Imagine you are five years old. The phone rings and caller ID is not even a concept. Your little Sicilian mother tells you, “Deborah, pick up the phone, it’s your Aunt Rosie.” You pick up the phone … it is your Aunt Rosie. Aunt Rosie calls infrequently and lives two hundred miles away, yet this intuitive knowing is the cultural norm inside of which Deb Mangelus spent her formative years.
It never occurred to Deb that other people didn’t navigate the unseen world in the same way she did. It was a struggle to fit in as a child and even into her teens given her gift of psychic awareness. As an adult, however, Deb’s gifts blossomed in a setting where they could go largely undetected. She chose nursing as a career, working with those most at risk. Her intuitive abilities benefited patients in settings such as Pediatric Intensive Care and High Risk Labor and Delivery. She was able to sense what was happening for her patients before looking to the various monitors to confirm her intuitive knowing.
It was not until Deb worked with high risk adolescents in a hospital setting that she realized how clearly the unspoken messages of the mind and heart spoke to her. The rewards and challenges of that time practiced and refined her natural psychic “seeing,” allowing her to reach into the depths of the most disturbed youngsters and connect to their healing paths. Once again, she reached into herself to heal and benefit those who were lost in their trauma … but not lost to Deb.
After leaving the nursing profession, Deb was called upon for teaching and counseling by people from all walks of life. Her practice is fueled purely by her clients’ experience of healing in their own lives. Whether it is the mention of her impact on David Brudnoy’s life in his book, “Life is not a Dress Rehearsal,” or the high school student’s phone call to a friend about how Deb helped her transform her fears, she is loved and acknowledged by her clients. Most recently, her abilities are explored in “Extraordinary Knowing” by renowned UC Berkeley psychoanalyst and pioneer thinker Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer. At first a skeptical client, Mayer developed a profound admiration for Deb’s work throughout their professional relationship, which blossomed into a deep and abiding friendship:
I told Deb nothing — or as close to nothing as I could consciously manage. But within minutes, she would tell me things that made me feel that she saw my life with a clarity my closest friends couldn’t match — things I knew but hadn’t yet recognized that I knew. They rang extraordinarily true and were also extraordinarily important: she pinpointed the central dilemmas, choices, situations, and desires in my life. Deb was somehow breaking every mold I recognized about how people achieve insight about themselves. She knew me. And I couldn’t begin to explain how. (Extraordinary Knowing, February ’07, Random House Books)
Along with her consulting practice, Deb teaches and is a student of Poekoelan Tjimindie Tulen, an Indonesian martial art described as “compassionate balanced action.” Based in indigenous teachings from rural Java, the art encompasses the study of energy and its application in fighting and healing. She owns two Kembali Wellness Centers where these practices are the central wellness modality, and administrates the certification program for Kembali Wellness Practitioners worldwide. Deb also sits on the advisory board of the Tulen Foundation, a non-profit organization that brings affordable self-defense and empowerment skills to kids and those in need. A mother of two boys, Deb lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and continues to practice, teach, and provide spiritual counseling to clients whom she believes “show up when they are ready to grow.”
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