it's like gym for your soul...

My clients must get sick of me telling them to start meditating. They frequently talk about how they just can't stop thinking. How they just keep overthinking. How they worry about their kids, their jobs, their partners.

Ah. The bullying mind!

Of course, we're human and very few of us who live an average human life are going to rid ourselves of all worry. But it honestly doesn't have to be this painful.

What most of us aren’t taught - and should be! - is that the mind is a tool.

We think that the mind is us, that the crazy rushing river of thoughts between our ears is what we actually are. Sub-consciously, many of us fear that if that never-ending stream of chatter ceases, so do we.

But. The mind is simply a tool that helps us to work out how to get stuff. Like a computer does. Or Anthony Robbins.

We let the mind run roughshod over us and when we do, it’s like those cartoons you see where someone unskilled starts a chainsaw and runs round the yard chopping shit up as they struggle to get control of it.

The very best thing you can do to tame your rampaging mind is learn meditation. Meditation is gym for both the mind and the soul. It strengthens both your ability to concentrate your thoughts and your ability to clear your mind when complete calm is needed.

There are a lot of different types of meditation and a lot of different ways to learn. I always recommend people start with YouTube. Just search guided meditations and listen to a few different ones till something floats your boat.

Five minutes a day is far more useful to you than a half hour on Saturday morning. It's about making that small daily silence a habit. One day, you will find it has become so habitual, it will happen automatically during a crisis and the other people involved will say to you, 'How can you be so calm?'

It's because you'll have trained your mind to react as needed in the meditation room in the same way a weightlifter trains their body to react in the gym.

Just make a start. Put the word out to The Universe that you are ready to start stopping your thoughts - just for a while, here and there - and the path to blissful quiet in your head will open before you.


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it's like drinking poison and expecting someone else to die...

Humans are complicated. We're like walking talking symbols of Oppositional Defiance Disorder. We routinely both love and hate our significant others - partners, parents, kids - at the same time.

I often see people who are looking for intuitive guidance from the cards on how to resolve, or at least, live with these destructive dilemmas. A reading can help with the specifics of an individual case, but in the mean time, there are certain truths that can help in every situation.

Whether it's someone you love who is in your life everyday, or a stranger passing through your life, you can stop drinking the poison and experience less of the corrosive emotion of hate.

1) Understand that we are all born guiltless and that life then happens to us. Life is hard and it often twists people. If the person has done something unforgivable, try not take it personally - by that I mean that, it's them, not you.

2) Understand that nobody, except a very sick individual, gets out of bed in the morning and thinks now whose life can I cock up today? Everybody thinks they are doing what they have to do to survive.

3) Understand that letting go of your hatred helps you, not them. To say, I'm not going to be angry about this anymore is not the same as saying What you did to me was okay. It is more like saying, I'm not going to let you keep doing it to me.

4) Symbolic visualisation of what you want your emotions to do helps enormously. The human brain thrives on visual plans and wants to do what you instruct it to do. It LOVES symbols - flags, dreams and music tell us this very clearly.

5) Meditation is the greatest tool you can use to calm destructive emotion and there are many places on the net where you can learn to do it for free.

You can imagine a balloon with the object of your hate inside and release that balloon to float away out of your sight. This symbolic imagination tells your brain that you don't want to think about that person anymore. It will work soon enough if you persist.

You can imagine that hatred as a yukky poison that fills your body which you then let drain away out of you through your fingers and toes. This tells your brain that your resentment is toxic and it shouldn't allow poisonous crap to hang around in your mind because that also affects your body.

If that person is still in your life and you are forced to unpleasant confrontations, you can imagine yourself as being surrounded by a shield which protects you from any 'bad vibes' that might come from them. This tells your brain to disregard input from that person.

You may be thinking How can these things help me? It's all imagination.

Well, great news - so are your emotions!

Yes, it's true - your emotions are all in your head. Which is not the same as saying they are not real, it just means that you are in charge of them. Yes, they are an unruly bunch and when they are running very high, it takes effort and clear thinking to keep them civilised, but still, they are yours to command.

