Llewellyn Publications's Blog, page 90

The New Moon in Taurus occurs today, May 9, at 8:28 pm EDT (12:28 am, Friday, May 10 GMT), at 19 degrees. New moons signify a new cycle, new beginnings, and rebirth.

This New Moon, along with the Sun (also in Taurus) will highlight the earthy Taurus qualities of stubbornness, stability, and sensuality, as well as second house themes of money and material possessions. This New Moon period is the perfect time to examine how you deal with money and saving. Are you making goals and following through, adding to your savings each month? Or are you spending so that you can enjoy the creature comforts of home? Now is the time to make goals and stick with them! This New Moon period is the perfect time to set goals related to health and personal well-being, such as goals for weight loss, smoking cessation, education and learning, etc.

Today is a solar eclipse; eclipses are times of heightened energy. Expect surprises, especially as they relate to money.

Keep in mind also that Saturn is retrograde until this summer and Pluto turned retrograde last month, so you may find yourself being extra retrospective or reflective of where you’ve come from, where you see yourself now, and how you see yourself achieving your future financial plans.

Over the past month, the Tower has been stalking me by showing up in readings I’ve done for myself. I read for myself regarding a workshop I taught at Well of the Moon in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, asking, among other things, what I needed to know about the experience and got…The Tower (cue the ominous music). I’ve always been wary of spinning cards positively and ignoring any negative or, more accurately, uncomfortable experiences. The Tower, for all its gifts and blessings, does herald a time of turmoil, doesn’t it? Change is always hard, right? Turns out, maybe I was wrong, stuck in my own tarot rut.

This morning I came home from walking my dog, Whiskey, and excitedly told my partner that I had a “Tower experience.” She, knowing my thoughts on the Tower, looked alarmed but let me continue. I proceeded to explain this “fireworks and explosion” of thoughts and ideas about the future of my tarot practice. It was like a long period of stagnation burst forth with new life.  It was like the many threads of new ideas, learning, study, and spiritual revelation that were fermenting under the surface suddenly fell into place. My old practice, in my mind, was shattered and almost immediately a new structure revealed itself.

My partner, knowing how I’ve been talking about the Tower lately, asked me why I thought it was a Tower experience when it didn’t seem painful, just freeing and exciting. This caused me to think about it. How and why have I come to this idea that the Tower, with all its change, was always painful. I looked back on what I wrote about the card in Tarot for Beginners (which I wrote in 2009/2010):

“Sometimes we build something, such as a home, career, relationship, or belief system. We care for it, love it, and come to depend on it. Then, out of the blue, something occurs that changes everything. Our cherished creation is knocked down, utterly destroyed, and we are surrounded by shambles. The Tower represents this experience–and a little more. It is not merely destruction for destruction’s sake; it is a breakdown that allows for a breakthrough. It releases us from what no longer serves our best interest. It takes away what is no longer good or sound. The Tower destroys something as we know it, thereby providing the raw material and experience to re-create something new.”

My experience this morning did feel like the Tower. I was listening to a podcast (Why Shamanism Now) and the host, Christina Pratt, said something and suddenly it was like thoughts were exploding in my head. The thoughts were blowing to bits my idea of myself as The Practical Tarot Reader. For years, I’ve loved my practical approach, so you’d think the destruction of that would have been upsetting. But it wasn’t. It was “a breakdown that allows for a breakthrough.” I was ready for it, even though I didn’t know I was.

In addition to my breakdown/breakthrough, I learned an additional lesson: beware of tarot ruts with card interpretations. Seems simple, but apparently even seasoned readers can develop bad habits.

Today, try inviting the energy of the Tower into your tarot practice. Do a reading to find out what ruts you may be in and not even know it. Shake up your world and see what you discover.

Image: The Tower from the Lo Scarabeo Tarot

 

We are excited to announce that Great Sex Made Simple by Mark A. Michaels & Patricia Johnson is an IPPY Award-Winner, and finalist for two other awards.

The book’s accolades include:

2013 IPPY Award (Gold, Sexuality/Relationships); the awards, launched in 1996, are designed to bring increased recognition to the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers.
ForeWord Awards (Finalist, Self-Help category); ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Awards were established to bring about increased attention to the literary and graphic achievements of independent publishers and their authors.
ForeWord Awards (Finalist,Family & Relationships category).

