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A skeptic gets read

In light of this weekend Celebration of Psyche and Soul events Shelley Arnusch discovers tarot.

I’ve never had much interest in the mystic arts.

I don’t even read my horoscope while I’m at the hair salon. Some syndicated crackpot thinks they know what’s best for me based on my birthday?

Yeah, right.

Chinese astrology always struck me as a bit more intriguing, for the sole reason that the year I was born makes me a tiger – one of the coolest, most attractive and most badass animals in the jungle. Had I been born a rat, then forget it. No offence to all you rats out there.

There’s also the fact that Chinese Zodiac literature usually ambushes me at very vulnerable moments. When you’re that hungry you’ll read anything that’s in front of you. Once the springrolls arrive all interest in the mystic placemat typically dissolves.

For years I’ve disregarded tarot and tea leaves, ESP and palmistry, crystals and clairvoyants with a shrug and a frank "good for them," never considering whether any of it would be "good for me."

Not to confuse disinterest with condemnation. My view of the non-syndicated mystic arts has always lied with the former. My intents were never malicious, just non-existent, until recently.

Learning of the events surrounding this coming weekend’s Celebration of Psyche and Soul in Whistler roused my curiosity, breaking down the wall of disinterest that had long separated me from the world of the séance.

A partnership between Tourism Whistler and the North Vancouver-based West Coast Institute of Mystic Arts, Psyche and Soul is placing local and visiting psychics in a variety of host cafes, restaurants and other retail outlets throughout the village over the long weekend.

In addition to the visible practitioner presence Psyche and Soul features a free workshop and lecture series by various institute teachers running all day Saturday at MY (Millennium) Place. On Sunday at the Farmer’s Market there will be a booth where local dogs can get their paws read by animal spirit communicators.

With the exception of the dog thing ("I see a trip to the vet in your future, this matted piece of fur between your toenails indicates your reproductive organs are at risk...") I decided I could no longer brush this off.

Mystic arts practitioners don’t dwell on the lunatic fringe. They’re an integral part of this and pretty much every community. From alternative medicine healers to psychics, they’re as easy to track down as a local hockey rink. If an organization as conservative as Tourism Whistler was willing to join hands with the West Coast Institute of Mystic Arts to promote the resort, the appeal was even broader than I had thought. My mind was opening. It was time to discover what I’d been missing.

My choice of art to pop my psychic cherry was a tarot card reading.

I’ve always been very visual and the idea of having vibrant cards to pore over appealed to me more than having some earnest stranger stare at my hand. I’ve been biting my nails a lot lately and my left middle finger is crooked. I have hangnails. I’m not all that stoked to find out what that says about me.

I called up Kara-Leah Grant, a local tarot card reader and fellow writer whom I greatly respect – a necessary pre-requisite to kill my penchant to confront the unfamiliar with sarcasm. If I was going to do this, I was damn well going to do it right and enlisting someone whom I was going to have to face again in this town socially would force me to take things seriously.

The reading took place in K-L’s cozy living room. She offered me coffee or tea, and I chose green tea. It seemed to fit the mood. Sitting on pillows on the floor facing each other over a coffee table, K-L introduced her Osho Zen deck, a lushly illustrated series with descriptions updated into contemporary language. Within it are the major arcana cards, marked with those typical symbols of tarot such as The Master, The Outsider and The Fool, and the numbered minor arcana cards, divided into suits representing the four elements.

Like a new board game it was difficult to fully understand how it worked until I had seen it enacted. Sensing this, K-L took action and shuffled the cards. I cut the deck. She laid the cards face down on the table and I began my foray into the mystic arts by selecting 10 to be read in the Celtic cross formation. Centred around one major Arcana card, it’s a reading that one informational Web site deemed a cosmic "snapshot," effective for showing who you are, who you were, and where you’re headed at a particular moment in time.

The cards have an interesting duality – designated meanings that are gateways to deep pools of interpretation. Considering the cards invokes intense self-examination, which inevitably leads to self-discovery. The known is reinforced, the unknown, revealed.

More guide than authority, K-L offered traditional explanations for the various cards’ significance in relation to each other and gently encouraged me to relate them to my current situation and emotional state. When I commented on her style she explained that there are many ways to conduct a reading and that she prefers to use the cards as more of a counselling tool than an authoritative "fortune telling" system.

Whatever she was doing, it was working for me.

Mid reading I asked Grant about how she came to tarot. She replied she was unaware of her psychic abilities until she moved to Whistler from New Zealand six years ago. In the early days a couch-surfer at her house declared that he sensed she’d be astute with the cards.

She took him up on it and took it upon herself to develop her abilities until eventually the self-taught psychic felt prepared to read for friends and acquaintances.

She’s just now moving into the public sphere. Although she offered readings at last month’s Wild Life of Burning Man exhibit opening gala at MY Place her inclusion on the Celebration of Psyche and Soul roster is essentially her official debut as a Whistler psychic. Following the weekend, she’ll be offering readings via the Oracle in Nesters Plaza, run by West Coast Institute of Mystic Arts founder and Psyche and Soul organizer Kelly Oswald.

Tarot is great for people that love going off on tangents. Let’s get back to my reading.

After the Celtic Cross, K-L had me draw seven new cards for a Star reading, which was followed by a timeline reading. Perhaps I was being thrown a cosmic bone on my first time out but all three formations had a remarkable continuity and I found all to have significance to my current state of being.

The session was capped off with a pendulum reading, a method of divination whereby a chain with a small charm at the end is held above the cards. Questions are answered "yes" or "no" if the pendulum spins clockwise or anti-clockwise. If it remains static your question is too much for even the earth’s energy to deal with. Sorry. There’s the sarcasm thing I was talking about earlier.

Still in awe over the card readings I just couldn’t put my heart into the pendulum.

But that was just me on that particular afternoon; don’t expect much from a beginner with a swirling brain. Another day, another reading, it might have made all the difference.

Gossip hounds hoping for some dirt on me are going to be disappointed. This is no B-list celebrity tell-all so the personal issues that came out of the reading will remain between me, myself and my psychic.

What I will say, however, is that I found the experience to be extremely uplifting. True self reflection, however it comes about, is healthy and I walked out inspired to continue with the things that had been revealed as beneficial to my life and to take action to change the things that were bringing me down.

My introduction to tarot had been, for lack of a better word, therapeutic. Dredging your soul can’t be trivialized as "fun." Instead, I’ll ladle out the highest compliment I can think of for K-L and say that her reading had contributed to my wellbeing. Hopefully it was as worthy of her time, as it was mine.

I can’t exactly say when I’ll go for another reading. It won’t be right away, but I am confident there will be a next time. That is, if she’ll have me back.

If not, I’d better book a manicure.

Interested in finding out more about tarot? Check out www.tarot.com. You can even get an online reading.

For more information on this weekend’s Celebration of Psyche and Soul drop by Tourism Whistler’s Information and Activity Centre or go to www.mywhistler.com to download a complete schedule of events.