If you have been very wronged, it can take time to heal and release your hatred - but while ever you are making the effort to let it go rather than to hold on to it, you are moving forward towards freedom and happiness.



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magic is all around us, every single day...

Just a quick reminder. 

You are a marvel!

You started as a miracle when two invisible cells found each other in the dark of your mother's body and for better or worse, bound together in the holy matrimony that is you!

Then your amazingness continued to grow as you were built - inside your mother's body! - using some mysterious blueprint science calls DNA.

So, think about this. Two cells - one from Mother, one from Dad - find each other in the pitch black, become one and begin to build every single organ in your body by dividing itself over and over again.

So. Once that cell has divided, how do those two halves know what to become? I mean, some of them will become heart cells and some of them will become brain cells. How do they know which is which? Is there a team picking thing going on in there?

'Okay! You. You. And... you! Over here - you're on the kidney team.'

That gob-smacking process used the material of your mother's body to create you. Think about it. Where else did all the stuff that was you when you were born come from? It came from your mother's body - not just what she consumed, but what she actually already was. This is why women get so tired being pregnant. They are literally growing a machine more complex than any other on earth IN THEIR BODY.

This is why women can loose teeth when pregnant - if she isn't consuming enough calcium or if, for some reason, the calcium she is consuming is not bio-available, Life takes the calcium from her teeth and bones to build her baby's teeth and bones. That's why pregnant women are so often anemic - Life takes the iron from her blood to build the baby's blood.

Creepy - and yet, phenomenal, spectacular, astonishing!

But this is not a post about what mothers give up for their kids. It's a pleasure and an honour to do Life's work for her - or at least, it should be.

This post is about what a miracle you are, as is every single person you will meet today, as is every creature you see in your travels. Even spiders and snakes. And I don't mean 'miracle' in the religious sense of the word. I mean it in the 'Holy %$#*! That's unbelievable' sense of the word.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I long for the day we all give the miracle of all Life the deep respect and love it is due. We need to stop fighting and killing each other and all the other incredible creatures we share this planet with.



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how I learned to stop worrying and love The Tower

The Tower's meaning changes and grows with us.

The Tower: Change is coming, ready or not. 

Of course many of you will recognise the title as a play on the title of Stanley Kubrick's hilariously terrifying satire about war: Dr Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.

With lightning striking at its crumbling rooftop and people leaping from its windows like some medieval 911 scenario, The Tower has a very dodgy reputation as tarot cards go. It forms, along with Death and The Devil, what I call 'The Tripod of Terror'. These are cards that, as a reader, I'm really not that thrilled to see come out in a reading.

But not because they're terrible cards that necessarily mean death and destruction are coming your way. I just hate to see them because too many clients know only just enough about tarot to be scared of them.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I've turned a card to reveal The Tower only to hear my client make a sound as though they'd been punched in the stomach.

OOF!

I stop my very important work of laying out the cards, and look up to see them staring at The Tower as though it's a crime scene photo. I generally laugh then and say, 'Let me guess - you get your cards read a lot, but you don't read yourself?' And I'm generally right.

The surface reading of The Tower - in the little paper booklet that comes with every pack of tarot cards and contains one sentence on each of the 78 cards in your deck- will be something like:

CATASTROPHE! THE SKY IS FALLING! RUN! RUN AWAY! RUN FAR FAR AWAY.

But the reality is far more nuanced and hopeful than that.

Yes, The Tower does indeed usually tell us that it's time to let go of something. But it rarely means that you are going to lose everything without warning - which is how a lot of beginners see it. To me, the main lesson of The Tower is to grasp everything in your life lightly - because it all passes away.

When the time comes to let go of something - be it a job, a location or a relationship - be prepared to let it go. If you don't let go when the time comes to let go, The Universe has a nasty habit of reefing it out of your grasp.

"Give it up gracefully" says Life, "or I'll be forced to take it from you."

That is always the most painful option.

As the old hippie song goes - To everything there is a season, turn turn turn... If you want to see some crazy go-go dancers and hear some of those pretty harmonies from the 1960s, take a moment to listen to The Byrds tweeting out some timeless wisdom. To everything, there is a season...

