Gerry Gavin doesn’t just talk to angels—he brings their grounded, transformative wisdom into everyday life. As a speaker, life coach, and medium with a global following, Gerry is best known as the channel for Margaret, an angelic presence whose messages have touched thousands through his bestselling Hay House books, Messages from Margaret and If You Could Talk to an Angel. For five years, his voice resonated across the airwaves on the acclaimed Hay House Radio, and come July, he’s returning with a brand-new podcast to continue the conversation with spirit. But Gerry’s work goes far beyond celestial communication. With a background in shamanic healing, he helps clients reconnect with lost aspects of themselves through soul retrieval and deep energetic work. His acclaimed “Angels and Shamans” workshop has helped many uncover inner guidance, restore balance, and access healing on a profound level. Speaking from his serene horse farm in New Jersey, Gerry sat down with Mystic Mag to talk about what it means to truly heal, why listening is a sacred act, and what the angels want us all to know right now.
Meeting your Guardian Angel Margaret changed your life. How did that first connection happen—and what did Margaret say that confirmed you weren’t imagining it?
It was a very unusual series of events that brought Margaret and me together.
At the time, I had just gone through a very difficult divorce. I was looking for a place to live where I could still support everything my daughters were involved in—gymnastics, sports and all sorts of other activities. Rather than getting an apartment, I decided to rent a room from a friend who I was working with. She had just gotten a house and had recently split up with her fiancé, so the timing actually worked out perfectly for both of us. We were really able to help offer support to each other through that period.
But then, maybe a month or month and a half into living there, we discovered the house was very, very haunted.
Neither of us had ever experienced anything like that before. This was well before the days of all those TV shows about hauntings, so we didn’t really know anything about it—or what to do. It was a strange time. We learned a lot, though.
A friend of mine was seeing a therapist who also happened to be a gifted psychic. She had a very unique form of therapy. You couldn’t really hide anything from her—she would just look at you and say something like, “Who’s so-and-so?” or “What’s all this anger about?” It was kind of intense. We reached out to her for help, and she helped us learn a ceremony to clear the house.
What was interesting, is that after that experience, I seemed to be more open to things. I began perceiving things—seeing images and energy—and I really wanted nothing to do with any of it. I was trying as hard as possible not to experience it.
Around that same time, my roommate decided she wanted to go to massage school, and I joined her. The school was taught by a woman who, in addition to being a gifted massage therapist trained at the Swedish Institute, had also studied with Latin American and Native American shamans. She brought some of that wisdom into her teaching.
In class, I would often have profound responses to the shamanic exercises. For example, if we did a “bear posture” exercise, other students might describe peaceful experiences. I would literally become a bear. It was bizarre, and it began opening me up even more.
My teacher advised me to stop fighting it. She said, “It’s pushing on you because you’re resisting. Try embracing it instead and learn from it.” I decided to do just that and opened myself to the world of shamanism.
I began learning how to do shamanic journeying—meeting spirit guides and power animals, working with energy healing and learning various forms of shamanic bodywork. Eventually, I even learned how to do soul retrieval.
About three years into that process, something started to bother me: I had never met any angels during this spiritual journey. I had met spirit guides and power animals, but no angels. That felt strange because I grew up believing in them and always felt a connection.
One particularly difficult night, I sat on my bed and said aloud, “If I knew your name, I know I could find a way to communicate with you. Just tell me your name.” I closed my eyes, and it was like seeing a movie screen with bold black letters on a white background spelling out: MARGARET.
I thought, Margaret? That doesn’t sound like an angel’s name. I was expecting something like Ezekiel, you know, with trumpets blaring.
I tried to focus again, and this time it was white letters on a black background: MARGARET.
Still, I didn’t buy it. I was trying to get something more “angelic.” But then, like I was scrolling through fonts in Microsoft Word—the name MARGARET kept rewriting itself in every possible font. So I finally gave in and said, “Okay. I guess it is Margaret.”
Then I began to think about how to communicate—and this thought popped into my head: automatic writing. Honestly, Karina, I thought that was the silliest idea ever. I mean, come on—I’m writing the question and the answer? I figured the answers would just come from my imagination.
But I was in a rough place emotionally, with a lot of conflict in my life, so I started writing this letter full of anger and frustration—venting about different people and situations. And then I wrote a reply. The first words that came were: “Hello, dear one, and welcome.”
That’s how she’s introduced conversation with everyone ever since.
I’d never started a letter like that before. And it felt like my hand just started moving on its own. Her responses were so loving, so gentle, and completely non-judgmental. But at the same time, she was showing me how responsible I had been for many of the issues in my life—how my actions were influencing the bigger picture. And I could hear it and take it in. I wasn’t defensive, like I might have been if a friend had said the same things. I just took it in.
