Big news: More chances to take my Through the Portal workshop! [ADDED DATES]

UPDATE: 

Now you can download a short audio announcement about my Image and Psyche: Through the Portal workshop here. 

And, wonderful news! We'll be holding a repeat of Through the Portal on Saturday, October 4 (1:30-4pm) and November 8 (1:30-4pm), both in great Brooklyn locations. Please feel free to pass this along to your friends and give them the link to my Contact form here.

Journey through Tarot's portals with Eva Yaa Asantewaa [NEW DATES ADDED!]

I'm teaching a new Image and Psyche workshop, Through the Portal, on Saturday, September 20 (1:30-4pm), hosted again in convenient downtown Brooklyn.

Archetypal symbols in Tarot and other imagery oracles are not just beautiful pictures. They are portals to spaces for creativity, wisdom and healing. Where do they lead YOU? 

Journey with me and find out at my next Image and Psyche workshop!

Admission fee: $30 

(pre-registration required by Saturday, 9/13)

Space is limited, and I don't want you to miss out. If you're interested, scroll down to my Contact Form here, and get in touch soon. I will reply with new registration details.

I look forward to journeying with you on September 20!

******

UPDATE: Now you can download a short audio announcement about my Through the Portal workshop here. And, wonderful news! We'll be holding a repeat of Through the Portal on Saturday, October 4 and November 8, both 1:30-4pm and both in great Brooklyn locations. Please feel free to pass this along to your friends and give them the link to my Contact Form here.

Book Review: "Clairvoyance for Beginners" by Alexandra Chauran

Clairvoyance for Beginners
Easy Techniques to Enhance Your Psychic Visions
by Alexandra Chauran (Llewellyn Publications, 2014; 216 pages)
ISBN9780738739151

reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, hummingwitch

Alexandra Chauran's book comes along at a good moment for me as, in the course of trying to analyse how my work with cards and imagery produces results, I'm looking at my experience with clairvoyance as the Super Glue that keeps it all together.

Card divination can be considered a form of clairvoyance projected into material form, a way in which perception can grapple with elusive, symbolic imagery and extract meaning from it. Also, for me, reading oracles like Tarot, Lenormand, Lotería and regular playing cards stimulates and opens up space for other imagery to sprout in the mind and contribute to a reading's information and counsel.

No matter how fabulous they are, oracle cards are like training wheels for something even more amazing. Simply stated, concentrated study of visual imagery can bring out the clairvoyant in you.

A lot of card readers probably avoid using terms like "clairvoyant" and "psychic" because of how these terms have been overused in popular culture, exploited by scam artists and ridiculed by the mainstream media. But we should reclaim these identities and functions if they ring true to who we are and what we do. Chauran's well-written guide provides an easy-to-follow and comprehensive program for initiating or enhancing your skills in this area.

Chauran, a doctoral candidate living in Washington State, describes clairvoyance as "the ability to see literal or symbolic truth, either with one's eyes or the mind's eye. The word means 'clear seeing,' thereby defining the perception as being both precise and accurate." In an age where many of us walk around with our eyes locked onto electronic screens, we could benefit from being more observant of what's around us (and within us) at any given moment.

The author's words resonated with me: "When I was a child, I didn't just have an imaginary friend, I was constantly co-creating myself along with entire imaginary worlds." Indeed, this sort of thing is basic training for the future metaphysician, ritualist and psychic. Some of us learn to fear our natural abilities and shut them away for many years or forever. Happily, the young Chauran developed her skills within a family where her experiences and perceptions were welcomed.

In a series of exercises, she passes along her methods for paying attention to information coming from visual sources, discerning meaning and telling the stories encoded in visions. But it's not all about taking in the view. Chauran recommends creating it, too--through constructing vision boards for what we want to manifest, through sketching what we see, through setting the best conditions for dreaming, and through meditative visualization. It's an abundant, ongoing exchange with visual reality. She carefully guides the reader through advanced practices that beginning students can find baffling, such as trance work, psychometry and scrying.

In her section on psychometry--the psychic reading of the energy and history of an object--Chauran encourages the student reader to fully feel the telling emotions that can well up:

It's okay if you inexplicably laugh or cry. Remember, you are in charge of this meditative session and your emotions. Our culture often teaches that extreme emotions mean that we are out of control. However, the clairvoyant needs to be able to experience extreme emotions while remaining in control. As a beginner, you may need to fight against your cultural training or against your coping mechanisms, both of which are geared to repress extreme emotions when faced with life challenges.

Be assured, Chauran offers appropriate grounding practices to help readers stay clear-headed when faced with powerful visions and emotions. She also discusses important questions of ethics in the reader-querent relationship and guides the reader through a survey of the most common concerns that bring querents to the table.

