I’m welcoming new students in the Lenormand Foundation Course.
Although close to 200 people have taken this course already, I’m very pleased to see that there’s more out there who need it – not to mention the ones who are back for a refresher.
I had a moment of hesitation as I was admitting the new ones in the facebook group dedicated to the course:
What do I say to them?
I can say thank you, and leave it at that. But how flat is this?
I can express my deep and sincere gratitude for the commitment to my work that people demonstrate.
But how inflated must this come across? I’m actually considering this, as flattery is my number one enemy and I never want to commit it myself, however unwittingly.
We all encounter situations when we need to ask:
What do I say to you?
I actually use the cards for the situation when words seem inappropriate.
I entice others in my practice to pose this very question to the cards, whenever there’s awkwardness about what is appropriate to say.
Now to my example of the cards, which happened to extend my moment of hesitation, before I actually had a major laugh at it.
I shuffled the cards and got the Dog, the Coffin, and the Whip.
Wow, now WHAT do I say to them, to a bunch of enthusiastic and happy new students?
I decided to deliver a message that is as straightforward as I can possibly produce, mentally and honestly.
I decided to say this to the new group:
Whatever is familiar to you about the Lenormand cards will be buried. Not only will I bury it, but I will also make sure that it stays dead, and not be resurrected.
I was happy with this answer, also because being quite Zen makes me refrain from imagining, projecting, or mirroring, what the others in the classroom might think of this message. They will think what they will think. It’s not for me to judge what others think. People think many things all the time. Some of this thinking may be aligned with reality, and some remains the expression of opinion devoid of substance.
I was ready to take a snapshot of the cards, when I noticed that 7 of them were on another table. 7 good cards: the Star, the Woman, the Moon, the Fish, the Book, and the Heart. I had read earlier with this deck, and when I was done, I didn’t put the cards together and back in their pouch.
Damn, I thought, how can I welcome the new students in the Lenormand class via a reading with an incomplete deck? How professional is that? What if THESE cards had shown up in the reading?
Well, I can continue asking this question and remedy the mistake by re-doing the reading. But this would run counter to what I preach: You always read the cards on the table, nothing more, nothing less.
‘What if’, and ‘let me do it again until I get the good cards that would show me what I would rather hear’ is not part of my practice.
So, whether appropriate or not, I welcome my new students with these words:
Whatever is familiar to you about the Lenormand cards will be buried. Not only will I bury it, but I will also make sure that it stays dead, and not be resurrected.
More are welcome to this party. It’s not a party for friends, even though many in the group are friends, but a party of learning what there is to learn, the disciplined way, the way of ‘no pain, no gain.’
My sole aim is to teach people to read cards for very fine precision. I can’t do that without correcting old ways. Correcting can be offensive, but when the point is demonstrable and beyond negotiation, there’s much to be gained.
And then there’s the Fortuneteller’s Moment of Zen that concludes each of my sessions. This one teaches the value of never taking the process of learning personally. Learning is learning, not a process of tending to a constructed image of the wounded self.
Keep going.
♠
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