Since I want to make it as easy as possible for visitors to my website to get in touch, especially if they have questions, I’ve just added a Contact page. You can find the link in the menu at the top of the page. On the page, you’ll find my e-mail address, links to my Facebook page and other social media accounts, and a form where you can directly send a message to me.
I just wanted to let you know that the latest issue of the Tarot Readings By Graham Newsletter will be out next week. If you’re not already subscribed to it, I suggest you do so immediately, because it’s the Holiday issue, and I’ll be announcing a special offer exclusive to newsletter subscribers. It’ll be my Holiday gift to you.
Just a quick bit of housekeeping: You’ll no longer need to type that unwieldy address, “tarotbygraham.wordpress.com” into your browser to get here. I’ve just (about time, I know!) registered tarotbygraham.com as a domain name, and that’s all you’ll need to use to access this website from now on.
You may remember my post to this blog, Music To Read Tarot By, recommending some sources of ambient/new age music for use when reading tarot, meditating, etc. This is an update of that post, since I’ve discovered a couple more excellent sources.
As I mentioned on the earlier post, I like to have background music playing when I read tarot. It helps me focus and keep odd external noises from distracting me. I prefer to have fairly neutral music playing, since I worry that anything too emotional might “color” the reading too much. I also prefer music without a beat for this purpose. Recently, I’ve also been playing these stations when napping and sleeping.
Ambient Sleeping Pill
bills itself as “Internet Radio pouring out uninterrupted music for sleeping, taking Naps and other more wakeful tranquil moments” and that’s a very fair description. It streams 24/7 with “No ads, no beats, no new-age-cheese.” Most of the music it plays is free for downloading also, although one of the ways the station has been funding itself is by selling CD and downloadable compilations of some of the best music it plays. I applaud this station for keeping the ads out of the stream; there’s nothing more jarring than an upbeat advertisement when you’re in the moment!
Drone Zone is a streaming station from the SomaFM family of Internet radio stations; in fact, it was the first SomaFM station. It bills itself as, “Served best chilled, safe with most medications. Atmospheric textures with minimal beats.” It goes on to say, “Droning atmospheric space music and ambient textures with minimal beats. Music on Drone Zone is all about sonic textures and environments.” You’re likely to hear music by such artists as Steve Roach, Brian Eno, Harold Budd, Robert Davies, etc. The music is scheduled and programmed by Rusty Hodge, the founder of SomaFM and the General Manager and Music Director. SomaFM is listener-supported, mostly by donations. There are occasional channel IDs, but they’re in keeping with the sound of the station, and not intrusive.
Both of these stations can be listened to directly by going to the websites linked to above, or by using an application like TuneIn. TuneIn’s mobile apps have a sleep timer, which turns a channel off after a given time period, which is handy! SomaFM also has its own app. available.
I’ll make the same request that I did at the end of my previous post about music; do you know of any other sources of this kind of music? If so, please do share in a comment below.
UPDATE: Somebody on Facebook saw this post and commented, including a link to another resource that’s too good not to share here: Ambient Chillout Music Mixes by JaBig. It’s a collection of music by Brian Eno.
One night, I stayed up all night playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house and four people died. – Steven Wright
I love Steven Wright, but I always cringe just a little when someone repeats his joke on Twitter – and it happens a lot! It plays into the hands (excuse the pun) of those who are a little afraid of tarot cards. As I have been known to say: There’s nothing magic about tarot cards; they are simply paper, paste, and some pretty pictures in ink. The magic is in our heads.
A little while back, a potential client was enquiring about a reading, and made a bit of a joke about avoiding the “Death” card, because (and I’m paraphrasing here) while he knew that having the “Death” card come up in a reading didn’t always actually mean death, presumably it could mean death, right?
The way that my readings work is to give you information to empower you. My aim is always to enable you to write your own story. This means that really the only way that the card we call “Death” would represent physical death is if you were engaged in risky behavior that might lead to your demise if you didn’t do something about it. I would assume you’d want to know about that! The truth is that this card, depending on the context, can have many meanings. Sometimes it means making a “clean sweep” and discarding something from the past and moving on into the future. Sometimes it can mean divesting yourself of toxic “friends.” Just the other day, I had “Death” come up at the conclusion of a reading about a relationship; knowing that it would worry the client, I pointed out that in this context, my interpretation was that if something did not change, the likely result would be that the relationship would end. I was delighted when my client got back to me and said they had already done something about it, and the situation was much better.
So, my recommendation would be to stop seeing the “Death” card as a “bad card” and maybe start seeing it as a wake-up call or a card of opportunity.
I’m very excited to announce that, just in time for the holiday season, I am now offering gift certificates for readings. If you have friends, colleagues or family members who you think might benefit from my readings, these would make a great gift. While you can purchase a certificate for a single reading for $5, you can save money by purchasing more readings. So a certificate for a three-question reading is $12 and a five-question reading is $20. Recipients don’t have to ask all their questions at the same time, either, so a five-question certificate could provide some great guidance for an entire year (the gift certificates never expire, by the way)! Payment processing is by PayPal (although you don’t have to have a PayPal account to purchase via credit or debit card), so these can be purchased internationally.
The certificates can be ordered directly from this site and the printable certificate can be emailed to you to include with a physical gift or card, or can be emailed directly to the recipient.