The book includes a wonderful dictionary of common symbols for numbers, colors and a range of items from Alligator and Anchor to Wolf and Wood, but the meanings noted here are just for starters. Chauran wisely advises that symbols can mean different things to different people, a useful lesson for purists who insist that everyone must adhere to one or another codified system.

Indeed, in my experience--as in Chauran's--symbols speak in the moment, to the matter at hand, to the sensibilities of the specific reader and the needs of the specific querent. A guide to standard symbology helps give a beginning reader confidence but, in time, that growing confidence can breed a lovely fluidity in the way symbols are understood and communicated. Symbolic imagery will not remain stuck on a sheet of cardboard, in the pages of a book or in the folds of an arcane tradition. It's alive.

Learn more about Clairvoyance for Beginners here.

Eva Yaa Asantewaa, hummingwitch

Book review: The Clairvoyant Path

The Clairvoyant Path: Follow Your Inner Wisdom to Healing, Empowerment & Change
by Michelle DesPres
(Llewellyn Worldwide; ISBN: 9780738730189)
Paperback. 240 pages. $14.95 USD

When I attended clairvoyant school, I had no idea what I was actually getting myself into. I thought I would be going to school and learning to read people without using my tarot cards....However, what I experienced had little to do with clairvoyantly reading someone else, and everything to do with healing myself. -- Michelle DesPres, The Clairvoyant Path

As Michelle DesPres sees it--and, as a clairvoyant medium, she possibly sees quite a bit--our troubled, threatened world is due as much for revelation, re-evaluation and reinvention as revolution. While I'm completely sympathetic to DesPres' concern for our beloved Gaia, I'm still on the hunt for innovative books on psychic development that cut to the chase.

I know that might sound selfish and shallow, but that kind of instruction book is in short supply, whereas, if you've ever just taken a stroll around a New Age bookstore, you're familiar with most of what the Colorado-based author and former radio host shares in The Clairvoyant Path.

Declaring that "peace doesn't actually come by rectifying our differences with others; it comes by rectifying our differences with our self first," she guides the reader through an exploration of self and Self via well-known methods of active imagination, chakra viewing, energy work, past life inquiry and the like. You are instructed to create an inner screen, visualize and interpret symbolic roses, run energy through your body into the earth and vice versa, releasing old, negative baggage--the usual drill. It's mostly a valid and valuable drill but lacking a fresh approach to necessitate yet another book about it.

I wouldn't mind this so much if The Clairvoyant Path were a well-written guide, inviting and even fun to read. However, DesPres's fairly simple, straightforward development exercises actually take up a minor portion of her book. They're surrounded and clogged by earnest declarations like this passage from a section entitled "Envisioning the New Education of Inner Wisdom":

Today I find myself yet again needing to stand up for what is right and fair in regards to education and individuality. With our energetic shifting climate, we are offered an opportunity to begin honoring the innate diversity in every individual by simply re-educating ourselves about our spirits, their connectedness, and the magic of their complexities.

Or this section on free will:

If our soul's purpose is to enact whatever purpose we desire, the it is our sole purpose to enact our free will. The implications of enacting our free will are enormous as this enables us to alter the fundamentals of our lives. In turn, the implications of neglecting to enact our free [sic] can eventually lead to a type of spiritual impoverishment from which we may feel our only escape is death.

My free will inclines me to escape this book and keep hunting.

Learn more about DesPres and The Clairvoyant Path at Llewellyn Worldwide.

Review of Teresa Brady's "Ignite Your Psychic Intuition"

Ignite Your Psychic Intution: An A to Z Guide to Developing Your Sixth Sense
by Teresa Brady
Llewellyn Worldwide, 2011
paperback, 269pp
ISBN: 978-0-7387-2170-5

No surprise that Teresa Brady is not only psychic but also works as an attorney. She wields a clear, assertive, persuasive writing style. She's confident and clever--but not overly clever--and aims to instill a similar confidence in her readers. All of that, and some entertaining tales of how she has used clairvoyance in her legal practice, might be the most valuable things about this guide. Unfortunately, the A-to-Z format looks a bit gimmicky and forced.

Brady employs "...a 26-letter mnemonic method I believe will make recall of the tools in this book easy and fun to experience. Years after reading this book, you will instantly remember chapters just by thinking of their corresponding letter" (p. 59).

Do we really need separate chapters on "Breathing" or "Keep Journals" or "Love" or "Peacefulness" simply because of the initials B, K, L and P? This format might visually set Ignite apart from other New Age-y psychic development workbooks, but the material within lacks sufficient distinctiveness and substance. Now consider that Llewellyn's market for books of this nature is probably not absolute newbies but readers who have already eagerly consumed a lot of information--good, bad and indifferent--about all things psychic and paranormal.

