Intuition: The world of Anna Toyna

Anna Toyna waits for me in the St. Peter's Episcopal Church cemetery in downtown Lewes. A cold wind is blowing, and as I approach, I notice she is listening to music through headphones under her black-hooded coat. While she loves music, that's not the reason she is using headphones.

She is blocking out the inevitable noises and voices she hears anytime she comes close to a cemetery. Anna is part psychic, part creature communicator, part conduit to the spirit world, but more than anything, an intuitive.

She smiles as I come closer and reminds me that she wants me to ask her some questions about my personal life; she wants to do a “reading” of sorts.

As a journalist, I'm trained to be skeptical. I've never heard of an intuitive, let alone met one. But it's hard to ignore what Anna has accomplished during her lifetime. She's attended prestigious schools, appeared on television, studied abroad, given seminars and had a syndicated newspaper column and radio show.

Anna's world is different. It's hard to put a label on her because her talents come from within a place most find hard to comprehend.

Anna's intuition has become a powerful tool that she has used to help countless people with personal, financial, relationship, business and even medical issues. She says her work should not be confused with psychic work because she gets flashes of insights that need no interpretation; she says psychics must translate or process the insights they receive into real-life meaning.

She likens it to mother's intuition.

“Intuition is something most people experience all the time,” she says. “We get ideas, creative inspiration, feelings of apprehension - and hopefully we act on them. Intuition is literally our back-up system, so that when our psychic senses are in a state of atrophy due to disuse, intuition kicks in.”

She says her keen intuition is information coming from more than our five senses. “When we are children, we use more than five senses, but by school age we are taught not to use them. I wasn't taught that,” she said. “I'm using a part of the brain that anyone can develop, but most don't."

As a creature communicator, she feels she may have found a niche in the area because so many people have pets. She says her intuition is just as effective with animals as it is with humans.

“My only agenda is to be credible; I only want to be correct,” she says. “If I'm right, it scares people, and if I'm wrong, the skeptics come out. Sometimes it's a no-win situation.”

Retired now and living in Long Neck, Anna is trying to re-establish herself in a new place, something she has done throughout her life; she's moved nearly 40 times. She's also a fifth-generation jeweler who has worked with her father and had her own business.

One of a few medical intuitives

Anna is one of a handful of trained medical intuitives in the world. This small group claims they can use their intuition to find the cause of a physical or emotional condition.

Without diagnosing or prescribing - more as a medical scanning device - Anna offers advice how to identify a medical problem, where it occurs, the possible cause and the type of test and specialist or procedure most likely to corroborate her findings.

She is one of the first graduates of the Edgar Cayce Foundation. Cayce, who died in 1945, is probably the most well-known medical intuitive or clairvoyant who ever lived.

Additional advanced training with Carolyn Myss - one of the top medical intuitive teachers in the country - has enabled Anna to become one of about 200 medical intuitives practicing in the United States.

She studied parapsychology at Duke University, and later went on to obtain a degree in psychology and art therapy.

It all starts with a question

She started studying parapsychology in the 1970s before it became mainstream and continued to do readings for people for barter. “I did very well answering people's questions on health, family and relationships,” she said.

Using her intuition, she's able to answer people's questions over the phone or via email. “In fact, I prefer not to meet the person face to face,” she said. “It's distracting to me.”

Over the years, her talent landed her a syndicated radio show based at WCBM Radio in Baltimore. She also wrote a column for numerous newspapers, did seminars and appeared on national TV shows.

She answered people's questions on politics and predicted sports winners. “I made betting people a lot of money,” she said with a smile. “Some of these things - like sports - I had very little interest in and didn't even know the teams, but I could tell you the winner by the color of the uniform.”

She has also worked on cruise ships telling people how to use their intuition in everyday life.

Anna has many stories from her past. She had a client who was a financial planner in Connecticut who would call her every three to four months for advice on mutual funds. “He told me I was far more accurate than professional financial newsletters he paid for,” she said.

Then there was a dentist who made more than $700,000 from her advice to stay in the Japanese market even though times were bad. “I didn't even know there was a Japanese stock market,” she said. “Then he complained that I charged him $75.”

Not an ordinary childhood

As a young child growing up in Florida, Anna says she had experiences that included past-life regression. “I could see myself in different environments in places I had never been,” she said. “At the time it was so ordinary; I thought kids just did that.”

To her, the experiences were normal. “When the phone rang, my mother would know who was calling and would tell me what to say,” she said.

Her mother was Roma, a Ukrainian gypsy, and her father was a German Jew.  She would later learn that her grandfather was a palm reader.

School was a solitary existence for Anna. Suffering from a speech impediment, she didn't talk much. That didn't stop her from excelling in the classroom, which led to a lifelong quest, reading and learning.

Her psychic powers began to get stronger in her teen years as she discovered Tarot cards and learned she had a gift to read the cards for people. Her intuition was also beginning to mature.

Reading palms and cards became her focus when she was young, but she discovered that her talents were strong enough that she didn't need what she calls the arcane arts.

She also began to hear voices that were thoughts from those around her. “I couldn't be with a lot of people; it drove me crazy,” she said.

Haunted tour in Lewes

Growing up a military family, she has a penchant for moving and has done so about 40 times. She moved to the Long Neck area just over two years ago from Maryland, having never been in Delaware.

Not long after moving to the area, she was taken on a tour by local historian Russ Allen of some of Lewes' most famous haunts. Allen said he was taken aback by her knowledge of the history of the area, although she had never been to Lewes before.

“There are still ghosts in Lewes, as there are in most towns,” she said.

One of the most active ghosts she encountered was at the Metcalf House behind St. Peter's Episcopal Church in downtown Lewes.

She says the female ghost from the 1700s lives in the attic and ventures out to the porch on nice days. “If you put your hand on the outside of the house, you can feel her presence. She likes to interact with people,” she said.

In another old Lewes house, Allen showed her a Spanish trunk that contained a locked box. “I told him important papers from a ship that contained a king's mark had been in the box at one time,” she said.

In another house, she had a vision of old dresses in a closet. “I heard a voice that wasn't in English so I couldn't tell what the words meant, but I did know there were dresses there that should be cared for so they wouldn't fall to ruin,” she said.

Lewes also provided an education to Anna. She had always thought that a spirit stays with the land and not the house. But because so many houses in Lewes have been moved over the years, she discovered spirits can stay with a house.

She doesn't put much credence in the recent popularity of ghost hunters who use high-tech equipment to track down spirits. “It's only entertainment,” she says. “They are not what they proclaim to be. It goes against what I have worked 45 years for – to be credible. Their actions only lessen my credibility.”

See Anna Toyna's website at in2itive-edge.com.