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.

Infidelity

I like Nerve Magazine,  (not just because they did a small piece on me once  )

I was reading them recently and they had a terrific interview with Ira Glass,   and he said something so interesting,  that I really believe, about infidelity:

“For example, before people begin an affair, before they cheat, the real transition begins when they confide in someone else. That’s where the betrayal begins…And as soon as he starts having truths that he doesn’t tell to her but that he tells to someone else…that’s the beginning of the end for them.”  

I see this all the time in the stories people tell me. When you are confiding more to your friends than to your lover/spouse, if you are being more intimate with others than with them, that’s when trouble starts.  It’s not that you can’t be intimate with other people, it’s just that you can’t have stories you withhold from your lover but share with others, especially others you find attractive; that is a tiny crack between the two of you, which can easily grow if you put enough pressure on it.

A young man's experience

Recently I stumbled across this article.  In 2011 I did a reading for this young man, and this is what he wrote

“Liat Silberman, an Australian expat who reads fortunes in TriBeCa, wasn’t sketchy at all. She charges 100 bucks per reading*, is often booked months in advance, and does her tarot-card deciphering in upscale cafés. She was pleasantly matter-of-fact as she laid out a “Celtic cross” arrangement of cards and told me what she saw: I was low on money, anxious and uncertain about the future and not making enough time for friends – if I continued this way I might fall into repetitive, materialistic patterns of addiction, represented by a suitably ugly Devil card. She saw two women in my future, but – she turned over a card featuring a guy facedown with a mess of swords in his back – things weren’t going to turn out well with either of them.

Either she was more psychic than the storefront Gypsies or she was way better at bullshitting. But whatever the case, as I spread out my problems before her she reminded me that I was in my 20s and everyone in their 20s feels this way when they’re trying to figure stuff out. It’s no big deal. Her advice was to have some fun, enjoy the city, grow and adapt – the stuff I know but still need to hear again and again, because I’m an idiot – and she delivered it in the manner of that kindly, unhip aunt whom you feel comfortable discussing your drug use with…”

So there you have it,  I’m the kindly unhip aunt,  with whom you can feel comfortable discussing your drug use…    


*I’m charging $120 per reading now.

Article in Nerve.com

A couple of weeks ago Colette McIntyre from nerve.com contacted me and asked if she could do an interview, asking for sex advice from a psychic - and here it is!

Interviewed by Tribeca Citizen

Lovely interview with me on Tribeca Citizen. Many thanks to Erik Torkells for making it happen!

Making a Splash

Just got a mention in Splash Magazine's weblog... you have to scroll about half way down, and there I am! (by the drop of water)  They are recommending me as a mother's day gift - for the woman who has everything.. a glimpse of the future might be the perfect present.

Downtown Express mention

Just got mentioned in the Downtown Express. Don't know for how long the link will be alive, so I've cut and paste the article below.


Tribeca tarot
With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, many people are looking for answers on love. Some of them will go to Liat Silberman, a Tribeca mom and former president of the P.S. 234 P.T.A., who also reads tarot cards for a living.

“In old Tribeca, it was kind of more normal,” Silberman said of the readings she now conducts in quiet corners of the Whole Foods cafe.

Silberman, a Community Board 1 member, limits her readings to personal events in people’s lives, not large world events. Unless she was doing a reading for President Obama, her predictions skew more toward luck in love than international politics.

“Though I did know that going into Afghanistan was a bad idea,” she said, “and not because I’m clairvoyant.”