I’ve been hesitant to share this story here because I didn’t want anyone to misinterpret it as a sales pitch. As much as I am a full-time tarot pro and therefore constantly in shameless self-promotion mode, my blog here at PaganSquare is about magick, tarot and community, not making sales.
The thing is, when one is a professional diviner, the classic lines between the magickal and the mundane blur quickly and easily.
This a holiday story of tarot magick which involves dreams, mediumship, and the often-missed opportunity for healing offered us by Mercury in retrograde.
It starts with the fact that most tarot pros offer some kind of holiday or end-of-year special sale. This year, I had zero inspiration to create a great offer, and a busy schedule that didn’t have a lot of room for the new business a holiday special might generate.
I noticed that Mercury would be in retrograde for most of December. I smirked, thinking about the number of lost and mis-delivered holiday packages this would inevitably mean.
I’m not a huge Mercury Rx fear-monger, however. I’m happy to teach a class, travel, or launch a new product during Mercury Rx – I just try to be extra careful about the details. I would be lying, though, if I said I didn’t feel the energetic drag.
I was really surprised when, at the end of November, I had a very specific dream that laid out the special service I was to offer in December.
I don’t remember the details of the dream. I remember seeing a textured pattern, like sunbeams through a bamboo window shade. When I focused in on the pattern, I saw my tarot cards on a table, and my hands at work, laying the cards out, shuffling, doing all the things I do every day.
A male voice was giving me clear instructions. When I woke up, I knew exactly what to do.
I was given, in the dream, a specific protocol for working with the energy of Mercury retrograde to facilitate healing. The voice in my dream (I never saw a face) told me the sessions I would offer would be short – only a half hour long – and at a discounted rate, less expensive than a standard half hour reading.
I am not used to receiving such specific direction in a dream, however, the next day, I went to work, creating and publicizing my offer.
When it came time to give the first-ever Mercury Retrograde Tarot Healing Session, I realized I had spent no time at all preparing, going over the protocol I would use, or thinking about how I would make sure the session would be the unique healing opportunity I had promised and not simply a discounted half-hour reading.
I like to be prepared whenever possible, but I had very little nervousness going into that first session. It felt as though the voice that instructed me in my dream had given me the blueprint I needed, even if I wasn’t completely cognizant of it.
That first session amazed both my client and me with its simple clarity and deep opportunity for healing. You see, Mercury is all about communication and connections. In a retrograde, communications and connections can be missed or interrupted. However, the blessing of a Mercury retrograde is the opportunity to review, revisit and rewrite our personal stories.
Very often, we form personal stories and beliefs about ourselves that cause us to limit our opportunities, to not see our skills and abilities, or to not believe in our worth. Mercury retrograde offers very real support to the process of discovering the origin of the false stories we tell about ourselves and our lives, and finding more truthful, healthy and supportive ways to understand and tell those stories.
In that first Mercury retrograde session we did exactly that. But, I wondered, would other sessions be equally powerful, or did I just get lucky with the first one?
I have to say, with each and every session I have done thus far, the outcome has been breathtaking. In a recent session I was able to pinpoint a client’s negative self-talk to the exact sentence her mother spoke just prior to her death. When I said the sentence to her I didn’t realize I was speaking her late mother’s words. When she told me, it was clear we had been directly led to heal the damage done by those unkind and untimely words spoken so long ago. That is certainly the essence of Mercury retrograde healing.
So who exactly entered my dreams that night to guide me in this process? I am one who rarely tries new tarot spreads; I have used the same basic reading style for all my professional readings for the past twenty-five years. Who has guided my hand, heart and voice in these amazing healing sessions?
It could be my higher consciousness, certainly, and that would be magickal enough. But what if the guidance came directly from Mercury, also known as Hermes and Thoth? These entities have long been connected to tarot and even given the starring role in not one but two tarot cards, the Magician and the Hermit.
When I first started working with tarot magick, it was simply an adjunct to divination – something else and extra to be done with the cards. Eventually, I learned that magick could happen in every divination process, and that divination itself is a form of magick.
Now, I see it goes even deeper. Tarot is a vehicle for communication with the Gods. Whether we perceive the Gods as entities or symbols, their wisdom speaks in our dreams, and through these seventy-eight magickal tools.