not stop. That was his personality, she said: the life of the party, and he really wanted to connect with his niece. Johanna describes it as clairaudience, actually hearing, as opposed to claircognizance, a kind of knowing.
Her client, it turned out, hadn't been able to be there when Uncle Charlie died, and he had been a father figure to her. His message was: you were where you needed to be. Johanna told me that if her client had said "you're crazy," she might not be doing this work today. I wondered out loud whether Uncle Charlie knew he needed to make it safe for Johanna, too. He has stayed with her, she says, and when she needs a boost: "Okay, Uncle Charlie, let's go."
Grief, energy, and what Johanna says to skeptics
In Johanna's view, souls are loving, they observe boundaries, and talking about death is a natural place for them to show up. She believes souls vibrate at a much higher frequency than humans, and that grief lowers ours and blocks the connection. That stopped me, because I once had someone come to me right after a death, and I've wondered if they were knocking on my door because I wasn't in grief and their person was. Johanna said yes, they recognize energy, like moths coming to a porch light.
For skeptics, Johanna goes back to Einstein and the idea that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Then she points to the room at a death. If you've been there for a last breath, she said, there's a subtle shift: an out breath, then nothing, and it's palpable. I've felt it too. The out breath, the nothing, and then the room gets full.
From advance care planner to medium
Johanna was her own skeptic at first. She loved advance care planning (she's an educator at heart), but more souls and spirits kept coming through in those sessions, and clients started asking for mediumship sessions. At some point she realized she was enjoying mediumship more, and she told herself: I'm in my 60s, and I get to make this life what I want it to be. I know that feeling. When I became a death doula after two decades in corporate training and consulting, the doorways started opening. When we find our groove, everybody can tell.
The educator in her shows up in how she works now. Her sessions are 45 minutes, followed by a 15-minute integration call a few weeks later, where clients come back and talk about the signs they've started noticing. She offers it because she deeply believes we all have the capacity to connect, and you don't have to go through a medium to do it.
What a reading looks like, and what counts as evidence
Johanna prefers that clients not tell her who they want to hear from. Before a session she opens her energy and asks who's there. Souls tend to show up as soon as someone books, sometimes right as she's falling asleep, so she now has a gatekeeper: her mother-in-law, a genteel Southern woman from New Orleans with a firm "not now" kind of energy. (I told her that's a bouncer.) A session opens with a candle and an invitation to share only what's in the highest good, and then each one finds its own arc.
For Johanna, evidence is often specific and visual. Once she kept hearing "pink bathrobe." When she finally said it, her client laughed out loud. Her mom had worn a pink bathrobe her whole life, and the daughter still had it hanging in her closet. Now she can put it on and feel her mom close.
When the person you hoped for doesn't come through
Johanna said the person who shows up while she's checking in beforehand is often exactly the one the client wanted, and she couldn't recall a time when the presence wasn't there at all. Sometimes, though, a soul says it isn't the right time, out of respect for a complicated relationship. In one session the client's parents said they knew they weren't welcome, and in Johanna's telling, Archangel Michael came in to reassure the client that she was loved.
Guilt and regret are two of the most common reactions to a death, Johanna said. She says her own mom has come back to tell her she did not want to grow old or lose her capacities. I hear that guilt all the time, like the person who went out for a ten-minute cup of coffee and their father died while they were gone. I tell people I believe we get to pick when we die, and some people want privacy for that moment.
Johanna's dad had told his daughters they could be with him from eight in the morning to eight at night, but not overnight. Johanna woke at home around three in the morning and started singing to him, crying while she sang. At 3:30 the nurse called to say he had died.
Give grief time, then start paying attention
Johanna generally works with people who are six to twelve months out from a death. In her view, mediumship isn't meant to help anyone skip grief, and it isn't a cure for it. People need time to feel their feelings and be supported by the humans around them. Doing sessions right after a death, she said, isn't effective, fair, or safe.
Where can an ordinary person start? Johanna sees signs in a physical sensation, a song that keeps playing, numbers that keep appearing, or a reference to an inside joke only that person would know. Her free audio meditation and worksheet is called You're Not Making It Up, and she says the first step isn't decoding signs. It's learning to pay attention to your own energy, which is easier once the deepest grief has had time.
Wherever you land on what happens after we die, I hope you carry this with you: the conversation doesn't have to end when a heart stops beating. Maybe that's the very reason to start the important ones now, with the people you love, while you can still hear each other's voices.
About Johanna Munson
Johanna Munson is an evidential psychic medium and intuitive teacher who helps people explore the connection they may still feel with someone they love after death, and recognize the intuitive capacity within themselves. She came to mediumship later in life, trained with medium Suzanne Giesemann, and works with English-speaking clients around the world. She believes intuitive awareness is a capacity many of us have but have learned to dismiss or call coincidence.
Website · Free: You're Not Making It Up · Book a session · Instagram
In this episode
- 00:00 Uncle Charlie
- 02:34 How Johanna's parents' deaths brought her to doula work
- 04:48 Spirits at her father's bedside
- 06:07 Hearing a voice on a Zoom call
- 09:02 Energy, grief, and what to say to skeptics
- 12:08 Pivoting from advance care planning to mediumship
- 15:46 What counts as evidence: the pink bathrobe
- 17:24 Inside a reading, from start to finish
- 20:46 When loved ones don't come through
- 22:41 Guilt and final goodbyes
- 25:13 Why she waits until grief has had time
- 26:31 How to start connecting
- 28:20 Johanna's free meditation, podcast, and newsletter
- 29:32 Bringing people back into community
- 30:40 Closing reflections
Caring for someone near the end? You don't have to figure out the last days alone. Book a Guided Care Planning Call and we'll talk through what's ahead.
Feeling the pull to do this work? Pay attention to that. I teach it at Compass Doula Academy.
Listen: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · 31 minutes
If there's anything else you're dying to ask, let me know: christy@christybraun.com
