What Actually Happens in a Reading

People arrive at my door with two things: a question they have been carrying for a while, and a quiet worry that they are about to be performed at. I want to take the second one off the table immediately.

Before we begin

There is no incense. There is no dimmed room, no draped fabric, no music designed to make you feel like something mystical is happening. There is a comfortable chair, a pot of tea, and about ten minutes of ordinary conversation so that we are two people in a room rather than a practitioner and a client.

That opening chat is not small talk, though it looks like it. I am listening to how you speak about your own life — where you slow down, where you skate past something quickly. That tells me where the pressure is, and it tells me which discipline is going to serve you best: cards, mediumship, energy work, or simply sitting with what is already surfacing.

The middle hour

Then we work. Depending on what you have come for, that might look like a tarot spread laid out where we can both see it, with me talking you through what each position is doing rather than pronouncing at you. It might be mediumship, which is slower and quieter than television has led people to expect. It might be reading the shape of your energy — which sounds abstract until you hear it described back to you and realise it is uncomfortably specific.

Whatever the method, three things stay constant.

I tell you what I am doing. You will never be left wondering whether something meaningful just happened. If a card lands hard, I will say so and tell you why.

You can interrupt. This is a conversation, not a broadcast. The best sessions are the ones where you push back, correct me, or say "that does not land" — because that is information too.

I do not fill silences with guesses. If something is unclear, I say it is unclear. More on that another time, but it is the single most important rule I work by.

The last ten minutes

We close by turning it into something you can actually use. Not homework, and certainly not a list of things to buy or a recommendation to come back next week. Usually it is one or two clear observations, phrased plainly enough that you will still remember them on Thursday.

What you leave with

Most people expect to leave unsettled. Almost nobody does. The common reaction, and I say this having watched it hundreds of times, is a kind of relief — not because I have told them what they wanted to hear, but because something they had been circling for months finally got said out loud by someone with no stake in the outcome.

If you are sceptical, you are in good company. A surprising share of the people who sit with me are, and I would rather work with a thoughtful sceptic than someone who believes everything. Scepticism is just attention with its guard up. Bring it along.