More information about these awards, Mark & Patricia, and Great Sex Made Simple can be found on their website at http://tantrapm.com/.

As I’ve been following the conclusion of a decade long missing persons case along with so many others, I am grateful that a tragic story has become a triumphant one. The story of Amanda Berry, Georgina DeJesus, and Michele Knight is beyond comprehension. After being swiped in their teens/early twenties, missing for nearly a decade, and thought by many to have been dead, suddenly they are miraculously present and alive. They broke free. They survived. They are found.

I’m sure plenty more will unfold in this case and justice certainly still needs to be served, but my attention has also been drawn to psychic backlash in connection to this story. While these women were hidden away against their will, Amanda Berry’s mother was told by famous psychic Sylvia Browne that her missing daughter was dead. According to an article with Good Morning America by Colleen Curry, this isn’t the first time Browne has been in the negative spotlight for providing inaccurate information and a site is even up cataloguing her failed predictions.

In this same article Dwayne Baker shared his story: “My son was missing for two years, two months and 12 days. Psychics called me. I even received a DVD in the mail that a guy claimed he could talk to the dead and this was Travis’ voice, with no return address. I don’t understand why people would want to do that.”

But I could. While I wouldn’t go sending out unsolicited DVDs, when an old friend of mine went missing I quietly called on my own inner guidance in an effort to find answers to help bring resolution amid the horror. While I’ve had accurate predictions in the past, I didn’t share anything in this case because in the end if I wasn’t accurate I didn’t feel I could handle the backlash. I didn’t want to dishonor the family and my personal sense of psychic responsibility wouldn’t allow for chance in such dramatic events. That’s not to say I was right or wrong in choosing to share or not, but if I had acted on it, my intention would have always been for love and healing.

“I don’t understand why people would want to do that.” It’s a statement that sticks with me because it deserves to be answered for the benefit of both sides.

From my personal perspective there is the good and the bad, as with anything else. Mechanic, doctor, teacher, officer, business person, psychic, etc. Some seek money. Some seek attention, importance, success, and fame; this is the ego rush. Some simply want to help with absolutely no hidden agenda and I feel this is the largest group. Some are bleeding hearts who feel the pain of other’s stories and want to offer a helping hand. Unfortunately in an effort to do good, they may overstep their boundaries by offering assistance when it’s not asked for. But in the end their intention is to bring understanding to the journey, resolution and relief to pain, and healing in an often wounded world.

So as a personal promoter, practitioner, and fan of psychics and intuitive ability why am I even highlighting this story? Why give it more attention than it already has? The more I tried to wave it off, the more it pulled and nagged at me to process and share. For the part of me that heard the outcry and thought, “See, it’s better to always hide all my intuitive guidance,” I had to start a discussion, because I know that thought isn’t right. I have to call it out because I can see both sides. We can’t look at this in black and white because the world doesn’t work that way. I’ve seen a pained family peppered with unwelcome psychic messages. I’ve withheld my own information to not overstep boundaries. I’ve been accurate at times and inaccurate at others. The black and white response that all psychics are evil, irresponsible con artists is hard to watch, but I get it. It’s why psychics have worked in hush for so long and have only been coming strongly back into the public eye recently. So will a story like this set this community back? Will it set you personally back if you’ve been working to trust your intuition independently?

I would love to see more discussion from all sides including those in the psychic community, those who appreciate or criticize psychic services, and those who are simply trying to honor that still small voice they know as their higher spiritual self, an internal GPS, or even God. In the end, it’s not Sylvia Browne alone that’s in the spotlight. It’s anyone who trusts their intuition or puts faith in the spiritual ability of others. Perhaps sometimes it’s right or sometimes it’s wrong, but do we only determine this and paint with a broad brush when we realize we’ve been wrong to give or receive information? What are your thoughts?

We are excited to announce that The Awakened Aura by Kala Ambrose is now the winner of three awards!

The book’s accolades include:

2013 IPPY Award (Silver, New Age [Mind-Body-Spirit] Category); the awards, launched in 1996, are designed to bring increased recognition to the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers.
Living Now Gold Medal Award (Metaphysical Category); the Living Now Book Awards celebrate the innovation and creativity of newly published books that enhance the quality of our lives.
USA Best Book Award (Gold Award Winner; New Age Non-Fiction 2012); www.USABookNews.com is an online publication providing coverage for books from mainstream and independent publishers to the world online community.

