How to Make a Practice with All These Pieces

If you are reading this column because you fancy venturing out on your own as a palmist, here is a piece of advice: When you start a reading, ask your client to let you know if there is something she or he does not like, so the two of you can discuss it right then and there. You want to develop this habit of open communication with your customers. It is wise to discourage anyone from thinking of you as a fortune teller. Encourage people who come to you to think of you as someone who will help them explore choices and define opportunities, not as someone who reads a pre-determined future. Never forget, your clients have agency in both the reading and their future.

You want to explain up front that your role is to clarify what choices and opportunities someone has, so that he or she can best determine how to create an individualized path to the kind of actualized future they want to create for themselves.

You might want to explain that when you read a palm, you are creating a gestalt, or an integrated summary of a structure of experience. This gestalt is better read or accomplished with other information or data. Sometimes I use Tarot cards. You might also ask the client to tell you who their heroes, heroines, best friends, and greatest villains are. Either approach gives you something to refer back to when you try to explain the lines on their hands to them.

For example, when you find a temporary obscuring of the life line, which inevitably occurs on some palms, you will probably be able to hear the heartbeat of the terrified person who thinks this is evidence that they will die young or live out their life in a coma. You might be able to explain, if you had more angles to come at them from, that this is a time period in which they will get off the fast-living highway and take a rest, like a sabbatical, rather than barrel dangerously along without thinking of life’s consequences. If you know the hero for this person is Mahatma Ghandi, rather than John Wayne, you could suggest that this might be a period of civil disobedience, or a sit down or hunger strike, when the person will decide it is better to sacrifice the comfort of their own life for an injustice, rather than continuing to live in an unjust world. You want the person to leave with a positive reinterpretation of whatever fear they might have come in with that might be blocking them.

Batya Weinbaum arranges private or group readings. She can be contacted via email at batyawein@aol.com, or by calling (216) 233-0567.