Top Tips - Be Proactive not Reactive

Building upon your daily reading practise in an empowering way.

The daily draw is a firm favourite with divination teachers, it is a great way to get to know your chosen system, but it can be problematic. Normally the advice is to do your draw early in the day and if possible spend some time in study and even meditation with that card or symbol and it’s traditional meaning. You might be prompted to carry it with you throughout the day, or to place it somewhere prominent where you can see it so that you can also subconsciously work with it. Then at the end of the day you are normally encouraged to reflect on the day and contemplate how the draw revealed itself to you.

This is great! Very quickly you will learn to trust your instincts, get to know your system, build keywords personal to you and gain a firm knowledge of the traditional meanings. What more could you want? This is what I call reactive reading at its finest and it is what most people want when they ask for a reading, they want to know what will happen, how it’s going to be, it gives back a small level of control to them as it allows them to attach a reason to why something might happen - because the cards said so!

"Do you want to know what it is?" - Clients expect the outcome to the reading to be fixed.

The daily draw can be a micro version of that, forearmed with the knowledge of what is to come you feel prepared to face the day. Until of course you give over your sovereignty, handing over the control of the day entirely to expectation and desperately searching for correlation and validation at the end. It can become obsessive and disempowering. Admit it, you’ve done it, we all have at some point in our lives. When it happens most of us realise fairly quickly what was going on and put a lid on it. But more often than not this results in you starting to shy away from the daily draw and questioning its worth. That's like a builder throwing his hammer away because he hit his thumb, you don’t give up great tools just because you made a mistake and didn’t use it properly.

But what if I told you there is another way? A 'red pill' that will give you back the control and reduce the chance of the daily draw fixation setting in again?

Proactive readings are ones that inform rather than predict, they can be far more powerful and far more enjoyable read for you. Using the draw proactively you can take control of your life in a new and exciting way. Ever wondered how some people just manage to get “stuff” done, they’ll often cite great inspirational books or tell you that they follow systems like “eat the frog” or “6 Impossible things” that allow them to prioritise their inbox and todo list with military precision. For the rest of us mere mortals we stare in horror at a growing list of things and feel the overwhelm. Don’t, now’s the time to do your daily draw. Let the card help inform you as to which task you will attempt and how.

For example here’s my draw from Monday - The 7 of Disks from the Thoth deck - Failure. It’s meaning is far more negative than its Waite Smith cousin and more in line with the Marseille tradition. Earthly challenges are great and the chance of failure is very high! We see not just one pumpkin like disk laying unsatisfactorily on the ground but the entire vine withering and dying. It is Saturn in Taurus, the weight of time bearing down upon the situation, heavy and full of decay, the alchemist has failed and those disks stubbornly remain lead when they should be gold. Crowley in The book of Thoth stated that the pattern of the disks on the card represent the geomantic figure ‘Rubeus’ which he claimed is “most ugly and menacing”. Pretty grim huh? So what did I do? Well I didn't mope around watching for what might go wrong. I chose the task that had the highest chance of failure to tackle first. Knowing full well I had a high chance of failure I realised I had nothing to lose and gave it all I had. Now as it happens, I didn’t fail, well not yet, (there is still time) but what I did do was consciously choose to make the day fit the card, rather than fatalistically waiting and then retrospectively making the card fit the day. The result was an amazing sense of accomplishment. No hiding in fear of what might go wrong, but an embracing of the situation and working with it instead. Is your card the 3 of Cups and it's a works night out? Go! even if you cannot think of anything more dire than spending another couple of hours with your colleagues. Got the Fool and a meeting you need to go to that you've been putting off? Make the decision, do it, and preferably get there without the SatNav. Suddenly your choices become as endless as your imagination and your 'todo' list day by day gets a little bit shorter, whilst your knowledge bases gets bigger and bigger.

Give it a go for a week, see how it can change your day and come back and let me know how you get on?

DO YOU HAVE A TOP TIP TO SHARE? WHY NOT FEATURE AS ONE OF OUR GUEST BLOGGERS BY SUBMITTING YOUR BLOG POST TO ME HERE