More information about these awards, Kala Ambrose, and The Awakened Aura can be found on Kala’s website at http://www.exploreyourspirit.com/awakenedaurabook.html.

Our recent release, Learning Lenormand by Marcus Katz and Tali Goodwin, is a great place to start your Lenormand studies. Marcus and Tali also have a website, Learning Lenormand and a Facebook page (details on their website) to support your Lenormand journey. Have you taken the Lenormand plunge? What do you think? Do your results differ much from your tarot work?

 

Four Llewellyn titles are IPPY award winners! These titles were named as winners in the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards, which are designed to bring increased recognition to the deserving but often unsung titles published by independent authors and publishers.

The 2013 Independent Publisher Awards (IPPYs) were revealed via an announcement on their website. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in New York on May 29. Our Llewellyn winners are below:

Our Children Live On , by Elissa Al-Chokhachy (Bronze, Aging/Death & Dying)
The Awakened Aura , by Kala Ambrose (Silver, New Age [Mind-Body-Spirit])
The Good Energy Book , by Tess Whitehurst (Bronze, New Age [Mind-Body-Spirit])
Great Sex Made Simple , by Mark A. Michaels & Patricia Johnson (Gold, Sexuality/Relationships)

In addition, one book from Llewellyn’s Midnight Ink imprint was also a winner (Hide & Snake Murder, by Jessie Chandler took Gold in the Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Fiction category).

A full list of award winners can be found here.

Congratulations to our authors!

Recently, James Ricklef asked several regular users of Tarot how they think giving readings with the cards actually works. He published the answers on his blog in two posts located HERE and HERE.

In his posts he begins by sharing his own theory and that of Robin Wood. He also shares the beliefs of Rachel Pollack, Mary K. Greer, Thalassa, Julie Cuccia-Watts, Lon Milo DuQuette, Pamela Steele, Mike Hernandez, Joseph Ernest Martin, Robert M. Place, James Wells, Bonnie Cehovet, Johanna Gargiulo-Sherman, Lisa Hunt, Ferol Humphrey, Katrina Wynne, and myself (James even included a nice little drawing to make my theory clear).

So here are 18 theories as to how the Tarot works, some being similar and some being quite different. I’m sure I could bring in many other people who could provide a wide variety of theories explaining how the Tarot works. The question that needs asking, however, is which of the theories is right, and how can the other people give great readings using the Tarot when their theories are wrong? In fact, what if they’re all wrong?

The Map is Not the Territory

On the internet it is common to have someone explain something followed by the letters “YMMV.” This means “Your Mileage May Vary,” signifying that your experience may be different. A presupposition of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is that “the map is not the territory.” This means that your impression or my impression of something is just that, an impression. It is not the actual thing, just something picked up by our senses and filtered through our minds via distortion, deletion and generalization. Maps are representations of reality. Likewise, theories are representations of reality. It is with this understanding that Ricklef wisely began his two-part post with this paragraph:

Have you ever wondered how the Tarot works?  I’ve heard many theories about this, and they vary a lot.  Perhaps there is a definitive answer, but I’ve yet to hear it.  However, does there have to be one true, definitive answer?  And is that even possible?  I suspect that there are many partially true answers, but we finite humans can’t really grasp the totality of the answer, much like the proverbial blind men examining and explaining what an elephant is.

I agree with Ricklef, although I would say that what he describes as “partially true answers” are actually “answers that are completely true to the person stating them based on their knowledge and experience.” That is, to each person who has a theory as to how the Tarot works, the answer is complete. However, each answer is only a map, and not the territory. The more complete the map, the closer it is to being an accurate representation of the territory—in this case how the Tarot actually works—but it is still just a representation.

Drugs and Placebos

A placebo is something that shouldn’t work but does. The most common use of placebos is in the testing of new drugs. A person with an ailment is given either a new drug being tested for effectiveness or a placebo, a harmless pill that should do nothing for the ailment. The amazing result is that in many ailments, people who merely think a drug they’re receiving will be effective receives positive benefits. For a drug to be seen as effective, it has to achieve a better improvement rate than that achieved by the test subjects receiving the placebo. This has two very important implications:

First, the mind is incredibly powerful, and even for very challenging and chronic ailments, the human mind, on its own, may be able to create a cure.
Second, if a placebo creates positive change in 25% of subjects, and the actual drug being tested creates positive change in 35% of the subjects, drug companies and our government considers the drug to be successful in 35% of cases (instead of 10%) and the drug may be approved for sale. That means many drugs available today are helpful to a very small percentage of people.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t take your medicines! Nor am I saying they’re all ineffective. I’m simply pointing out that even the most effective drugs don’t help everyone. People are not identical robots where parts can simply be replaced with other, universal parts. We’re each individuals, and something that works for one individual may not work for another. And that brings me (finally!) to magick.

