The Psychic Connection

Ever since “Psychic Tarot” by Nancy Antenucci and Melanie Howard hit the shelves, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own psychic experiences as well as how it applies to reading tarot. Intuition comes naturally to me and I’ve never had any real qualms about admitting that I fully trust my sixth sense. So it was wonderful to finally read a book that also acknowledges how intuition can play a part in tarot reading. I decided to chat with these soul sisters more about psychic ability and tarot. This interview was interesting and fun. Enjoy!

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1. What was your earliest psychic experience?

Nancy: First I define Psychic means Connected Sight…when you see with all of your human and spirit self. I was about 7 years old. I attended a Catholic grade school where we would play in the alley way during recess. I knew every inch of this alley because my home was nearby. On this particular afternoon…it was pretty chilly and I didn’t have a jacket for the weather. I decided that running would keep me warm. I wanted the others to play with me so I ran like a horse. Soon I became a white horse, the leader of the group. I could feel my tail and see my breath. I lost all track of time and cold. I felt the power of the horse in me. When I look back at that experience, I realized that day that my body was a form that all kinds of great energy could be in.

Melanie: I can remember being five or six and waking up from some sort of dream about my deceased great uncle. It took my parents, who were beside themselves, a long time to convince me it wasn’t real. Except it was. It had something to do with a war. He was a World War II vet. I used to dream a lot of things that either had happened or would happen. But I also had terrible nightmares in between. I was usually very grateful to forget my dreams, and now I rarely remember them. I still have at least one dejavu moment a year, though. I’ll be sitting somewhere, talking to someone, and realize I dreamed this conversation.

2. How did you become a psychic tarot reader?

Nancy: When I was very young, I remember looking sideways at a book of a native American boy. I was looking at it sideways convinced that if I could find just the right angle, I would be able to see under his loin cloth! Pictures and images always felt 3 dimensional to me.

My very first Tarot deck was the Rider-Waite. I was 10 years old. My mother gave me my first deck (Rider Waite) when I was about 10 years old with the condition that she would take them back if they worked. You’d have to know my mom to understand that rule, I did.

My first opportunity to use my cards with others was a Show N Tell at my grade school. My teacher, Mrs. Biganti’s curiosity was piqued when she saw my cards and asked for a reading. I laid down about 5 cards and did my best to tell her what each card told me thru their picture. Each card told me a very definite message.

I told her that her new baby would be very healthy except for one little thing (what that one little thing was not revealed). I hadn’t known that she already had a number of miscarriages and was quite nervous about this pregnancy, so she seemed very pleased. It was fun and almost forgotten until she gave birth to a child that had one ear malformed. Mom took the cards.

During the great upheaval of my early twenties which I refer to as my Medieval Period…dangerous, lusty, full of restlessness and pain, I met Jeff. He reawakened my love for the Tarot. One evening, he laid the cards out dutifully in a Celtic spread and then looked up each one’s definition in his book. I looked at the pictures as he read aloud from the interpretation book.

At one point, I remember being completely mesmerized by the Magician card. Thoughts and feelings were triggered like small explosions. The cards gradually spoke louder as Jeff’s voice became a muted soundtrack. The images told me stories upon stories. I felt like Alice in Wonderland falling down, down, down after the magical rabbit.

Shortly after this reading, I decided to go to Mary, the one professional reader near my hometown in Pennsylvania. After being ushered to her kitchen table, she laid out a well-used playing cards. She started to read her cards marked all over with handwritten definitions.

At some point, she stopped talking, pulled all her cards together and started teaching me. She saw that I would be a great reader so I needed to get started. There is nothing like a calling to stir my Catholic girl’s heart. That same evening at a birthday party, Jeff gave me my second Tarot deck, the Morgan Greer.

I would study one card every night by meditating on the images of each card. I would receive volumes of energy and information from some and barely nothing from others. I loved the experience of exploring the inner landscapes that these cards seemed to trigger.

Nearly a year later, I studied classical definitions by Rachel Pollack (“Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom”). Much to my surprise, my own intuitive base was like the heart, blood, and muscles to the bones of the traditional meanings. It was the true beginning of a very genuine foundation that serves me to this day.

Tarot quite literally opened my eyes to the power of Love in my life. I was still young and reckless with mine and others’ hearts but my soul was discovering a language, a mirror, a teacher. If this was a labyrinth, I wanted to find it’s center. I craved more.

I had read in the cards that my true teacher would be in the Twin Cities. When I arrived, I was disappointed with the rote, traditional ways of teaching that was offered. I didn’t want to memorize meanings or use numerology or astrology as a way to understand Tarot. So I started teaching.

I wanted to explore an intuitive approach and figured that I might be a good tour guide for others that didn’t want the memorization path. Both the students and I came to new ways of seeing the cards from our own creative authority. I learned how to verbalize my intuitive approach.

Exercises such as seeing each card as if it were a little movie or theater were playful and profound explorations. After years of these kinds of questions and exercises, I realized that I was the teacher that I read about years beforehand.

Melanie: I was what Nance calls an “emergency reader” long before I was a Tarot reader. I read emotion, I still can read emotion better than I can read anything else, but I have much better boundaries now. I would read every room I entered, and I could tell tension as a physical change in temperature. Sadness has a taste. Of course, I was always looking for negative emotion – anything that might be a threat to me or my status quo, hence “emergency” reader. There was a lot more information around me, though, and I never saw it in an organized sort of way. Then I met Nance at the Women and Spirituality Conference in Mankato the year she taught the High Priestess card, and she was so impressive, and taught reading cards in such an organic way, that I just connected to it as a way to cross that barrier.

3. What are the most common misperceptions about psychics?

Nancy: Since this is a “gift” from God, it is noble if you give it away for free

We are dying to read you (kind of how some straight men think that every gay man wants them)

We are constantly connected and/or bombarded by energy in the world and from beyond

Psychic ability = wisdom

You flirt with Satanic forces when you leave the well beaten path

We are hippie chicks or charlatans

The future is predetermined and only a psychic can get the nitty gritty

We can predict the time and manner of your death

We are doing this for the love of the craft, not for a life sustaining income with professional boundaries

That all tarot readers are psychic.

Melanie: That we lack sense, order, and control in our lives. That we’re so far out in the whoo whoo that we can’t be grounded. I’ll admit to having met a handful of people like that, but they aren’t always “psychics.” Psychics are people first, psychics second. No two are the same.

4. What inspired you to write “Psychic Tarot”?

Nancy: This is the book that I would have wanted at the beginning of my journey because it isn’t dependant on others’ definitions of the cards, chakras or the 5 Claires (Clairavoyant, clairaudient, etc).

I also wanted to send a message to the future seers so they would know how some of us were thinking and sensing energy at this time of the world.

Melanie: Well, Nance, of course! I was a year into apprenticing with her, learning her way and her helping me to find my way, and then this book opportunity came up. And Nance asked if I would help her write it. I was honored, am still extremely honored, that she did. I’m so excited the ideas that inspired me to study the Tarot as a psychic and personal tool are now out there in the world to inspire others.

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A big thank you to Nancy and Melanie for chatting with me about tarot and psychic stuff.

If you want to connect with Nancy, you can find her at her website: Between The Worlds

You can find Melanie at her site: Way Ward

Do you use psychic ability when you read tarot? If so, I’d love to hear your stories in the comment section below:

Blessings!

Theresa

https://www.thetarotlady.com

http://www.tarotmentor.com