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The Pure Heart Collective<\/a> sits on a busy stretch of Ventura Boulevard, the facade painted in a soothing shade of lavender, with a sign advertising \u201cpsychic and astrology readings,\u201d as well as yoga, healing classes and meditation. Once home to the Liberate Emporium, a metaphysical supply store, this building was already a hub of spiritual activity when Wendy L\u2019Belle-Tividad took it over 10 months ago.<\/p>\n L\u2019Belle-Tividad is pale, almost luminescent, an effect enhanced by her bright blond hair and her wardrobe of flowing, white and pale pink garments. Long, black spidery lashes and black eyeliner frame her pale blue eyes, intensifying their iciness. Her movements are swan-like. Any skeptic would find themselves disarmed by her soft smile and twinkling voice, and her tendency to address everyone as \u201cangel.\u201d With a list of clients that includes both A-list celebrities and struggling artists, L\u2019Belle-Tividad not only helps people sort out their emotional lives but also offers what she calls \u201ccreative sessions\u201d \u2014 readings to help people work through their ideas and projects.<\/p>\n But I didn\u2019t come for a creative session. Not sure where I fell on the spectrum between \u201ccynic\u201d and \u201cbeliever\u201d myself, I found myself anxious as L\u2019Belle-Tividad sat me down for a reading. My eyes watered as I fixed them to her forehead. She told me I may see her third eye throbbing there when she entered her trance.<\/p>\n L\u2019Belle-Tividad wears a vintage dress and her own jewelry.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have a lot of light around you,\u201d she said, her eyes seeming unfocused as she rested her vision on a candle flickering to the left of me. The first person she saw as she entered my \u201cfield\u201d was my sister. And then my mother. And then my grandmother. Finally, she started talking about me.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re at odds with some things in your life and you\u2019re trying to figure out which direction to go,\u201d she said. \u201cYou sometimes start things and then don\u2019t finish all the way because you\u2019re not sure which direction to go. Did someone offer you a job?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d I said, trying to remember if I\u2019d mentioned it already. Someone had offered me a job, in an industry I was conflicted about.<\/p>\n \u201cThere could be money there,\u201d she said. There was. \u201cI think you might do it, my angel. I think it makes sense for you right now, because you need a stable placement.\u201d I did. \u201cYour energy goes in a very interesting angle to that space. It\u2019s almost like \u2018don\u2019t notice me and just let me do my work.\u2019 There\u2019s a lot of male-dominating energy there. Do you know what I mean?\u201d<\/p>\n I did know what she meant. Because the job was at a tech company. I took the job.<\/p>\n L\u2019Belle-Tividad doesn\u2019t refer to herself as a psychic. Rather, she prefers to be called a \u201cball of light\u201d or \u201cGod\u2019s helper,\u201d mystifying phrases unburdened by the conventional stigmas. In 2023, I listened to an interview L\u2019Belle-Tividad gave on \u201cOtherworld,\u201d a podcast about supernatural encounters hosted by Jack Wagner. In the two-episode series, one of her clients tells a convincing story about how L\u2019Belle-Tividad helped her discover that her father\u2019s girlfriend was slowly poisoning him to death.<\/p>\n It turned out many of my friends, and friends of friends, knew who L\u2019Belle-Tividad was and recognized her from the podcast. Many of them were her clients. Her daughter, Harmony Tividad, formerly one-half of the band Girlpool, had drawn many of the young creatives in her orbit into the yurt in L\u2019Belle-Tividad\u2019s backyard in Sherman Oaks, where she once regularly held group readings. For years, I\u2019d been hearing tidbits from these readings, predictions she made for friends and friends of friends. But I was just now putting the pieces together \u2014 and trying to book my own appointment. Except I couldn\u2019t. She was booked out for years. <\/p>\n \u201cWe ended up closing my books for a year and a half because it felt too overwhelming,\u201d L\u2019Belle-Tividad says. \u201cIt was, like, 2024 and they were booking me for 2027.\u201d<\/p>\n Since Wagner\u2019s podcast, the mysterious \u201cclairvoyant\u201d<\/a> has been repeatedly sought after. She\u2019s been featured in Nylon<\/a>, Interview<\/a> and Office<\/a> magazines. This year, Lizzo, one of her several celebrity clients, invited a New York Magazine<\/a> journalist to sit in on one of their readings for a profile of the pop artist.<\/p>\n L\u2019Belle-Tividad has blown up. So much so that she was able to move her spiritual practice out of the yurt in her backyard and into the building on Ventura last January. \u201cWhen L.A. was burning, on January 10, that\u2019s when I signed the lease,\u201d says L\u2019Belle-Tividad. \u201cIt was such an act of faith, because, you know, we\u2019re in the middle of this incredible disaster.