Not Better, Different

When I first become involved in the practice of magick there was a virtual war going on between practitioners of natural and sympathetic magick, primarily used then by Wiccans, and the techniques of ceremonial magick. Each side argued as to which was better, faster, more powerful. My Modern Magick was one of the first books to say that both systems were good and powerful. Each person can use what’s best for the situation and what the person is most comfortable using. Arguing philosophy and theory can be fun, but it’s ultimately a waste of time. I think Crowley stated the ultimate secret of the powers of magick best in The Book of the Law (Chapter III, Verse 42):

Success is thy proof: argue not; convert not; talk not over much!

This agrees with something that I’ve been saying for a long time: if it works, use it. If it doesn’t work, discard it and do something else.

What About Tradition?

There are a variety of magickal paths out there. Some of them are justifiably called a “tradition.” Following a tradition, especially when you are learning magick, can be very beneficial:

It has a proven success record over time.
There are people who are familiar with it who can help you.
There are generally lots of books and resources that can provide guidance.
It’s normal to try to modify the tradition to increase your success. If success falters, you can always return to the tradition.

Some people find themselves at home in one tradition and follow it. It works for them. Some people need to modify a tradition to have success with it. Others don’t achieve magickal success with one tradition and have to try another.

Traditions are similar to effective drugs in that they will help many people and are more effective than starting on your own. But no single drug and no single magickal system will work for everyone. That’s why it’s wonderful there are so many magickal traditions available to us.

The Dark Side

Yes, there is a “dark side” to this. Some people make the error of jumping from a specific (“This works for me”) to the general (“This must work for everyone”) without evidence to support such a leap. I have absolutely no doubt that some form of magick a person has discovered works for him or her, or at least they believe it does (excluding those who are simply lying to make money off of the gullible). I encourage them to spread their information, their map of magickal practice. I hope they do! After all, merely because something doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean it won’t work for others. Spread the information. Share your map. And yeah, if you want to, sell your map at whatever price you can get for it. In my opinion that’s all good.

Sometimes, however, people discover that something is right for them and insist that it must be right for you. They’re wrong. That personal, subjective magick they’ve discovered is not universal, or at least there’s no evidence to support such universality. The purveyors of such new systems might, unfortunately, let their egos take over. “I have they only true system. Others are evil or doing things wrong. I am the only one with the truth. They are our enemies.” They work hard to create an us vs. them mentality. You can see this in politics and some religious sects as well as with some magickal groups.

And the funny thing is, 50 years later, nobody remembers them. Today, their magickal systems that were going to revolutionize all of magick have been forgotten. The messages they created or received from imagined secret masters are left to ignored volumes found in musty used book stores that are high priced not because of the value of their content, but because of their rarity to collectors. One such book I own is The Do-It-Yourself Witchcraft Guide, a small paperback by Luba Sevarg. Another I have is The Island Dialogues: Liber ALAL by Llee (777) Heflin. One set of books I looked at many years ago but didn’t obtain was the multi-volume Znus is Znees by C.F. Russell.

I’m not saying the information in these books didn’t have intense value to their authors, only that they have little or no importance to magickal people today. I have them for reference, especially for questions I receive. I don’t worry about the writers of such books who are often self-styled leaders of small occult groups. They have a path that works for them which is a good thing…for them. However, I do worry about the people who are caught up in their charisma and self-delusion. On the other hand, if it’s true that “when the student is ready, the teacher will appear,” then it’s also true that when the student is ready to be misled, the deceiver will appear. I’m reminded again of the advice from Crowley’s book, “argue not; convert not; talk not over much!”

I’ll share my map of openness and effectiveness. If it works for you, great! If it doesn’t work for you, try something else. Others may be so sure what they’re teaching is right they start doing things that are wrong. The bottom line in this consists of the following understanding and practices:

There is no universal way that is right for everyone.

