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From Someone Who’s Been Given Too Much Advice

What is it about a difficult situation that makes us look outside of ourselves for answers, thinking that an outsider’s perspective/advice has more validity than what we are personally thinking and feeling? I’m not saying that another person’s viewpoint doesn’t have validity; but why is it that we so willingly give away our own power by accepting their opinion as above our own?

I’ve been reading blogs that I wrote a long time ago when I was on livejournal.com. I wrote about the label of psychic and what a tarot reader should or shouldn’t be. This was only a few short years ago. My perspective has completely changed from what I wrote:

“So, while I do still do tarot readings (but am avoiding it because I focus on present situations too much… so what if I’m accurate? No one goes to a tarot reader to hear about the present… they want to hear the future) I don’t think I want to make the claim that I’m psychic. I’m starting not to like labels anymore.”

to the following perspective:

There are many reasons why a person would go to a tarot reader. The future is not set in stone. We have many choices, and those choices affect a possible outcome. Tarot shows patterns. Here’s the final outcome card: Is it the outcome you want? No? Then make a different choice and your path changes. And psychic is a label that I’m still not comfortable with if it separates me from anyone else. Everyone is psychic.

When I read Small Mediums at Large by Terri Iacuzzo, she wrote that she entered into relationships full knowing that they weren’t right for her. It is psychic, but just about everyone has a feeling before a bad relationship before entering into it. They just “know” it’s not right. I knew that about one or two exes that I’ve had in my life. I entered into those relationships knowing that in the long run we’d end up wounding one another and ultimately weren’t compatible. I have a feeling that they knew it, too, and ignored those misgivings in the same way I did. It seems to be human nature to deny, deny, deny because we want things so badly to work out, and that we don’t trust that side of ourselves that would try to save us from the experiential proof.

It was told to me once by one of my mother’s friends (that is psychic) that it’s a bad idea to read tarot for yourself. She described to me that all one would pull would be horribly terrible cards of doom and gloom. I laughed when she said this, because I had been trying to do a full reading for myself every morning at that time, and gave up after two weeks because every single day I would pull The Tower, The Devil, The Hanged Man, The Nine of Swords (what I consider the card of nightmares), etc. Since then, I have realized that I am entirely capable of reading for myself. It’s not the advice that I’m lacking. I’ve got it in spades. Advice and objectivity are two different things, and I’ve been tooling along my whole life believing they are the same. They’re not. It is absolutely valid to go to a reader for objectivity. It’s even okay to go to a reader for advice. But what’s not okay is people discounting their own advice column they’ve got in their gut (yes, I’m referring to intuition here, and yes, you have it). It’s not okay to put everyone’s opinion about the way to run your life above your own.

Take back the power. Take back your own Dear Abby.
How did you realize that some of the best advice given is some of your own? Leave your stories/opinions in the Comments section below.

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