My own favourite story of The Tower and how it can play out in real life happened like this:

Many years ago, before I'd gotten better acquainted with The Tower, when I was still afraid of that bolt of lightening that would come out of nowhere and lay waste to my life, I laid out some cards regarding a crucial creative grant I'd applied for. My career would be set back by years by failure in this matter!

BAM! Out came The Tower along with several other cards that would normally refer to my creative endeavours.

Dammit. Dammit dammit dammit. I wasn't getting the grant. Obviously. I was so bummed. I felt like I'd already heard the bad news and right away, I began the work of getting over it.

The next day, I had a practice session with my music partners, Dougy and Laurence. I own a beautiful rare old Maton classical guitar, considered one of the best guitars ever made in Australia. I've had it since I was 16 years old when I swapped it for my Yamaha semi-acoustic. Believe me, I got the best side of that deal.

I loved that guitar and couldn't imagine playing anything else. There were problems though, and I'd been thinking of getting another guitar for a while. Since I'd been jamming with Laurence and Dougy, my gentle nylon string was overwhelmed by the sound of their pushy steel strings.

But I held off. I couldn't let go of my Maton.

You know what's coming, don't you?

There I was, standing with my beloved guitar across my belly, slung on its strap around my shoulder. As we talked about what to play next, I rested my crossed arms atop the body, not a care in the world.

Until the guitar strap broke. With the weight of my arms on top of her pushing towards the ground, I didn't have a hope of saving her. She smashed to the floor, totally unplayable. I was inconsolable. That guitar was like my third child.

But we had a gig to play in 2 days time. I didn't have time to grieve her. I had to buy a new guitar.

So, guess what? I loved my new guitar. I should have bought it earlier so that Ms Maton didn't need to be sacrificed to my inability to let go of the old. My musical ability progressed out of sight with an updated tool of trade.

I was able to find someone to patch my first love up. She's playable. I love her still and play her often - but she'll never be the same.

This was vintage Tower action. Like all cards, there are nuances and different interpretations depending on the issue under discussion, but at base, The Tower teaches us to let go and be ready for anything. It can foretell a broken guitar or a car accident - but it can also foretell the love of your life or a lottery win, depending on the cards surrounding it.

Change is coming whether you like it or not. Be flexible.

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manifesting... it's really just expecting the best

YES!

That's exactly what I mean to tell you.

It's called visualisation, or more fashionably 'manifestation' and it's a principle which says that what we concentrate on comes to us.

It's not exactly magic. But it can seem that way. What you focus your will upon will come to pass in your life. Not always in the way you expected, but your thoughts will be reflected in your life for better or worse.

If you focus your mind on health and exercise, you are very likely to follow those thoughts with action and you will be a healthy person. If you focus on wealth, you are likely to take the kinds of action needed to make money. If you focus on love, you will exude love which attracts others and you are likely to live a life filled with doting lovers, friends and family.

Conversely of course, if you focus on negative thoughts, you are going to attract negative experiences.

For instance, fear. If you're a very fearful person, you'll find yourself stumbling through life, hesitating at the very times when you should take a gamble and therefore missing opportunities. In relationships, you'll find yourself expecting the worst of the world and suspecting the worst of your partner - which will drive them away. This is what's called self fulfilling prophecy and it's closely related to visualisation. From there, it's but a short leap to manifestation.

And YES! What I'm saying there is you can manifest negatively as well as positively.

When you expect the worst, calamity gravitates towards you like a homing pigeon. If you expect the best, good luck will also find its way to you.

This is not to say that when terrible things happen, it means you've brought it on yourself by negative thinking. Terrible things come to us all regardless of how we think about life. But I do believe that some of these bad things are avoidable in the first place, certain others we can make better with a positive attitude and the worst of these terrible things which are a natural part of the human condition - failure, loss, grief - can be processed and recovered from more quickly and completely when we are in charge of our own minds.


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how to feel better in 10 minutes a day...

