A Chat with Sally Morgan

 We didn’t know quite what to expect when we applied to interview Sally Morgan for this edition of Eternal Spirit. She is a lady who has had much written about her already and captured the public eye spectacularly through her connection with Diana Princess of Wales.

What would this lady be like? Would she be as bubbly and down-to-earth as she appears on stage or would there be an alter ego lurking behind the bling and glamour? A star?

Sally is exactly what she appears to be on stage, and more. She is a very ordinary lady with a refreshingly down-to-earth attitude to life whose loved ones are extremely important to her. The entire interview was peppered with references to her supportive and much loved family.

We began by asking Sally about her weight loss surgery, which will be shown in a one hour special on 22nd June 2010 on Living TV. We wondered whether there was any sense of public pressure to lose weight, but it turns out that the decision was made purely for health reasons and strongly urged by her doctors.

She actually found the idea of public pressure amusing as she says that her audience would always tell her that she was lovely as she was, even at 23 stone.

She also says that she had no difficulty in finding complementary clothes for stage work in beautiful colours. Sally doesn’t like wearing black on stage, preferring “vibrant colours and a bit of bling” for a personality that doesn’t lend itself to dull colours on stage. Nothing stopped Sally wearing the colours and clothes she loved and feeling confident and beautiful in them.

She was at her heaviest in September 2009 having reached 23 stone. Her father died of a heart condition as did both his brothers, and Sally was showing signs of a heart problem; in fact she was told by her doctors that she could be dead within a couple of years.

She needed to lose 11 ½ stone (or two full grown adults) and she needed to do it quickly. Sally had managed in the past to lose 3 or 4 stone through dieting and personal training, but each time her weight would go back up. Consequently her doctors felt that, having made such efforts herself to no avail, weight loss surgery was the only answer.

Sally had been considering this step for about 5 years, but it was clear that now the need was medically urgent so she went ahead with the operation feeling lucky to be born into a generation where weight loss surgery is available and acceptable.

Her main motivator for taking this step was to see her “amazing grandsons” grow up; her other reason was that she feels that she still has a great deal of work to do and she isn’t getting any younger – we were staggered to learn that she is nearing 60 years old.

Since the surgery she has lost 9 stone in weight, weighing in at just over 14 stone the last time she stepped on the scales. To her absolute delight she now has a bike and a personal trainer “if you’d told me this a year ago I would have laughed you out of the room.”

Her stomach had been over stretched by years of compulsive eating and, not wanting to go into too many gory details, she now has a stomach the size of a yoghurt pot – a small one! She says that she used to eat from the moment she got up until the moment she went to bed, but never understood where the compulsion came from.

She is a very controlled person and was baffled as to why she could control every area of her life except her eating. Consequently she reacts very strongly against the idea that over eating is either gluttony or laziness; she says that this is a popular misconception amongst people who have never had to struggle with the compulsion to over eat.

Sally doesn’t plan her life in minute detail. She has no agenda to what she does and just goes with the flow of life seeing what it brings and making the best of what is delivered to her. Therefore she was surprised when the television company that films her stage shows suggested a documentary following the procedure and outcome. They felt the journey would be worth filming and after due consideration she agreed.

She felt that many of her fans are middle aged people, particularly women who have had babies and put on a few pounds, would share the same concerns that she has and that maybe the documentary would inspire people to become healthier and be around to see their grandchildren grow up.

She also felt that “if you put yourself out there in the public eye then you can’t pick and choose what you want to share. I had nothing to hide; I was doing it to stay alive not to get into size 10 jeans.”

Sally didn’t put any constraints on the filming and allowed herself to be filmed in her bra and leggings at the beginning and end of the documentary – Psychic Sally’s Big Fat Operation.

Her message to people would be “if you’re fed up with yo-yo dieting and you’re morbidly obese do something about it.” Yet you also sense that she would genuinely like to help people avoid becoming morbidly obese and having to go through the same procedure that she had to endure.

You can’t interview Sally Morgan without thinking about her most famous client – Diana Princess of Wales. We wanted to know what it was like to help such a famous client and whether there were different pressures compared to Reading for ‘ordinary people’. We also asked her if the connection to Princess Diana launched her career.

Sally says that the connection didn’t launch her career because she had 10 telephones in her house for years before she met Diana. He neighbours used to say that her house must have sounded like the Pentagon on a bad day with sometimes four telephones ringing at once.

