Protek not Atak

Autumn is in the air and I for one welcome my russet hued, new pencil case overlord. If you’re like me and your emotional/energetic year runs from September to September, you might want to sweep a new broom and get a tarot reading with me. You can book in with me here.

I’m still having an ever evolving and delicious creative conversation with

Kim Druker Stockwell

as her oracle deck shifts from her imagination through her paintbrush and into life. The focus of her work is all about celebrating women in mid life and beyond. I am a woman in mid life and beyond and being celebrated is a lot of fun. I am excited for this deck.

The glorious

Sarah C Swett

whose work is beautiful, thoughtful and inspiring had a reading with me and was kind enough to talk about it here. Her newsletter is a treat whether I’m in it or not.

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Last time I had just found out that I was probably a reluctant lady wizard with strong views about public nudity. This discovery led to the first clients who a) paid me for my work and b) wanted me for my skills and not because I was being paraded about like a reluctant Sideshow Bob.

Although I mostly just read cards for people, I did get the odd request that put the weird in odd. One lady collected antique jewellery and asked me if I could read it for her. Another lady asked the same question but about large pieces of old furniture. The reading of objects is known as psychometry and it’s something that my granny was very good at. I had no idea if I could do it and even if I could, what could I say about an Anglo Saxon ring or an Eighteenth Century four poster bed that could be proven to be true? I was never going to get a gig on the Antiques Roadshow, (which is good because I have strong feelings about Fiona Bruce).

I explained this to the women, who were absolutely ok with the fact that I might not be able to do it and even if I could, who would know if what I was saying was unmitigated chutney? So I went off and read bracelets and chairs for a while, but I didn’t love it.

The problem I had with the objects was that I found them too noisy. They’d been around for a long time and every person who had owned or lived with them had left a bit of themselves behind. It took an extraordinary amount of focus to drown out the clamour and hold onto one voice or one story. It’s better if the object has belonged solely to one person, but that’s asking the impossible of a four hundred year old bed. The people I read for were happy enough to pay for what I was able to tell them, but I didn’t feel comfortable with it, so I retired my psychometric life early doors.

Now that I was working with the cards, protecting myself and preserving my energy was more important than ever, which is where the psychic protection course at the College of Psychic Studies came in handy.

Again, I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the woman who ran the course, but she was brilliant. The difficulty with all psychic work is that like reading Medieval bracelets, it’s very much a matter of trust in the process and the person with virtually no evidence/tangible proof that something is real/working.

If you don’t trust the person who is teaching or working with you, even if they are saying something which later turns out to be true for you, it probably won’t help you. You might not choose not to act on what you don’t wholly believe. You might, even if your conscious mind wants to believe, not be able to work with the person or knowledge because your unconscious mind considers the level of vulnerability and trust too risky or dangerous for you.

I signed up for the psychic protection course, not because I wholly believed in it, but because I was desperate enough to try something that promised to give me a level of control over the barrage of information and voices that were flooding into my head all the time.

I am, for a woman who makes a living out of harnessing the power of widdly wee and woo, highly sceptical. At times I am forced to contend with a deep level of irritation at the world in which I find myself. The irony is not lost on me, but my intolerance for Mystic Meg levels of psychic nonsense will not die and I have often found myself at odds with people and their spiritual practice. I have tried many things over the years but have only chosen to hand my vulnerability and my cash over to a handful of people more than once.

What I learned is that it doesn’t really matter what the spiritual practice is, it matters who practices it and why. Dabbling in the realms of the ineffable is, by its very nature, difficult to describe. Things that happen beyond words and the concrete and visible often get mangled in translation.

I am not really a tarot reader. What I do is something else that is a lot harder to explain, but tarot reading is the easiest vehicle by which to deliver that doing to people in a way that doesn’t leave everyone deeply confused. This misalignment happens all the time. I have seen Reiki practitioners who are definitely doing more than Reiki, people who work with crystals and auras and colour and sound who are doing something else alongside working with crystals and auras and sound. The tools are rarely the thing that upset me, but the people wielding them are a different thing altogether.

Psychic protection is all about exploring your vulnerability and learning how to strengthen it. It asks you to go to the thinnest places in your psyche and muck about on the edges of your understanding. With the wrong information or a careless tutor you can find yourself letting in more of the things you wanted to keep out. You really need to trust the person guiding you through the liminal spaces between you and the rest of the universe. Thankfully I did, and she did a great job.

We worked largely through visualisation and guided meditation over the weeks of the course. I had had a traumatising experience with hypnotherapy in my teens that made me deeply afraid of any and all meditative/hypnotic practices and it speaks volumes for the teacher that I was able to trust her enough to do the work at all.

What I loved about it was how utterly calm and matter of fact she was about what we were doing. She did not have an agenda or any theories about why we could do what we did and what we were there for. It was a bit like having a plumber come over and tell you how to fix a leaky tap. Everything was geared towards putting her teachings into practice to get the result we wanted.

She was the first person I encountered who consciously made the connection between your day to day life and your spiritual life and wanted to make both of them work. She may well have been interested in ascending to a higher plane, but in class we focused on tasks that allowed us to get through our real life in more comfort. She understood that it might be absolutely wild to tune into your neighbour’s thoughts, but that it might not be helpful if you needed to be civil to them while you were working out whose responsibility painting the garden fence was.

She was particularly brilliant about using ordinary objects to support your spiritual practice. She pointed out that while having four million hand carved crystals might be aesthetically pleasing, salt was also a crystal that worked brilliantly to cleanse and protect you and your home. We also did work with water, (tap not holy/Evian), fire and earth, all of which were inexpensive and freely available.

She was also great at offering short, effective rituals that didn’t require you to sit in the Lotus position opening your third eye for forty five minutes if you had a lot on. Grounding rituals, cleansing rituals, rituals for cutting ties with people who wanted to give you all their bad feelings and/or take all your good ones were all things we learned. Rituals for closing down not just internal chatter but the effects of listening to other people’s actual chatter were so helpful, as was the ability to tune in and out by degrees, like a radio. It’s fair to say that I’ve used something she taught me in that class every day of my life since I took it. Of all the things I have done over the years, it remains the best investment in myself I ever made.

Once the course was done I was ready to build on what I was doing and see if I could turn it into a real job, which is where we will go next time.