North Fork medium’s book aims to empower people to rely on faith
If you live on the North Fork, you’ve probably heard the name MaryAnn the Medium.
You might have been told about a public reading the Laurel resident was giving at Southold’s Country Corner Café or The Giving Room.
Perhaps a friend told you about the time she helped them get in touch with a loved one on the other side.
She may have even guided you through an experience that changed your own life.
Now, through a new book released Sept. 20 by Rodale Books — a publisher of wellness books and magazines — MaryAnn DiMarco is sharing her gift as a psychic medium by helping people around the world read the signs being placed in front of them and connect with the energy on the other side.
“What I’ve found by meeting with people in session after session that I’ve done is they forgot the action part,” Ms. DiMarco said in an interview last week. “They’ve forgotten how to read those signs that a spirit is putting in front of them to sort of catapult their lives forward in a positive motion. I’m hoping the book empowers people to rely on their belief system, their faith and that it moves them forward in life to do good for themselves.”
In “Believe Ask Act: Divine Steps to Raise Your Intuition, Create Change and Discover Happiness,” Ms. DiMarco recounts how she first recognized her ability to connect with spirits when she was just 5 years old. She was in the basement of her uncle’s house in Patchogue, where she is also from, when she simply felt a spirit’s presence. In that same house, she said, she’d sometimes feel like someone was in a hallway with her — even if she couldn’t see them.
Ms. DiMarco says in the book that this ability is something many of the women on her mother’s side of the family have also experienced. She believes the presence of all her relatives in that home helped her to initially recognize her own strong sense of intuition.
But Ms. DiMarco, now 45, didn’t rush to sharpen her skills or pursue a career as a psychic medium. Instead, she worked in retail management and focused most of her adult life on raising her son and daughter.
She moved to the North Fork in 1999, living most of the past 17 years in Jamesport. It wasn’t until a mix-up during a referral to meet with another medium, whom she describes only as “now famous,” that Ms. DiMarco ended up meeting the woman who would ultimately lead her to pursue becoming a full-time medium.
Pat Longo is a spiritual healer with a practice in Hicksville. Although she’s not psychic, Ms. DiMarco credits Ms. Longo with helping her to recognize her ability to connect with the other side.
It was during their very first appointment when Ms. DiMarco saw what she describes as a “full apparition” of her former husband’s late father, whom she had been very close to.
“It’s time to use your gift now,” he told her. “You’re ready now.”
Shocked, Ms. DiMarco asked Ms. Longo what she had just observed.
“You’re a medium,” Ms. Longo told her. “Are you ready for the ride of your life?”
Ms. Longo, who has worked with many mediums before, recalled the experience in an interview this week.
“She was quite amazed by it,” she said of Ms. DiMarco’s reaction to the breakthrough. “She was a bit on the tearful side.”
After working intensely with Ms. Longo for a year, Ms. DiMarco became a professional psychic medium about six years ago.
Ms. Longo said that in her many years of working alongside mediums, she can usually sense early on when someone has an extraordinary ability.
“I’d put MaryAnn in that category,” she said. “I’m happy to know her.”
Until recently, Ms. DiMarco’s business grew almost entirely through word of mouth and in particular around the North Fork.
“It had a slow trickle effect,” she said of the way her career began. “You’d hear, ‘So and so told me about you.’ Then my phone started to ring more and more and it was local people who heard about me.”
Today, Ms. DiMarco’s reach is more global. She said the feedback she’s received about her book has come not just from Long Island, but all over the world. She also made her first national television appearance last week, on an episode of “The Dr. Oz Show.”
“It’s fun,” Ms. DiMarco said of the attention she’s receiving from the book and the hard work that goes into promoting it. “I’m meeting the most wonderful people who are really interested in the book and what its message is.”
In order to understand that message, Ms. DiMarco said you just have to be a person of faith. It doesn’t matter where that faith comes from.
She was raised mostly without religion, although she connected with the Catholic Church as an adult because her children attended Our Lady of Mercy in Cutchogue.
“I remember really falling in love with the school,” she said. “It was exactly what I needed to wake me up again.”
But it doesn’t take a church, a mosque or a temple to connect with the spirits around you, she insisted.
“You can [make a connection] wherever you find your peace,” she said. “That might be sitting in your garden.”
While not everyone is a psychic medium, Ms. DiMarco believes we all have the ability to learn how to connect if we establish a belief system and learn to ask the right questions — territory explored at length in her book.
Despite the fact that she’s now receiving attention from places far beyond the North Fork, Ms. DiMarco said she has no intention of leaving behind her roots. A true person of faith, she’ll leave the future up to the spirits that guide her.
“Right now I’m so happy and content to get out this message,” she said. “I’m not looking to be anything more … I just want to help empower people.”
Top courtesy photo: MaryAnn DiMarco made her first national television appearance last week on an episode of ‘The Dr. Oz Show.’ (Credit: Stacy Wickham Photography)
