Journal · Guidance
How to Choose a Reader You Can Actually Trust
I am going to tell you how to judge someone in my own trade, including how to judge me. I would rather you walk into my room already knowing what good looks like than walk into someone else's and find out the hard way.
The biggest red flag is a curse for sale
If a reader tells you that you are cursed, that your family is cursed, that there is a darkness on you — and the solution happens to be a sum of money, paid to them, today — stand up and leave. It does not matter how frightened you are by then. That is the point of saying it. Fear is the oldest sales tool there is, and it has no business in this work.
I want to be plain about my own boundary, because people ask. I do not do harm work. I will not put anything on anyone, for any price, for any reason. I will not take revenge work, and I will not take money to make someone love you or leave someone else. That is not squeamishness. It is the line my grandmother drew, my mother kept, and I have never once been tempted to cross. Anyone who offers you the opposite is telling you exactly who they are.
The price should be known before you sit down
You should know what a reading costs before it begins, and the number should not move once you are in the chair. The trick you are watching for is the escalating session — a modest price to start, then the discovery of something terrible that requires a larger working, and a larger one after that. An honest reader has a price. A predator has a ladder.
A good reading hands you back your own authority
Here is the test that matters most, and you can apply it to any reader alive. When you leave, do you feel more capable of making your own decision, or more dependent on theirs?
My job is to show you the shape of what you are standing in, so that you can choose. It is not to choose for you, and it is not to make you need me. If you find yourself unable to make an ordinary decision without calling someone first, something has gone wrong — and a reader who cultivates that in you is not helping you.
Beware anyone who is certain about everything
More than forty years in, I am comfortable saying I do not know, and I say it regularly. The future is not a fixed document being read aloud. It is a set of currents, and people change them all the time by what they decide on a Tuesday. A reader who narrates your next ten years with total confidence, down to names and dates, is performing.
I will also tell you when a question is not mine to answer. If you are sitting in front of me asking whether to take a medication, whether to sign a contract, or whether the pain in your chest is serious — those belong to a doctor and a lawyer, and I will say so. A reader who accepts every question is not more gifted than the rest of us. They are less careful.
Questions worth asking before you book
Ask what the reading costs and how long it lasts. Ask what happens if it does not give you what you came for. Ask whether anything else will be recommended afterward, and what that costs. Ask how long they have been reading, and who taught them. You are allowed to ask all of this. Watching how someone answers is itself a kind of reading.
For my part: my prices are told to you up front and do not change once we begin, your first question is free, and I guarantee my work. If you leave without the clarity you came for, tell me. I have been able to say that for more than forty years because I do not need to frighten anyone to fill my room.
Here on the Central Coast
People drive to me from Salinas, Monterey, Santa Cruz, Gilroy and San Jose, and a fair number have already been to someone who scared them. If that is you, you are not foolish and you were not weak. You were talked to by someone who was good at it. Come sit down, and we will start from where you actually are.