Denise Doherty: Hi there, welcome to this episode of A Girl On A Mission TV! Today we are at A Gathering Grove, here with Alex Chauran! Welcome!
Alexandra Chauran: Thank you!
Alexandra Chauran: Denise Doherty: How are you doing today?
Alexandra Chauran: Just peachy, thanks!
Denise Doherty: Good, good! So, a couple questions for you! What was your high school mascot?
Alexandra Chauran: The kangaroo.
Denise Doherty: Oh really?
Alexandra Chauran: Yes! Lake Washington kangs!
Denise Doherty: Right on! Are you a chocolate or vanilla person?
Alexandra Chauran: Chocolate for sure. Okay, great! I'm surprised when anyone says vanilla!
Denise Doherty: On your car or on your past cars, do you have any bumper stickers?
Alexandra Chauran: I used to have one of those little Darwin fish with the little feet, but then it fell off!
Denise Doherty: Favourite coffee and/or tea beverage?
Alexandra Chauran: Well, I'm drinking chai tea today at A Gathering Grove. They have excellent chai!
Denise Doherty: Fantastic! Your favourite adult beverage?
Alexandra Chauran: I would have to say Bloody Mary's!
Denise Doherty: Okay, very good! Where would you spend your dream vacation?
Alexandra Chauran: I
just got to go to the Bahamas on a cruise with Royal Carribean. I was
actually working on a themed cruise called Psychics On The Sea. And it
definitely was a dream vacation! I could definitely see how somebody
could spend years on a beach with palm trees!
Denise Doherty: That sounds great, and you were working, so it's even better!
Alexandra Chauran: I know, even better!
Denise Doherty: If you could speak another language what would it be?
Alexandra Chauran: I speak un un peu français, but it's more like French Canadian, so I can read the back of shampoo bottles and that's about all.
Denise Doherty: Right.
Now we're going to go into a little bit about why we're here, and what
Alex does and all this great stuff! So, can you actually define what
fortune telling or a psychic is for people?
Alexandra Chauran: Sure,
I kinda'... Everyone gets down into the terminology. I know people who
are trying to make the term "soul reader" work. "Psychic" is what a lot
of people use, but it's such a broad term. It includes anything that
is... You're sensing from the external... You're taking in in a way
that's not the normal five senses. And so that could cover a broad
range of things. It certainly is often mistaken for telepathy or some
form of omniscience, so I feel like it is very confusing and sometimes
it causes people to say, "well, I don't want to interact with a
psychic." So, I like to use the word fortuneteller because it's a
little more disarming. And it allows people to ask questions and
dialogue about what I do. And what I do is, basically, I'm like a
therapist, only I actually help people, and I use a lot of different
divination tools in order to work through the path of somebody's life
and show them some options. Well, many different divination tools have
been in existence for a long time, throughout prehistory. Scrying
forms, such as scrying in water or scrying in fire or scrying with a
crystal ball have been used.
Denise Doherty: What do you mean by scrying?
Alexandra Chauran: Scrying is a form of divination where you look at symbols that you might see, like clouds in the sky.
Denise Doherty: Okay.
Alexandra Chauran: If you were looking at clouds in the sky and you saw different symbols that meant something to you, you would be scrying.
Denise Doherty: Oh, okay.
Alexandra Chauran: And
the history of it is basically, scrying was probably the first form of
divination when people started assigning specific meanings to those
symbols instead of just making up the meanings. And after that, things
like the tarot cards were invented during Medieval Times actually as
kind of a political commentary and later on it began being used for
divination.
Denise Doherty: Oh, okay.
Alexandra Chauran: Well,
I brought a few tools of the fortune telling trade today. These
certainly aren't all of them, but they give you an idea of the range of
tools I might use in a reading. Here's one of the most common which is
the tarot cards, which is a deck of seventy-eight cards, and they each
represent stages along the Hero's Journey, which are some Jungian
archetypes that keep appearing in different stories and mythology, and
when they're laid out in specific arrangements called "spreads,"
they'll tell your own story. This is a pendulum, which is a plumb-bob
that I explained earlier that it can be used to magnify the movements
of one's own body in order to indicate what sort of subconscious cues
are coming across. So, it can be used with a lot of different diagrams
to tell different time frames, and it can be used to find things on a
map which might be misplaced. Here's a tea cup and saucer that I use
for tea leaf readings, and I use Pacific Mist tea which is at
PacificMistTea.com which is a Renton based tea company. I use a fine
loose leaf tea, and what happens is you put the tea in here with the
hot water and the hardest part is where the client has to drink it
without drinking all the tea leaves. When there's just a little bit in
the bottom, they're swirled around three times clockwise and overturned
in the saucer. And then the shapes in the tea leaves that are left over
in the cup are interpreted according to traditional symbols.