bar fight...

This gave me a chuckle. You will probably recognise the images as being from the Rider-Waite deck of tarot - but the panel was put together by Janet Boyer of www.tarotpals.com.

I've followed Janet on twitter and Facebook for a while. She's a hoot! I love to see other readers who don't take themselves too seriously.


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what does a tarot reader actually do?

This makes me laugh. There are so many misconceptions about what tarot reading really is and what it's meant to accomplish.

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the sunny side of the street...

It's so tempting to be cynical about life - but the truth is, there are many more good things happen in a day than bad things. Over the course of your life, you will almost certainly be done more good turns than bad ones.

Love, kindness and altruism are the most amazing success story in evolution's giant bag of amazing tricks.

Not only are we programmed by our DNA to look after ourselves, we are programmed to look after each other. That's not to say we always do - of course we don't.

But evolution has also built a fail-safe into our systems. It's called guilt! If we don't look after each other - at least those we are 'meant' to look after, our parents, our children - we feel guilt, one of the most unpleasant emotions known to humankind. Once you have experienced guilt a few times, you will find it is an excellent behaviour modifier - most of us learn to behave in a way that keeps us safe from the ravages of guilt.

Guilt is so corrosive to an individual's life, that in order to escape it, the sufferer will pound their consciousness with mind-altering substances just to dull the experience of it.

Those who don't look after those they are meant to look after and also feel no guilt about it, are almost universally seen as defective. They are labelled sociopaths and shunned. This is another fail-safe - one that operates at the community level; it's called outrage. Community outrage has an amazing ability to moderate behaviour.

Not only is it seen as the norm of human behaviour to look after those you are supposed to look after, those who go further than this are seen as somehow 'super-human'. Nurses, firemen, paramedics even teachers are revered sight unseen because they take the human norm of caring one step further up the ladder and look after those they have no moral imperative to look after.

Sure, you can look out there and see all the aberrant behaviour - parents killing and molesting their kids, young people mugging the elderly, people stealing from their neighbours - but the fact that you are outraged or even just depressed about it only reinforces my point. The time to worry is when this behaviour is tolerated as normal and not commented upon at all.

The wonder is not that enough of this aberrant behaviour takes place to cause us outrage, it is that love and kindness under the normal circumstances of human society is so much the norm that we don't even notice that it is being practised far far more often than behaviour that purposely harms others.

Every day, perfectly average people get up and look after their children and parents far above the standard of care required for mere survival. Everyday, people wait and let others into queues ahead of them. They call and ask friends if they are okay. They create surprises for those they love just to make the day more enjoyable. They cook for friends. They put away money they could use now just so their children won't have to struggle after they die. They give prodigious amounts to charity and most agree that, not only should we help our immediate neighbours, but that rich countries should help people in distress in poor countries that we have never met and who will very likely never be able to return the favour.

Holy snapping milk of human kindness, Batman!

Yes, there are many many failures of care - but there are many many more daily successes. You could almost say we are on the right track!


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the mysterious other ...

I've been reading tarot for thirty years now and it's an activity that I come to love more and more as time goes by.

To me, a tarot reading is a process that takes place between two people, a deck of cards and some mysterious Other. Some readers call will it God. Some call it angels and some guides. There are as many explanations as there are readers.

So, what do I think that Other is?

Well. Hmmm. Um.

I'm sorry to disappoint you but I have no idea! Oh, I suppose that's not strictly true. Of course after all this time, I have some ideas about what happens during the profoundly mysterious process of a successful tarot reading but I will never know for sure whether I'm right or not until after I go to The Big Reading Room in the sky.

All I really know is that a person, often a stranger, comes to me and we take a small amount of time to tune into each other by each shuffling the cards in silence. I do have a couple of mental rituals that I go through while I shuffle but these rituals are not noticeable to the person I'm reading for and are much closer to meditation than they are to magic. I simply try to clear my mind to allow whatever intuition is released by the spread of the cards to come through more clearly.

The amazing thing to me is not when I am proven wrong - and I freely admit there are such times - but that the information I get through these mysterious means is so often right. Why should it be so?

