NEED TO KNOW

  • Laura Day spoke with PEOPLE about her new book, The Prism: Seven Steps to Heal Your Past and Transform Your Future
  • She counts Demi Moore, Lucy Hale and Samantha Ronson among her friends and supporters
  • In an exclusive conversation with PEOPLE, she explains her methods and why she doesn’t like the word “psychic.”

I had been interviewing Laura Day about her work for an hour when she gives me an unusual instruction.

Day and I had been chatting about her work as a consultant to Fortune 500 companies, helping law enforcement to find missing children, her seven New York Times bestselling books including her newest The Prism, and life (the New York City native found an entirely new audience since the pandemic via Instagram Lives where she teaches others to be intuitive) when she tells me: “You can ask me questions, do not give me information. Resist that urge.”

I can confirm that what Day shared with me turned out to be startlingly accurate. At her book party a month prior, a bevy of A-list Hollywood actors and executives gathered at the Los Angeles home of her best friend and agent Keven Huvane, where Demi Moore toasted Day’s loyalty — and intuitive accuracy.

‘The Prism: Seven Steps to Heal Your Past and Transform Your Future’ by Laura Day.

Spiegel & Grau

After speaking to friends of Day’s in Hollywood, at news organizations and at international companies, it’s clear that for all the glitter and glam, it’s helping people live better lives that gets her up in the morning. And to do that, she says, “You have to be ready to do some work.”

“Because of Laura’s intuitive gifts, I never have to explain how I’m feeling or what’s going on. She just knows,” friend Lucy Hale tells PEOPLE exclusively. “Her guidance has been such a blessing in my life and a gift that isn’t coincidental at all. I had asked and prayed for guidance and support. And it showed up in the form of the fabulous Laura Day.”

The afternoon I interviewed Day, she had been working with the actress Jaimie Alexander and songwriter and deejay Samantha Ronson on the method laid out in The Prism.

Lucy Hale and Laura Day at the author’s book launch event.

Courtesy of Laura Day

“The fact of the matter is, we are systems,” Day says. “We have a respiratory system, a digestive system. And there are seven areas on the human body that relate to seven glands, seven structures that actually have a function in the world. The ego centers,” which she notes are also known as chakras. “They really follow the endocrine system, the system that creates the chemicals in our bodies that allow us to do certain things, that gives you get-up-and-go also corresponds to your ability to manifest.”

The system, Day adds, “saved my life. And it’s a system that I have now workshopped for over 10 years on thousands of people.” Says Hale: “She gives me tools to handle the anxieties. Tools I can take and do at anytime, anywhere in the world.”

Here, Day talks to PEOPLE about her work, her friends and her abilities.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Laura Day and friend Demi Moore.

Courtesy of Laura Day

PEOPLE: You don’t like the word psychic.

Laura Day: I do not like the word psychic because even a clock is right twice a day. A lot of people make a lot of money by disempowering people, by convincing them that they, and not the person themselves, has the truth. I don’t like words that promote that. And the reality is, the best way to practice intuition is in community.

 PEOPLE: But you have a well-documented history with being intuitive. When did you first know you had these abilities?

Day: In my early 20s, I saw a TV show on experiments that were being done on extrasensory perception. And what they were talking about were actually normal experiences for me. For example, being able to hear what someone else was thinking or knowing what was going to happen in a very detailed way, being able to stop something like a clock by looking at it. And I thought, “Well, doesn’t everyone do this?” Like, it was amazing to me the realization that everyone didn’t have these experiences.

As a young child, her mother was taken to the hospital. “A chaplain came and I described to him my mother’s injuries. And he said, ‘It’s terrible they allowed you in an intensive care.’ I was 11 alone in Bellevue waiting room. I said, ‘Oh, they didn’t let me in. I saw in here.’ And I pointed to my head. And I didn’t really realize this because, I was a young child. It was a gift of intuition.”

Laura Day hugs Lucy Hale.

Courtesy of Laura Day

PEOPLE: The Prism is your seventh book and it’s as much memoir as workbook.

Day: I come from a family where everyone has suicided. And yet I have thrived. I have a beautiful son, a wonderful marriage. I have enough money. I’m healthy. I have a great career. I have wonderful friends. I mean … I wasn’t the smartest. My brother graduated from Harvard and got his master’s in physics from Stanford. I wasn’t the most beautiful. I wasn’t the smartest.

PEOPLE: But at its heart is a method, really.

Day: It’s a system.  How do you make small changes in that prism, that wonderful machine that is the ego, that is the eye, that make big changes in your outer life. I’ve workshopped it on thousands of people over the past 10 years. The Prism was something that intuitively was given to me to survive when I was about 5 years old. I wasn’t aware of it consciously ’cause you don’t have words, you don’t have separateness at that age. Really, until I needed it to survive the deaths of my siblings.

You know, we’re all taught to look in, and there’s so much looking in and looking in often just further entangles and isolates you in old patterns. This is about what are you not doing in the world. What is not coming to you? What are you not connecting with? Or even what world do you wanna live in that’s inaccessible to you? And then you find the ego center, the part of “I” that perhaps didn’t develop when the “I” develops, which is from conception to age 7. And then what we see and what we create is set in stone for us. Our own ability to decide to have something different, that’s the chisel that carves the stone, that makes the life we want.

The ego is the machinery that takes all the experience and energy around us and creates our world. And sometimes the best healing is getting exactly what you want. And that’s much easier than what we are taught to believe!

PEOPLE: We do seem to be at a moment in culture when experts, books, Instagram accounts involving intuition, astrology, psychics, mysticism are, for lack of a better term, trending. People seem to be seeking.

Day: I think there always was a huge amount of seeking, But I think that slowly people are realizing that it doesn’t all happen online, that there’s some magic potion in actually coming together in the flesh. I think people are seeking less actually and wanting to engage in successful lives more, which I am 100% for. What I hate about the new age is all of this senseless seeking that leads you nowhere except for more seeking. It really is important to create life in life, to create bonds, to create success, to create creativity, to really experience, to use our senses, to find ways to manage our neurology. I always tell people, stop looking within. If you had the answer, you would’ve fixed the problem.

I always laugh at those new age people where it’s all love and gratitude. Like, it’s not all love and gratitude. You know, sometimes it’s rage, sometimes it’s jealousy. Sometimes it’s a lot of things. It’s not all love and gratitude. Stop dumbing down life because you get dumb lives from that. But it sells, love and gratitude sells.

PEOPLE: Your name does come up with a lot of celebrities. And Demi Moore gave you quite a toast at your book party. She said you’re right 99 percent of the time.

Day: But you’ll notice, every celebrity I’m associated with is also a fine, ethical person. Nicole Kidman, Lucy Hale, Margaret Qualley, all the people who gave me quotes on the book. They’re all super humans. Brad Pitt. But nobody writes about all the fabulous nurses and house cleaners and social workers who are my friends. I will give readings to anyone is who is around me because that is my only speed. And I have ADHD. I forget who the vice president is and yet I can tell you your future.

PEOPLE: Last question, let’s say you sit down on a plane and the person next to you asks you what you do for a living. What is your answer?

Day: I’m a writer. But, first of all, I’m old school. I was born in 1959, so when I’m on a plane, I’m in a white blouse, blue pleated pants and a blazer. I’m not the kind of person you start a conversation with. What often happens is synchronistically, I’ll sit next to someone who’s going through some kind of trauma. And I will say something completely inappropriate, and we will get into a deep conversation without them ever having any idea how I knew what I just told them about their life.

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The Prism is available now, wherever books are sold.