Study a path and learn it.
Modify the path to improve it.
If you begin to falter, return to the tradition.
Share what you learn with others, but understand that your path is a way that works for you, not the only path that must work for all.
Do the work.

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Debra Moffitt, author of Awake in the World and the new Garden of Bliss.

Everyone wants to find happiness, but what if there is something deeper, something more lasting? Happiness is good. It’s a wonderful feeling that comes from buying a new dress or eating an ice cream cone. It may be connected with having physical desires met, but happiness can be fleeting and temporary. Joy dives deeper and last longer. It touches into the spiritual and comes from within. Bliss is the ultimate harvest of spiritual life; it’s an experience that transcends the physical and, according to wisdom traditions, it is our true nature. If you want to find that path through the shades of happiness and joy to bliss, how do you get there? One way to begin is to cultivate your inner secret garden, that sacred space within you where the seeds you plant can be cultivated and grow into a harvest of joy.

Some essential tools that help to dig deep and tend the inner garden include a regular meditation practice, a dedication to pay attention to and act on the guidance of your inner gardener—that higher, wiser part of you that is Divine—and a yearning to get rid of inner junk and pests that stand in the way. This junk is often old stuff from the past, including attitudes and habits that may have served us well at one time, but now just get in the way and hold us back. It’s time to let go of these and grow into the new life that’s waiting.

One of my favorite ways to cultivate bliss in my secret garden is through consciously choosing guiding values. Values are like seeds; they may include peace, kindness, generosity, joy, determination, patience, and more. When we choose the seeds we want to grow more of in our life, we can begin to cultivate them both inside during meditation and also through actions in our daily lives. One of the seeds I tend regularly is love. As the inner tending and nurturing progresses, we attune more deeply to spirit and become one with its qualities of peace, awareness, and bliss. These qualities are our divine nature and the more they are expressed in our lives, the closer we live to the Source. With patience and perseverance, the secret garden transforms into a garden of bliss.

Our thanks to Tess for her guest post! For more from Debra Moffitt, read her article “Cultivating Bliss: 4 Ways to Explore Your Inner Garden.”

In a recent post, Psyche gives some excellent information on how to give a Tarot reading. Specifically, she advises that the information the reader gives should be presented in a manner that is useful to the person receiving the reading.

This sounds like it should be elementary information—if the information presented in a reading isn’t useful, it’s basically meaningless data. However, Psyche’s idea is actually a rather advanced concept. In fact, it is often one of the most challenging aspects of giving a Tarot reading. The reader has to give up being centered on himself or herself and turn all attention to the client. The reader, in seconds, has to determine how to best convey information so the client is

not overwhelmed by what they hear and ignores it, and
affected by what is being revealed, so the client will act on it.

In my experience, the best natural Tarot readers can do this instinctively, and other people wishing to learn the Tarot can learn this through developing their skills at empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Psyche gives an example of this taken from the book, Two Tracts on Cartomancy by Austin Osman Spare:

I was telling a friend’s fortune, and could ‘see’ that he would die within a few months. Naturally, I did not tell him so, but what I did advise him was to at once put his affairs in order and that in a few months there would be a very great change in his affairs, of which not much could be said. Meantime, there was great happiness for him, though he was to guard against accident. He was happy for the few months that he lived.

Several years ago I had a similar experience. I was living in San Diego and giving Tarot readings regularly at a psychic fair held every other weekend. An elderly woman, small and bent from age, and with a kindly face and smile, told me her story. She had poor finances. She had been studying the path of a certain guru and had obtained through the guru’s group a roommate who helped pay the bills. She couldn’t exist without a roommate.

But the roommate was very severe and constantly criticizing her for not working harder and advancing faster. It was making her very unhappy and harming her health. Her questions to me were whether she would be getting a new roommate and would her spiritual work pay off?

Divination, Not Fortune-Telling

Before telling what happened, I need to share my approach to giving Tarot readings. I perform divinations. By this I mean through the use of spiritual technology such as the Tarot, I can provide information about the likely future if a person continues on their current path. However, once a person has this information, he or she is free to keep going to the likely conclusion or change and overcome adversity or enhance and encourage something positive. I do not believe in the concept of “fate,” or that something “must” happen. Rather, I believe in free will and the ability to change our futures. If everything is predetermined fate then divinations are irrelevant and magick is impossible.