Most readers use a combination of academic knowledge and intuition. That is, they have studied the meanings of the cards and can get a general meaning from any tarot spread. But once the cards are out, intuition overlays another level of interpretation.

Intuition is information that comes to you through a channel other than your average five senses. Intuition works for me the same way as trying to remember the details of a movie you saw a long time ago; you've got the general gist of it - but it's not completely clear.

It's like someone is prompting you to remember it, giving you little hints, and you're saying, 'Oh, right! Yeah, there's a guy, isn't there? - but I'm not sure what colour his hair is. Oh, hold on - wasn't it black? And yeah, I think he was tall. Wasn't he? And good looking too! Oh, right - it's coming back to me now! He saw this girl he'd never met before and...

And that, is approximately the process that leads a reader to pronounce those infamous words: You are going to meet a tall dark stranger.

I've spent thirty years learning the meanings of the cards, how they relate to each other and how to read the story they are trying to tell me - which is, of course, the life story of the person I'm reading for. I believe we all have fascinating lives which contain meaning beyond that which we can see, hear or understand through everyday means. I believe that pretty much all of us want to do what's right and best for ourselves and those we car about. I believe the journey depicted in the tarot offers us all guidance on how to best live our lives to our own greatest fulfilment.

But you know, after all this time, I'm still no closer to understanding the nature of that mysterious Other, present in all helpful readings, which steers us in the best direction for our future success.


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everything's amazing but nobody's happy...

I love this guy! This is an hilarious rant on how jaded we are and how unappreciative of all the amazing things we can do today. It's a lesson in how our expectations make us miserable. Louis CK on the Conan O'Brien show. 

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build yourself an altar...

Okay. I admit it. Building an altar sounds kooky and well, maybe it is - but I don’t care because it’s REALLY fun!

It’s no news that many of us focus too much on the negative in our lives as we get older – the wrinkles, the money worries, the inadequacies of our spouse - and forget that there are a few decided advantages to the passing years as well; wisdom, experience, discipline and the richness of a lifetime of relationships to mention a just a few.

Setting up an altar helps you focus on those great things and harness the energy of a life well lived. 

I made my altar fifteen years ago after reading about the potent symbolism of having a physical representation of focus at the spiritual centre of your home.

This is a place where you gather your energy. You put your important stuff here, the things that give you strength in life; letters from those you love, photos of everyone who is important to you, physical evidence of your achievements - education certificates, house deeds, references.

When you set a goal, place a written copy of it on your altar. In this way, you tie your future achievements to your past ones. Considering both of them in the same place gives you confidence and strengthens your resolve. You have evidence of all you achieved in the past and therefore know you can achieve this time as well.

How do you build an altar? Any damn way you please! It can be a low table that you can sit cross legged in front of to meditate with your special little treasures arranged on top or it can be a set of drawers with a table cloth your Grandma crocheted covering it while you keep your treasures in the privacy of the drawers.


I bought mine, shown in the picture above, from a second hand shop for about fifty bucks. It's a glass top table made of bamboo and that suits me very well; both transparent and flexible. On it, I keep likenesses of Ganesh and Buddha, photos of loved ones, things my girls made for me, gifts from friends and so on. When I first made it, I asked those who are important to me if there was something small I could have to  put on it. My father gave me a small silver pony he'd owned for fifty years. My mother gave me my grandfather's Waterside Worker's badge. 

One thing I absolutely insist on though; it should be beautiful and it should smell nice. It should be something that gives you pleasure just to look at it. Clean and dust it regularly – it’s a powerful symbol of taking care of your life when you take the time to care for the special items you have accumulated on your altar.

As you wipe each one, consider its importance to you, think about the loved one who gave it to you, think about the time you received it and why you decided that this item of all the other mementoes you have of them was the one you placed here. If you focus on your body sensations, you will feel a warm and gentle power build in your belly as you go through this ritual. 

It’s not enough to look after ourselves physically. We are three-fold beings; we need to look after ourselves spiritually and mentally as well. Building an altar to your Higher Self is a great start on the spiritual part.

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magical duet

Some things just lift your spirits whether you like bluegrass music or not. If you don't love the sound of banjo in the morning, go straight to 1:32 to see something that you have to smile about. 