It was actually 4 ½ years before the connection was leaked to the press, Sally assumes by someone who knew Diana.

Sally didn’t feel any different about Reading for the Princess of Wales than any other client before or since saying that she feels “the same burden of responsibility every time I do a Reading.”

She also doesn’t feel that anything launched her into fame because she doesn’t feel famous. “It’s flattering and motivational that people are comforted if they get a message or a Reading, but if I ever began to think of myself as famous I would become seriously worried as thinking about myself in relation to my work just isn’t natural for me.”

“Doing this work one has to remain very grounded, and whilst it’s flattering that people consider me to be one of the best Mediums in the world, the only way I can maintain that is if I continue to feel as if I’m just doing my work day-to-day.”

The other reason that Sally didn’t feel pressured is because she doesn’t set out in her work to guide anyone, she sets out to give people information if they ask to receive it. When she gets up on a stage all she’s really aware of is the messages in her head and that they have to be passed across.

“I feel humbled that I am able to look at people’s inner selves and privileged to be able to help. It’s literally just a love thing. I don’t get carried away with the ‘so-called’ fame and that people seem to need to know everything about you and I don’t feel the need to be on a pedestal. I just feel privileged to be able to speak to the Spirit World and pass on the messages to relatives, and grateful that my audience are so kind.”

“For me to be able to do this work with the intensity I do means that it rules my life. I’m nearing 60 years old and aware that I have to do a lot of work at great speed. Every day I get up and say to myself ‘come on Sal, there are people out there that really need to hear messages from their loved ones, just get on and do it’. If I wobble my husband is very good at helping me to keep my feet on the ground and stay focussed.”

In fact two years ago she had occasion to fear that her so-called fame was going to result in imminent arrest!

She walked into Marks & Spencer with her daughter and became aware of a very faint screaming, turning to see where it was coming from she saw a Security Guard, complete with walkie-talkie, bearing down on her.

“I was so worried that I was going to be arrested I was mentally going through anything and everything I could possibly have done wrong. However, it turned out that the girls in the security room had seen me on camera as I entered the store and persuaded the Security Guard to bring down scraps of paper for autographs!”

We asked Sally how she sees her work expanding in the future, but she says that she doesn’t look at her own life she just works in the moment. At the moment she’s touring and doing some television and she’s very happy with that.

However, she does believe that it’s important to have dreams and she does have two things that she would one day love to do.

Firstly she would love to have a bereavement centre to help people to deal with grief and especially to provide specialist help for families who have lost children.

Secondly, she is very interested in green burials and would love to be able to buy a wooded area for really lovely burials.

Until recently when she began to get press exposure Sally had never advertised in her life, all her work arrived by word of mouth and she used to be known as London’s best kept secret. She hadn’t felt the need for training, although she has no strong feelings on the subject either way saying that “people must find their own way by looking inside themselves for the truth.”

She is going to purse this idea, amongst others, in a forthcoming book in which she wants to focus on people developing themselves in an individual way. “What needs to come out of each individual is already inside and should well up and be exposed naturally.”

Her experience of working with people has taught her that human beings are often unaware that they follow what others do, including music, clothes and even colours – “we tend to do what is fashionable in the moment and it doesn’t come naturally to listen to oneself.” She’s obviously going to have a few individual words to say about that.

Sally is currently on a nationwide tour, you can find more information on dates and venues at www.sallymorgan.tv. She is also filming a second series of Psychic Sally: On the Road for Living TV during May and June 2010. Don’t forget to watch out for the documentary on Living TV on Tuesday 22nd June.

Talking to Sally was a fascinating experience. She is a down-to-earth lady from a working class family with parents “who weren’t interested in having a psychic daughter their main concern was to put food in our bellies.”

She is proud of her working class upbringing and giggles when she recalls that the neighbours thought they were posh because they read the Daily Express! Sally herself always loved newspapers, devouring the headlines as soon as the newspaper arrived – to the amusement of her family.

One wonders what the young Sally would have thought if she’d realised that one day she would be one of those headlines.

When we asked her about her operation and whether she was frightened, she said that the most frightening thing to her was that the supportive audience who had always loved her for who she was would feel that they’d lost their Sally.

Having spoken with her we’ve concluded that one third of Sally Morgan is far, far better than no Sally Morgan at all, and even though she has lost the body weight we know that her audience will still feel the same weight of love every time she stands up to work.

© Deb Hawken - First published in Eternal Spirit Magazine, Summer Solstice 2010