About Me
My name is Emma Rayne and I read the tarot.
I've read about a lot of other people who have come to the tarot later in life, particularly after a really good tarot reading. And others who have quit huge jobs in order to take on the tarot full time. Neither of these apply to me. I have always been, and always will be, a tarot reader.
I was born into it. Not the tarot, but all things metaphysical. I was a girl obsessed. I constantly read books about Cayce, Browne, and other psychics from the library, making the trek down on my bike by myself to get them, convinced it was my calling. I read books about the ouija (I think I still have the one I never returned to the library when I was a kid LOL), and made my mother buy me a board. I wanted to be psychic. I wanted to talk to the dead. I wanted to have a gift. I wanted to be special.
I bought packages filled with psychic tests...little envelopes with those cards one person would hold up backwards and you would guess which card it was. Though I normally played it alone...just using it like a game of memory. I scoured auctions and flea markets, hoping to find a set of oracle cards or books on parapsychology. I was convinced that was what I wanted to be when I grew up: a parapsychologist. I mean, what a cool name to be called, right?
But then again, I also wanted to be a singer, an actor, a clothes designer, and an artist. Artist was the only thing that stuck, as I couldn't sing or act, or even begin to learn how to sew (though I sew now, but from patterns, not my own designs). I was kind of a strange kid. My passions were bigger than my abilities, which also lent to my so-called psychic ability.
Because even though I desperately wanted to be a psychic with ever fiber of my being?
I kind of sucked at it.
But I was still convinced that somewhere, deep inside of me, was a psychic waiting to happen. I may not guess that circle or that triangle on those cards, but I could look at you and tell you what you were thinking.
And as a kid, I took this as I was psychic! As a young adult I took this as "empathic abilities" (a cuter name for being psychic). As a middle aged adult, I know this to be "born out of a need to read the adults in my home in order to know how to proceed in order to stay safe" (read: dysfunctional & abusive parents).
So, I was a kid with a gigantic desire (almost obsessive) for escapism. Fantasy. Psychic abilities. Talking to the dead. Numerology. Astrology. And when I turned 12, the tarot. The neighborhood "witch" died, and in her possession was a Rider-Waite tarot deck that we got to bid on at auction. And we won!
I was born for it. I was born into it. What else could have come next in my life? The tarot of course. My life put me right smack dab in the middle, ripe for tarot reading.
I then became a girl obsessed with fortuntelling. I read playing cards. Oracle cards. I Ching. Coins. Hot wax dropped in cold water. Anything I could get my hands on or wrap my mind around. Anything that made my life seem better than it was. Anything that told me that there was a way out of the hell hole that was my family.
And I was damned good at it. Growing up, I had to learn how to read mom and dad. Were they happy? Sad? What were they thinking? Are they showing signs of snapping? Of yelling? Of drinking too much? I better hid the liquor! I had to assess their moods like the FBI assesses a serial killer. I had to become them, and anticipate what would come next. If I were mom or dad, what would I do? And eventually, I became so good at it, I could do it with anyone. Not on purpose, mind you, it just happened naturally. I could tell by body posture, looks on their faces, their tone, and their movements what someone was thinking. Sometimes word for word.
This ability lent well to my tarot reading. I could get inside my client's head to see what their true issue was and read the tarot for them to get to the bottom of it. They were always so shocked I was so good at what I did at such a young age. But little they didn't know it wasn't a gift. It was a honed strategy for survival.
I think so many of us who have at one time or another identified as being empathic came from the same sort of background. Maybe not all, maybe some were born this way, I have no idea. But I think a lot of us were trained by unpredictable parental behavior to be like this. We've come from a world we needed to escape from, so we learned to read the dangerous people around us so well that we eventually learned to read everyone. And so now, we call ourselves "empathic", but honestly, we are just really, really good at putting ourselves into someone else's shoes.
I have a deep understanding of the human condition. I tend get stomachaches around people who have wanted to hurt me. One being my uncle (who's now passed away), one I took a class on tarot with, one being a guy I used to babysit for, one being a neighbor boy when I was young, and now, one being a neighbor who lives a few houses away.
They all have either tried to hurt me (meaning crossing a boundary of inappropriateness in some way) or have successfully done so. My gut feelings have always been right. Not because I am psychic with a creep radar, but because of this thing, this survival strategy to read people's feelings and intentions. To hear inflections in tone, to read between the lines, to see the way someone moves, to hear the differences in pitch in their voices.....everything. And to understand how people work, the psychology of the human mind. I understand it so well, that I can't not put myself into someone else's shoes.
While it's been my way to navigate life and has helped me more often than not, it also can be quite annoying. I just want to "be" sometimes. I have been accused of being a "bleeding heart" or a "busy body". I want to help everyone I can, especially those that can't help themselves. I can't drive past a hurting animal without calling animal control. I can't watch a fight without calling 911. I can't walk away from injustice. Growing up, nobody was there to look out for me, so subconsciously, it became my life's mission to be able to do so for others.
And I think that's why I love the tarot so much. I've seen readings change lives. I've seen victims have the strength to walk away from bad situations. I've felt my own life shift from personal readings I've done for myself. It has shown me the answers I already knew deep down inside, I was just too afraid to admit them. Fortunetelling is fun. But the true purpose of the tarot is something wholly different:
The true purpose of the tarot is breaking open the truth.
Sometimes the truth is hidden and difficult to either admit or accept. And the tarot illuminates that for us. It smashes through the rocks, the layers of gravel, the mushy sediment, and pulls it out into the sunlight, where it becomes clear as day.
You can't run away from the truth anymore when it's staring you directly in the face. The tarot screams "HERE!! THIS!! SEE???!!" And you really don't have a choice but to look. Whether you absorb what you see or not, is up to you. But at least you've seen it. It can plant a seed for change to come to fruition at a later date. It can start a chain reaction of stepping-stone-changes that are tiny, but when worked upon one another, become huge.
When I was 12 and doing the tarot, I needed it in my life. It changed my life for the better. It helped me through some very bad times. And it has continued to do so into the present.
So while I don't have some cool story about how I came to the tarot, the point is I came to it. Or it came to me. In a box on the front lawn of a woman, who as children we called a witch and I have no idea why, who had passed away, who then passed down her gift to onto me. Not a psychic gift, mind you, but the tarot, as a physical gift after her death. I am lucky we went to that auction that day, had we not, who knows when I would have gotten my first deck. And I would have had to figure out the maze that was my life on my own without it. Sure, I would had gotten through it, but it would had been harder without the tarot to break open my truths.
So I am very grateful that these cards have done for me. And how much they've changed my own life is why I want to share them with you. I want to help the world, one person at a time, find their own truths, acknowledge them, and fix them.
When you make choices off the truth, your life becomes richer and more meaningful. When you make fear-based choices, you are unknowingly living a lie. Maybe a safe lie, a comfortable one, but a lie is a lie, nonetheless. And how can you be happy with a lie? You can't. Pretending to be happy isn't really happy. So, why not face the truth instead? Give a tarot a try.
What have you got to lose?