A profile of celebrity L.A. psychic Wendy L’Belle-Tividad

The Pure Heart Collective sits on a busy stretch of Ventura Boulevard, the facade painted in a soothing shade of lavender, with a sign advertising “psychic and astrology readings,” 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’Belle-Tividad took it over 10 months ago.

L’Belle-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 “angel.” With a list of clients that includes both A-list celebrities and struggling artists, L’Belle-Tividad not only helps people sort out their emotional lives but also offers what she calls “creative sessions” — readings to help people work through their ideas and projects.

But I didn’t come for a creative session. Not sure where I fell on the spectrum between “cynic” and “believer” myself, I found myself anxious as L’Belle-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.

L’Belle-Tividad wears a vintage dress and her own jewelry.

“You have a lot of light around you,” 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 “field” was my sister. And then my mother. And then my grandmother. Finally, she started talking about me.

“You’re at odds with some things in your life and you’re trying to figure out which direction to go,” she said. “You sometimes start things and then don’t finish all the way because you’re not sure which direction to go. Did someone offer you a job?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to remember if I’d mentioned it already. Someone had offered me a job, in an industry I was conflicted about.

“There could be money there,” she said. There was. “I think you might do it, my angel. I think it makes sense for you right now, because you need a stable placement.” I did. “Your energy goes in a very interesting angle to that space. It’s almost like ‘don’t notice me and just let me do my work.’ There’s a lot of male-dominating energy there. Do you know what I mean?”

I did know what she meant. Because the job was at a tech company. I took the job.

L’Belle-Tividad doesn’t refer to herself as a psychic. Rather, she prefers to be called a “ball of light” or “God’s helper,” mystifying phrases unburdened by the conventional stigmas. In 2023, I listened to an interview L’Belle-Tividad gave on “Otherworld,” 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’Belle-Tividad helped her discover that her father’s girlfriend was slowly poisoning him to death.

It turned out many of my friends, and friends of friends, knew who L’Belle-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’Belle-Tividad’s backyard in Sherman Oaks, where she once regularly held group readings. For years, I’d been hearing tidbits from these readings, predictions she made for friends and friends of friends. But I was just now putting the pieces together — and trying to book my own appointment. Except I couldn’t. She was booked out for years.

“We ended up closing my books for a year and a half because it felt too overwhelming,” L’Belle-Tividad says. “It was, like, 2024 and they were booking me for 2027.”

Since Wagner’s podcast, the mysterious “clairvoyant” has been repeatedly sought after. She’s been featured in Nylon, Interview and Office magazines. This year, Lizzo, one of her several celebrity clients, invited a New York Magazine journalist to sit in on one of their readings for a profile of the pop artist.

L’Belle-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. “When L.A. was burning, on January 10, that’s when I signed the lease,” says L’Belle-Tividad. “It was such an act of faith, because, you know, we’re in the middle of this incredible disaster.”

L’Belle-Tividad wears a vintage cape and vintage La Perla dress.

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.

“When I first started reading, I just knew I was meant to do that,” she says. “I don’t 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’s almost like you want to be a vessel and you want everything to move through you.”

When I visit, she and her husband, Vince Tividad, have just moved in with their two dogs, Heaven and Dove. On this day, they’re also watching Harmony’s dog, Dragon, a mouthy attention-seeker who interrupts our conversation multiple times.

“Do I need to go into your field and see what’s going on?” L’Belle-Tividad asks Dragon when the dog starts barking again. “Do I need to find out what’s happening with you? Do we need to do a little deep dive?”

Yes, she can read animals too. L’Belle-Tividad has been reading people and animals now for nine years, but what she calls her “Kundalini awakening” happened in 2013. “It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t easy,” she says. “It’s like having a lot of electricity move through your body. And it’s 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.”

The electricity was so intense, she says, she often had to sleep in epsom salt to soothe her body.

L’Belle-Tividad doesn’t refer to herself as a psychic. Rather, she prefers to be called a “ball of light” or “God’s helper.”

“She had always had incredible intuition when I was younger, and we’d always make jokes about her being psychic,” says Harmony. “That was something that was common in the discourse of our household: ‘She’s doing her psychic thing, you know.’”

But it wasn’t normal for her mom to be “channeling metaphysical data,” says Harmony. She remembers her mom suddenly acquiring a “strange breadth of knowledge” on subjects she had no expertise in. She remembers out-of-the-ordinary electrical occurrences happening in her mother’s wake, like lights suddenly going out. Her mom was, they say, deep-trance channeling. Vince recognized it right away.

“I was a philosophy minor in college, and I’d researched a lot of different philosophical leanings and things. And [I knew] she was channeling. There was no doubt about it,” he says.

“I remember her being like, ‘in a trance, I saw you in a magazine, there was a write-up about you,’” says Harmony. It was before Girlpool had taken off. “And within like a month, we were in NME for the first time ever and that was our first write-up.”

The first reading L’Belle-Tividad gave was to a group of three of her friends, more than three years after her awakening. “Within 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’s hands, and get information, and go into their field,” she says. “I call it perceiving.”

For my own reading, L’Belle-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 — a special concoction her mother Diane makes called Wolf Oil, 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. “I’m formless,” she said. “I’m you now.”

At the risk of perpetuating a silly cliche, it’s not uncommon to hear people in Los Angeles refer to their psychics 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. “No 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.,” The Times wrote in 1988.

