Religion and Spirituality – Page 2

Nail It: Two-Card Tarot.

A good discipline for a reader is to read little and often. It’s a kind of self-programming. Make it tough on yourself, tarot is wonderfully subtle but sometimes you need to nail a colour to the mast.

However open your vision, and habits of interpretation when doing readings for others, it’s good to know you will generally get it right. You won’t always of course, so feed yourself a piece of humble pie every day, but you need to be right a LOT as a professional reader, or what’s your value? So practice, and challenge yourself with the nail-biting no-no that is the CLOSED QUESTION.

‘Will XYZ happen or won’t it?’ The second card is to ask why will it or won’t it? The discussion or meditation then opens out again if necessary.

Here is a recent example: I was thinking of attending a tarot social event, taking a friend, a fellow local tarot reader and professional clairvoyant . Knowing what a hermit-crab this shy friend can be, I marked him as a POSSIBLE attendee only, half-expecting him to bow out in advance.

Two days before the scheduled event, he rang to say he’d be going, but I still expected him to change his mind, and the day before I pulled two cards to test this out.

I drew The Ace of Wands Reversed. Wands is the suit of trips and longer journeys, also of selling, bartering and exchange, buzz, chatting, marketing…general communications. Drawing it reversed, denied, suggested he was about to cry off. Now, this was absolutely fine, and was just as I expected, but could the Tarot tell me why in advance of the facts?

I drew The Hierophant Reversed. The Hierophant which used to be known as The Pope, suggests a priest, a teacher, a counsellor or healer, a church, a tradition and an established order. It is orthodoxy and conformity. It can also signify marriage…and keys! That’s the Tarot for you!

I looked at it and was puzzled. ‘But A***** doesn’t GO to church!’ I said.

Later that afternoon he rang to say he still wanted to go to the tarot event but was now double-booked. I was glad to think he had plans elsewhere, he’d been a bit down and depressed, and I read this as a sign of recovery. I told him not to worry about the tarot social, I could see he really wanted to go to the other thing instead.

What was it?

A Christian Science church, he said. Did I want to go? Er, well, no. They had a guest speaker coming in, he said. A healer visiting from the States.

Ahaaa! So that was why the Tarot had seemed to say ‘church.’ But it also meant ‘priest/healer.’ It knew what was going on, all right. And the cards had been drawn reversed because, having decided time-planning didn’t allow him to go to both, the events were then being perceived as being in conflict with one another.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gilded-Tarot-Boxset-card-deck/dp/0738705209

Practical Tarot:The Chariot

I find a 4 card spread is a neat but comprehensive way of quickly opening a reading, I think of it as ‘taking someone’s temperature’ Tarot-style…

North card. Material Affairs, home, work, health etc

West Card: Relationships, spiritual matters, mood.

South Card: Career, ambitions, passions, energy levels

East Card: Thoughts, intellectual preoccupations, planning.

A central card or simply an extra card placed alongside may be used to identify the question or concern that is the motivation for coming to the reading.

This may or may not be logged in the forefront of the client’s conscious thinking at the reading’s outset and may emerge later. Don’t be put off too much if you’re new to reading, share the meaning of a card and a client refutes it. Don’t argue, accept the rebuttal and wait…very often it will emerge during the reading that the Tarot was right, and the client just needed a little more thinking time or to settle into the conversation first.

In the North I drew The Chariot Reversed. A card of Travel, Transport, Ambition, Partnership, Cohesion, Teamwork, Success achieved through focus and determination. Being drawn Reversed…was he currently experiencing trouble with transport or a sense of dissatisfaction with his job?

Not with transport he said, looking baffled. Yes, to the dissatisfaction at work question. He was a building labourer, a skilled one, and that was OK, he liked the work, but he had a hunger for learning, and a taste in reading and curiosity in metaphysical matters that he found was not readily understood by his work mates.

This formed the greater part of the discussion that followed.

But for now that did not seem to be all of ‘it’…what about his car or van, I asked? This was probably not a serious problem, positive surrounding cards indicated it as a passing concern, but it was lodged in the material and financial department of this small spread.

The MOT was due on it the following week, he said, and he was not looking forward to the bill one bit.

Aha. The Tarot was picking up on basics. And so it should.

1jjChariot-761232 — The Chariot from the Swiss IJJ Tarot.

A Devil Of A Tarot Tantrum!