For more details and to purchase gift certificates, see my Gift Certificates page.
Directly underneath my website’s title “Tarot Readings by Graham,” I make the following bold statement:
“No-Nonsense, EMPOWERING Tarot Card Readings”
I have discussed the “No-Nonsense” part of this statement elsewhere within my “Musings” section. But how about the “EMPOWERING” part? Can a tarot reading be empowering? If you are a believer in fate, then a tarot reading will surely just predict what’s going to happen, right?
Well I for one do not believe in a fate that’s set in stone. I do believe that some things are meant to be, for sure; but I think that for the most part we can shape our own fate. Which is a very good thing – life would be very boring if everything was completely mapped out for us.
One way that tarot can help with the future is by showing you what is likely to be the result if you continue to take the path you are currently on. That way, if you don’t like where you’re headed, you can do something about it.
When you come to me with a question, no matter how “fuzzy” the concept is, I will always try to phrase it in the form “What’s the best way for (your name goes here!) to achieve (insert goal here)?” or similar. No beating around the bush with vagueries. By asking questions in this direct way, what I will come up with during our reading is something that you can actually do.
And that is empowering!
Having returned from a vacation at the beginning of last month feeling refreshed and enthusiastic to get back into the swing of doing more readings, I decided a challenge was in order. On both my Facebook tarot page and on my personal Facebook timeline, I asked friends, clients and potential clients the following:
Is there anything you’d like to know about tarot, about the way I read tarot, or anything like that? Do you have any reservations or even fears about tarot? Don’t be afraid of asking “stupid” questions. I don’t want you to be embarrassed about asking me anything, but if you don’t feel comfortable about sharing it here, please feel free to send me a private message instead.
I didn’t know what to expect, really. My main goal was to find out whether there was anyone out there who was wondering whether they should ask me for a reading, but was hesitating for some reason.
Little did I know that an old school friend was going to try to turn the challenge around, by asking the following question:
Go on then: “how does it work?”
To be quite honest, I don’t think he expected me to give a serious answer. But I think he (and anyone else reading the post) deserved one. This is how I responded:
My “flip” answer: Very well! 😉
I think that if you ask 20 different tarot card readers this question, you’ll get at least 10 different answers. I can only tell you how I *believe* it works. At least this is how I reason to myself it works, because it fits into my belief system:
I believe that when you communicate with someone, your subconscious automatically collects a whole bunch of information from that person’s subconscious. But that information is often very difficult for most of us to access in any meaningful way.
Here’s where tarot cards come in. To me, the images on the cards act as a focusing tool. They prompt me to access certain elements from all the information my subconscious has collected, that are relevant to the question a client has asked me.
It’s a little more complex than that, because I not only look at an image on an individual card, but also what I see as interactions between images on different cards, but I’m sure you get the idea.
I personally do not claim to be psychic and I don’t believe there to be anything “magical” about the cards, although the results often make it seem that way. Beyond that, these days I try not to think too much about how it all works, because that distracts from the readings themselves. Which work “Very well!” 🙂
What matters the most to me is getting meaningful advice for the people who come to me for readings. It really doesn’t matter whether or not they agree with me about how tarot works, as long as they find what I reveal to them to be helpful. Having said that, and as I brought the subject up here, I would love to hear back from you on this subject. How do you believe tarot works?
I wanted to give the site a little personal touch, so, prompted by the WordPress “Zero to Hero” series, I created the header image you’ll see at the top of each page. Simple and straightforward, in keeping with my tarot philosophy, the background is adapted from the pattern on the back of my tarot deck of choice, the Jean Noblet Tarot de Marseille. Let me know what you think in the comments section.
I’m starting to write a little e-book that I’m planning to offer for free in exchange for signing up for my e-mail newsletter. It’s designed to simply show how tarot can be an powerful tool to change your life for the better and to help you get the most out of a tarot reading. In addition to offering it to new subscribers, I will share it with those who are already on the e-mail list, as my way of saying thank you for being my list pioneers.
If you’ve read earlier posts or spent some time on my website or Facebook page, you probably understand that I’m not your “traditional” tarot reader. I don’t shroud my readings with mumbo-jumbo new-age nonsense.
Music is a big part of my life. I once had intended to become a music teacher. I compose music, I play, and of course I listen to a lot of music. So what do I listen to when doing a tarot reading? It’s your traditional, new-agey meditation/spa music! I find that the washes of sounds without too much of a beat help me to focus on the cards.
At some point in the future, I may very well create some of these types of tracks myself and make them available. But there is a wealth of it out there, on various music streaming sites, for example. There’s a Spa channel on Slacker.com and AccuRadio and other sites also have similar channels available. This music is suitable, of course, not just for giving tarot readings, but also for any time you need to relax or focus – meditation, contemplation, concentration or relaxation. My only word of warning is that some of these streaming sites occasionally play audio advertisements, which can be very jarring.
Another option might be YouTube. I’ve found a bunch of collections of interruption-free meditation music with a few simple searches. Here’s one to get you started:
If you find some other sources you recommend, please do feel free to share them in the comments. And don’t forget to check out the comments, to give you some more ideas of places to find some of this great music!
Tarot Readings by Graham 