Kerry Powell on Reiki, tarot and finding balance in East Devon (Interview by Mid Devon Press)

Reporter: Lewis Clarke (Mid Devon Press)

This is a direct lift from the Midweekherald.co.uk interview. I haven’t changed any of Lewis Clarke’s report and I have credited Lewis with the photographs he has taken. There is a link to the original article which appeared online on 12th Sept 2026 and a shortened version appeared in print on 16th Sept 2026. I’ve dropped it here for nostalgia and so that I don’t forget.

Tarot room at Chi-quilibrium (Image: Kerry Powell)

Two words appearing in Kerry Powell’s mind one morning were enough to set her life on an entirely unexpected course. “Learn Reiki” was the message – simple, unexplained and, for a woman then working in aircraft maintenance, the beginning of a journey that would eventually lead her to leave employed life behind and build a very different future.

Five years later, Kerry, 52, runs Chi-quilibrium from her home in Whimple, where Reiki, tarot, intuitive workshops and gatherings have become her full-time focus. It might seem a world away from a career that has included council offices, aircraft maintenance and teaching people to scuba dive, but Kerry believes the threads connecting the different chapters of her life were there long before she recognised them.

Born and raised in Plymouth, Kerry worked for Plymouth City Council before moving to Kent in her twenties. Around the same time, she learned to scuba dive, an experience she credits with changing both her confidence and her outlook on life.

“Learning to scuba dive gave me a completely different view on the world and gave me confidence in a way I did not expect,” she said. “I decided I really wanted to become a divemaster, so I continued my diving education, became an instructor and eventually a master instructor.”

Some of the workshops and items (Image: Lewis Clarke)

Kerry went on to help run a dive centre in Kent, combining teaching with sales and marketing, before diving carried her considerably further afield. She moved to Egypt and worked aboard liveaboard dive vessels travelling along the Red Sea, somewhere she had felt an affinity with since childhood.

“I had always had a connection with Egypt, going right back to primary school,” Kerry said. “Being there with the heat, the sun and the water, there was just something I really connected with. I travelled a lot up and down the Red Sea.”

Finding home in East Devon

Kerry eventually returned to Devon, and she and her husband Simon began looking for somewhere that would work for them both. The pair had first met through diving and been friends for years before becoming a couple, but at the time Kerry was in Plymouth while Simon still had a home in Kent.

Simon’s answer was characteristically practical. He plotted the distances to family, friends and the places that mattered to them on a map, with the calculations pointing them towards East Devon. Their house hunting eventually led to Whimple, where they settled in 2008.

Kerry later joined an aircraft maintenance company at Exeter Airport, where she worked for 14 years. Yet alongside the practicalities of working life, another part of her personality had been quietly present since childhood.

Some of Kerry’s earliest memories are of her maternal grandmother reading fortunes from ordinary playing cards and interpreting tea leaves. Her grandparents were also connected to a spiritualist church in Plymouth, while Kerry believes her great-grandfather had been involved in starting one.

“I can remember begging my nan to read our cards,” Kerry said. “She would use a normal deck of cards and she used to read our tea leaves as well. Those are some of my earliest memories.”

Chi-quilibrium at Beautiful Days Festival (Image: Kerry Powell)

She also recalls being highly sensitive to the atmosphere of particular places and, as she grew older, feeling instinctively drawn towards crystals without really understanding why.

“I have still got my very first aventurine crystal,” she said. “There were also times when I would go into a house and just know I did not want to live there because it did not feel right to me. That sort of awareness had always been there.”

As adult responsibilities took over, those interests became less prominent. Then came the pandemic and the morning when two words brought them sharply back into focus.

‘I woke up and had the words learn Reiki’

“I woke up one morning and I had ‘learn Reiki’,” Kerry said. “It was that simple. I had no idea what Reiki was.”

At the time Kerry had also been thinking more about her own wellbeing and exploring different ways of looking after herself. She is careful to stress that she does not see holistic practices as a replacement for conventional healthcare.

“I had various health issues and I wanted to look at healing myself from the inside rather than constantly taking tablets,” she said. “But the two things can work holistically together. I am not saying it has to be one or the other.”

Kerry began researching Reiki and found teacher Barbara Hennessy. Even choosing whom to train with became one of those moments Kerry interprets as synchronicity.

She had seen Barbara online and immediately felt drawn towards her, but before making contact happened to watch another Facebook page she followed. Barbara appeared unexpectedly as a guest leading a meditation.

“I thought, ‘OK, that is a sign’,” Kerry said. “I am all about signs and synchronicity. We were in the pandemic, so we had to find a window when we could actually get together, but eventually I did my Reiki level one with Barbara.”

What Kerry had intended as a personal exploration very quickly became something more. She says that within the first hour of her course, before she had even explored Reiki in depth, she knew she wanted to share it with others.

“That was not why I went there,” Kerry said. “I went there to work on myself, but it was such a profound experience for me that I just knew I had to give that to other people.”