I look at divinations as being like the advice from a doctor or lawyer. They have specific knowledge and training that I don’t have, but it’s up to me whether I take the advice. Similarly, a Tarot reader or diviner obtains information about your probable future, allowing you to accept or change it. With divination, I might say, “The cards indicate challenges with an ocean voyage next month. If you take such a voyage it could be very dangerous.” This is practical and useful advice. Knowing a sea voyage could be dangerous allows a person to choose to avoid such a journey.

On the other hand, fortune telling works with fate. “You will go on an ocean voyage and the ship will sink.” How useless. If there’s nothing that can be done to avoid that fate, how is telling a person this going to help that person? It may, though, leave them in horror and shock, feeling there’s nothing they can do to escape their supposed fate. Knowledge is useless? Magick is useless? Moving to Utah and staying away from an ocean is useless?

I don’t buy it. I believe the purpose of divination is so we can create our own futures, not just to reveal our fates.

The Reading

Normally, when I give a Tarot reading, I lay out the cards one at a time. I read each card as it comes up, relating it to the position in the spread and to the other cards that are already showing. At the conclusion I summarize and put everything together.

The cards, for me, always give advice. They tell how a person can overcome difficulties or make good things better. One of my goals as a reader is to give hope for a better future.

The elderly woman I was reading for had her fingertips resting gently on the table as I put out the cards. She’d look at the card and then look at me with what I felt was both agony from her painful, bent body and mind-numbing financial situation, while hoping for a better future. I didn’t want to disappoint her.

When I give a Tarot reading I feel it is vitally important to share exactly what the cards are telling me; the truth and nothing but the truth. Some people equate the truth with being brutal. In another field, a doctor can say, “You’re going to die a painful death” or “We have no way of knowing how long you have to live. There are going to be challenges ahead for you, but I’ll be there, assisting you every way I can.” Both are the complete truth. One is brutal while the other is helpful and gives hope. My approach is the latter.

The first card was the Death card. Normally, this means positive evolutionary change. But reading the Tarot is more than memorizing a bunch of meanings and repeating them. In my experience it requires the use of intuition, attunement to the person you’re reading for, and attunement to the spiritual energies. I did not like what I was sensing.

Instead of reading the card as I normally do, I turned over the next one. And the next. And the next. They were all cards of endings, terminations, completions, sudden change. Although rare, this reading was predicting her physical death. It might be delayed, but it was coming; and it was coming soon.

This was not fate. There was no prediction of a specific method, date, or time of her demise, only that if she followed the path she was on the result was clear. The challenge before me was how to share this information in a way that would be positive and provide hope for a better future.

What to Say

As I wrote above, my ethics require me to share the complete truth. But how could I tell her this information in a useful way, a way that would give hope for a better future? I felt myself beginning to sweat—not perspire, sweat. I looked at the sweet woman and saw that she was hanging on what I was about to say. Knowing that she was on a spiritual path with a guru gave me an approach.

I smiled as benevolently as I could. I told her, “In the next few months your life is going to go through a remarkable change. Everything about your life will alter. You will no longer have to worry about your financial situation and all of your aches and pains will fade away and become unimportant. Spiritually, you will find yourself moving faster and faster on your path, more than you ever dreamed you could, and you’ll feel closer to God. You won’t have to worry about roommates, and you’ll find that you have more time than ever to relax and enjoy being with old friends, especially spiritual friends who can lead you on your path.”

I went on in this direction for several minutes. Every time I looked up from the cards at her she had that same look of hope and wanting more information in her eyes. I think my shirt was almost drenched from the sweat.

After I had finished telling her the complete truth according to the cards in a way I felt she could understand, I asked if she had any questions. “No,” she said, with a look of contentment, “that’s exactly what I thought. I just wanted to make sure. Of all the readers here I was drawn to you. I thought you’d tell me the truth and I believe you have. Thank you so much.”

The woman arose. Now standing a bit taller, she slowly walked out. I believe she had felt she was going to pass over soon, but the lack of confirming information had made her fearful. Now, believing she was moving toward a change that was going to be positive, she was able to face her remaining time on the physical plane with strength and hope for a better, more spiritual future.

Shaking, I had to take a break. A long break.

Many of the readers had seen her during previous psychic fairs. She never showed up at a psychic fair again.