A Taste of Tarot by Hilary and Lessons Learned

The beginning of a internet journey...

Guess what! My fully functional website launches this Friday! (so you better stop by then to find out what goodies and reading specials are happening!)

This website is the cumulation of nearly five months of work with my tarot mentor, Theresa Reed. It is something I am extremely proud of, and something I will continue to be proud of. Most of this work has been a cosmic kick in the pants, the crux of the message being to not hide my light under a bushel. This is somewhat terrifying to step into the limelight (much like that Fool above teetering on the precipice), but I acknowledge that it is something I need to do to help my business grow. If you have been "hiding" your talents in some way, take my advice: Stop. Stop it right now. You are worthy of so much more than you give yourself credit for.

Lessons learned (so far):

1. If you are not happy in the job you're in, take the steps to change the situation. If you cannot change the situation, change your perspective. You may find the results liberating. 
2. We make SO many excuses when we are afraid. My excuse was the tax man/IRS/blah-blah-blah/etc. were going to come get me if I even thought about making tarot my business. Guess what? It's an excuse. And if I do everything through the correct channels, my fear of the guvment (misspelling intended) is unfounded.
3. Damn, a lot of us tarot readers have low self-esteem. Were we not loved enough as children? Where the hell did this low self-esteem epidemic come from? I know a lot of amazing readers (listen, peeps, these are published authors of tarot books) that suffer from low self-esteem. Surprising, right? We all have our issues. Doesn't make them real. Doesn't make what we think true. Pluck up and see above: you are worthy of so much more than you give yourself credit for.
4. You gotta spend money to make money. Sadly, a truth to some degree. But if you keep up to date with your bookkeeping and use a spreadsheet... who knows what success you can accomplish! There are also plenty of ways to advertise for free or on the cheap. Applying a creative brain to it absolutely helps. And the phrase "I'm just not a business person" is... guess what? Yup. An excuse.
5. There is a wormhole that is directly and inversely proportional to the amount of time you put into this. Surprisingly, as busy as I've been, time seems to warp and allow me to do everything I want to do! The mantra of work hard, play hard has been really working for me! Also, every social opportunity I turn into a "marketing" opportunity (in a non-skeezy way, of course). I run in some weird, strange, esoteric circles. Tarot is a subject that happens to come up a lot in social situations. And I say... "What a coincidence! I'm a tarot reader!" I'm letting it all hang out.
6. A mentor is a wonderful thing. They push us SO much farther than we're willing to go ourselves. They tell us stuff about ourselves that we pooh-pooh or explain away. They make us do things that we're afraid to do. They allow us to grow and flourish under a watchful eye. They give us advice so we don't make costly mistakes. So, in case I haven't said it enough: Theresa, thank you. A million times thank you.

"Leap, and the net will appear."--John Burroughs

If You Sprinkle When You Tinkle... Leaving Clients Better Than You Found Them

"If you sprinkle when you tinkle
please be neat and wipe the seat"

Variations on this “poem” include the second line being “please be a sweetie and wipe the seatie” instead, but you get the idea...

I saw this in a bathroom recently and I thought about tarot. Weird, right? I know. But most hours of the day I think about tarot, so it’s not so weird to me. Okay, so how did this simple little sign about other people’s urine make me think about tarot?

I’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on my tarot business lately... stuff that y’all will get to see when my website launches at the end of September (and hopefully luuuuuv). It’s been “man behind the curtain” work, involving but not limited to a lot of meta stuff like motivation, how tarot works, how tarot works when I read, my style of reading, how I came to this work, my ethics, confidence issues, and where I’m heading. A lot of stuff that I really never thought about until I starting writing my web copy. And it was HARD. And now I’m coming out the other side of it, and I’m realizing it was hard but WORTH IT.

Back to the “poem”. I would like to make a version of this poem, and hang it about my tarot table (or wherever I choose to read). Why? Because this is a part of my personal ethics, and it boils down to this:
 
I want a person to leave a reading in the same condition (and hopefully better) than the start.

Sometimes a reading is heavy. A lot of shit comes up. Do I let the client just walk away after a reading, covered in that heaviness? Hell no. I clean them up. I buoy them up. I try to find the silver lining. Sometimes it’s really hard to find, but there is ALWAYS a course of action for the client to take, including inaction. There is always a choice to make, and that rests with the client. There is a song by the band Rush called Freewill... “You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.” Either way, whatever they decide... It’s the client’s decision. And I want that decision to come from them, and from a position of empowerment.


Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net


What personal ethics do you have that come from an unlikely source? Feel free to describe in the Comments section... I would love to hear them!