Public sessions opened up shortly after I started studying tarot and astrology seriously: this coincided with a time when our circumstances collectively swerved. Learning meant a solitary space, but we were forcibly getting isolated from one another. Reading with people collided with my plans to be alone with my mind. The practice coaxed me to understand that with these tools, seclusion is not part of the curriculum. To become practice I desired, studying tarot and astrology prescribed animation. These systems require mediation and connection. I preface this reflection with the natural discomfort that rises when Spirit and our human filters converge. In my situation, my filter carried that judgment of what being a scholar meant: singularly consuming all accessible information to earn the right to participate in the field. Yet, the lesson was to overcome the idea that knowledge is distinctly outside one’s self, where one needs to labor for and earn approval.
As this personal story continues to ripple, I turn to my patrons over the years. In many ways, they’ve become unexpected partners in a beautiful collective work with Spirit. Taking steps to become conscious co-participants in spiritual ecosystems, my patrons demonstrate how everyone seeks to weather our socially programmed filters when Spirit calls.
Reading with people, I find that we reach for these practices to make connections with one another.
Alienation came for us as a world experience, expressed in complex and awful personal ordeals. It is radical to overcome the compulsion to stay alone and unwitnessed. Isolation is part of a predator’s recipe. Because in that space, one is forced to submit to pain and shame alone.
I see courage exemplified by my patrons when they reach out to relate to themselves and the world. To be witnessed is the first brave act, interrupting this estrangement that feeds hungry ghosts. The parts that were ostracized and diminished have a chance to surface and testify that they hold the key to connecting with others.
A contract gets shaped when a reading happens. It is a contract to be seen. In the latter part of this text, I talk about the experience of guides and energetic signatures coming forward. These voices are often responsible for bringing abandoned parts of you forward to be seen, and a properly-established contract of a reading serves as a container for this magical mediation. Working alongside a reader, and tools such as the tarot and astrology, simultaneously support seeing. To be seen is also to see. It’s a decisive moment to discover the schema imaged in cards and charts speaking through clients with little to no proficiency in these languages. This is Spirit at work. And these readings become a contract to connect, witness, and find our way back to others and the world.
Reading with people, I find that these tools and the ways we work with spirit are not rarefied.
Spirit speaks in multiple tongues. Systems like Tarot and Astrology are only one language: they are powerful containers that translate Spirit to a language our human limitations can understand.
I first considered that these tools must be deployed in the arena of the intellect. Schools and literature that illustrate the empirical systems of tarot and astrology are attractive to my budding ideology around the use and circulation of these technologies throughout history. This was important to create discernment of our human filters that can also be swayed towards clout and cult, careless interpretations, and abuse of power. I also wanted to be able to draw a natal chart from scratch.
Like a mental muscle sequence, holding all preparation and notes end when the encounter, the session, begins. The cerebral aspect of learning brought my intellect home to the copious realm of tarot and astrological traditions, but my relationship to these tools is by Magic. My patrons reveal a unanimous rapport with Spirit. Some are unconscious of such a relationship: their human filters cacophonous and distracting them along their way to clarity and unification. I like to watch those who let me sit beside them as the chaos of growth integrate with their insides: here, the commotion is betrothed to expansion and creativity. Others, however, are so far ahead of their minds: they’ve touched Spirit, living profoundly, but their heads needed convincing. This kind of patron makes good use of the technologies of tarot and astrology in my reading because the empirical mind can rest with systems, diagrams, and other legible human tools. However, every reading is magical because all sessions indicate parts of my patrons that work towards this conscious participation in spiritual ecosystems. We accept this gift when we develop languages to learn our inherited tools. In doing so, we fully step into our birthright to active and eloquent relationships with Spirit.
Reading with people, I find that what seeks to come forward in these magical containers is not what you think.
A humbling moment during a session is when a voice or a guide from a patron steps forward and starts speaking for us. The client usually never notices this, but when I do, a thrill rises in me, and I struggle not to do whatever it takes to grasp this vulnerable moment (like taking notes, or giving a standing ovation).
Having kept a healthy cynicism that accompanies my natural attraction to religion and spirituality is part of this work. The human filter of criticality and language to speak back, when used as means to cultivate one’s faith systems, protect you from becoming a vessel of life-negating and fear-mongering energy characters. The archetypal worlds of the tarot, and the planetary, transpersonal quality of astrology caretake other living realms that mirror our own’s heterogeneous mundane ecosystems. I’ve started recognizing the quality of other beings in us, momentarily given a stage, because of these sessions.
I mentioned that stepping into readings makes contracts. Sessions reveal who steps up for an encounter. Reading together, it’s neither just myself nor the client as we “know” ourselves that occupy the arena. Sometimes we’re fixated on identities that deter our guides from stepping up. Sometimes we’re surprised to find we are integrating spirit lessons and sometimes, we’re relieved to discover we’re expelling voices that have been getting in the way of our expansion. We may find the cards and charts as a decoy to reveal those parts of us who recognize the language to come through. But in the sessions I facilitate, cards and charts are the crucible.
A theme from the time of my public offering of readings continues to be: I serve Spirit. This means that I center the orientation of my relational work on Spirit’s call. Instead of testimonials that have become a norm for these services, I would like to give testimony to Spirit that operates in a unified field (beyond the distinct space of Bunga ng Langit). Likewise, I continue to *see,* when contracted, people: the patrons of this work, and co-participants to the collective work to living as spirit-embodied humanly possible. I attribute their own healing and recovery work to their personal journeys.
As I seem to still keep my books closed, I offer a critical guide to patrons of any readings with any readers. It is my wish as Bunga ng Langit that you find expansion in every decision you make. And yes, I am not just addressing your mind but also the invisible parts that are listening. You are welcome to be seen.