I finished the letter and was honestly amazed. But the scientific part of me still questioned it. Was I just making this up?
So, I decided to test it.
I called a few people I had spoken about in my letter to Margaret and asked, “Hey, are you feeling like this?” or “Are you experiencing that?” One by one, they confirmed that I was spot on. One friend even said, “That’s weird. I didn’t even know I was feeling that way, but now that you’re putting it into words—yes. That’s exactly it.”
When they asked how I knew, I just had to say it sort of hit me. I obviously couldn’t say , “Well… I have a new pen pal. An, by the way, she is an angel.”
And that’s how it all started.
For a long time, I just wrote letters to myself. Who was I going to tell? “Hey, I’m communicating with an angel.,” without them thinking I was crazy. It felt strange. But my old friend, who had known the psychic therapist, encouraged me to see a different psychic, thinking she might help me process all this.
I went, and the funny thing was, as soon as I walked in, she said, “Oh! I’m so glad you’re here. I have so many questions I want to ask Margaret!”
I was like, “No, no—I’m here to talk to you!” “I’m not a psychic – I just write these letters!”
But she started asking questions, and for the first time, I was answering someone else’s questions through Margaret. And the answers really helped her. She then referred some of her psychic friends to me, and I began doing readings for them. That led to referrals, and eventually I started doing readings for others.
This grew to hundreds of readings and ideas about how to reach more people. Back in 1992, Margaret and I had talked about writing a book called “Messages from Margaret.” I really wanted to do because it felt like a way to share what was happening everywhere. But for many years, it was always on the back burner.
Finally, in 2012, the book came to be.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but Margaret later explained that I needed to go through many more experiences before I was truly ready to write it. And when the time was right, a series of miracles helped the book get noticed by Hay House, get published, and now it’s available in seven languages around the world.
And that… that’s how it all started.
You blend ancient shamanic healing with modern spiritual insight. What’s the most surprising way you’ve seen these two worlds harmonize to help someone reclaim their soul?
A couple of years into doing the readings and related work, Margaret said to me one day, “It would be great if you could begin teaching other people how they can communicate with their angels.”
And I said, “I’d love to do that—if I could figure out how I do it myself. I don’t really know how I do it with you, so I’m not sure how I’d teach it to others.”
She said, “Do what you know, and it will come. Create a workshop and teach other people how to do it.”
At the time, I didn’t know where to begin. So, I started researching everything that was being done around angelic communication. I put together a workshop using everything I could possibly gather – thinking, well, it’s okay, nobody’s going to come anyway, so no pressure. I made some flyers—and of course, my greatest fear was realized and the workshop filled up immediately.
I was so nervous about it.
On the morning of the workshop, I asked Margaret if she had a message for the group and whether there was anything I should change. She said, “I definitely have a message for the group—and yes, I would change everything about the workshop.”
I panicked: “People are coming in an hour! What do you mean, change everything?”
She replied, “This isn’t you. This workshop you crafted is based on everyone else’s material. What is you? You understand things through the shamanic tradition—recognizing that we are physical human beings in these bodies, connected to a deeper spiritual source. Teach people from there.”
So, the workshop became completely ad-libbed, and it eventually came to be known as “Angels and Shamans.”
The music I chose for the workshop was heavily influenced by Native American sounds. For a couple of the exercises, I used shamanic drumming—the same kind of rhythmic drumbeat used to facilitate shamanic journeying. At the time, I didn’t fully understand the science behind it, but I later learned that shamanic drumming actually alters brain waves and can bring you into a meditative or even hypnotic state.
We began with a grounding exercise, then moved into one to balance the chakras and then another to help release fear and grief from the heart. I emphasized that everything we are—our emotions, our experiences—is all cellular. We needed to take things down to that level. Each exercise worked to release or redirect energy and prepare participants for a guided journey to meet their angels and guides.
At the end of the final journey, the one to meet your angel, I was bracing for people to turn to each other to say, “I didn’t get anything—did you?” But instead, people had deeply profound experiences. They connected. They spoke with their angels!
The workshop evolved. Through a beautiful series of coincidences—or maybe not coincidences—I met someone who composed original music for it. We recorded it digitally. Originally, the workshop was only available on cassette tapes, then CDs. Now, it’s available on my website for digital download, so people can learn how to communicate with their angels and guides from anywhere.
The techniques, the music, the drumming—they all came together to bridge two worlds: the concepts of shamanism and the experience of direct communication with spirit guides and angels.
That is one of the profound ways these two worlds—spirituality and shamanic tradition—have come together in my work.
What type of services do you offer?
