For the most part, 2013 will be a good year for New Westminster, according to local psychics Christophir and Crystell Regan.
The husband-and-wife clairvoyant team has been offering professional psychic services worldwide for more than 20 years.
In a recent interview with The Record, they shared their predictions for the Royal City, as well as for a global outlook for this year.
"There's going to be a surge of growth, even more than what's already occurred," says Christophir, referring to an influx of people who live and work here. He said he foresees business will soon be booming, with a surge in commercial growth.
On the political front, Christophir says, "there is definitely a very good chance for the NDP to get in," but that "there is adjustment available. People should not just see that as inevitable. The Conservatives certainly can affect a kind of challenge to that."
Crime, he says, will be down in New Westminster in 2013, and there will be increased activities around women's issues.
Crystell, for her part, sees a celebratory event in town related to a sister city this year, but she did have one dire prediction: the Fraser River will flood in the summer, possibly in June, and reach unprecedented levels.
"I think we're going to find that some of the streets closer to the water may actually end up being closed because of water right over the streets," she said.
Globally, the Regans say there will be more cyclonic storms and volcanic action and earthquakes. "These are things that we just have to get used to because we are affecting the planet," says Christophir.
But while he foresees a continued deterioration in the weather forecast, Christophir says he foresees the global economy starting to improve this year, with Europe's fiscal outlook back on track by April.
And in the entertainment world, Justin Bieber may take a hiatus from work, he says.
"A lot of the things that have been happening lately have kind of spooked him and so I think you're going to find him dropping off the scene for a while."
Overall, the pair believe this will be markedly different from the last.
What Crystell calls a "darker energy" - a pervasive negative vibe in society - will dissipate in 2013.
"You know how sometimes when you're ill, when you start healing, it appears as though it's getting worse, and then it gets better? ... 2013 is going to be a year when people start to balance the energies," she says.
Christophir says he sees a small nuclear accident in Iran this year, which will then lead to a lesson learned and a new awareness on a global scale of a way to achieve peace and harmony.
Overall, the outlook, according to the Regans, is good.
"It's a better world that's developing," he says. "People are becoming more aware of their own intuition, which allows them to evaluate situations and reduce levels of fear."
Based out of an office in New Westminster, Christophir and Crystell field calls from clients here in town and as far away as the Caribbean, Europe and Asia.
They have done readings through interpreters, but say they prefer to converse directly with clients.
Most of their referrals come through word of mouth.
The two have also spent more than two decades as regulars on CKNW and other radio stations, and say they have helped police find downed airplanes using their extra-sensory gifts.
A few years ago, when they were living in the Okanagan, the former president of the B.C. Police Association called the Regans after a CKNW show to ask for their help in finding his friend who had disappeared in an airplane a few hours earlier. Christophir says he was able to give the precise location of the plane crash at a certain altitude on a mountainside about four miles west of its last known location. The police found the plane 20 minutes later.
"It's weird how it happens," he said. "I'm amazed. Both Crystell and I are both amazed by some of the information that we get."
Crystell, whose nickname is Angel, says she has always had a keen ability to read people's auras and see into the future, while Christophir only discovered his similar ability after he met her and they started a relationship.
He was once an engineer and a self-described skeptic of anything that could not be proven empirically.
But then one day, not long after they started dating, Crystell gave Christophir some information about himself he couldn't ignore, and which changed the course of his life.
"She saved my life," he said. "She kind of stepped back from me and looked at my aura, and she saw what appeared to be a kind of disturbance there and said, 'You have cancer.' I said, 'You're nuts.'"
But after insisting he see his doctor to get a biopsy, it turned out Crystell was right - a small, seemingly insignificant freckle on his back turned out to be the only visible indication of a malignant melanoma, the most lethal type of skin cancer.
He said his doctor told him he'd be dead in seven months without treatment.
Two days later, Christophir says had the cancerous cells removed at Burnaby Hospital and has been healthy ever since.
"So, when that happened, it kind of demonstrated to me that this kind of information is valuable," he said. "It was something I should look into, and from that point on I kind of let her train me because she was a natural."
Once he shifted his attitude towards psychic abilities and the non-scientific elements of clairvoyance he had before discounted, Christophir said he soon realized he had ignored many instances of premonitions throughout his life.
"If you have a mind that is very deductive and very logical, there's a tendency to discount what appears right there in front of your face," he said.
The Regans consider themselves to be professional psychics and say that while everyone is intuitive, they have honed their skill in this area to such a degree that they can make a full-time living offering this service by phone.
"Any psychic link is not a physical link, it doesn't matter where you are," says Christophir. "All we need is permission. It's not mind rape. What we have the ability to do is to tune into persons, and because they are linked to others, we can tune into individuals around them and their decisions, basically looking at the options that are available to them. Very often we're not aware of the options that are kind of invisible around us that can assist us in making choices that are going to better our lives. And we do that every day."
All they need to know, when a client calls, is their name and the names of a few key people in their life, and a list of questions they'd like to have answered.
The vast majority of requests for readings centre on money and relationships.
As a clairvoyant, Christophir says he gets a flood of information that is visual, almost like he's watching a TV screen in his mind.
He says both he and Crystell have been able to warn people away from certain situations, relationships or travel options when they have foreseen disasters, and encourage people to pursue business deals, book deals, and other relationships if they see good things happening in the future.
"Our futures are elastic," says Christophir. "They're what you might call open to adjustment."
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