This “customary affinity for the socially bizarre” — as the New York Times put it in a 1976 article on SoCal’s “flourishing” psychics — has been a curiosity for those who come from colder coasts. Is there something about the sun that makes you more susceptible to supernatural influence? The reporter of this article notes the rise of psychic readings among the middle class and quotes Marsha Miller, the wife of an Exxon executive: “All my friends are going to psychics; they spend their food money on it … They ask about their husbands, their husband’s jobs, their health, their marriages, what they should do with their lives — everything.”

The article reports psychic fees as high as $250/hour in 1976. Back then, it was against the law to charge for “psychic readings.” That is no longer the case. Today, L’Belle-Tividad suggests a donation in the range of $400 to $1,000.

L’Belle-Tividad was born in Mission Hills, at least 50 years ago, although she won’t disclose her exact age. (“Can you just say I’m ageless?” she asks.) Her mom was born in Hermosa Beach. “My mom’s always been very spiritual. But when I say ‘spiritual,’ I mean she’s loving. She’s connected to love,” says L’Belle-Tividad. Her grandparents were very religious Christians. She doesn’t remember any preoccupation with psychics or mediums growing up.

In her 20s, she worked as an artist. She made her own greeting cards, which she sold to Fred Segal, and then worked in TV commercials as a creative assistant for some time. She met Vince, a bass player, about 31 years ago, at the House of Blues.

“I was sitting at a table, and I turned around, there was this beautiful girl sitting behind me, and I said, ‘Do you always sneak up on people?’” remembers Vince. “And she goes, ‘No, I just felt safe here,’ or something like that.”

Harmony was born a couple years later. It was Harmony who encouraged her mom to start doing readings. She would bring her friends over and L’Belle-Tividad would read for them. Over time, the yurt gatherings grew larger and larger. Word spread. People started sending L’Belle-Tividad celebrity clients, most of whom prefer to remain anonymous. They do include A-list actors and musicians. In 2019, Lizzo booked an appointment.

“I was not, like, always super into psychics,” Lizzo tells me over the phone. “I didn’t want them to tell me anything negative…. [But with Wendy] it’s not just somebody looking in a crystal ball being like ‘and then this is gonna happen to you.’ It’s more like she is formless, and she is speaking as essentially your highest self. You’re essentially having a chat with yourself, like the ‘you’ who knows better, you know what I mean?”

Lizzo says that in their first session, L’Belle-Tividad appeared to know things about her that no one could have known — information about herself that was not on the internet. In the years since, Lizzo has booked countless appointments. They text each other regularly. Lizzo refers to herself as L’Belle-Tividad’s “client-friend.”

“My music video for ‘Still Bad’ that I released earlier this year was in the woods,” says Lizzo. “Before it came out, she was like, ‘I see you in the woods. It’s so beautiful’. And I was like, ‘Yeah, girl, how did you know that?’”

L’Belle-Tividad wears a Marc Jacobs top, Dior corset and skirt, and her own jewelry.

Vienna Pouliot, a “helper” and apprentice at the Pure Heart Collective, describes L’Belle-Tividad as a “beautiful bubbly fairy” whose secondary power is in cultivating long-lasting relationships with her clients. Pouliot has seen cynics walk into L’Belle-Tividad’s readings or classes and walk away as believers. “[A nonbeliever] came into the intuition class, and the person that they were paired with was actually able to completely see what their partner had done the day before,” she says. “They thought they were just kind of being imaginative, and then they ended up describing to a T what this person, who they never met, did the day before.” L’Belle-Tividad believes everyone has innate intuitive ability, but that the realities of contemporary life — a 9-to-5 job, screen addictions, long commutes — have dulled our senses.

Tommy Bruce, a music manager at Full Stop Management, which manages top talent like Harry Styles, Tate McRae, John Mayer and U2, has been a client of L’Belle-Tividad for five years.

“I send anybody that I can to Wendy, if I can get them in. Wendy’s currency [among] people of note is … it wouldn’t work if she ever shared anything with anyone. And — I’m sure she’s told you this in her readings — when she’s in her [trance] state, she doesn’t even remember [what was discussed].”

I don’t know if I believed that or not — still, the promise made me comfortable enough to ask L’Belle-Tividad about an extremely painful and private event in my life that happened many years ago, the details of which I cannot remember, in my own reading.

I can’t tell you what happened, or what she said. What I can tell you is that she seemed to know details about what happened that no one else could have known. While I answered her questions and listened to her answer mine, I started sobbing. I don’t know if what she said was true. I don’t know if it matters. What I do know is that it felt true. I allowed myself, in that moment, to let go of the shame and guilt I felt over this painful event in my life. I hardly think about it anymore.

The skeptics in my life believe L’Belle-Tividad may just be really good at collecting information about people, gleaning details from other readings and our demographic data. Creatives tend to be very chatty and have a hard time keeping secrets. And, the truth is, we’re all a little bit more predictable than we like to think we are. When L’Belle-Tividad first entered my field, she asked, “Have you finished your book yet?” I hadn’t told her about the book I was writing, but it was an easy guess to make: I am a 30-something writer in Los Angeles.

There are also some things in my reading that she got wrong. She told me I had a knack for languages. I do not. She told me I would find myself living in France some day; I had actually been thinking about moving to Spain. And she described my maternal grandmother as “chatty.” This simply was never the case with my late grandmother, a stoic woman who preferred silent company. But perhaps it’s a quality she’s acquired in the afterlife.

Tasbeeh Herwees is a writer born and raised in Los Angeles.

L’Belle-Tividad wears a Sue Wong dress, Free People cape, vintage sunglasses, and her own jewelry.