I Believe That a Reading Should Be a Dialogue

If you start to read for others you will occasionally run into a client who sits there like the Sphinx, waiting for you to expound on every detail of their life. No. Just no. Ideally a reading should be a dialogue between the diviner, the client, and the ancestors. I see myself as an interpreter or translator. The bones are the language I am interpreting, and the original speakers are the ancestors and spirits.

Like any language, the bones can describe things in detail. Like every interpreter, however, we are not always able to make the translation as clear as the original speech. We unknowingly make slight changes in what is being said, or we are not able to pick up on the nuances in the original words that the bones are speaking. While we may be fluent in the language of the bones, it is still our second language. We are also limited in the number of words we have. My bone set has 120 pieces as of this writing, which may sound like a lot until you stop and think that there are over 100,000 words in the English language and that most English speakers use 20,000 to 30,000 of them. Even a two-year-old child has a vocabulary of one hundred fifty to three hundred words. Your spirits are trying to communicate using an extremely limited vocabulary. Obviously, some things will go unsaid or be misinterpreted. Be open to listening to spirit and do your best.

I think that it is helpful to both yourself and the client if you ask questions along the way. You do not have to be the know-all, tell-all prognosticator. If a group of bones does not seem to make sense to you, point them out to the client saying what each piece means, and ask if they make sense to him or her. Many times, they will be able to interpret them, or at least say something that will help you interpret them.

Sometimes the bones are telling you things that are not making sense to you or the client. No worries — leave it alone and move on with the reading. If it is on the cloth in a prominent position, it is important to tell the client. And even if it does not make sense now, it will most likely do so in the future. I have had clients come back to me and say, “Do you remember that thing we didn’t understand? Here is what happened with that . . .” But even if you never hear from them again, don’t fret over what it meant. The reading is for the client and for whatever reason, his or her spirits wanted the information to be passed on to them. Go on with your day and don’t give it too much more thought.

Sometimes despite you trying to engage the client in a dialogue, they just refuse to cooperate. Maybe they are testing you, or maybe they are naturally taciturn. In those cases, just do the best you can. Point out what you see and how you interpret it. At the end ask if they have any questions or if there is anything else that they wish to know. If you have done your best, be satisfied. That is all any of us can do.