I still do one-on-one readings with Margaret. Generally, how that works is that someone will schedule a reading, which usually lasts around 45 minutes to an hour. Most people come in with questions. It’s not a psychic reading in the traditional sense where someone says, “Tell me about my future” or “I want to know this or that.” I’m not criticizing that approach—I’m just saying that with Margaret, it’s different.
She often says there’s no clear-cut way to accurately predict the future because you’re creating it in every moment of your life. Every decision you make, every action you take, alters the course of your future. While there may be probable situations, there are so many variables and possible choices that it becomes a constantly shifting landscape.
More so, what she does is offer people insight—guidance to help them see the bigger picture of what’s going on in their lives. Most frequently, people come with questions about health, relationships, or why they feel stuck. That’s probably the number one concern: people wondering why they’re in a place in life where they feel they can’t move forward. We help them figure out how to get unstuck and move in directions they may never have considered.
That’s one of the great things about communicating with an angel—they see from a broader perspective. They can say, “Maybe try this way, or that way,” opening possibilities you haven’t thought of – and there is never any judgment. Plus, when bringing the energy of an angel through, it definitely elevates my vibration and the person I am reading for.
In addition to the readings, I offer a service called Soul Reclamation, which is a bit different from what I initially practiced. In the beginning, I performed soul retrieval, drawing from my training in shamanism. But several years ago, I began doing this work in partnership with Margaret.
Her insight was that people needed to feel more empowered in the process. You are actually reclaiming your soul—those lost pieces of yourself scattered throughout your life, whether lost through trauma, giving them away out of love, or hiding them to protect them. It is one of the most powerful decisions a person can make – but so gentle to do. It’s about choosing to call back your life-force energy, parts of yourself that were left behind in different moments in space and time.
Margaret wanted people to fully understand that they were actually reclaiming their soul. She also introduced a powerful addition to the process, which we call the 30 Days of Joy. This is where we help people revisit those difficult times of their life and learn techniques to trigger joyful memories that can help replace traumatic ones. It’s a way to energetically shift and transform the entire experience.
As part of this work, I also teach a course called The Soul-Based Life and Business Program. In this program, we teach people how to live and operate from the perspective of their soul—how to align with their soul’s purpose and approach life with love, compassion, and understanding instead of fear, anger, or resentment.
We also recently launched a new program, available as a PDF book, called “Discover Your Why.” It helps people identify what they came here to do in this lifetime.
And last but not least, in the past year, I’ve begun channeling a new spirit guide named Joaquim. Similar to how people might know of Abraham—who speaks for a collective—Joaquim speaks for a group called “The Multitudes.” He describes them as thousands of souls, thousands of higher selves, who have come together with a mission to help humanity move forward—to help us “over our challenges,” so to speak, at this point in time where we feel so divided and disconnected. They desire to bring us to our highest vibration of who we are – while being here in this physical form.
A key part of your work is helping people ‘hear’ what their body, mind, and soul are trying to say. What are the most common messages you find people are missing—and why?
We’re physical beings, right? But we often miss the fact that what we’re feeling physically may not necessarily be just a physical ailment.
My understanding, on a cellular level, is that physical ailments are often the result of emotional energy—stored cellular memory—being held in different parts of our body. These memories aren’t always easy to access. It’s kind of like a computer: we store things throughout it, and while we have a limited amount of memory, it’s stored in various locations. Similarly, our bodies store emotional experiences in different places.
Those little aches and pains we experience may begin as subtle ways our body tries to communicate with us. When you’re feeling something, it’s often your body saying, “Hey, there’s something here you should pay attention to.” But we live in a time where, instead of listening, we usually try to numb or eliminate the pain. We take measures to get rid of it without addressing the root cause.
In response, the body starts to build protective mechanisms—scar tissue, tension, inflammation—which can lead to greater difficulties over time. Many people experience back pain, for example, without ever having suffered a specific injury. They’ll end up with fused discs or other spinal issues, often without knowing why. This is because the central nervous system—the highway of neural information—can be affected by trapped energy or tension in the surrounding musculature, which puts pressure on those areas.
In different forms of bodywork, what often happens is that energy gets released. That can happen through something as simple as massage. One of the most fascinating things I’ve discovered is how the brain, in its brilliance, tries to protect the body.
When a memory is so emotionally difficult, that recalling it could cause you to relive the trauma, the brain may intervene. During cell division, instead of duplicating the cell normally, it may separate the emotional experience of the cell from the cognitive experience and send them to different parts of the body. When I first started learning massage, I’d work on a certain area of a client’s back, and they’d suddenly start to cry. They’d ask, “Why am I crying? Nothing hurts.” It wasn’t physical pain—they were releasing stored emotional energy.
