Demystifying intuition —Bend woman makes a living by teaching art of using intuition

By Andrew Moore / The Bulletin
February 03. 2007

Got a hunch? A gut feeling? A suspicious sense of what's around the corner?

Welcome to the world of Karen Grace Kassy, a 42-year-old Bend woman who's built a career out of sharing her insights and teaching others how to take advantage of their own. She trades in hunches. She's even written a book on the subject.

Kassy bills herself as an "intuitive" and shares her hunches most often in paid consultations. Intuition, describes Kassy, is "knowing something without knowing how you know it," and she's put hers to work advising clients on everything from health issues to real estate speculation to "the thing people always want to know about: relationships."
No, it's not your ordinary line of work. But somehow you already knew that.

Everyone has a sense of intuition, Kassy said, like when you know who's calling before you answer the phone or when you "get a feeling about where a parking spot is and boom! There it is." The trick, she said, is getting it "to show up when you want and be accurate." Thanks to years of practice, Kassy said she has an accuracy rate of more than 80 percent.

Hmm. You knew it had to be high.

Well, hope you'll pardon the skepticism. Kassy does.

"I know people think what I do is really weird, but it's a nice way to connect with people for something that's surprisingly legitimate," she said. "The thing is, once (people) meet me, they realize it's normal."

Kassy does seem normal. She lives in an old yellow farmhouse on a small spread north of Bend. She keeps a horse and counts her two giant, saddle-worthy Newfoundland dogs as her children. When we interviewed her, she was finishing up a painting project in her kitchen (a new coat of burgundy for the walls) and wore a sweatshirt and a faded pair of jeans. Miss Cleo she was not.

If you missed the reference, Miss Cleo was an eccentric, self-proclaimed psychic who made hay in the 1990s by hawking - in a feigned Jamaican accent - a hotline for psychic readings in a number of infomercials.

Power of the mind

Kassy’s specialty is health intuition, a fact reflected in the title of her book: “Health Intuition: A Simple Guide to Greater Well-Being.” A number of medical professionals in the region swear by her skills and recommend patients to her. One is Dr. Mary Ellen Coulter, a homeopathic physician with a practice in Bend. Coulter has personally used Kassy’s services and will sometimes recommend Kassy to her patients. Kassy, said Coulter, is “not at all” a fraud.

“I tend to use Karen more when people believe in the intuitive aspects of their health, then I will definitely use her,” said Coulter. “And I use her myself, and I think in some cases, she’s very helpful. There’s a lot to it.”

“Kassy,” said Coulter, “can’t legally diagnose illness. Instead,” she said, “Kassy will give individuals “what she thinks you need to look at.”

Another health professional who uses Kassy is Rebecca Roth, an acupuncturist and the owner of Emerald Acupuncture & Herbs in Bend.

“I have had an intuitive reading from her and it was fabulous,” said Roth. “I would say her forte is not only calling attention to some health issues that need attending to, but as well she is very good at directing people towards a modality (of treatment).”

Kassy also consults with people from walks of life outside of medicine. Moira Rounds, formerly the owner of Area Rug Connection in Bend, is one.

“I had never met her. I talked to her over the phone and she had an amazing ability to connect very accurately to what I was feeling and what I was experiencing ...without telling her very much,” said Rounds.

Rounds already had experience in listening to intuition. Chiefly her own. Rounds said that as a saleswoman, she relied on it as a way to read customers. She was so impressed with Kassy’s consultation that she signed up for a weeklong intuition workshop Kassy offered last year in Costa Rica, in hopes of honing her own intuitive skills. “It was a great experience,” said Rounds, and she hopes to use what she learned to help others.

“There are ways I have always hoped that I could help people enhance that natural part of us,” said Rounds. “The better intuition works, the stronger you can make any system in your body work, the better your life will be.”

“This is really not any kind of magic,” added Rounds. “It’s just practice.”

The effectiveness of intuition is debatable. As David Knuff, an Oregon State University-Cascades Campus associate professor who specializes in consumer psychology, notes, “the mind is a very powerful thing.”

“As long as a person is internalizing the prediction, or planting a seed, it has the potential of increasing the likelihood of said behavior,” said Knuff.

Music and intuition

Kassy, a native of Colorado, earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration as well as a master’s degree in intuition and energy medicine from Greenwich University, a now-defunct correspondence school. She moved to Bend seven years ago, drawn to the area, she said, by a voice in her head that came to her while in the shower.

Kassy works out of her home and does all of her consultations over the phone. There is less chance of drawing assumptions based on physical appearance that way, she explained. Kassy charges $165 for a reading, according to the rates posted on her Web site, and said she has clients from as far away as Australia.

As much as she enjoys her work, Kassy is finding more and more joy in teaching intuition. In two weeks, she will kick off another workshop in Costa Rica. It will consist of two components: The first will be a weeklong seminar on “Intuition and Creativity” she is co-teaching with Bay Area musician Joe Craven, and the second will be a weeklong seminar on “Life Intuition.”

Kassy is particularly excited about the workshop with Craven. She met him a year ago at Toomie’s Restaurant in Bend and immediately told him that he would soon leave performing to teach. Craven, said Kassy, looked at her as if she were crazy and told her that as the percussionist for jazzman David “Dawg” Grisman for the last 15 years, he had the best job in the world. As Kassy tells it, within the year, Craven left Grisman’s band to teach.

Craven, 50, doesn’t remember his exact exchange with Kassy, but confirmed it’s mostly true. He did leave Grisman’s band, but it was not expressly to teach, although he does do more of it now that he’s working on a solo career in music. Details aside, Craven is excited to join Kassy in Costa Rica.

“This is the thing I love about Karen,” said Craven. “She was and is always so encouraging, and she had some great things to say after we had this initial meeting... when I found out that she, as an intuitive, was an educator, it was great. She has been a great person to connect with.”

Craven is looking forward to the workshop, partly because he does “see the connections and the tie-ins” between music and intuition. Knowing which note to play, for instance, or which way to lead a song.

“I’ve never known an intuitive before, so I was very taken with her directness, about how she was seeing or feeling what I was thinking or doing. It’s pretty fascinating,” said Craven. “I’m very intrigued as to how this is going to go.”

Kassy, an amateur banjo picker and guitar player, can’t wait to jam with Craven in Costa Rica. Craven is known for making music from everyday items, such as shoelaces, to the outlandish, such as bedpans and donkey jawbones.

“I really fell in love with his teaching style, of demystifying stuff,” said Kassy.

Like Craven, Kassy wants to demystify her trade. Skeptics are welcome. She’s convinced they’ll understand the utility of trusting your instincts. In intuition, Kassy believes she’s found “an extra edge” for people, a way to maximize hunches and make life richer as a result.

“It’s nice to get these glimmers that save you trouble,” said Kassy. “It’s nice to think it’s practical; otherwise I wouldn’t waste my time.”