Over and over, I say to the people who come to me for help: The best thing you can do to make your life better is to meditate. 
Over and over, they say back to me: My mind won't stay still long enough to meditate. 
Over and over, I say to back to them: No, it won't, will it? Not till you've practiced meditation for a while! 

So many of us think a calm mind is the normal human state of being and a mind that chatters away at us every waking moment is abnormal. Somehow we think that most other people have it together and we are the only ones whose minds are giving us grief all day every day.

I'm afraid not. It's the nature of the mind to think. That's what it's there for. The mind exists to look for problems and when it finds them, real or imaginary, to turn  possible solutions over and over until it finds one it's happy with. Stupid Mind doesn't care if it's the middle of night. It doesn't care if its solutions are actually helpful. It doesn't care that it's actually only a tool for us to use in order to have a happy life.

The Mind thinks very highly of itself. It thinks it's in charge of our lives. The Mind thinks it's in charge of us. In fact, the Mind thinks it IS us.

It isn't.

It's certainly an important part of us - but many people consider our mind, our thoughts, to be our core Self.

It's not.

Think about a time where you felt peaceful - maybe it was lying on the beach in the middle of your best holiday ever and all you were aware of was the sun on your face and the smell of the sea in your nostrils. Maybe it was climbing a tree when you were a kid and your whole concentration was tied up in where to find your next foothold.  Maybe it was lying in your lover's arms after some mind-blowing sex and all you were aware of was the after-light of the fireworks behind your eyelids.

These experiences generally do not need the words or thoughts that Mind uses to communicate with us - and yet these are the times when we are most our true selves.

The mind is important. In no way am I saying it isn't. It's fun to play with. It's interesting to explore. It's crucial to navigate successfully through life's problems. But it isn't our most essential self. If humans were computers the mind would pretty much be the operating system. Like Windows, with all its problems and glitches. Just as Windows runs the computer, but is not actually the computer, so the mind runs the self, but isn't actually the Self.

I see my job as helping people find their way in a scary world - and the number 1 way to navigate this world is by putting the mind in its place. What we think of as our mind is often more just a constant stream of worrying and negativity. What will happen if I run out of money? What will happen if my lover leaves me? What will happen to me when I'm old?

What's the point of these out of control thoughts? There is none. They don't solve anything. They just make you unhappy. Meditation will teach you to quiet your mind so that you can enjoy the beautiful things in life. It will allow you to control when you let your mind off the leash to apply its logic to actual life problems in the here and now.

There are operations you leave Windows to run automatically on your computer and things that need your direction. Your life is like that. Practising meditation allows us to quiet those unnecessary thoughts and experience what lies beneath them.

What will we find beneath the constant chatter of an out of control mind?

Peace.

In my next entry, I'll give you some pointers on how to get started on the great adventure inward that we call meditation.

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making the most of your misery...

I think one of the places people of my generation have failed in bringing up our kids is that we so badly wanted them to be happy - have this! watch this! go here! distract yourself with this fun thing! - that many of us didn't teach them that unhappiness is a normal part of life. 

In fact, it's a crucial part of life. 

These are some of the things I'd say to our young now. These are some of the things I'd have made clearer to my own kids if I had it to do over. 

You will never escape times of unhappiness. We never taught you how to just sit with the feeling of being unhappy. We never taught you that being unhappy with your lot isn't the worst thing  that can happen to you.

We also didn't teach you really effective ways out of your angst. I'm not saying we should go back to the old days, the tough old days where men were men and women ate their young - modern psychology has identified a lot of issues that make humans unhappy and that's a good start. Now we need to start making sure that everyone gets some grounding in how to live with and find their way through, the part of the human condition called misery.

1) Write things down. If you're unhappy with your life as it is, organise it via the written word.

a) what's wrong with my life 

b) what can I do to make it better 

c) what do I need to take that action and most important of all 

d) TAKE THE ACTION.

2) Get out of your own head. Think of others. Do something for someone you love for no reason whatsoever. Do something useful for someone you don't even know for no reason. Do this more than once. Make a weekly habit of it. All of our unhappiness exists within the 2 square foot of space that our body occupies. Move out of that 2 square foot regularly and put yourself into someone else's - it makes you bigger. 

