About

I’m a professional Tarot reader, intuitive consultant and writer in the UK, and have been reading Tarot, playing cards and runes since 2002. I started this blog in 2010 with the aim of showing the Tarot at work, dealing with real life questions, and with a focus on ‘how’ readings are done. This is not a New Age site. This is a mantra free zone. Love’ n’Light is a very nice idea, and all that, but divination aims to deal in meaningful information

Prediction

What I don’t do is fortune-telling where I issue a client with flat predictions. I am not saying it can’t be done. I have done it myself on enough occasions to know that it can. The future exists, as in, we will all die some day, guaranteed, and maybe too, there is such a thing as destiny. But this is not to take away the client’s power of choice, free will or personal responsibility. I seek to advise but not influence or intrude. Forecasting is part of the tradition and fascination of a reading, and will be attempted as appropriate, but needs treating with respect.

While there are things we can’t change, like the weather, the only moment in which we can actively exercise our own power of decision is now.

How does it work, this Tarot thing? The cards act as a pictorial trigger of the reader’s intuition about the other person or a given situation. The cards are functioning as an extension of the reader’s psychic antennae, if you will.

Background

I’m a writer on astrology and Tarot sites, with other writing published in magazines, online digital publications and anthologies (flash fiction, short fiction and poetry. )

I’m a (long ago) Arts Hons graduate (History of Art and Design) with post-graduate qualifications in Business Studies, Marketing and IT and Education as a qualified lecturer in Further Education. I taught Business Studies, Design Theory and English Language and English Literature.

I have worked in Marketing, PR, Telesales for the CBI, book shops and Museums, Recruitment in the private sector, and in the public sector, working with the long term unemployed.

Becoming a Tarot reader

I became increasingly unwell in my early 30’s; a form of autoimmune arthritis. Matters became progressively worse. I lost physical mobility, until I became so unwell I could no longer go out to work, or walk or even stand and needed a wheelchair to get about. I had children at home and a worried husband.

The pain was acute and unrelenting and the damage began to become visible. I had to dig ever deeper in coping, and psychic tendencies which I had long been aware of, but had previously resisted or ignored began to express themselves more strongly.

There were dreams of precognition for example, which later turned out correct, and poltergeist or telekinetic manifestations, and other kinds of haunting which were not sinister, but were nonetheless at times startling or unsettling.

I am not a religious person. I do not come from a family background with a psychic reading tradition. I’m not into occultism, nor part of any spiritual scene. I am not into Wicca or the New Age scene. I have never taken mind- altering substances in my life. I tend to be sceptical. But I thought about all this for quite some time. Then a family member gave me a Tarot deck and I seized on it, drawn by the artwork and the stories embedded in it, and started learning to read the cards as a way to better understand these psychic or paranormal experiences, and to find out if I could train and direct my intuition for something -anything- concrete, specific, useful or helpful.

I started out as many readers do, reading for myself, then family and friends until, after a few years I felt ready to read at a service level for people I didn’t know. One day I was contacted by a journalist, and, with some reservations, accepted an invitation to do two cold readings under supervision as part of a magazine feature. This was an instructive experience and my service developed from there.

The trouble with Tarot readings? Tarot does not have all the answers, just as even the latest state of the art medicine does not have the answers for my health problem. What my work with the Tarot has done for me personally, is give me extra tools with which to cope, hovering high over the situation rather than being flattened under it. It has helped me to stay in charge, clarifying my best options in a situation in which there are no answers.

Working with the Tarot, my world has only got wider, weirder at times, but also more wonderful. Long ago a lady, an astrologer, told me I was a ‘wounded healer’. She said something about Chiron, but I didn’t really know what she was talking about, and I didn’t like the sound of this Chiron one bit. What does ‘healing’ even mean, anyway, unless it means a solution or a cure? I smelled bullsh*t.

Now, I would say, it means we stay true to ourselves, that we are nobody’s fool or toy, living at peace with ourselves inside our own skin.

‘Be thine own palace, or the world is thy prison.’ -John Donne.

Sometimes we are faced with a fork in the road but we have an information gap, and our heart does not agree with our head. This is where Tarot can shine a light on the road ahead, and point out the signposts, potholes and all.

This it will do, whether we like it or not. And we really might not like it or recognize the validity of the advice especially if it is in conflict with our own wishful thinking which can be our very worst enemy. But the Tarot can see the blind spot, and what we do with that feedback is entirely up to us.

We are part of Nature. But there is more in Nature than we know. There is more in us.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” – Hamlet

Quite so, Mr Shakespeare.