Got a mention in the New York Post

There was an article on tarot in the New York Post this week - and I got a mention!  Always fun when that happens. 

In case the link doesn't work - here's the article below -

After about a month of dating a new guy, Amy, 32, is ready to take the next step in the budding relationship, but that doesn’t mean mentioning his name to her mom or friending him on Facebook.

Instead the Boerum Hill resident makes an appointment with a tarot reader.
“If I like a guy, it’s helpful to get an outside opinion as to whether this guy could be a long-term thing or just a fling,” says Amy, a lawyer who asked not to use her last name due to professional reasons. “It’s the same as getting feedback from friends as to whether a guy is good for you.”

More and more New Yorkers say they’re seeking out love advice from tarot card readers, and Newsweek research from 2013 found that 18-to-30-year-olds are more likely to turn to tarot and astrological readings than religion or praying to cope with existential angst.

But tarot readers may be adding to that angst by doling out relationship advice — especially in New York City, where love is notoriously hard to find. Jersey City resident Walt Hickey recently went to Union Square tarot reader Angela Lucy. She told him he was likely to be unlucky in love until December.

It sounded grim to Hickey, a writer for the statistical analysis blog fivethirtyeight.com. Then he looked at some stats on the subject and found that there may not be much more in the reading beyond a little common-sense intuition.  “New York City is the third worst city for relationship formation, according to Facebook data,” Hickey says. “It’s not a stretch for a tarot reader to assume a single New Yorker is having trouble.”

Liat Silberman, a Tribeca-based tarot reader, doesn’t think of tarot as a tool for predicting the future. Rather, she says a reading can help clients identify blind spots and bad habits in their lives. “So often, clients come in asking me when they’ll meet their husband or wife. And I can’t tell them that,” says Silberman, adding that this lack of certainty will often initially annoy her clients — but that if they stick with her, they and their love lives will benefit. “In Australia, where I learned how to read tarot card, readers are often Jungian therapists, drawn to the cards because of the archetypes they contain.”

Silberman, herself a former psychotherapist who decided to focus on the cards full time, has found there’s a lot of overlap between therapy and tarot.
“The cards can uncover patterns and show you where you might be stuck,” she explains. “You might want to meet a mate, but are stuck in a relationship conflict with your parents. Until you resolve that, love won’t happen.”

Tarot reader Lucy says that, often, the most obvious tough-love advice can be helpful when it comes from her — because clients will actually follow through in a way they wouldn’t if they heard it from their friends. “I had one client who came in, desperate to find a partner. She had a ring on her left hand!” Lucy explains. “I put the cards down and told her, ‘Everyone thinks you’re married!’ Until I said that, she had no idea that was the message she was sending.”
Although the advice may be taken with a grain of salt, busy New York City millennials have embraced the “can’t hurt, might help” mentality a tarot reader might bring.  

“The instant gratification of actually getting a response to a question like ‘Why hasn’t he texted?’ outweighs the fact that the answer is probably BS,” says Deena, 30, an editor and East Village resident who declined to give her last name for professional reasons. “Because, hey, what if it’s not BS?”
The last tarot reader she spoke with correctly guessed the first letter of her current boyfriend’s name. “I think that’s pretty good,” she enthuses.