\u201d<\/p>\n L\u2019Belle-Tividad wears a vintage cape and vintage La Perla dress. <\/p>\n She was also able to move out of her old home in Sherman Oaks, the one with the yurt in the backyard, and into a new light-filled ranch-style house up in the hills. The furnishings are as eclectic as the woman herself: A pink couch in one corner has four bowing swans affixed to each corner. Two gold swans provide the base of a glass coffee table right in front of it. A ceramic red-haired mermaid sits in the corner of her spacious bathtub. And then there are the closets. She has two of them, with lacy white- and pink-colored garments bursting out the sliding doors. She wears only white to work.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I first started reading, I just knew I was meant to do that,\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t know how else to explain it. I just thought I was gonna wear white because it will move everything through me. Nothing will stick. It\u2019s almost like you want to be a vessel and you want everything to move through you.\u201d<\/p>\n When I visit, she and her husband, Vince Tividad, have just moved in with their two dogs, Heaven and Dove. On this day, they\u2019re also watching Harmony\u2019s dog, Dragon, a mouthy attention-seeker who interrupts our conversation multiple times.<\/p>\n \u201cDo I need to go into your field and see what\u2019s going on?\u201d L\u2019Belle-Tividad asks Dragon when the dog starts barking again. \u201cDo I need to find out what\u2019s happening with you? Do we need to do a little deep dive?\u201d<\/p>\n Yes, she can read animals too. L\u2019Belle-Tividad has been reading people and animals now for nine years, but what she calls her \u201cKundalini awakening\u201d happened in 2013. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t pretty. It wasn\u2019t fun. It wasn\u2019t easy,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s like having a lot of electricity move through your body. And it\u2019s very activating. When it opens the heart field, you feel tremendous, tremendous compassion for everyone. You have a deep understanding of everyone, even people who have been hurtful to you.\u201d<\/p>\n The electricity was so intense, she says, she often had to sleep in epsom salt to soothe her body.<\/p>\n L\u2019Belle-Tividad doesn\u2019t refer to herself as a psychic. Rather, she prefers to be called a \u201cball of light\u201d or \u201cGod\u2019s helper.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe had always had incredible intuition when I was younger, and we\u2019d always make jokes about her being psychic,\u201d says Harmony. \u201cThat was something that was common in the discourse of our household: \u2018She\u2019s doing her psychic thing, you know.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t normal for her mom to be \u201cchanneling metaphysical data,\u201d says Harmony. She remembers her mom suddenly acquiring a \u201cstrange breadth of knowledge\u201d on subjects she had no expertise in. She remembers out-of-the-ordinary electrical occurrences happening in her mother\u2019s wake, like lights suddenly going out. Her mom was, they say, deep-trance channeling. Vince recognized it right away.<\/p>\n \u201cI was a philosophy minor in college, and I\u2019d researched a lot of different philosophical leanings and things. And [I knew] she was channeling. There was no doubt about it,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n \u201cI remember her being like, \u2018in a trance, I saw you in a magazine, there was a write-up about you,\u2019\u201d says Harmony. It was before Girlpool had taken off. \u201cAnd within like a month, we were in NME for the first time ever and that was our first write-up.\u201d<\/p>\n The first reading L\u2019Belle-Tividad gave was to a group of three of her friends, more than three years after her awakening. \u201cWithin time, I found out I did not have to go into this deeper trance state to get information, that I could use a lot less energy, and just touch people\u2019s hands, and get information, and go into their field,\u201d she says. \u201cI call it perceiving.\u201d<\/p>\n For my own reading, L\u2019Belle-Tividad walked me into her office, a small space in the back of the Pure Heart Collective that is decorated excessively in soft pinks. She dabbed some oil on the inside of my wrists \u2014 a special concoction her mother Diane makes called Wolf Oil<\/a>, which you can buy at the collective for $45. She closed her eyes and held my hands, and then she focused her gaze on a flickering candle. \u201cI\u2019m formless,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m you now.\u201d<\/p>\n At the risk of perpetuating a silly cliche, it\u2019s not uncommon to hear people in Los Angeles refer to their psychics<\/a> or mediums as casually as they refer to their therapists or masseuses. On every main street you can find a neon sign advertising psychic services. \u201cNo other community on the face of the globe has given rise to half as many mystic, philosophical, psychological, occult, consciousness-raising, therapeutic and alternative creeds as 20th century L.A.,\u201d The Times wrote<\/a> in 1988.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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