Colette Baron-Reid was born in 1958 in Toronto to a French, German and Polish mother and a Serbian father who worked as a land developer and engineer, and was educated at Havergal College. She left home at eighteen to sing in bar and nightclub bands for roughly a decade, signing and losing several record and management deals along the way, while struggling with alcohol and cocaine addiction.
She entered recovery around 1986 and has described more than three decades of sobriety since. After recovery she worked in aromatherapy and began offering readings based on visions she said she experienced, and released a meditation tape in 1998 before a chance connection with music producer Eric Rosse led to a recording contract with EMI Music Canada. She released two albums, Magdalene's Garden in 2001 and I Am/Grace in 2005, before the contract ended in 2006.
That year she turned to writing and card deck publishing with Hay House, eventually creating nineteen oracle decks that have sold more than two million copies combined, alongside books including The Map and Remembering The Future. She has hosted television and radio programs, including Messages From Spirit and a long running Hay House Radio show, and has appeared on Dr. Phil, The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Dr. Oz Show. Baron-Reid presents her work as intuitive counseling and psychic medium practice, a claim outside mainstream scientific consensus that she frames through her own recovery and creative history rather than through verifiable demonstration.