Likewise, sometimes we can remember a horrible event cognitively, but feel no emotional attachment to it. That separation is intentional—it’s a coping strategy the brain uses. But these unprocessed, separated cell fragments aren’t fully formed—they’re like free radicals. That can lead to the development of other irregular cells, which may later manifest as disease, even cancer.
So, the key is to listen to your body early on. When something is going on physically, ask yourself: What is my body trying to tell me? One simple practice is to place your hand on the area that is bothering you and ask, “Body, what are you trying to show me?” You may receive insight, a memory, or a shift in emotion. Notice when there’s tightness in your chest, throat, or voice—these are energetic signals, not just physical symptoms.
Your body holds wisdom. It’s always communicating—our job is to listen.
Your mission is to keep the work grounded—how do you stay rooted in everyday life while navigating such ethereal, spiritual terrain?
Being a human being, it’s pretty hard not to get stuck in everyday life, right? We’re dealing with so many things all the time. I think the key, especially when you’re getting involved in spiritual work, is finding balance. Margaret often refers to her messages as down-to-earth angelic advice, because sometimes people see spirituality and physicality as two opposite ends of the spectrum.
It’s as if being spiritual means giving up everything physical—like being physical is somehow bad. But we are human beings. We chose to come into this human body at this specific time for this experience.
I deeply believe that we chose our parents, the time of our birth, and the astrological sign we were born under. On my website, on the Soul Reclamation page, there’s a series of four videos titled The Maintenance of the Soul, where I talk all about that: why we’re here, why we chose this body, and why we go through certain experiences.
Recognizing that everything we experience as spiritual beings comes through this physical form helps us function better within it. When we understand, “Okay, I came here to do this. I came here to be grounded in this human body,” we can learn how to do spiritual work as part of the human experience. That makes us more effective and aligned in both.
Another important aspect of being grounded is utilizing the Earth for that grounding. In the “Angels and Shamans” workshop, there’s a grounding exercise I really love. You can do it any time. Stand up, stretch your arms out to your sides, and as you lower them to your sides, imagine yourself releasing your tension into the Earth. Just ask the Earth to take in that tension for you. Then slowly raise them up from your sides until you are stretching out to the sky and as you are doing this imagine that you are drawing energy up from the earth and into your body.
Once, someone said to me, “Isn’t it unfair to dump our tension into the Earth?” And I responded, “Think about how the Earth breathes in carbon dioxide and turns it into oxygen so we can survive. The Earth is always purifying.” So, when we lower our energy into the Earth and ask it to cleanse that energy, we can then bring our arms back up and imagine drawing up clean, grounded energy, that simple act, works incredibly well at grounding and supporting our energy.
If you’re outside, you can even go to a tree. You don’t have to hug it—just place your hands on it and ask the Earth to help you release what no longer serves you. All of this comes back to remembering that we are physical human beings. And the spiritual experience is just us connecting with who we really are—our higher self, our soul.
We’re always trying to figure out how to connect better with that soul, so we can have the most profound and authentic experience of who we are in this lifetime.
Let me check if Margaret wants to add anything.
Margaret speaks: You are going through times right now where the world feels very divided. It’s easy to forget, as human beings, that even though you see maps with borders and lines, from space the Earth shows no such divisions. We don’t see where the European Union ends or where the United States begins—we see one planet, interconnected.
You are all part of that one planet. You’re all interconnected, but you forget that. Even though you hold different opinions and have different experiences, you are, at your core, the same. You are the same souls—beautiful, radiant beings—here to learn and grow.
One of the most profound lessons you are working on right now is moving from separation back to unity. That doesn’t mean you’ll all agree or like the same foods or live the same lives, but you will recognize that beneath it all, you are the same. What you really want is love, compassion, understanding, and joy. That’s why all of you came here: to experience joy!
Gerry Gavin is a speaker, life coach, medium, and the author of two Hay House books, Messages from Margaret and If You Could Talk to an Angel. For five years he hosted of a very popular weekly radio program on www.HayHouseRadio.com, which had a loyal international following and can be accessed through their archives. He will be launching a new podcast in early July. Gerry is the creator of the very successful “Angels and Shamans” workshop, which puts participants in direct connection with their angels and guides, and is available for download on his website. He channels the angel Margaret, who conveys life-changing, down-to-earth angelic advice, at public appearances, on radio programs, and in private readings. He also specializes in shamanic healing practices that help individuals to reclaim their power, health, and even lost pieces of their soul through a process called Soul Retrieval. His work is a combination of modern therapeutic techniques and ancient healing practices that listen to the body, mind, and spirit to help clients reach their fullest potential. Gerry lives on a small horse farm in New Jersey.
Website to schedule a Reading with Margaret, Soul Reclamation or to sign up for Gerry’s newsletter: www.gerrygavin.com
