The Steamroller Meditation
Stumped in a reading? Flatten assumptions to find the truth!
**Scroll down to get to the meditation recording**
In her 2008 book Trance-Portation (affiliate link included), Diana Paxton chronicles the best practices and worst habits of those who submit their bodies as voice pieces for their gods. While I do speak to spirits, I’m a lousy roommate, so much of the book’s discussion of what it’s like for Odin or another entity to ride you didn’t apply to me. If it does to you, read Paxton’s work—I’ve met her, and she is the Real Deal.
Trance-Portation remains on my shelf because of a “we don’t talk about this” tidbit: not every priest/ess loses full consciousness while consensually possessed. In Paxton’s tradition, the priest/esses who consent to short-term possession are called, as a metaphor, “horses” that the Norse spirits ride. She noted that sometimes those priests who did not relinquish full consciousness inserted “horse talk” - personal opinions under the guise of sacred communication. The horse talk was easy to spot because it was almost always far more post-Christianity judgmental than anything the gods themselves might say. If you’re familiar with Norse mythos at all, Freya slut-shaming anyone would be a dead giveaway for horse talk.
How Horse Talk Shows up in Tarot Readings - and how the Steamroller Meditation Can Help
A version of horse talk can also occur in tarot and often does. Purity culture in the spiritual world is toxic, and it’s everywhere. It has been insidiously normalized to the point where most of us confuse arbitrary rules with healthy boundaries. You’ll see horse talk in being told someone has to gift you your first tarot deck, that you can’t be psychic without a particular diet (that the person claiming this has just the thing to sell you for that diet), or that you’ll lose your intuitive abilities if you use them to your benefit for any reason whatsoever. All of that is virtue-policing and horsetalk that I’ve encountered at many a reader’s table.
Divination and spirit work are meant to empower the client, not browbeat them back into a mainstream society that isn’t working so well. You can’t do that if you insist on giving them messages appropriate to your life place rather than theirs.
That’s part of why I cultivate radical nonjudgement in my spirit work practice. Context is everything (and will be especially relevant in the Tarot for Kinky People class I’m teaching online next week.)
However, judgment is part of our reflexive training. We are also profoundly prone to confirmation bias. We see what we want to see based on what we want to know, and there’s a degree of pressure to Sound Like an Authority when someone is at your table, asking you to use the picture cards to explain their lives to them.
There are readers out there where that doesn’t matter. These readers entertain at parties; they don’t want to get into anything deep and have a general patter. What these readers might get wrong doesn’t matter.
These folks aren’t the ones reading for the people who show up in a shop at 6 pm on a Thursday night, and ask me to use the tarot to show them how to be a better man for their wife and family, what to do now that their husband has Alzheimer’s and they are now married to a mentally 17-year-old stranger with a girlfriend, or why pain from past trauma has lingered. They aren’t the ones asked to help pick the cancer treatment that will extend life just enough that they can keep their child away from an abusive parent until that child reaches adulthood. I get situations like these AND the paranormal things I talk more openly about.
I haven’t been a party reader in decades. The type of client I attracted changed when I switched to shop and rented space work. What this different type of client brought with them immediately were experiences far outside my bubble. My first official shop reading was for a young Mandarin couple seeking help because their families wouldn’t approve of their marriage; they wanted to see how different scenarios played out. (I have since started refusing couples readings for other reasons but make rare exceptions.) While I try to learn everything and anything, I don’t know everything. In that situation and many others, I’ve had to rely on my intuition - and I’ve had to persuade my American cultural biases and assumptions to step aside. Of course, my biases are American and from a certain degree of privilege, so stepping aside instead of insisting my way is better is a matter of fighting not just myself but the egregore that is the American People.
Also, it’s easy to develop confirmation bias on the paranormal side. “It must be a fairy!” is one thing, but if it turns out to be an Aswang like it did once, that’s a dangerous mistake to make. (That’s without getting into the deadly mistakes people often make involving fairies. 90% of “demonic hauntings” are the fae, being a—-s.)
The steamroller meditation eliminates horse talk and confirmation bias as much as either can be. The practice is simple - picture a steamroller rolling through the metaphorical yard that is your psychic perception ground.
If you’re a reader, learning to read tarot or other divination, or just need to solve a problem and need help getting out of your way, try it. It’s quick, easy, and a little bit of life-giving silly. Also, inner steamrollers don’t require permits and Class C licensing!
Meditation Audio Here
Meditation Text
Sit with your feet flat on the floor. Rest your palms on your knees or a flat surface. Close your eyes if you feel safe to do so. Inhale, pulling clean, cool energy through your crown down your central column to your root, exhaling when you reach the root. (If you need medical terms, breathe from the top of your head and exhale when you reach the sphincter.) Repeat the breathing cycle at least four times. After enough breath repetition, shift your focus to your third eye (forehead, centered just above eyebrows). Imagine a field existing in that space just before the third eye. To your right, you see a steamroller ready to go. The person driving it is someone from your ancestors or spirits that you trust to only run over the right things. Give the operator a thumbs up, and allow the steamroller to drive over any internalized ideas obstructing your ability to see, hear, feel, and sense the truth of a matter. Don’t worry; no roots are removed, and anything momentarily flattened will recover.
Bonus Reads for March 5,2024
At Medium: Who Knew AI would be marching with us to our doom?
At Golden Apple: Deep Beginning Witchcraft: 10 Things Easy to Get Wrong about Witchcraft
Next Appearance
ONLINE: Tarot for Kinky People March 13, 2024
If you have spicy clients, or at least clients who spend a lot of time on BookTok, this class will show you ways to interpret the tarot through power dynamics. You will also learn a face-up technique to negotiate a scene with a play partner!
Space in class is limited, so reserve your spot now!