After completing level one, Kerry practised extensively with family and friends before progressing to level two and later becoming a Reiki master instructor herself. Barbara remained her mentor and became one of her closest friends.

For Kerry, the experience also seemed to heighten her awareness of everyday life.

“Everything just became alive,” she said. “The trees looked greener, food tasted brighter and I became aware of energy in a different way.”

Reiki table (Image: Lewis Clarke)

From Reiki to the tarot table

Reiki remained Kerry’s first focus, but as her training developed she began exploring other areas too. She completed psychic development work and studied tarot with Barbara through to diploma level, although the thought of actually reading cards professionally initially filled her with self-doubt.

“Barbara encouraged me to do tarot professionally and I did not think I was good enough,” Kerry said. “I did not have the confidence because it had always been about the Reiki for me.”

The turning point came when Kerry took part in a village event in Whimple in 2022. She invited Barbara to join her, with Kerry offering Reiki while Barbara read tarot alongside her.

Watching the readings and seeing the response gave Kerry the confidence to try it herself. By the next event she was offering both – and discovered the cards were attracting even more interest than the Reiki.

“The tarot was more popular, which really surprised me,” she said. “There were so many people looking for answers.”

Kerry believes periods of uncertainty can encourage people to become curious about different ways of looking at their lives. She thinks the pandemic was one such moment, with more people becoming interested in Reiki, tarot and other spiritual or intuitive practices.

Festivals now form an important part of her year. She has returned to Beautiful Days for four years and has also read at Jurassic Fields, completing more than 100 readings across the two festivals during August.

Perhaps most rewarding are the people who come back.

“I have clients who came to me in my first year at Beautiful Days and they book in again,” Kerry said. “I have become part of their festival experience, which is quite humbling.

“They will say to me, ‘Do you remember you said this?’ and I have to say, ‘No’. Once I have finished a reading, it has gone. I tell everyone to take a photograph of their cards and some people record the reading.”

No two readings are the same

Kerry’s approach to tarot has evolved considerably since those early days. She recently came across an old price list advertising conventional three and five-card readings and was surprised by how far her practice had changed.

“I had forgotten I ever did that,” she said. “Now when somebody comes for a reading, it is completely individual. It might be a few cards or it might be 20. I do not work to a script because everybody is different, so every reading should be different.”

Kerry describes her approach as intuitive and sees tarot not as an immovable prediction of somebody’s future but as a way of exploring what is happening in their life and the choices available to them.

“I believe we have our pathway, but at any given time we always have choice, even if some of those choices are incredibly difficult,” she said. “The cards might give an idea of what could happen, but you can use that information to navigate things differently.

“If you know there could potentially be some conflict ahead, for example, you can choose how you respond to that. There is always choice.”

Festival life also brings Kerry into contact with people who would never ordinarily book a tarot reading. Sometimes one partner has booked and persuades the other to sit down too, meaning not everyone arriving at her table is convinced.

Kerry said she can often sense that initial reservation but enjoys seeing people become more open to the experience.

“The thing I hear all the time is, ‘That is really weird’, when cards start coming out and they are making sense to that person,” she said. “Someone might have been persuaded to have a reading and by the end they are saying, ‘Wow’.

“For me, it is lovely when somebody comes in unsure and then leaves feeling that they have got something from the experience.”

She has also noticed that tarot seems to be reaching a broader audience. At Beautiful Days this year, Kerry calculated that 19% of the people she read for were men – a figure she found particularly interesting.

Holding space for people

Behind the colour of tarot cards and festival tents can also be deeply personal conversations. Kerry sometimes meets people who are grieving, facing relationship difficulties or trying to make sense of major changes in their lives.

For her, part of working responsibly is understanding the difference between supporting somebody and taking their emotions home.

“My role is to hold space for people,” Kerry said. “Of course I can still get emotional, but I protect my own energy and I am there to allow somebody to let go if that is what they need to do.

“My role is there to support. You have to protect yourself because you are holding that container for somebody else.”

Confidentiality is equally important. Kerry says what is discussed during readings stays there, and returning clients may be surprised to discover that she does not remember details they shared with her months earlier.

That, she feels, is precisely how it should be.

Following intuition beyond Reiki and tarot

As Chi-quilibrium has developed, Kerry’s curiosity has continued to take her into new areas. She now runs workshops introducing people to practices including pendulum dowsing, tea leaf reading, Witches Runes, intuitive tea blending and incense making.

The aim, she says, is less about telling people what to believe and more about encouraging them to explore their own instincts.

“We all know that feeling when you have a gut instinct and afterwards think, ‘Why did I not listen to that?’” Kerry said. “I want people to explore their own intuition and learn to trust it.”

Her tea leaf sessions have an especially personal connection, bringing her back to those childhood memories of watching her grandmother. Kerry has also become increasingly interested in plants, herbs, nature and older traditions, although she is conscious that some of the language surrounding spiritual practice can carry misconceptions.

For her, it comes back to reconnecting with the natural world and encouraging curiosity rather than attaching labels to people.

