I was recently interviewed by Gillian of WarmHeartsEmailTarot.com. Here is the interview, reproduced in full:
An interview with Reverend Lora Andrea, who offers Tarot for Spiritual Guidance, here at WarmHeartsEmailTarot.com.
In this interview, Reverend Lora Andrea discusses her spiritual and tarot background, together with why and how she gives tarot for spiritual guidance: ‘Some psychics are here to help people with their love lives, with their financial issues, or whatever, but I am here to help with spiritual development. No matter what kind of question I am asked, the answer always ends up revolving around the individual’s spiritual development. I don’t mean to say that I do not answer the question, but the answer to the question always involves their approach to their spiritual evolution.’
In this interview, Reverend Lora Andrea discusses her spiritual and tarot background, together with why and how she gives tarot for spiritual guidance: ‘Some psychics are here to help people with their love lives, with their financial issues, or whatever, but I am here to help with spiritual development. No matter what kind of question I am asked, the answer always ends up revolving around the individual’s spiritual development. I don’t mean to say that I do not answer the question, but the answer to the question always involves their approach to their spiritual evolution.’
1) Can you tell us about your background in the psychic arts?
I have been interested in psychic phenomena ever since I was a little girl. For some reason my mother, who was raised Catholic, had an excess of interest in ghost stories! Prior to going on vacation, she would take a book of ghost stories out of the library, and we would read them together. Most of these stories took place in the historic houses along the routes we were planning to take through old New England. So, we would visit these houses, or at least stand outside and watch the window where the white lady was supposed to appear, or whatever, and it was all very interesting.
I now think my mother, who was highly-educated and not at all religious, loved antiques and historic houses for the same reason I do: because she was very sensitive to the energies that inhabit older daily items. Old houses always contain a real vibe, similar to cemeteries and battlefields, and old furniture and even small stuff, like silverware, does as well.
That was my childhood experience of spiritual pursuits, but since then I have read avidly and participated avidly in a wide array of spiritual experiences. Shamanism, mysticism, pendulums, aura studies, poltergeist activities, automatic writing, channelling, meditation, studying the world’s religions, learning astrology, learning the Tarot, learning numerology, studying early Catholicism, studying reincarnation – you name it, and I’ve done it, or at least learned a lot about it. I’ve even recently started having mediumship experiences, almost against my will, since it is difficult to talk to someone about a deceased loved one. They can become very distraught, and I would hate to think I was misinterpreting what I was being told. So far it has worked out, however.
2) How has your spirituality developed over the years?
As a native intuitive, I have not had to work at this. All of my studies and investigations have been in an effort to understand my own experiences. I recently had an astrological reading by a professional astrologer – a new experience for me, believe it or not. I had always done my own astrology or ordered reports online. He told me that my placement of Neptune means that I’m extremely, ridiculously intuitive, whether I work at it or not. I was vaguely aware of Neptune’s influence on me, but his words had a big impact.
I think my spirituality has developed in a rather inevitable way. The more I experience, the more I learn; the more I learn, the more I experience. For example, 25 years ago I was given information about a past life. I didn’t believe it, since I didn’t have much faith in my automatic writing skills nor those of my friend who got the original info, and at that time there was no Internet to investigate the claim. Then, in the year 2003, I idly typed in a couple of search terms I had been given through our automatic writing many years prior, and the person I was supposed to have been popped up at the top of the search. I was knocked flat, let me tell you; I had never been able to find reference to her in any written source at the library, partly because I didn’t understand the naming conventions in place at that time and mostly because she was a very minor figure, historically. Google overcame those difficulties. I discovered that I actually had a great many memories of being this person, and was easily able to validate dozens of impressions and experiences I have had over the years as I read memoirs by people who had known her. This meant that I was now much more attuned to my intuition, because now I could better recognize an accurate insight when it came to me. This is a good example of why learning more causes you to experience more.
3) How did you get interested in tarot?
I think we are all tempted to use divination as a means of finding out information we desperately need. I was just more persistent than many people, and kept working with the tarot cards in an effort to read for myself for so many years that I became proficient. That said, the cards are really just prompts – or a crutch, as a much older psychic once said to me! She is not really wrong, since the cards really just help me validate what I am already hearing in my head. It’s a way of trusting myself just a little bit more. And it really is wholly unnecessary. If somebody called me for a reading, and my cards suddenly disappeared, I would still be able to give them as good a reading. I do like using them, however, as much as a visual aid as anything else. It helps me keep my thoughts focused – whenever I’m doing any kind of psychic reading, I find it very helpful to stare off into the middle distance. Most psychics do. For whatever reason, staring at the cards works very well for me.
4) Why do you give tarot for spiritual guidance?