Brady's advisory chapters are less useful than earlier passages that help readers connect to one woman's actual experience of being psychic. For instance, she mentions that the heightened senses often overlap, and we simultaneously receive "messages coming through more than one sense" (p. 5). She acknowledges that "third eye vision" might be a misleading term since "you can experience third eye vision from the top, front, sides, and back of the head; or when your eyes are open, closed, looking up or looking down" (p. 8). Her description of how she uses directionality and color in clairvoyance to determine the time factor in her received information can be helpful to psychic development students struggling to recognize, accept and utilize their own idiosyncratic ways of getting and interpreting information.

Ignite is advertised as being "designed for people with busy lives," but if your life is truly so jam-packed that you need a lightweight introduction to opening your mind to the Universe, that condition already offers you a lesson worth learning.

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa, hummingwitch

BelindaGrace on the practice of clairvoyance

You Are Clairvoyant: Simple Ways to Develop Your Psychic Gifts
by BelindaGrace

Llewellyn Worldwide, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7387-2723-3
paperback, 222 pages

Reading BelindaGrace's You Are Clairvoyant is like listening to a kind, plain-spoken counselor. This teacher exudes sincerity and compassion, and this is not a showy book nor a typical New Age manual. It does not feel derivative like so many in this genre. In fact, for some readers, this introduction to clairvoyance might seem a bit tame and too simple to be powerful. But I don't think BelindaGrace intends it for readers who need psychic development guides to be fancy, esoteric and overly complex. She leaves the razzle dazzle strictly between you and whatever will come to your imagination, and that's all to the good.

As you will learn, imagination is the key:

Your imagination is a very valuable tool. Use it, exercise it, treasure and respect it because it is your vital link to the beauty and magic of all the non-physical levels of life. (p. 26)

I greatly appreciate her linkage of imagination in creative ability with imagination in psychic development and her noting that suppression of imagination--"it has no monetary value" to mainstream society--stunts children in so many ways. If you have ever suspected that there's more to you than you've allowed yourself (or been allowed) to express, this book can help.

If you're reading this blog, you're likely quite familiar with many of the topics BelindaGrace addresses--including chakras, visualization, past lives and meditation. However, you might enjoy passing this book along to someone who, new to this type of worldview and practice, could benefit from gentle encouragement in the act of "meeting the Universe half-way."

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, hummingwitch (http://hummingwitch.blogspot.com)

Points of view

When you close your eyes to meditate, pray or even just to take a breath and get a little peace at a stressful moment, where do your eyes look?

That might seem like a funny question, but check this out: When your eyes are covered by your eyelids, where they seem to be looking--according to an actual physical sensation or your imagination--can give me some sense of what you are looking at, what that inner vision means to you and what light it might shed on the question or concern you have brought to our reading session.

Here are the possibilities:

• straight ahead
• to the right
• to the left
• tilted slightly upward through your forehead
• tilted upward through the crown of your head
  
• tilted slightly downward
• behind your head
• from a point above your head

The level, straight-ahead position focuses you in the current moment. It is also the place of manifestation. When you focus there, you are bringing the energy of possibilities into coherence and, to the extent that we can do this, nailing it. Whatever you envision in the other positions can be brought here, if desired, and infused with the intention of manifestation.

The rightward position is a place of the potential future. It is about creativity and has a warm, positive vibe. Use it to visualize what you would like to have happen, then anchor those visions by moving your eyes front and center.

The leftward position is a place of the past, and it is good site for examining, evaluating and selecting--or rejecting and/or letting go of--ideas and things.

The forehead position correlates to the idea of the Third Eye chakra. Focusing here, you are seeking things that cannot be immediately seen with the human, physical eyes. You are seeking their mysteries. It is a profound truth-seeking position. It is also a remote-viewing (seeing at a distance) position.

The crown position correlates to the idea of the Crown chakra. Focusing here, you are on the cusp of the liminal, shamanic space between worlds. You are able to see, comprehend and communicate with the dual nature (material/spiritual) of all things in physical existence and to apprehend spirit as it exists in all things.

The downward position signifies that you are reading--as if from an invisible book resting in your lap--information about a person, place, thing or situation.

The behind-the-head position--which should remind us of the expression "having eyes at the back of your head"--takes you into seldom-visited depths of self and into the deep past. There is much to be learned here--and in back of the entire body--that reveals what we, as three-dimensional, local ego selves, have little or no awareness of and often cannot control.

The above-the-head position correlates to what some have called a Transpersonal Point, a few feet above the Crown chakra. Here, your vision and awareness are transpersonal and multidimensional.

I became interested in these closed-eye positions when I realized that my own closed eyes typically look downward or feel as if they're slightly tilted up to my forehead when I'm doing readings for my clients. I have begun to deliberately retrieve or accept energy, information and insights from more of these positions and to explore what's happening when clients close their eyes to remember something or to perhaps to visualize something else.

All of these positions are valuable modalities of psychospiritual development, and I encourage you to explore them, too, and keep track of your experiences in your journal. If you'd like to share your results with me, I'd be most delighted to read them.

(c) 2007, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, hummingwitch