‘Not possible’ querents, impossible readings

I like reading tarot blogs – there’s a whole supportive culture out there of readers, and the challenges they face are not so different from   those encountered by Yi people. For instance, here’s Brigit writing warmly and with a good dose of common sense about dealing with difficult clients.

It’s actually odd how few of these ‘difficult’ people I’ve ever met. My clients tend to be self-aware, imaginative, responsive people – I don’t believe I’ve ever met the ‘sceptic’, nor the ‘it’s an emergency’ one. But here’s one I have got to know:

The “Not Possible” Client

Reader: “From what I’m seeing here, the relationship is well and truly over.”

Client: “Nope. Not possible. He loves me.”

Reader: “I understand you’re hurting right now, but the Ten of Swords is showing me that this relationship has come to an end.”

Client: “You’ve got it all wrong. He loves me and we’re going to be together. I don’t care what you say.”

Hmm.

And you’re secretly thinking, “Then why the hell did you just pay $50 for a reading?!”

My Advice for Dealing with this Type of Client…

No amount of reasoning is going to change this client’s thinking. She has a very clear idea in her head about what’s happening and if anyone offers something different to that, it will fall on deaf ears.

You may be best to say, “It sounds like you already have a pretty good feel for the situation, and you already have the answers you need, just by listening to your gut. Shall we move on to another topic?”

(from Brigit at http://www.biddytarot.com/dealing-with-difficult-clients/)

Or you might not… for whatever it’s worth, that’s not how I’d respond.

To begin with, going back to first principles: I, the reader, might be wrong. Stranger things have happened. Especially in a situation where any impartial outside observer would agree on the facts of the matter – obviously he’s just not that into you, obviously the ‘business opportunity’ is a money pit and/or scam, obviously the only way to deal with the tyrannical boss is to leave the job… – it can be tricky to avoid joining the ranks of those impartial observers and to notice what the reading’s actually saying. (And the better you know the person, the more insight of your own you have into the situation, the trickier it gets. It is very, very hard to listen openly to someone and have a real conversation with them when your mental image of the situation is completely different from theirs.)

So. You might be wrong.

But if you’re not? Suppose the visible facts of the matter, everyone who knows the situation and all the readings agree that there is no game in this field, no life in this empty city, the future holds Stripping Away/ Splitting Apart, maybe with some 24.6 thrown in for good measure, so you’d eat your yarrow stalks and/or card deck if you’re wrong about this one… and still the querent’s saying, ‘No, that’s not how it is at all. You wouldn’t understand, but I know.’

Then what? As Brigit says, ‘no amount of reasoning is going to change this client’s thinking.’

Well… how fortunate that this isn’t even remotely the diviner’s job.

As a reader, your role is really not to take the insight and vision the reading gives you and transplant that into the other person’s head. It can’t be done. Vulcan mind melds are actually not real.

What to do instead?

In the heat of the moment, full of your awareness of the reading, compassion and frustration, this is hard. But what I try to do is to let reasoning go, and just share imagery and tell stories. I’d be quite open about this: ‘You know, this really doesn’t look promising to me at all… but let me tell you the story of the line, and you can listen and find what resonates with you.’

And then maybe something like this:

‘It just says, “In the field, no game.”

In old China, people actually laid out ‘fields’ especially for hunting. They drew the boundaries, set out to hunt down what they wanted within them. But in this field, within these lines, there’s nothing – no animals, no birds, not a whisker.

It’s odd how the oracle doesn’t say that this is bad. Just that there’s this field where you go hunting, and what you’re looking for isn’t there…

You’re persevering in pushing upward, you have this enduring aspiration and desire to make progress… only the field’s empty…’

And no more than that: tell the story, listen to the response. Maybe they just say the field can’t be empty; maybe they insist on reading the relating hexagram and ignoring the rest. But maybe, somewhere in their response, is a tiny seed that’s the beginnings of understanding. If you detect its presence, it’s not a great idea to pounce, dig it up, throw it into a pan of boiling water and shout ‘Germinate!’ at it. You say ‘oh, yes’, echo their insight back to them. You use the word ‘maybe’, you leave questions hanging, and then you retreat and leave space for the imagery to work.

A mystery of divination: oracles don’t just tell an objective truth; they talk to people. If we’re deluded, sometimes the oracle will puncture that delusion in one go; sometimes it interacts quietly with the delusion to foster sanity. Some readings come like lightning and transform thinking in a split second – but some changes of thinking need time to grow, and may need to grow in ways that you, as reader, have absolutely no clue about. Not every change has to happen on the road to Damascus.

As I was saying, this is hard for a reader. You see someone pouring out their love or time or money (or all three), full of hope and yearning; you know this is going nowhere… of course you want to do something to make this stop – and pretty soon you find that you can’t.

Only… nothing is broken here, because your task as reader is not to change anyone, but to give them the gift of connection and relationship with an oracle. The changing part will be taken care of. As Stephen Karcher said to me many years ago, when I was dithering anxiously over beginning phone readings, ‘Trust the oracle.’