“It was almost like being three years old again, and the whole world is completely new to you”
Kim Wuirch is struggling to find her way around the Keurig machine. “I think it goes in here,” she says, as she flips the green tea pod this way and that, finally stuffing it into the right spot with a triumphant grin.
She’s dressed for a boardroom, with an elegant blouse atop black dress pants and ankle boots, her short boyish hair framing deep-set blue eyes. In fact, she’s just driven over from her day job in Calgary, where she works as an IT analyst for the City of Calgary, a position she’s held for the last 10 years.
So what is this corporate warrior doing at a spiritual event centre in Airdrie, located in a basement under a tattoo parlour at Main and First?
“Welcome to my crazy life,” says Wuirch, who has lived in Airdrie for 10 years with her son Seth, who’s now 13.
She was caught off guard three years ago by her spiritual awakening.
“I couldn’t have been more green or more clueless about this stuff … I thought I was losing my mind, but after a couple of days, there was just no denying,” she says.
It started simply enough with a book she was reading on a camping trip with Seth and her former partner on the September long weekend in 2014. The book was a paranormal fiction called Haunted on Bourbon Street. One of the characters who was labelled an ‘empath’ described her to a tee. Although Wuirch had never heard the word before, it stuck in her head.
Once she got home, she began researching the word, took some online quizzes, and was shocked when the results confirmed that she in fact was an empath – someone who is highly sensitive to the emotions and energy of others, and who can use this gift to help heal others emotionally, spiritually or even physically.
“It was almost like being three years old again, and the whole world is completely new to you,” Wuirch says.
Fast forward to 2015, and Wuirch was completely immersed in this spiritual awakening, having sought out teachers and online resources on everything from healing crystals, reiki, Akashic records reading, numerology, card readings and more.
“It was just like following a crumb trail,” she recalls.
She began to journal – mostly to create a guide for Seth, convinced that he too has spiritual powers, and not wanting him to feel alone and crazy as he grows up.
“I thought, ‘Poor kid, what’s he in for?’”
But her friend and spiritual mentor urged her to publish her writings to help other people who were also awakening, as there were almost no books on the subject at the time.
“Eventually, I realized it would be selfish and wrong to not put it out there,” she says.
And so, in December 2016, Wuirch self-published her first book, Waking Up An Empath. In it, she lays bare her remarkable journey from awakening to spiritual healer, writing down what she learned about spirit guides, chakras, angel signs, totem animals and more.
Hailed by other spiritual healers as the ‘go-to’ resource for people coming to grips with their empathic abilities, the book has sold 1,500 copies since its launch in February 2017, she says.
Wuirch quickly followed this up with her second book, Awakened Empath, written in only two and a half months, in the evenings after work and on weekends.
“This one was more automatic writing, which is a form of channelling, where the information just comes and there’s no thought process … I’m just typing as fast as the words are coming.”
Awakened Empath goes even further than the first book, discussing how past-life regression shed light on her short-lived second marriage and introduced her to Ken Lewicki, her partner in life and business.
In a chapter titled ‘The A-Team,’ Wuirch highlights her ability to communicate – pretty much on demand – with angels and archangels, especially Archangel Razial.
“I run everything past Razial,” she writes. The book includes passages he reveals to her on complex spiritual concepts such as dimensions, realities and realms – things even she doesn’t fully grasp. Sometimes she writes the first draft, and then he tells her to edit certain words or phrases. She also regularly uses Razial as a messenger to talk to other angels and otherworldly beings.
She readily admits it can sound “terrifying” to folks on the outside.
“I understand it’s not for everybody … I’m really not trying to convince anybody. All I really am trying to do is find the other ones that already want to know, or already know and just want to find a community,” she adds.
Wuirch opened The Spirit Within spiritual centre in Airdrie in January 2017. Together with Ken and other likeminded practitioners, they run weekend workshops, reiki sessions and other healing events there. But she also offers her services via Skype to clients as far away as the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, she says.
Wuirch believes people are waking up in waves all over the world. Her angel guides tell her it’s part of the evolution of mankind, and can’t be stopped.
“I think what’s going to happen is that the majority of people are going to awaken, to the point where you’re going to be the weird one if you’re not,” Wuirch says.
In the meantime, she goes about her business with the confidence of a woman with an archangel in her corner, and a waitlist for her services that’s three months long.
Mundane earthly contraptions like coffee makers, however, still occasionally trip her up.