One thing I have learned about myself is that I am apparently here on this planet to assist people with their spiritual development. Some psychics are here to help people with their love lives, with their financial issues, or whatever, but I am here to help with spiritual development. No matter what kind of question I am asked, the answer always ends up revolving around the individual’s spiritual development. I don’t mean to say that I do not answer the question, but the answer to the question always involves their approach to their spiritual evolution. So, for example, if someone were to ask me whether to break up with their boyfriend, they might be told that they need to take a different perspective on him because the questioner has a tendency to approach life from a certain direction and thus needs to rethink their reason for being in the relationship. I will likely get a strong hint to help them know which way their guides are leaning in regard to their question, but the questioner will probably need to do some spiritual exploration to find the best answer. In other words, the reading will always end up being about the questioner, although it will still give good information on the subject of the question.
As for the reason why I use tarot — well, we already covered that in some respects, but the tarot is ideal for deeply spiritual issues, since it is based on the Kabbalah, an esoteric system of mysticism that was specifically designed to understand spiritual evolution and states of being.
5) How do you use tarot for spiritual guidance?
As I said, the tarot is really an ancient system of divination based on an esoteric system of mysticism called the Kabbalah, so every card has a very high spiritual meaning in addition to the more mundane meanings you might derive. For example, the zero card, The Fool, which is the first card in the Major Arcana, can simply mean exactly that – a fool. It rarely does, but sometimes it’s completely obvious that my guides mean me to interpret it that way. You might say that is the lowest definition. The next level of definition would include the idea of new beginnings, innocence. The most esoteric definition would involve an understanding of the Kabbalistic tree of life that I couldn’t begin to go into here, but essentially has to do with the early stage of a complex path of development every soul follows. The point I am making is that the tarot is probably better suited for discussing spiritual development than almost any other form of divination. Another one would be the I Ching, which I have also studied, far less extensively.
6) What sort of questions do you answer? What sort of questions do you not answer – if any?
I said earlier that I can answer any question, but that would not be strictly speaking true. Some questions are too overly simplistic or manipulative, and I would not be able to give the questioner a good answer. One example, from my days working as a phone psychic on a hotline, is: will my next boyfriend have brown hair? My issue with her question was not because I can’t see the colour of someone’s hair, if it is significant: I can. The problem was that the questioner was determined to find out if somebody very specific was going to be her next boyfriend, and her guides did not want her to have that information right then and there. They wanted to discuss why she was so fascinated with this individual, who was not healthy for her. She wanted nothing to do with such conversations; she was bound and determined to “catch this guy.” She was very annoyed with me because I refused to answer her question about his hair colour. Our guides cannot be played, and I will not be party to an attempt to manipulate spirit.
7) Do you have guides or helpers, who assist you with your work giving tarot for spiritual guidance?
You have heard me referring to “my guides” and “our guides.” My guides frequently help me with my readings, but so do the other individual’s guides. I don’t spend any time questioning who is downloading the information into my brain; I am just very aware of the information, and it is my understanding that this is a collaborative effort among everyone’s angels, guides, ascended masters and so forth, to get them the information they need. Our guides and angels are most interested in our spiritual development; they think it’s a little bit funny that we worry a great deal about very mundane things, when they know our real goal in any life is to advance spiritually as far as possible. The rest of it is fluff.
I should mention here that sometimes a deceased loved one connected to the questioner will show up to help answer questions. That feels different – I can feel them behind me, and the information comes through in a very different sort of way.
8) Do you have anything to say to a person who would like a tarot reading from you?
I would say, don’t enter into this lightly. I know it’s only an inexpensive email tarot reading, but our guides are very anxious to get in touch with us, and if you are not in the habit of doing divination or getting a lot of readings, your guides may have a lot they would like to say. So don’t dismiss anything you’re told, even if it sounds ludicrous or is off-topic. Also, be aware that our guides are much more interested in talking to us about our spiritual development. They really don’t want to discuss what kind of car you should buy. That isn’t to say that they aren’t interested in helping us get through daily life, so that we can focus on our spiritual development. They are very interested in doing that, which is why career and relationship questions can be very important. Everything we do in this life is an effort to learn and grow spiritually. However, that said, you are usually — although not always — going to learn a lot more about your spiritual evolution from a career or a relationship than you are from purchasing a specific model of car.
9) Is there anything else you would like to add about your work giving tarot for spiritual guidance?