I love bluegrass and I love flannel shirts and I love dorky looking rangas with crooked smiles. All this goes together to make me think Josh Williams is a bit cute. 

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THE WORLD IS AWESOME!

Just watching this makes me smile. 

I'm going to spend today concentrating on what I have instead of what I don't have. Have a great day!



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The Symbolic Language of the Tarot

Why is a tarot reading by a competent experienced reader so helpful to many of us?

Well. I have my opinions, of course  - an ex-boyfriend or two might even claim I have too many of them! But having read professionally for thirty years, I think I have something to offer to the debate.

The tarot, along with astrology and other such tools for intutive guidance, play perfectly into the human mind’s preference for symbolic thinking. Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, identified this trait in the 1800s and began to treat clients with intractable mental problems by decoding the symbols that their minds used to hide painful information from their conscious selves.

The world is a scary place and almost all of us go through traumatic experiences that we don’t want to face. Sometimes, it’s not even a case of not wanting to face things, it’s more that if we want to be able to function on a conscious level in everyday life, we have to push the pain and fear deep into our unconscious  and just get on with it. But those experiences don’t go away; they are like bogey men, hiding in the closet, waiting to jump out at the most inconvenient time to scare hell out of us.

For instance, you might have had a terrifying relationship with a stalker when you were fifteen years old. The stalker’s name might be Bob and his effect on your life was such that you had to move towns.  This is traumatic and your mind cannot deal with it properly and get you off to school everyday.

So it pushes the experience deep into the unconscious so that your conscious mind can continue to function and files it away safely under the label ‘Bob’. The word Bob soon becomes the symbol in your unconscious for Danger! Run away as fast as you can!

The file evolves over time and also becomes the place where your mind stores all of its disappointments about men in general - it’s a matter of convenience really. Why make new folder and a new symbol for ‘Problems with Men’ when you already have a perfectly good one with plenty of room in there for new stuff?

And look - none of this matters one little bit. Well. Not until twenty years have passed and you’ve been married and divorced, you have a couple of kids to bring up largely on your own, and you still haven’t found the time or space to excavate and deal with all that old trauma Bob the Stalker caused you when you were fifteen.

But what happens when you meet a great guy who sincerely wants to love you and your kids but you just can’t trust him no matter how perfect he seems? Why? Why can’t you trust him when he’s done nothing wrong by you?

It’s simple really - can you guess why you look at this poor guy like he's Charles Manson every time he moves too fast around you? The poor guy’s name is Bob, of course, and he’s paying not only for the sins of Bob the Stalker but for every other guy who ever stood you up and every cad who didn’t call when he said he would.

Symbols are a like a filing system for our emotions and humans can be very easily manipulated via their identification with symbols. Flags and national anthems for instance, as symbols for the love of country, have always been used to lead young men into wars. If we don’t decode and keep which symbols work in our favour rather than against us, they can be very destructive.

One of the many things that the symbols of the tarot deck help us to do , is bring your own personal symbols to consciousness and unlock past traumas that are still affecting our lives and decisions at a conscious level. The process of bringing these painful things to consciousness is one of the most important things we do in our personal growth. Until you have shed light on your shadow selves, they will remain frightening ghosts you cannot hope to defeat.


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Nobody's Perfect

If I had to put it into one sentence, I would say that the purpose of tarot reading is this: To help you find your path in life again, no matter how long it is since you lost your way. 

I always wanted to write a self help book titled Nobody's Perfect. 

So many of us think we've made too many mistakes to ever be happy, that we've squandered our chance at a great life, that because of past actions, we can never deserve to be really content.

Wrong, wrong and, let me think about that last one for a moment... Hmmm, yep, that one's wrong as well.

My favourite movie with a spiritual theme is Groundhog Day. A lot of people scoff when I say that. A lot of people see Groundhog Day as just another hilarious Bill Murray performance in an amusing but impossible set of circumstances. A lot of people are wrong about that.

What if you kept living the same day over and over again with no explanation and no real escape from your issues, no matter how hard you try?

Oh. My. God! That's my life! Well, some days anyhow.