Jung coined a phrase to describe how he thought tarot worked: ‘synchronicity.’ Something in the reader connects with something in the cards. The cards are shuffled blind and drawn at random. However, synchronicity proposes that actually the selection isn’t random;

”[In synchronistic experiences] the perception of wholeness derives not from our ego, our conscious sense of self, but instead from the way in which the meaning unites all of who we are, parts of experience we were unaware of, potentials we have that have lain dormant or underdeveloped, elements of our personality that we didn’t know existed”

One evening a client left after an intense reading, and that day I had been very, very tired. I went upstairs with a cup of tea to lounge with a book. My teenage daughter came in asking me to take a look in the cards for her.

I said, ‘not right now, sweetie, I’m too tired. Give me half an hour’.

She persisted, and as I knew the question, and knew it wasn’t serious, and could wait I became annoyed.

‘If you keep on asking when I’ve said I’m too tired,’ I said. ‘I’ll show you the Devil card! Now then.’

She asked again. Oh, dear.

‘Right!’ I said and whipped the cards out from their cloth and shuffled them furiously.

‘Now see THIS!’ I hissed, pulled a card and brandished it at her, and knock me down with a very small chick feather, it was, it really was THE DEVIL CARD. Look atta ugly mug.

Ooh-er. A Devilish Tarot Tantrum to match my own.

She was I might say, suitably impressed. In fact she ran from the room howling for her dad, who was watching the footie and wasn’t remotely interested in this psychodrama, while I sniggered, feeling better now, peacefully drinking my tea.

Hey, you old Devil… you said it for me, heh heh! Now go away again, thank you.

Devil's Backbone — Devil’s Backbone (Photo credit: pietroizzo)

How about that for synchronicity?

Tarot Bites…

Summertime, and the livin’ is easy. Except, flying home from Spain on Sunday over the Bay of Biscay , it was clear to see the cradle of our summer weather problems….you could look down and see what the jet stream was brewing there, and the head on the beer just went on and on. The account below was written in 2010 and spoke of events in 2009. Our summers have been odd since at least 2008, with the last scorcher in 2006. Implications for the UK Tourist Industry, offset against the effects of recession?

‘The weather was odd at home last year in 2010, and even in N Italy where we went in August 2009…it was very changeable, cool at times, and there were cracking thunderstorms nearly every day. Forked lightening like you could scarcely believe. Now, you can’t see the bites in this photo, taken near Florence that summer, but the Italian for ‘mosquito,’ I can inform you, is zanzara. And the word for a bite is puntura. These are helpful words to know when you need to go to la farmacia.

I had received a warning about the mosquito campaign from the Tarot, fat lot of good it did me. The warning was presented as follows.

The Page of Swords (A Page card in Tarot can mean something small, swords can mean air and something that is sword-like and sharp – like a needle or in this case, a bite or sting)

The Page of Pentacles Reversed (ie in Tarot’s language ‘debased earth’, prefiguring the infection of said bites, round and swollen and red, the opposite of the green associated with pentacles cards, the suit of earth. )

The Page of Cups Reversed. Ahem. Not looking one’s best going round impersonating a human giant measle. The suit of Cups relates to healing, happiness, well-being and beauty. It corresponds with the element of water, and therefore also indicated a need to ensure maintenance of adequate hydration.

I had upon reading this duly armed myself with repellent ( ask for controlgio d’insetti, folks) after our first night there. Did it work? Did it heck. But don’t let that put you off. It might for you.

Then – and perhaps I reacted unusually badly because my immune system was depressed, I tried anti-histamines, hydrocortisone, lavender, tea tree, TCP and finally, a course of antibiotics from a gentle Italian GP who came out 40 minutes after being called. This allowed us the guilty thrill of using that little plastic E111 card for the first time. The service was brilliant though it did cost 25 euros for the call-out, but hey, it was 7.30 on a Saturday evening. We were grateful. Would we have received such a prompt response at home?

We need the Jet Stream to move north. I think we’ll have some better pockets dotted fairly regularly throughout August. Better than June and July, I mean. Another fairly crummy summer so far…but we will never surrender. We will fight it in the garden, and in front of the telly, and in good company, and with a cup of cocoa and….

One of the hottest summers I remember, was two weeks spent on the Appin Peninsula in NW Scotland. And it was sublime. It was glorious, and there were white sands and blue waters to rival the Med any day. The only problem (- there is always a serpent in paradise) was the darn, pesking clouds of mozzies.

I think that’s where I came in…