Just that I am very pleased to be of help, and it gives me great joy if I feel someone got a good reading that will benefit them. In my work at psychic fairs, which I do very regularly, I find that people are most excited about readings that they themselves never expected. For example, they may have come in with a vague idea of asking about their career, but their guides decided they really wanted to talk about the burden of caring for the individual’s sick mother-in-law. And, really, if you are going to get jazzed about a reading, it’s going to be one that really hits home. We often don’t realize what our most central issues are, because we think they are something that cannot be changed or are otherwise immutable. That is rarely the case; our guides and angels often have really good answers for us, but they can’t respond if you don’t ask the question. It is a bit harder in an email tarot reading, since all I have is a static question on a page. But, if I come back with a discussion of your spiritual attitudes in response to a fairly standard yes or no question, rather than wondering why you didn’t get a straight yes or no, see how the answer may influence your daily life as it is now.
I have been interested in psychic phenomena ever since I was a little girl. For some reason my mother, who was raised Catholic, had an excess of interest in ghost stories! Prior to going on vacation, she would take a book of ghost stories out of the library, and we would read them together. Most of these stories took place in the historic houses along the routes we were planning to take through old New England. So, we would visit these houses, or at least stand outside and watch the window where the white lady was supposed to appear, or whatever, and it was all very interesting.
I now think my mother, who was highly-educated and not at all religious, loved antiques and historic houses for the same reason I do: because she was very sensitive to the energies that inhabit older daily items. Old houses always contain a real vibe, similar to cemeteries and battlefields, and old furniture and even small stuff, like silverware, does as well.
That was my childhood experience of spiritual pursuits, but since then I have read avidly and participated avidly in a wide array of spiritual experiences. Shamanism, mysticism, pendulums, aura studies, poltergeist activities, automatic writing, channelling, meditation, studying the world’s religions, learning astrology, learning the Tarot, learning numerology, studying early Catholicism, studying reincarnation – you name it, and I’ve done it, or at least learned a lot about it. I’ve even recently started having mediumship experiences, almost against my will, since it is difficult to talk to someone about a deceased loved one. They can become very distraught, and I would hate to think I was misinterpreting what I was being told. So far it has worked out, however.
2) How has your spirituality developed over the years?
As a native intuitive, I have not had to work at this. All of my studies and investigations have been in an effort to understand my own experiences. I recently had an astrological reading by a professional astrologer – a new experience for me, believe it or not. I had always done my own astrology or ordered reports online. He told me that my placement of Neptune means that I’m extremely, ridiculously intuitive, whether I work at it or not. I was vaguely aware of Neptune’s influence on me, but his words had a big impact.
I think my spirituality has developed in a rather inevitable way. The more I experience, the more I learn; the more I learn, the more I experience. For example, 25 years ago I was given information about a past life. I didn’t believe it, since I didn’t have much faith in my automatic writing skills nor those of my friend who got the original info, and at that time there was no Internet to investigate the claim. Then, in the year 2003, I idly typed in a couple of search terms I had been given through our automatic writing many years prior, and the person I was supposed to have been popped up at the top of the search. I was knocked flat, let me tell you; I had never been able to find reference to her in any written source at the library, partly because I didn’t understand the naming conventions in place at that time and mostly because she was a very minor figure, historically. Google overcame those difficulties. I discovered that I actually had a great many memories of being this person, and was easily able to validate dozens of impressions and experiences I have had over the years as I read memoirs by people who had known her. This meant that I was now much more attuned to my intuition, because now I could better recognize an accurate insight when it came to me. This is a good example of why learning more causes you to experience more.
3) How did you get interested in tarot?
I think we are all tempted to use divination as a means of finding out information we desperately need. I was just more persistent than many people, and kept working with the tarot cards in an effort to read for myself for so many years that I became proficient. That said, the cards are really just prompts – or a crutch, as a much older psychic once said to me! She is not really wrong, since the cards really just help me validate what I am already hearing in my head. It’s a way of trusting myself just a little bit more. And it really is wholly unnecessary. If somebody called me for a reading, and my cards suddenly disappeared, I would still be able to give them as good a reading. I do like using them, however, as much as a visual aid as anything else. It helps me keep my thoughts focused – whenever I’m doing any kind of psychic reading, I find it very helpful to stare off into the middle distance. Most psychics do. For whatever reason, staring at the cards works very well for me.
4) Why do you give tarot for spiritual guidance?
One thing I have learned about myself is that I am apparently here on this planet to assist people with their spiritual development. Some psychics are here to help people with their love lives, with their financial issues, or whatever, but I am here to help with spiritual development. No matter what kind of question I am asked, the answer always ends up revolving around the individual’s spiritual development. I don’t mean to say that I do not answer the question, but the answer to the question always involves their approach to their spiritual evolution. So, for example, if someone were to ask me whether to break up with their boyfriend, they might be told that they need to take a different perspective on him because the questioner has a tendency to approach life from a certain direction and thus needs to rethink their reason for being in the relationship. I will likely get a strong hint to help them know which way their guides are leaning in regard to their question, but the questioner will probably need to do some spiritual exploration to find the best answer. In other words, the reading will always end up being about the questioner, although it will still give good information on the subject of the question.