3) Get help to take care of the things in life that need to be taken care of. One of the greatest sources of anxiety is the feeling there are a million things you should be doing, that it will be utterly disasterous if they don't get done and you don't even know where to start. Accountants, lawyers, house cleaners - god bless them, every one, for doing for us the things that make us crazy. 

4) Learn to meditate. You will hear it over and over through life. Learn to meditate. It stills the grasshopper human mind and gives times of great peace and insight.

5) Dwell on the positive as much as you can. For most of us, there are a dozen positive things happen in our day for every negative one - but the human mind is rigged to look out for danger and so it latches on to every little negative occurrence and lets them crowd out the positive. I don't mean you should ignore the negative - but you should certainly strive consciously to give the positive equal weight in your life. Your family, the roof over your head, your health, books to read, gorgeous nature to moon over - there is so much to be happy for in even the very worst day.

6) Understand that whatever is happening for you now, it will pass. None of it is the end of the world. Understand really truly deeply that we are all miserable sometimes.

Life is good for a while and then it's crap and then it's really really good for a long while and then it's catastrophic suddenly and then later it's good again and ... so on and so forth to the end, where you look back and you really only remember the love and adventure  you shared with the people you met up with.

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How do Skype readings work?

Before they’ve had a reading via Skype with me, clients often wonder how it is that I can read for them when they are not even in the same room.

You know what? I don’t understand it completely myself. I do know however that it works and I’d estimate over 98% percent of my clients know it too once they’ve jumped onto the Skype revolution and taken that step.

All I can tell you is that process is not very different from reading cards for someone who is there in the same room with me. I make a connection with the Readee, I lay out the cards and information pops into my head. This information proves time and time again to be relevant and/or helpful to the person I am reading for.

We are entering a new phase in understanding the nature of reality, one in which science is proving that thoughts are made of energy and that energy is a manipulable substance.

Over the centuries, people who could read others’ emotions, see things that hadn’t happened yet or talk to the dead have been stigmatised to a bizarre degree – up to and including tying them to chairs and throwing them in rivers.

Yeah. I know, right?

In most religions, in the past, power was taken away from the individual and placed solely in the hands of a god and that god’s priest class. The common person was told there was only one way to access the power of the spirit and that was through the Church. Think the Catholic Church’s orgy of witch burning or the Mayan’s human sacrifice. These were a very effective means of convincing a population that might be interested in accessing their own intuitive power.

The truth is that we can all learn to access our own intuition. We can all learn to read the flow of the energy of live around us.

Yes, people like myself are generally more skilled at it, simply because we’ve been doing it longer and studying it more deeply. It’s like any skill – the more you practice the better you get at it.

I see much of my role as acting as an interpreter of the client’s own intuition. Most of us know what action we should take in any situation, but we often baulk at taking it because we don’t trust ourselves.

Often a tarot reading just confirms what the client already knows deep down. Just as often though, it brings to light aspects of a problem the client has been avoiding dealing with. When this happens, they will have an AHA! Moment as they recognise the truth of what the cards reveal for them.

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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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The Universe sends Townsville tarot reader a message of peace and joy...

I did a nice pre-breakfast reading for one of my favourite regulars in London - Hi Karen! xx -  via Skype this morning. How about this world we're living in, huh? The miles don't mean anything any more.

But that's not why I'm writing this.

After the reading, I took my lovely daughter out for a very posh breakfast at a very suave establishment. Okay. So, it was actually MacDonald's. There. I confess. I drink Macca's coffee and I'm not ashamed to tell the world.

But that's not why I'm writing this either.

I'm writing this because I wanted to share with you the fact that the Universe sent me a very cheery Have a nice day! message with my coffee this morning. I took the lid off and laid it on my free newspaper and here is what I saw:

Of course, I was quick to notice the bikini clad woman who appeared to be leaping out of my coffee lid smiley face because of the position of the newspaper and so decided it was time to have a little fun with her. 

And so, The Coffee Lid Showgirl was born.

You have a nice day now too!

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