My Mother was a Clairvoyant Psychic

I did my first psychic reading (that I can recall) about 40 years ago - when I was around 16. I read a few palms at a party. I hadn't been taught how to read the lines on the hand but I seemed to somehow know how to do it.

Bear in mind that my mother was from gypsy lineage and I had been brought up in a home that was always full of people from all different walks of life seeking insight into what lay ahead in their futures. My mother mostly read tea-leaves and cards. She also read palms, crystal balls and was a medium. I guess she was also a psychic detective. But back in those days we were all just 'fortune tellers'. Nowadays there are a zillion and one labels and titles for all manner of readings.

I think my mother read tea leaves cos it was a friendly way to do readings; a cup of relaxing tea, a good friendly chat and some real psychic insight all rolled into one session. She had a system with the cards - and these days her system is known as 'gypsy cards' or cartomancy. One day she taught me how to read the cards too - and this is a story all by itself.

My mother taught me that psychic 'systems' were just for show and that the real business and gift of being clairvoyant was completely unrelated to cards, palms, crystal balls and tea leaves etc. She said that real clairvoyant psychics did not need tools; that they could see without them and that only people whose skills were weak needed to rely on their tools. "Ask them if they can read a banana or a crystal ball," she said.

For some reason or other she particularly disliked tarot cards. I think it might have been because the cards were big and hard to shuffle, the pictures were distracting and when the people having readings looked at the pictures on them it tended to distract their focus. She said that tarot cards were for the show-men 'wafflers' who wouldn't know a psychic vision if it hit them right between the eyes!

She advised me to not let any of my natural abilities get clogged up by learning a divination system that someone else had invented; a good psychic can both invent their own system whilst not needing to rely on it she told me.

When strangers ask me how I do my readings I usually tell them, "I could read a toenail but would prefer not to". I really do believe that most people prefer to think that the clairvoyant psychic is following a system they have learned how to listen to and tune into and indeed most psychic clairvoyants who advertise these days do follow some kind of a system that they have learned.

Then I might get asked, "What kind of readings can you do"? My answer to this question is, "Any kind you can think of" and if they state a clear preference then that is how I shall do the reading for them. I cannot think of any divination system that I couldn't use - and this is down to my mother's unique ways of teaching me the craft.

My mother also told me that having an open mind is good - to certainly be aware of and examine what a particular type of divination tool can do but never to be confined by it. As a result of this advice I am aware of many, many systems of divination and am fluent in most of them whilst never allowing myself to be confined by them - in other words I can use a system to do more than it often does.

So - who would like their toenails read?