Once more through Tarot's portal!

from The Wild Unknown Tarot
by Kim Krans
(photo: Eva Yaa Asantewaa)

Image & Psyche: Through the Portal 

(location: Brooklyn, NY)

Saturday, November 8

1:30-4pm

Guided by Eva in safe community space, take a shamanic journey into the realm of Tarot and other oracular symbols to discover your own wellspring of creativity, wisdom, healing and transformation. Open to participants at all levels of experience with Tarot--from newbies to experts. Listen to an audio preview here.

Fee: $30 ($20 for repeating students)

To inquire about registration, use Eva's Contact form on this site or here.

Eva's teaching soon in NYC and PA!

Upcoming Workshops 

with Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Ace of Cups from World Spirit Tarot
by Lauren O'Leary and Jessica Sczuka Godino
Llewellyn Publications, 2001

Saturday, October 4 (1:30-4pm)

• Image & Psyche: Through the Portal (Brooklyn, NY) 

Guided by Eva in safe community space, take a shamanic journey into the realm of Tarot and other oracular symbols to discover your own wellspring of creativity, wisdom, healing and transformation. Open to participants at all levels of experience with Tarot--from newbies to experts.

Listen to an audio preview here.

To inquire about registration, use Eva's Contact form on this site or here.


Saturday, October 25 

• When Bad Dreams Happen to Good People (Fort Washington, PA)

Join Eva at Diane Brandt Wilkes's Northeastern Tarot Conclave 2014 for a demonstration of the use of Tarot symbols in harnessing and directing the power of the nightmare. Other workshop facilitators include Rachel Pollack ("Mirroring the Dream") and Paula Chaffee Scardamalia (From Dreams to Tarot and Back Again").

Get complete program, schedule and registration information here.

Saturday, November 8

• Image & Psyche: Through the Portal (Brooklyn, NY)

Guided by Eva in safe community space, take a shamanic journey into the realm of Tarot and other oracular symbols to discover your own wellspring of creativity, wisdom, healing and transformation. Open to participants at all levels of experience with Tarot--from newbies to experts.

Listen to an audio preview here.

To inquire about registration, use Eva's Contact form on this site or here.

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

My new workshop on Tarot -- March 2

Image and Psyche: An Introduction to Tarot
facilitated by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

This imaginative, 3-hour workshop opens the door to the world of Tarot, introducing its dynamic ecosystem and many benefits for you as an interpreter or as a querent. Eva Yaa Asantewaa has worked with Tarot in psychic counseling, meditation, classes and workshops since the 1980s and enjoys sharing her creative approaches. (See: http://magickaleva.wix.com/psychictarot and https://www.box.com/shared/rmttvvh76g.) 

Tarot is richly, deliciously complex but need not be intimidating. Begin your journey with Eva as your guide.

Bring a notebook or sketchbook and a Tarot deck of your choice that has detailed imagery for its Minor Arcana cards. If you have any questions about this, contact Eva Yaa Asantewaa for advice -- http://magickaleva.wix.com/psychictarot.

If you're interested in buying a new deck, this site might be helpful: http://www.usgamesinc.com/home.php?cat=1&page=1. If you do not yet own a deck and are not ready to purchase one, no worries! We will have a few for you to consult during this introductory workshop.

Admission: $30 per person by pre-registration by Friday, February 15 via Chase QuickPay. For information on Chase QuickPay, visit: 
https://www.chase.com/online-banking/quickpay or contact Eva Yaa Asantewaa for complete pre-registration instructions.

Refund policy: $20 refundable until February 23. No refunds after February 23.

Location information will be provided upon receipt of your pre-registration.

This workshop is offered as a potential prelude to a series of sessions (likely, one per month) delving deeper into practice in shamanic work with Tarot and other oracles and symbol systems in meditation, psychic development and healing. At the end of this workshop, we will assess the level of interest in carrying on as a group!

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

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