A Rare Medium: An ode to the late and highly-acclaimed spiritualist Steffany Barton

Photo Courtesy of Steffany Barton

Kansas City’s white light community—a tight-knit group of healers, energy practitioners, and intuitives—found themselves in mourning in late June when Steffany Barton passed away unexpectedly. Based in Leawood, Barton, 50, was a revered medium who had made a name for herself throughout the Midwest with hundreds of thousands of social media followers in her celestial orbit.

When asked, many of her colleagues and friends still found themselves having trouble talking about her in the past tense. “It’s not easy to offer words about someone who is an unwavering, brilliant spirit of light. Steffany carried herself with this ease and calm that just allowed everyone to take a breath and relax in her presence,” says quantum energy coach and healer Angela L. Holmes of Spiritual Alchemy. “She did not allow herself to be swayed with her spiritual beliefs and responsibilities she chose in this reality of time. I think this is very underestimated in the white light community.”

Photo Courtesy of Steffany Barton

Barton was the epitome of someone who lived an outwardly public, yet quiet private life and often referred to herself as an “accidental medium.” She would mention in interviews how she began to find her calling in her fundamental teen years when she lost a close friend to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She then discovered she was tapped into, as she called it, “the broadcast band on the heavenly radio dial.”

Later in life, Barton became a registered nurse and began to rekindle the ability to communicate with those who had recently passed on. Over the years, she nurtured that gift, honed her skills, and reinvented herself as a medium, clairvoyant, and energy worker. Think less RN, and more, as she would say, “nurse for the soul.”

“As a lightworker myself, making a difference in people’s lives is priceless,” says Natosha Keefer, an inspirational intuitive life coach artist.“Steffany had a major impact on her clients by making a difference in their lives by giving them clarity and a chance to communicate with their passing loved ones.”

In addition to lectures and stage presentations throughout the country, Barton was an acclaimed author. One of her first books, Facing Darkness, Finding Light: Life After Suicide, was written because of her deep cosmic connection with people who had taken their own lives.

“I have a strong desire to bring into words the unexpressed emotions that survivors of suicide may have in the days and years that follow such a traumatic loss,” she wrote. “My desire in writing this book is to speak to those still living, or perhaps, more truly, those struggling, scraping by, existing with the pain and perpetual grief of a death by suicide.”

For someone who deals with things outside the average Joe’s realm of consciousness, many who knew Barton remarked how unbelievably down-to-earth she was. “Steff approached life from the belief that we are spirits here to experience a human existence, and she had such empathy for all the emotions that come with that. She also didn’t see here and the afterlife as two different places, but very much as one in the same,” longtime friend Gail Helfer says.

Photo Courtesy of Steffany Barton

“’Your dad is right here with you,’ she might tell me on a call, then give the most impossible detail of that moment that would make me think, how in the hell did you know that? Her ability to ground raw human emotions like grief in such a gentle lightness of spirit was an extraordinary gift.”

A devoted and doting mother of three, Barton often crisscrossed the country with her children as she gave keynote speeches, seminars, and the occasional large-scale psychic reading. She was also a devoted member of Unity Temple in Lee’s Summit where she preached the power of love and compassion.

“If there’s such a thing as an earth angel, then you and I can both say we knew one. She deeply believed that the universal energy that unites us all—whatever name you choose to call it—is love. Pure, radiant, healing, unconditional love,” Helfer says.

“You could hear it in her voice and see it in the spark in her eye. I think that’s the best way we can honor her memory. To model her fierce brand of unconditional love. And in a time where the world feels so divided, wouldn’t that be a gangster move?”