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Over the years, I developed a fairly standard attitude towards doing a reading. The first thing I do these days is to ask my personal ancestors and helping spirits to be present and give me the power to help the person I am working with. Then I explore the inquirer’s areas of concern, helping them to develop an effective question and establish a field of feeling associations around it. I take care to establish the precise position of the inquirer, too, whom or what she or he is asking on behalf of, what the motives are and what my role is in this process. The clearer the question and the deeper our perception of the issues at stake, the more precise and profound Change’s answer can be.
Dialogues with Change
As time went on, I noticed more and more that these inquiries would tend to develop into a sort of Active Dialogue with Change, inviting a series of questions and responses. So I began to explore other ways of setting this dialogue up rather than the standard question and answer. My first one was quite simple, developed out of my personal work. I would ask a Basic Question about a problem or situation. After consideration, I would ask for a Guide to help me navigate and understand it. Then I would ask for what I call a From Now figure, how to take the reading into action from the present moment. I found this triangulation extremely helpful. It reflected my growing conviction that meaning in a reading does not emerge from the internal analysis of a single figure but out of the interrelations between a set or matrix of figures.
It was here I took a clue from the truly brilliant explosion of Layouts that has accompanied the revolution in the practice of Tarot over the last 30 years or so, particularly the work of my good friend and colleague Rachel Pollack. I began to explore ways of using Change in this more expansive and connected way. One of the Layouts I came up with is about Dreams and how to interact with them.
Dream Readings
Dreams express our relationship to whatever the Inner World is. They can be confusing, problematic, profound and trivial at the same time. Whatever they are, they are important and humans have been searching for a way to understand their deeply symbolic language for centuries, using a variety of approaches. What seems important to me, however, is to open an area where we can interact with the dream without reducing it to analytical allegory or being swamped by its simple presence, lost in clouds of confusion, or inflated by its powerful contents. Here is a sort of procedure and Layout that can be very helpful.
The first step is to write the dream out, getting a sense of its narrative units, characters, feeling tones and landscapes. Look at who you are in the dream. Look at the way it is re-arranging your memories, feelings and associations to create the various elements it portrays. Look at the breaks between sections, when the dream goes blank. Don’t judge too hastily, particularly with unpleasant or highly attractive figures. Just look and feel and note things down.
Then pose these three questions to the Yi. Record all the answers before you start contemplating any one of them:
1) What is the message or meaning of this dream has for me?2) What is my position in it (as dream-ego)? 3) What long term or core issues does it address?
In my experience you will feel the connections immediately as you begin to circle through the various positions. It is, of course, extremely helpful if you can recognize the hexagrams immediately. Don’t get fixated into any one of them too soon, though. Keep circulating. Let them build their own net of meanings. Work with your personal experience of the hexagrams involved. Keep a close eye on the hexagrams’ relation to the dream images. Pay attention to the positions of the transforming lines, for this is one of the ways you can locate yourself in the process and identify the Voices that want to speak to you.
I have found that looking at the interrelations of these answers can bring a kind of spontaneous insight into how the dream process is working and what it is speaking to in your life. The conclusion of the reading will probably arrive as a kind of “aha!” in relation to the overall field. The dream then begins to recede, satisfied, perhaps, that you have acknowledged it.
Relationship Readings
Our significant feeling relationships are like a net that fate throws over us to keep engaged with the ongoing process of our own souls and the soul of the world. They can be a true tangle, a source of real and unnecessary suffering, a kind of ecstasy or, in Jung’s words, an alchemical vessel. In my experience, when a relationship is troubled, the first step is to disentangle the people involved and give them a clear place from which to speak, a place that both reflects who they are, their needs and desires, and can recognize the other as really other. This begins the dialogue.
The next step is to give the relationship itself a voice independent of, but connected to, the people involved. Here is a sort of Layout or procedure you can set up to help bring these voices into play. First get a general feeling sense of things. Look at the crisis and how it might have evolved. Try to feel into the hidden side of the people involved without judgment. Try to sense or feel where the relationship itself is, what its concerns might be. Note your own reactions to things and the conclusions you begin to draw, without presuming they are correct. This is part of establishing the overall field of the divination.
When you have a sense that the people involved are ready and understand that the basic thrust of the question is to find a solution to the problem that works for the good of all involved, ask each person to draw the tokens to establish their individual positions in the relationship. Note the answers. Then ask them to alternate in drawing the tokens or forming the lines to produce a third figure, representing the voice of relationship itself. Work through the individual readings until each person feels comfortable with them as an expression of their position, identity and needs and the two begin speaking to each other through the symbols.
Then take on and introduce the voice of the relationship (from the third reading), speaking through it to each person involved. This can create a very fertile field for insight and understanding. It depends on your own inner preparation, your willingness to step into that spirit, to use but not be bound up in your own emotional material. This is an act of true divination, giving voice to what is hidden and does not have a language of its own. Have courage and compassion, be guided by the symbols and expect surprises, for this can truly be a healing act.