OUR STORY

At the end of 2010, Amy Garber was invited to start a "social group for intuitive people" by a client, Amber. They created a donation-based Meetup group called Intuitives Interactive, which held its first meeting in January 2011 in the upstairs room at Crazy Wisdom Bookstore & Tea Room. Interest in the group was immediate, and it expanded to two meetings a month. The group began choosing topics of interest to focus on and recruiting others to lead the discussions.

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Later that year, Amber dropped out of organizing the group, being too busy with graduate school. The group moved its meeting location a few times around Ann Arbor over the next year and kept attracting more members.

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In 2013, two group members (Jessica and Tammy) suggested having a psychic fair as a fundraiser for the group and volunteered to organize it. This first June fair, held at the former Body-Mind-Spirit Wellness Center on State Street, was a precursor of the Enlightened Soul Expo. It was wildly successful and the need for such an event in Ann Arbor was obvious! Christina DePugh volunteered at that event and was crucial in problem-solving and organizing on the fly. She became Amy's partner in putting on a second psychic fair, twice as large, at the Pittsfield Grange Hall on Ann Arbor-Saline Road. The following year, they held successively larger fairs in hotels, then two at the WCC Morris Lawrence Building, and eventually transitioned to two-day weekend fairs in 2016, starting at Eastern Michigan University, then moving to Skyline High School, and one foray to the Southfield Pavilion.

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Soon after the psychic fair, in July 2013, a group member named Shelly told Amy that she felt Amy would become well-known for something, but she wasn't sure what. She suggested that Amy meditate on it and see what she could find out. Amy went into meditation and saw herself running a holistic center, a special place where readings and energy healings would take place, and practitioners would refer their clients to each other as needed. This cross-treatment would redefine the meaning of "holistic" — truly supporting a client's mind, body, and spirit! 

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And there was more: Amy saw a building in the meditation, a large place that Spirit said was a former school building. It had small offices grouped around lobbies that they called "pods" and other group gathering areas such as an auditorium for large performances, a cafe, and a gift shop. She thought this was an inspiring idea, and wondered if it would come to pass. After all, she had a career in communications at the University of Michigan and loved the work.

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Amy started sharing the vision with others, and in the fall she mentioned it to Christina. It turns out that Christina had also seen a building in her meditation, and wasn't sure why. When she asked Spirit, she heard "Autumn." Since one of her daughters is named Autumn, Christina assumed it had to do with her daughter. When Amy shared about her vision, Christina realized her message probably meant that she would learn about it in the fall!

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On Good Friday 2014, Amy had open heart surgery to repair her mitral valve. After being out on medical leave for 8 weeks, her attitude inexplicably changed, and she felt that she didn't want to go back to her job that she used to love. With the help of the entities of John of God in Brazil, plus many local healers sending her energy remotely, Amy's heart had healed quickly and almost miraculously. Yet behind the scenes, more things were occurring. The donor who funded the center where Amy worked pulled his money out (this is unheard-of in philanthropic circles!) and within a few months of returning to work, she was told that her job would end in March 2015.

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While seeing the opportunity for leaving U-M behind and starting her own work full-time, it was scary as a single person with a mortgage to just go out on one's own with little planning. Spirit arranged for a part-time job while Amy built up her business giving psychic channeled readings as well as teaching Intuition Development classes and sponsoring others to present events, as she had been doing with the Intuitives Interactive group. By September 2015, she was too busy with her own business to continue with the part-time job.

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Soon after, it was announced that the Deep Spring Center for Meditation & Spiritual Inquiry, from which the Intuitives Interactive group sub-rented twice a month for their Sunday meetings, was going to terminate their lease and not have a permanent location. Christina suggested that they could take over renting that location to start their center and came up with the name. In March 2016, the Enlightened Soul Center was born at 3820 Packard Road suite #280!

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After 5 years of leasing in a hard-to-find office park, Amy was ready to move to a more visible location. Christina had left the partnership in 2018 (but remains the co-director of the Expo), so Amy was on her own — or so she thought. At the first visit to look at a potential new space, friend John Floros stepped up to be a "silent partner" in the Center. Many months and real estate listings later, the perfect building appeared: 2711 Carpenter Road, former home of the Lotus Center. A former acupuncture office with 6 treatment rooms around a back lobby, a large event room, a front lobby perfect for a store, and a kitchen room, plus its own parking lot and no other tenants, it's hard to over-emphasize how perfect the new building is for the activities of the Enlightened Soul Center! You'll have to come see it for yourself.

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The mission of the Enlightened Soul Center remains the same: To spread the light to Southeast Michigan and beyond, providing instruction and experiences in the holistic and intuitive arts, plus products to support them. Five of the 6 treatment rooms are rented to pairs of practitioners (readers and energy healers), with the 6th room for Amy and John's reading use and also for hourly rentals. (There is also a small 7th room that will be replaced by an expanded Kitchen Classroom in 2022.) Readers and energy healers are onsite most of the open hours, for drop-in sessions as well as by appointment. And the cross-treatment has begun: Energy healers are referring clients for readings, and readers have referred clients to energy healing.

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Come visit us to see what we have to offer! We are a unique entity in the region; we continue to regularly host and sponsor workshops, groups, and classes of a holistic & metaphysical nature while also operating a store and offering practitioner sessions. And who knows? Maybe in 2022, a cafe too!