This story was originally published by The Jasper Local in 2014

Nine months ago, Jasper’s Margo Bereska knew she had to go to Hawaii.

She didn’t know why, or for how long. She just knew she had to go.

“I have to follow my heart,” she said at the time. “I don’t get the details. I just get the hits.”

For Margo, “the hits” are messages, visions or energetic clairvoyances. As Jasper’s only practicing oracle, she has learned to trust her strong intuition—and to share it with others.

“I see what I see,” she explained at the Snow Dome Café, where posters promoting her Angel Reading sessions decorate the wall. Having come home from Hawaii in January, the 34-year-old has a waiting list of clients who want to learn about what Margo sees—no matter what the skeptics might say.

“I don’t tune into judgment. That’s not going to serve them or me,” Margo says. “If you saw a red car go by you’re not going to say ‘I didn’t just see that.’”

This is vintage Margo. When she gets on a roll—and it doesn’t take her much to get on one—she balances profound pronouncements with a cordial wit. Using evocative metaphors and sassy superlatives, she will mix pseudo-scientific slang with poignant poetry. And she’ll do it all a-mile-a-minute.

“Energy is really important. My intent as a healer is to connect you back into that pulsing, vibrating energy because that’s when your inner compass guides you,” she says. “My purpose is to break down the paradigms that people have created that potentially could inhibit their own evolutions.”

When words fail her—and they rarely do—she uses her hands and eyes and drawings and inexplicably accurate sounds to describe what she sees and feels. Her style is direct and unapologetic, yet compassionate and familiar. It’s also impossible to resist.

“Yes, this is me. Yes, I talk to angels,” she says, eyes unblinking, smile widening.

Today, while Margo uses her second sight to help her clients understand their own capacity for manifesting their future, it wasn’t long ago that she was overwhelmed by her gift—even resentful of it. Her story of how she came to reconcile with what was happening to her started when she was just a young woman.

Margo was always different. She grew up in Jasper, but the education system, she said, was limiting for her. It wasn’t working and so, after junior high, Margo moved to Calgary to attend art school while she lived with her aunt and uncle.

“I wasn’t a regular learner,” she said. “I thought I was more visual.”

How right she would be. But in the meantime, she was going through a difficult ordeal; she got pregnant, but lost the baby.

“A voice told me ‘you have too much to do,’” she said. “I was obviously not meant to be a mom at 19.”

After that painful experience, what stayed with her was not just the voice, but a vision. Even today, she has trouble defining what she saw.

“It was a feeling I can’t explain. It was a colour. There was a beautiful pink mist, with no pain. It was very peaceful.”

With the experience behind her, but wondering what the vision meant for her future, at 20, Margo moved to Mexico. She had a plethora of jobs, from the redundant to the ridiculous, but whenever times were tough something or someone would appear just at the right moment to rescue her.

“I was down to my last $20, someone came up to me in a parking lot and asked me if I wanted a job,” she recalled with a laugh.

The “job” itself was the real laugh. Her mission was to cruise the clubs of Cancun with a battery-powered electric conductor, approach customers and offer them an electric shock, for a price. What was shocking was how good she was at it.

“I would go up to these big tables full of macho guys,” she squealed. “I would leave with $300 a night.”

Soon enough the excitement diminished, but other thrills were on the horizon—Margo was engaged to be married, and being promoted to the manager position of a spa where she’d used her charm to get a job. But although a career of sorts was blooming and a relationship was budding, as she learned more about herself she realized her heart wasn’t in either.

“I was manifesting the type of life that you’d think everyone would want,” she said. “But there was an inner knowing that something very intense was supposed to happen.”

Her tipping point came when she was introduced to Tarot cards. Since the 18th century, Tarot cards have been used by mystics in efforts at divination or as a map of spiritual pathways. For Margo, it was as though a light went on.

“I was so drawn to them, it was so magnetic,” she said.

Realizing her engagement was a deviation from her true path, she broke it off. It wasn’t easy, but it would pale in comparison to what would come next.

“It took all my nerve to pack up and leave a man who was telling me he loves me,” she said. “I needed to do what I’d call a spirit quest.”

Now she was 30, and starting from scratch. Again. But she was becoming much more cognizant of what was around her. She knew she wanted to get away from life’s everyday distractions, but it wasn’t until a friend asked her if she’d like to rent a bungalow on the beach that she realized how badly she needed it. She was trying to use the down-time to write a book, but a new chapter in her own life was just beginning.

“I had a psychic awakening,” she said. “I was becoming more aware of my senses. I went through a frightening experience where all of a sudden I knew things.”

Almost overnight, Margo said, she became highly intuitive. She could “see” colours. She could sense people’s energy and even their past lives. She could predict future events. But it was all too much. She felt like she was going crazy.

“It was a lot of information,” she said. “I got paranoid. I now know I was tuning into a collective fear.”

While she can reflect on the experience today, at the time she didn’t appreciate her new gift. It was too strange, she said. It was too unbelievable.

“It was so beyond what we’re programmed to believe,” she said. “By the end of three months I was freaking out. I was asking ‘please God, turn this off.”

But her senses weren’t dimming down. In fact, they were amping up. Desperate, she went to an open church, where she said she had another vision.

“I saw Christ’s spirit…He put His hand on my heart and said ‘you know things that other people don’t,’” she said. “He said ‘you have a lot of work to do.’”

While Margo didn’t yet understand what that service would be, she knew the work would have to start at her mother’s house. Her mom—a career municipal councillor known for her pragmatism and logical thinking—couldn’t begin to understand where Margo’s journey was taking her. Her daughter’s talk of spiritual energies and divine guidance left her skeptical, at best.

“My mom thought I was on drugs,” Margo shrugged.

It wasn’t until some of Margo’s more startling visions started revealing themselves that both mother and daughter started to believe there was more to what she was seeing and sensing. For years, while in Mexico, Margo had had visions of a native chief who was somehow imploring her to come back to Jasper to conduct important work. When she finally came back, she fell into an opportunity to work with Indigenous Peoples in central Alberta.

“The visions started connecting,” she said. “It was a beautiful process.”

Not only was it hugely validating for Margo to start connecting the cosmic milieu with a more rational realm, but working with Indigenous people reminded her that other cultures place a high value on matters of the spirit.

“[First Nations people] are the most tuned-in, but also the most forgotten,” Margo said.

Today, Margo still nurtures those relationships, and uses the lessons she learned there to guide her work with other groups. Her angel readings often start with a cleansing ceremony, as she pays respect to the divine while giving her client the chance to, as she says, “hear the calling of their soul.”

While non-believers might scorn, for Margo, it’s a surprise when people can’t admit that there could be more to the universe than what they can see with their eyes and touch with their hands.

Moreover, she’s puzzled when people deny their own intuition, even if they can happily acknowledge the serendipitous or karmic forces in their lives.

“We’re all born 100 per cent psychic,” she said. “We always have a voice that says ‘turn left,’ but we tend to override it.”

Now, having listened to her own inner voice, Margo has found a newfound passion for the community she grew up in. Jasper, she believes, is a highly spiritual place awaiting its true awakening. To help in that regard, she suggests that we have to learn how to counter the ego, manage our energy, and find the clarity that will enable us to live to our fullest potential.

We have to be open, in other words, to getting “the hits.”

“It’s truth telling time,” she says, spreading her arms like wings. “We’re going to see some systems crumble!”

Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com

This story originally appeared online in the February 1, 2014 edition of The Jasper Local