Your fortune in a coffee cup

By Maria Gomez de Sicart

Jane Shaw Cunningham at her house in Staines

Jane Shaw Cunningham has a good aura. She sits at her dining table on which a Turkish coffee set is elegantly posed. She used it to perform a coffee cup reading a few minutes ago. She projects kindness and serenity; there is something magnetic about her.

Maybe it’s the way she looks. She is wearing a little girl’s hair clip where the fringe ends - not to tie her hair back but to deck it out - and two vintage medallions that fall off her wrinkled neck to the pale pink sweater she wears. Maybe it’s the pine smell of the house, the paper flower wall matching the tablecloth, or the meditation crystals scattered all over the place. Whatever it is, it reeks off individuality.   

“You should never read a book by its cover. It’s the same with people,” she says, and that describes her better than any appearance. She was born in Singapore but was raised in an orphanage in Sri Lanka after her sixteen-year-old mother died the day after childbirth. When the orphanage closed down, a sixty-year-old woman took her in. She was the one who taught Jane to do massages and readings.

They moved to Delhi together, where Jane worked doing readings in the morning and volunteering in an orphanage in the afternoon. “That’s when my love for helping people started,” she says.

When her mentor died, Jane lived in Greece, Australia and the US for a while before moving to England and opening her massage school. “I started working and I was trained to do English massage. I supplemented and supported myself by my readings. Therapy and readings. That’s how I always survived.”

She likes to define herself as a humanitarian. “I get great joy out of helping people and seeing them move forward. I’m a little bit of a rescuer. I want to save the world,” she smiles. Her voice is kind and sweet, very inviting.

Jane uses fortune telling to raise money for charities, and she goes abroad twice a year to volunteer. That’s not new to her as in her early teenage years she worked alongside Mother Theresa in India.

“I’m spiritual but grounded because I had to support myself, but I believe we’re looked after by one thing. I may not have a lot of wealth or status but my life, spiritually, has been very rich, and I am very privileged to have met the people I’ve met,” she says.

Jane Shaw Cunningham collects spiritual stones everywhere she travels

Back in the 2000s, Jane was listed as one of the top five psychics in the UK by The Times. That was a gateway to Celebrity Big Brother’s psychic show, the Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes film premieres and the BRIT Awards after party. She was also invited to early morning shows, radio programmes and public speaking events.

She recalls that time as being fun but less personal, which leads her to talk about the scepticism that her work always induces. “We’re not forcing anyone to believe in it, but I think you should be open in life. My master in India used to say that fortune reading is like a road map - we give directions and opportunities, we’re not telling people what to do,” she says.  

It’s 5 pm, and the sun is going down. It has been one of those days when the sky has only been disturbed by jet trails. Jane stands up and walks outdoors: “Come.” She makes her way to her garden house, a cosy wood shelter for summer readings. It looks like a fairy refuge.

She reaches for a frame with a picture of her wedding day. That’s her second husband; she was a widow before. She and Kevin met in Sri Lanka in one of her meditation classes. “We’re like the yin and the yang”, she says, grinning, and that’s enough to sense they are two balanced halves.

Jane and her husband on their wedding day

“Sometimes I can foresee death. I’m very careful,” she says back in her living room. She doesn’t think of herself as a medium, but she can pick up spirits. “When I see or feel them, they’ll say things, and then those things happen.

A normal person will say it’s a coincidence,” she says nonchalantly. She thinks she gets spiritually protected from knowing too much.  “Sometimes it’s sad living knowing you can foresee what will happen but not wanting to,” she reckons.

Nonetheless, Jane is in control of her spiritual senses. She doesn’t want to know what the future has in store for her or the people she loves. “My life has unravelled a bit like a train. I got off many stops and then got on again and had another adventure.”

She has had an interesting and fulfilling life, and she feels that capturing it in a book is the next step to take. “I want to write a book. It’s terribly important to communicate. Growing up in an orphanage, we didn’t have a television, so we talked to each other,” she confesses.  

Jane takes off her glasses when my camera points at her - she grooms herself. The camera lens intimidates her, and her body reacts to the sound of the flash. Her aged skin comes into focus, and her house seems to brighten up and pose for the perfect frame. She is now in harmony with the environment.

“You’ve been to Turkey, haven’t you?” she asks unexpectedly. I nod, and she looks satisfied. It feels as if she has come back from a parallel world. Her personality is striking, heady, almost as much as the scent of the Turkish coffee drifting from the table. At this point, one might think that sometimes – whether we want it or not – life is all about allegories.

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