As for the reason why I use tarot — well, we already covered that in some respects, but the tarot is ideal for deeply spiritual issues, since it is based on the Kabbalah, an esoteric system of mysticism that was specifically designed to understand spiritual evolution and states of being.
5) How do you use tarot for spiritual guidance?
As I said, the tarot is really an ancient system of divination based on an esoteric system of mysticism called the Kabbalah, so every card has a very high spiritual meaning in addition to the more mundane meanings you might derive. For example, the zero card, The Fool, which is the first card in the Major Arcana, can simply mean exactly that – a fool. It rarely does, but sometimes it’s completely obvious that my guides mean me to interpret it that way. You might say that is the lowest definition. The next level of definition would include the idea of new beginnings, innocence. The most esoteric definition would involve an understanding of the Kabbalistic tree of life that I couldn’t begin to go into here, but essentially has to do with the early stage of a complex path of development every soul follows. The point I am making is that the tarot is probably better suited for discussing spiritual development than almost any other form of divination. Another one would be the I Ching, which I have also studied, far less extensively.
6) What sort of questions do you answer? What sort of questions do you not answer – if any?
I said earlier that I can answer any question, but that would not be strictly speaking true. Some questions are too overly simplistic or manipulative, and I would not be able to give the questioner a good answer. One example, from my days working as a phone psychic on a hotline, is: will my next boyfriend have brown hair? My issue with her question was not because I can’t see the colour of someone’s hair, if it is significant: I can. The problem was that the questioner was determined to find out if somebody very specific was going to be her next boyfriend, and her guides did not want her to have that information right then and there. They wanted to discuss why she was so fascinated with this individual, who was not healthy for her. She wanted nothing to do with such conversations; she was bound and determined to “catch this guy.” She was very annoyed with me because I refused to answer her question about his hair colour. Our guides cannot be played, and I will not be party to an attempt to manipulate spirit.
7) Do you have guides or helpers, who assist you with your work giving tarot for spiritual guidance?
You have heard me referring to “my guides” and “our guides.” My guides frequently help me with my readings, but so do the other individual’s guides. I don’t spend any time questioning who is downloading the information into my brain; I am just very aware of the information, and it is my understanding that this is a collaborative effort among everyone’s angels, guides, ascended masters and so forth, to get them the information they need. Our guides and angels are most interested in our spiritual development; they think it’s a little bit funny that we worry a great deal about very mundane things, when they know our real goal in any life is to advance spiritually as far as possible. The rest of it is fluff.
I should mention here that sometimes a deceased loved one connected to the questioner will show up to help answer questions. That feels different – I can feel them behind me, and the information comes through in a very different sort of way.
8) Do you have anything to say to a person who would like a tarot reading from you?
I would say, don’t enter into this lightly. I know it’s only an inexpensive email tarot reading, but our guides are very anxious to get in touch with us, and if you are not in the habit of doing divination or getting a lot of readings, your guides may have a lot they would like to say. So don’t dismiss anything you’re told, even if it sounds ludicrous or is off-topic. Also, be aware that our guides are much more interested in talking to us about our spiritual development. They really don’t want to discuss what kind of car you should buy. That isn’t to say that they aren’t interested in helping us get through daily life, so that we can focus on our spiritual development. They are very interested in doing that, which is why career and relationship questions can be very important. Everything we do in this life is an effort to learn and grow spiritually. However, that said, you are usually — although not always — going to learn a lot more about your spiritual evolution from a career or a relationship than you are from purchasing a specific model of car.
9) Is there anything else you would like to add about your work giving tarot for spiritual guidance?
Just that I am very pleased to be of help, and it gives me great joy if I feel someone got a good reading that will benefit them. In my work at psychic fairs, which I do very regularly, I find that people are most excited about readings that they themselves never expected. For example, they may have come in with a vague idea of asking about their career, but their guides decided they really wanted to talk about the burden of caring for the individual’s sick mother-in-law. And, really, if you are going to get jazzed about a reading, it’s going to be one that really hits home. We often don’t realize what our most central issues are, because we think they are something that cannot be changed or are otherwise immutable. That is rarely the case; our guides and angels often have really good answers for us, but they can’t respond if you don’t ask the question. It is a bit harder in an email tarot reading, since all I have is a static question on a page. But, if I come back with a discussion of your spiritual attitudes in response to a fairly standard yes or no question, rather than wondering why you didn’t get a straight yes or no, see how the answer may influence your daily life as it is now.
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