The cards were out on the table, her friend was nodding assent in the background, urging me to go on: the writing was on the wall… to everyone BUT the client sitting in front of me.
Don’t get me wrong: I LOVED this client (still do!). I hated to see her in such pain. She’s a good person, believing that what you put out there you get back in return. But someone had taken her for granted, big time, and the only thing to do in the situation (at least according to the cards that were coming out) was to cut the cord.
My client shook her head. Made excuses. Made LOTS of excuses. Said she felt sorry for them and that she pitied them. Denied that this situation was affecting her life in a very heavy way, dragging her down to where even her joys felt weighted with the situation that she was avoiding dealing with and hoped would get better on its own.
I tried. I tried really hard, pulling card after card for clarification, not heeding my own lessons I’ve learned that tarot REALLY doesn’t like that when it’s already told you everything it knows and you don’t like the answers you’re seeing.
After awhile I said to her, “Listen, I know you don’t want to hear this….… Continue Reading
It’s high time I talk about the Universe’s sometimes twisted sense of humor. I just finished reading the book Psychic Tarot by Nancy Antenucci and Melanie Howard… and within the book they describe their favorite definition of synchronicity as “the Divine giggle”.
There are times when you know the gods are laughing at you. When there is a choice between laughing along with them or raging at them, I choose to laugh. A good example of this happened this past weekend, when I went out to get my PO Box for my tarot biz.
“If you sprinkle when you tinkle
please be neat and wipe the seat”
Variations on this “poem” include the second line being “please be a sweetie and wipe the seatie” instead, but you get the idea…
I saw this in a bathroom recently and I thought about tarot. Weird, right? I know. But most hours of the day I think about tarot, so it’s not so weird to me. Okay, so how did this simple little sign about other people’s urine make me think about tarot?
I’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on my tarot business lately… stuff that y’all will get to see when my website launches at the end of September (and hopefully luuuuuv). It’s been “man behind the curtain” work, involving but not limited to a lot of meta stuff like motivation, how tarot works, how tarot works when I read, my style of reading, how I came to this work, my ethics, confidence issues, and where I’m heading. A lot of stuff that I really never thought about until I starting writing my web copy. And it was HARD. And now I’m coming out the other side of it, and I’m realizing it was hard but WORTH IT.
Back to the “poem”. I would like to make a version of this poem, and hang it about my tarot table (or wherever I choose to read). Why? Because this is a part of my personal ethics, and it boils down to this: I want a person to leave a reading in the same condition (and hopefully better) than the start.
Sometimes a reading is heavy. A lot of shit comes up. Do I let the client just walk away after a reading, covered in that heaviness? Hell no. I clean them up. I buoy them up. I try to find the silver lining. Sometimes it’s really hard to find, but there is ALWAYS a course of action for the client to take, including inaction. There is always a choice to make, and that rests with the client. There is a song by the band Rush called Freewill… “You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Either way, whatever they decide… It’s the client’s decision. And I want that decision to come from them, and from a position of empowerment.
