Katie-Ellen Hazeldine
I am a professional Tarot card reader in Lancashire in the UK.
I use Tarot cards, ordinary playing cards and Norse runes as tools for uncovering or clarifying what is hidden or unclear, looking at people and situations, investigating questions, analysing and evaluating strategies and options, and sourcing guidance and forecasts (estimates and predictions) in respect of specific scenarios.
How does it work?
There is no easy, pat answer. Basically it is a kind of applied psychology enabled by symbolism. Sometimes it is ‘spooky’, occasionally exceedingly so, and at other times less so. The aim of this blog is to illustrate as best as I can, with real life examples, how this psychic reading ‘thing’ works in practice.
Important: I read in confidence and I keep my promises. These are true stories.Many are my own, any others are shared within the boundaries of confidentiality and ethics with identities thoroughly disguised.
There is no such person as ‘a psychic‘ or ‘a tarot reader‘. There is only the reader you consult; this, that or another reader. The only common denominator is the use that is made of a 78 card Tarot deck in delivering whatever is the reader’s stated service remit.
This service remit may mean fortune-telling or it might not, depending on the reader’s personal approach. There is no industry standard here, no formal training or accreditation system available to readers. They come from every kind of educational and employment background, and the reading you get depends on the background, interests, skills and abilities of your chosen reader.
My Background
I’m also a professional writer; an Arts graduate and qualified teacher.I previously worked in colleges, teaching Business Studies, English and Design Theory. Before that I worked in Marketing, Recruitment and Museums.
Then I became ill in my early 30’s; a form of rheumatoid arthritis. I became increasingly ill after the birth of my second daughter, lost physical mobility and could no longer go out to work as before. This was a great shock, the prognosis was dire, and the doctors’ best treatments did little to slow its progress. The pain was both chronic and acute; unremittingly severe and it seemed that nothing could touch it.
The effects on daily life were many, for me and my husband and children as I fought to stay as functional as possible. The situation forced me to dig ever deeper in coping. I’d always been aware of a certain ‘psychic’ sensitivity, and pretty much ignored it, but now under increasing stress, my intuition began to manifest itself in new and unsettling, even startling ways. Sometimes these were witnessed by other people, sometimes not. Poltergeist activity in the house. Dreams of precognition etc. and a diagnostic dream which later checked out correct after a doctor’s lab test.
I decided to see if I could train this capability for practical use by learning to read the Tarot, starting out, as many readers do, by reading for myself, then family and friends and finally, reading at a service level for people I didn’t know. Then, not long after starting out I was featured in an article called ‘How Did They Know That?’ in a national circulation magazine, ‘Fate & Fortune’.
And I have carried on ever since. Tarot is an ongoing study, and I have also learned to read with playing cards (cartomancy) and to read runes (The older Norse runes; the Elder Futhark),
Why do people use services like mine? Well, why do we watch weather forecasts, or play guessing games, or follow the Stock Exchange? Why do people place bets on this or that? It’s about coping and control, and about preparation, positioning and ultimately therefore, survival. It’s in our make-up for dealing with the world.
The human race has always exercised its wits, has had to, trying to look ahead, in preparation for readiness to meet opportunities, challenges or even downright threats.
Sometimes we don’t have all the facts we need, don’t have access to that information, but time is of the essence and we must take a leap in the dark. Tarot is a tool for leaping these gaps.
There’s more information stored inside of us all than we will ever use in our lifetime. We are, every one of us, equally, no less than the product of 4.5 billion years of life on Earth.
Intuition is master, Einstein famously remarked; the rational mind its faithful servant. ‘There is no unique picture of reality’, Stephen Hawking once observed, while the atomic scientist Niels Bohr is supposed to have said to one of his students, ‘you are not thinking, you are merely being logical.’
Tarot harnesses and harvests the unconscious understanding of the intuition. How exactly it works remains a mystery, but this is not about a religious, spiritual or superstitious practice.
No belief is required on the part of the reader or the client, whatever the method of divination, cards, runes, I-Ching etc.
Did learning Tarot help me get better? Miraculously cure me? How would it reasonably be expected to, when medical specialists have been at a loss? But time will tell, and meanwhile it has significantly empowered me in terms of coping, and in making choices in respect of possible treatments.
This psychic stuff can sometimes be eminently practical. It’s all about the way it is used, and I always look out for the ‘so what?’ My cards speak first and then I analyse. This is about harnessing the intuiting via conscious control.
At other times, things just happen and I have no conscious control whatsoever; and how and why this happens remains one of life’s mysteries.
These two faces of the Tarot, and all the rest of this so called psychic stuff, that’s what this blog is about.
