Hope and Doubt

I went to the New Living Expo on Saturday to get a psychic reading even though I wasn't sure I believed in them anymore considering how past readings that predicted I'd be married, with three kids and working for Lucas by now have obviously not come true. But I've been feeling an urgent need for guidance lately and thought a cheap reading couldn't hurt and might even be helpful.

I walked past booths selling special healing water, special healing clay, special healing jewelry -

"Hold it in your hand. You should feel some tingling."

I did as directed. I wanted to feel something---how neat would it be to heal emotional wounds and protect myself from negativity just by wearing something pretty!---but, I didn't feel a darned thing. And told her so. She didn't say, okay, disbeleiver, I am escaping the field of your negative energy now. But I imagined her thinking that as she walked away.

I also walked by people getting healed in various ways, a lot of them simply sitting in chairs while someone held their hands to their shoulders or chests. One blissful looking woman sat in a broom closet sized chamber which reminded me of a sauna, except it didn't heat up. The door was open and the woman wore a heavy jacket. The air or light inside, supposedly, was charged in some particular healing way. How the hell does that work? I wondered. Or does it work simply because the woman thinks it works?

Further down, a man sat with a string of copper wire thingies shaped into diamonds held against his chest as a woman stood before him dangling a singular diamond shaped thingy in small circular motions. Oh, come one! I thought. What bull.

After a while I wondered if anything there was real, the little devices promising to protect you from cell phone radiation, the crystals, the homeopathic, healing lotions, scents, and teas, the psychic claiming to channel a saint.

Speaking of psychics, anyone in a turban or the smallest whiff of barely scraping by as a psychic (aka: I will say anything you want because I really need your money) I walked right past. Otherwise, my only criteria was that the price be as low as possible. So when I happened across a pleasant looking young woman charging $20 per twenty minute reading, I thought, Well, she looks nice. She'll do.

But as I was signing up, she went on break, and I found myself paired with another, older woman. Is she a fake psychic brought to me by my negativity and doubt? Or, I wondered, is she the real deal I hoped for?

I wanted to tell her as little as possible, so when she asked for information, all I told her was that I was trying to decide between two options, with one feeling more like a move forward than the other. From this she went on to describe, perfectly, how I felt about x, how I was ready to do y and z, the circumstances surrounding my situation and how moving towards y and z will feel, in the meantime, like "walking on glass." But considering the alternative, here she described my energy leaks, the little pains here and there that I had begun to worry about but which were nothing more than my fear of speaking my truth and walking my own unique path. She even pointed to a particular pain I had been worrying about that very day, and as she cleared it energetically, I felt the discomfort completely disappear. Was what she did real? I don't know. But the discomfort is gone and the few times I've felt it start to return I tell it, oh no you don't. I ended up spending nearly an hour with her, fifty five well worth it bucks. Afterwards, I went for a long walk round the city, thinking about x, y and z...

I wish I could tell you more. But things are rather tricky at the moment. The psychic also mentioned how I was going through a grieving process. But one, I think, for more than just the loss of my father.

Well, that's it for now.