I was appalled when I was talking to some fellow tarot readers the other day about nightmare-ish scenarios with some less-than-ideal clients. Some scenarios they were throwing out there seemed unfathomable to me.
For example, if you had a potentially violent ex-boyfriend trying to bang down your door, would you:
a) Call the police
b) Run into the room furthest away from the front door and cry
c) Scream back and further exacerbate the problem
d) Call a tarot reader
“And you can speak your mind, but not on my time.”—Billy Joel, “My Life”
My friend told me about the time she went to a psychic that had been highly recommended by a friend of hers. This person swore up and down how good she was… how accurate. My friend had no reason to distrust her friend’s recommendation.
So she went into the reading expecting to be read by a professional and accurate reader… and wound up hearing all about the psychic’s life and not her own!
It’s a controversial headline for a blog post, I know. But the summation of a lot of my boundary lessons from the last year have accumulated in this assertion: your clients are not your friends. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to cultivate good relationships with your clients, but I am saying that over familiarity may not be what you want.
Tarot was not my first expression of my intuition. Dreams were. (Surprise!) I think the reason for this was that I wasn’t ready to receive premonitions on a conscious level, so my intuition used the back door of my mind (my dreaming self) as a means of communicating with me.
I realized I loved the song “These Dreams” by Heart because the lyrics “every second of the night I live another life” was completely true for me. When I saw that my hyper-realistic dreams came true a few weeks after I dreamed them, I realized not everyone received information like that in the same way. Unfortunately, only the tragic and bloody ones I remember. I remember dreaming about a roller coaster derailing and killing everyone. Fortunately, my dream would blow things spectacularly out of proportion, so that the reality was much less extreme than the dream. Two weeks after the dream, people were trapped on a roller coaster for hours… long enough so that it was reported nationally on the news. I’m glad reality didn’t follow my dreams to the bloody conclusion.
The dreams led me to invest in a dream journal (which I still have to this day). Sometimes I will get what I consider a “wish-fulfillment” dream, a lovely outlet to walk hand in hand on a romantic beach with a hunky celebrity I will probably never meet. Those are usually not the dreams I record in my dream journal, but if you start one, you should write all dreams down so you can analyze them at a later date. In that way you will start to recognize the feeling that comes with a precognitive dream as opposed to a flight of fancy.
The dream journal led me towards researching ESP and psi phenomena, devouring book after book at the library on paranormal subjects. Somewhere in that time period was when I started reading tarot. I also started to hear people’s thoughts as clear as day if they were “thinking loudly” (a phrase my boyfriend is now extremely familiar with me saying). I would often answer questions asked that were never asked aloud, or turn my head and ask people to repeat something only to find they never spoke anything verbally. I’m a very wordy person, so my kind of telepathy sounds like someone actually spoke. Sometimes I can get whole phrases. At first it was hard to block out, but now for ethic’s sake (and for my boyfriend’s sanity), I don’t prod around in anyone’s brains.
My point in all this is there are many ways to access your intuition. Mine started hollering to me in my dreams. I didn’t start out reading tarot, but I ended up reading tarot… and extrasensory information still comes at me from different sources outside of tarot. I don’t think I’m all that different from everyone else. I think in the end you find what works for you… or sometimes, it finds you!
“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.
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
What personal ethics do you have that come from an unlikely source? Feel free to describe in the Comments section… I would love to hear them!
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