“I want to open up a space where people can explore,” Kerry said. “It is about the herbs, the plants, the land and understanding that connection. People can come here and have a go at something without feeling that they have to know everything already.”

That playful sense of exploration is also behind one of her newer ventures, the Tiffin and Tarot Society. Kerry was inspired by the idea of people coming together over cards, tea leaves and afternoon tea – with one additional attraction.

“I like cake, so it makes sense,” she said. “It is not a teaching session. It is about bringing your cards along and being together.”

Kerry Powell from Chi-quilibrium (Image: Lewis Clarke)

When balance became impossible to ignore

For several years, Chi-quilibrium grew around Kerry’s full-time job. Reiki sessions took place in her lounge during evenings and weekends, with the furniture moved and the treatment bed brought out once the working day was over.

As more people began booking, it became increasingly difficult to fit everything in. Kerry reduced her employed working week to three days, allowing her to see clients and teach Reiki on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

For a while, that compromise worked. Then the business grew again.

“I was having to turn people away or trying to squeeze more and more people into a short amount of time,” Kerry said. “I was getting burnt out and I just was not getting any downtime.”

For somebody whose business name contained the idea of equilibrium, there was an obvious contradiction.

“I realised I was not balanced,” she said. “If I am working with energy, I have got to feel balanced. If I am not balanced, how can I help other people find that balance?”

In November 2025, after discussing the decision with Simon, Kerry finally left her employed job and made Chi-quilibrium her full-time focus.

She had deliberately approached the change in stages rather than taking one enormous leap, but giving up the security of employed work was still significant.

“The only person getting in my way was me,” Kerry said. “It was learning that what I was doing was what I should be doing.”

Working entirely for herself brought another adjustment. Without fixed office hours, Kerry discovered that she had to create her own boundaries – particularly when inspiration could arrive at six in the morning.

“It took probably a good six months to get into a rhythm,” she said. “You have this tendency to think you have to be working every single minute of a nine-to-five day.

“I might be really creative first thing in the morning and start writing at six, so I had to learn those boundaries. But now I love it.

“I do not go to bed on a Sunday night thinking, ‘Oh, it is Monday tomorrow’. I do not feel that anymore, which is amazing.”

The story behind Chi-quilibrium

The business name itself sums up the balance Kerry had been looking for from the beginning.

She had written down a collection of words describing what she wanted to create, including “chi”, representing life force energy, and “equilibrium”, representing balance. It was Simon who spotted that the two belonged together.

“Even before I had done my Reiki level two, I knew it was going to be bigger than just Reiki,” Kerry said. “I did not know how I knew, I just knew.

“I did not want to be pinned down with Reiki in the business name, so I had all these words written down. Simon looked at them and said, ‘Why do you not put those two together?’ So Simon actually named the business.”

His involvement is particularly fitting because Kerry describes the two of them as very different characters.

Where she regards herself as emotional and intuitive, Simon is, she says, decidedly logical – “Mr Spreadsheet”.

“When I first learned Reiki and wanted to practise on him, he was super sceptical,” Kerry said. “I think he fell asleep. I picked up that he had an issue with his knee and he swore blind that he must have told me about it.”

Some time later, Simon fell from his motorbike while travelling in Spain and hurt his wrist. His response amused Kerry because the previously sceptical husband contacted her to ask whether she could send him distance Reiki.

“For me, that was a big tick in the box,” she said.

More importantly, Kerry says Simon has watched both her and the business change over the past five years.

“He has seen people come into the house and seen how different they can be when they leave, whether they have been here for Reiki or tarot,” she said. “He has witnessed the changes in people and in me.

“When I started talking about doing tarot at big festivals, he was on board. He is front of house now and he can talk a tarot deck. He is my biggest fan and my biggest supporter.”

A deeper connection

Kerry’s journey has continued to evolve. In 2025 she completed Sacred Celebrancy training, something she says gave her further confidence and strengthened her connection with nature, ritual and creating sacred spaces.

Although she is not currently offering formal ceremonies or handfastings, that experience influences the circles and gatherings she now holds. She is also preparing to assist with the training of another group of sacred celebrants.

“It was an incredible experience and it gave me confidence in so many different areas,” Kerry said. “It has opened doors and opportunities I never would have expected.

“For me it is about feeling the ground beneath my feet and having that connection with Mother Earth and with the sacred things that are around us. It has also given me a better understanding of myself.”

Five years after the morning when two unexpected words sent her searching for Reiki, Kerry admits she could never have predicted where they would lead.

“Five years ago, I never would have thought I would be doing this full-time and helping so many people,” she said. “I never expected to be running circles, teaching, doing festivals and having all these opportunities.

“It has become much bigger than I ever imagined.”

And for somebody intrigued by Reiki, tarot or intuition but uncertain about taking that first step, Kerry’s advice is uncomplicated.

“Experience it,” she said. “Be brave.

“If you have questions, ask. I will answer anything.”