“The Finger Pointing At the Moon is not the Moon” — Buddha
A was mentoring a client of mine this week and teaching her the foundations of muscle testing and kinesiology so that she can start to translate her spinal attunement practise with clients online and instead of physically measuring her clients spinal tensions, she could muscle test where she was going to work on their bodies.
I giggled at one point — “I don’t use muscle testing anymore, but I still teach it as it is a really good starting point for you to learn and trust your intuition”
Many of my clients use the basics of kinesiology to get really pinpoint precise about where they are working on their clients. I teach the foundations of this practise in The Self Holding Method, which teaches practitioners how to work with somatic practises more intuitively and guided by both the body and field intelligence. It is almost like a level one to spinal attunement, which then works practically, hands on with the body and biofield.
That session prompted me to write this article.
Because there is nothing wrong with working with mediumship tools. Pendulums, cards, muscle testing, scrying…
They are, as Buddha once said “fingers pointing to the moon, but they are not the moon”… ie. they are gateways into knowing and learning your intuition and being able to use it without second checking yourself. They develop self assurance.
But, in a way, they are like training wheels. Once you are open to the field — everything comes through the field and if you can listen deeply enough, all of your answers are there.
That is also not to write off tradition.
And not to say, that sometimes, it’s just simply MORE fun to use tools, like tarot, or coffee and tea leaves.
There’s something also deeply mythological and sacred about the old ways, because each one grew out of a particular landscape and they carry the fingerprints of everyone who used them before.
Take dowsing. Some of its earliest written traces come from the mining regions of sixteenth-century Germany, where Georgius Agricola’s De Re Metallica (1556) shows men walking the hills with forked hazel rods, searching for veins of ore. From there it travelled into farming life across Europe and later into rural Australia, where water diviners were often called in before a bore was sunk. The practice belonged to ordinary people with practical questions: where is the water, where do we dig, where will the well hold through summer. There’s a humility in that. The diviner walks the land slowly, on foot, paying attention to the ground itself, and the knowing arrives through the hands.
That’s what I find most beautiful about dowsing, and it sits close to your own work. The rod or pendulum is a magnifier for movements the body is already making. The muscles respond in tiny ways before the conscious mind has caught up, and the instrument makes those responses large enough to see. So in a sense, dowsing has always been a somatic practice. The body knows, and the tool lets the body speak in a language the eyes can read.
Tasseography has a different texture entirely. Reading coffee grounds is woven through Turkish, Greek, Armenian, Lebanese and broader Middle Eastern households, and reading tea leaves became a fixture of Irish, Scottish and English kitchens. These were domestic, intimate practices, often held by women, often done after a shared meal. The cup is turned, you wait, you talk while the grounds settle. The reading happens inside friendship and hospitality. Part of its medicine lives in that slowness and in being witnessed by someone who loves you.
Tarot began as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy and only took on its divinatory life a few centuries later, gathering layers of Hermetic, Kabbalistic and astrological symbolism as it went. The evolution of the practise shows how a tradition can grow, absorb new meaning, and become a vessel for imagination and archetype. The images give the intuitive mind something to hold, a story to enter, a mirror wide enough to see your life reflected back.
What all these traditions share is ritual, and ritual changes the state we’re in. Shuffling the deck, working with the pendulum, swirling the last of the coffee, walking the paddock in silence: each gesture tells the nervous system that we’re crossing into a different kind of listening. The tool becomes a doorway, and it keeps us company on the threshold.
I had the most powerful coffee reading of my life in Greece, with a participant on my Spinal Attunement training in Samothraki — she predicted my brother would become pregnant with a boy, and a couple of months later he announced his pregnancy. She also predicted other events that have since come true.
But ultimately, it is about the medium themselves. You are the vessel and the spine is your antennae — when the spine is attuned, the information in the subtle energetic layers — the soul, spiritual bodies, becomes available to you.
I am currently working with a number of clients next year to help them tune to their gifts as a medical medium in my year long medical mediumship training.
I also have a number of shorter courses, designed to teach you how to start training your intuiton.
Join us for one of our upcoming trainings in 2027:
The Self Holding Method February 2027
Spinal Attunement at Temple Farmhouse, Byron Bay March 2027
Or if you want to speak to our team about what is most appropriate, you can email Raminta — hello@somamystica.org
With love,
Sigourney Belle & The Soma Mystica® Team