Groundhog Day was first written by Danny Rubin as a way to make the concepts of Buddhism and spiritual growth through reincarnation more accessible to a mainstream audience. When the story begins, Phil is an obnoxious, sexist, self-centred ... well, arsehole. But through some mysterious blessing, he is trapped in a single day, in a town he hates, for eternity, or so it seems, and is forced to repeat that one boring day over and over until he learns it doesn't matter where he lives, who he loves or what he thinks, many of his life's events are out of his hands and the only control he has over anything is how he responds to it.

In the beginning Phil responds to everything in life with contempt and superiority but through his many mistakes, he eventually learns to respond with grace, patience, love and humour. Most of all, he learns humility. To see his journey from puffed up ego-monster whom everyone hates to humble but effective man about town whom everyone loves is both fun and inspiring.

In one of my favourite scenes, Phil explains to Rita that he is A god, not THE god.

We are all imperfect. We are all just trying to find the best path towards our purpose. By the end of Groundhog Day, Phil is still imperfect, of course, but he has been busted out of that awful lonely cycle that we, as humans, can get into, of cowering behind our egos, hiding our wounds and fears. We either try to pretend that we are perfect or we beat ourselves up for our shortfalls - as if somewhere out there, if we just try hard enough, if we just sweat and hate on ourselves enough, if we just worry and obsess enough, we will someday BE PERFECT.

We won't be. We can't be. It is literally impossible on every level of being you can imagine to ever be perfect.

Nobody is perfect. Why can't we get that through our heads? Nobody is perfect! Why do we persist in beating ourselves up when we discover some new imperfection in ourselves?

Why not just acknowledge the latest in our many many imperfections, resolve to try to do better next time and continue our journey, glad to be alive and in the fine company of an entire world full of imperfect beings?


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what the tarot says about trust issues...

Tarot art by Emily Balivet

Like all cards, The Fool has several meanings - one of my favourites is Radical Trust. Trust in The Universe. Trust in the future. Trust in those you love.

I seem to be doing a lot of readings that revolve around the issues of trust and privacy lately  - both people who invade their partner's privacy and people whose privacy has been invaded.

Some clients will ask me if they should leave their partner because they can no longer trust them; either because the partner has been through their purse or their phone,  or because of what they found when they themselves went through their partner's purse or phone. Do invasions of privacy necessarily mean the invader can't never be trusted again? Does it mean that the invader necessarily doesn't trust the invadee in the first place? When is the invasion of privacy a ticket to ride and when can it be forgiven?

Like every issue within a relationship, only those within that intimate circle of two can really make those decisions. The cards won't tell you what to do; they can only help to clarify the issues and point the best direction for you to proceed to get to where you need to be in your life's journey.

But personally, I have to say, I do think that sometimes there is a little hysteria regarding these matters nowadays. Let's face it, privacy is a luxury that came into being very late in the evolutionary scheme of things. It is still a reality for only about 1% of the world's population*

Privacy is a by-product of wealth - you need to have enough money to buy space just for yourself.
Now, I know that most of us who are just working johnnies don't consider ourselves wealthy - but if you have a drawer with a lock on it, you are richer than much of the rest of the world. If you have an email account on your own computer to protect, you are rich beyond the dreams of the vast majority of the world.

I would argue that trust and privacy have very little to do with each other; trust is far older than privacy and has been inextricably entwined with our evolution. For instance, as we evolved, group members needed to trust other group members to find and kill food on a daily basis in order to survive. As they became farmers, they needed to trust that the rains would come. When their countries went to war, they needed to trust that soldiers wouldn't rampage through their village in the dead of night to burn their homes and kill their sons so they could never grow up into soldiers.

Needless to say, that trust was, and still is, being broken everyday in a thousand places around the world. And yet, those people get up in the morning and try to trust all over again. Everyday. Because humans cannot survive without a certain amount of trust in the future. If you love someone who was temporarily overcome with insecurity enough to go through your things and they demonstrate that they are sorry, suck it up.

Get up in the morning and try to go on. Come on, you can do it! Did you never sneak a peek at something you shouldn't have?

Life's short. Trust hard.

* statistic completely fabricated in order to demonstrate a point


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