Conscious Choice: Your Life is in Your Hands

March 1996

Your Life is in Your Hands

An Interview with Chirologist Justin Pomeroy

by Sheri Reda

The lines on your forehead betray your worries, the lines around your eyes and mouth tell whether you like to laugh, and the lines on your palm describe your nature. Wait a minute! The lines on the palm? As in Gypsies and palm readers and other carny types? I may be open-minded, you say; I may even be new-age. I’ve accepted the possibility that there are invisible meridians of energy running through my body. I am open to the idea of reincarnation. I’ve even come to believe that the stars and planets might exert energy on me and on Earth. But I’m not a total flake. How can the lines on the palm predict events in my life?

They can’t, according to Justin Pomeroy, acupuncturist/lecturer and longtime palm reader. The lines on your palm can’t predict the future any more than the stars in the sky can. You are a creature of free will and no one can say for certain what your future will be. Yet the lines on your palm can suggest information about your nature. And an intuitive, qualified palm reader can use that information to help you gain insight into yourself.

Sounds reasonable. Palmistry, like astrology, is a form of divination. It is like tarot and tea leaves in that it provides a tool for focusing the energy of the reader and the recipient on the ideas and questions at hand. It is unlike those more general sources of divination in that it makes use of empirical information—scientific evidence, if you will—that has accumulated over centuries of time.

Like astrology, palm reading was once a subject of serious study around the world. It was part of the university curriculum during the European middle ages, and it is the subject of one of the world’s earliest known books. Aristotle studied it; so did Alexander the Great. Because palm reading places the individual at the center of his or her universe, however, it fell out of grace with scientists after the age of Galileo. Because it relies on intuition and meditation as well as memorized information, it sank into disrepute in the West after scholars of all types embraced the Newtonian world view.

Yet there seems to be something to it. For one thing, no two sets of hand prints are exactly the same. They can be classified into types and grouped together by similarities, but they can never represent anyone but the person to whom they belong. What’s more, handprints follow that same pattern that psychologists have found to be true of personality traits: they are a combination of nature and nurture. We are born with a certain set of lines, we build others, and yet others appear and disappear over time. According to Pomeroy, we make these changes occur. We can deepen the fate line by acting responsibly, give definition to fertility lines by having children, or even create new lines by the actions we choose to take.

That the past is written on our bodies is not too far-fetched, when you think about it. It’s even likely that our hands, which are part of almost every activity, should reflect the kinds of energy that course through us each day. And of course, it makes sense that the energy patterns we establish should create tendencies or worn pathways, which can suggest, if not predict, the future.

For Pomeroy, practicing the art of reading hands, which is scientifically known as chirology, has been a fascinating journey. Through it, he has been able to consult with such public figures as Ram Dass, Andrew Weil, John Belushi, Ellen Burstyn, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and others. It has also taken him to Italy, Sweden, Finland, Canada, and throughout the United States where he has taught numerous workshops on handreading.

We interviewed Justin Pomeroy and asked him to provide analyses of a couple of his better-known clients. We think you’ll find it as fascinating as we did, and may end by asking yourself, "what do my palms say about me?"

CC: How does palmistry work?

JP: Palmistry—or chirology—is based on the assumption that the structure of the hand and the interrelations and correspondences of its components—palm, finger, lines, mounts, etc.—are connected with psychic structure and also with the nervous system. The intricate network of palm lines represents a personalized signature engraved by the nervous system into the hand tissue.

In ancient times, the teaching was "as above, so below." Scholars believed that the macrocosm was reflected in the microcosm. In terms of body language, this means that the outward body is merely an image and material copy or visible sign of the inner nature. Nowadays, with the advent of exciting new paradigms like quantum physics and the holistic thinking of David Bohm, chroniclers like Richard Leviton have begun calling chirology a "holographic map" or a compact mind-body gestalt. In its purest form, chirology is a set of investigative principles meant to reveal a person’s inner nature and also one’s "karma" or special direction and purpose.

How can hand analysis provide useful information?

There is, in fact, a consistent correlation between the way a person thinks and acts and hand morphology. This correlation makes palmistry a very useful mirror for self-understanding and also a guidance tool for growth and transformation. In fact, of all the "holograms" of the body that yield information about the whole of the bodymind—the eye, the ear, the shape of the face and head etc.—the hand is the most detailed, reliable, and accessible area of the human body for morphological analysis. This may be partly due to fact that our hands receive the most neural connections in the cerebral cortex. Since our hands are so intimately involved in everything that we think and do, the hand in this light, is an organ of knowledge, consciousness and communication.

In this century, C.G. Jung was aware of the value of hand-analysis for personality assessment and the evaluation of growth changes. In his introduction to a 1944 landmark palmistry book by Julius Spier called The Hands of Children, he wrote, "Hands, whose shape and functioning are so intimately connected with the psyche, might provide revealing and...interpretable expressions of psychical peculiarity, i.e., of the human character."

The conceptual system found in the topography of the hand correlates consciousness and energy patterns with morphology in the context of the unconscious, reincarnation, karma, and mental patterning. This complex drama is played out in the hands. We could say that the hand is a spiritual communication coming from within and yielding a complete archetypal layout of the personality.

How do the hands evolve?

Over time the lines in the palm can change- sometimes dramatically as we adjust our living, thinking and feeling patterns. Broken lines may become mended, grooves may run deeper or smoother, several separate lines may tie together and form new pictures or patterns. This important fact emphasizes palmistry’s valuable potential for prevention of problems through informed choice.

According to theory and the thousands of years of recorded experience in decoding the "time-map" of the hand, the inactive hand (usually the left hand) reveals the "soul record" or the accumulated karmic tendencies and impressions from the deep past that are brought into one’s new life. The information encoded on the dominant hand (usually the right hand) is this same threshold image combined with the ancestral patterns of one’s current heredity. A deep analysis of both hands yields a balanced portrait or blueprint of one’s destiny created by one’s free will as well as the predictive-probable future based on the energy patterns of the present.

To a trained chirologist, this vast information is holographically encoded in every part of the hand: every part has meaning for the whole. Thus, the hand shape or "chirognomy" is analyzed to correctly ascertain one’s basic approach to life, one’s character style. To date, twelve hand shapes have been recognized, based on four or five elemental principles.

What are some of the most important elements you examine?

Different evolutionary patterns of personality and health are found in the swirls and whorls of the fingerprints. The lines foretell the special talents and abilities, different themes and issues that one will work or struggle with as well as maintaining a record of one’s accomplishments and awarenesses.

The lengths of the fingers, finger leanings and spacings, flexibility, fingertips, the shape of the the nails, texture and temperature of the skin, thickness and "mounts" of the the palm all yield information concerning unique attitudes, beliefs, judgements, habits and special perceptions that a person employs in his/her life based on one’s unique characterology with its own defensive strategies.

You told me when you were reading my palm that chirologists can’t really predict the length of your life by your life line. That makes sense, if your lines are changeable. But what does the life line show?

There are four main lines in the hand. They come from the four different directions. There’s a line that goes down and a line that goes up. The line that goes down is the life line and the line that goes up is the fate line. Those are two of the lines. Head line and heart line come from the right and left, opposite directions.

The life line has to do with your physical body, your physicality, your basic body energy, your vital energy. It tells what kind of a body you have or what kind of energy you’re using. For instance, some people are very robust, very athletic, very vital, very hearty, very earthy. And some people are very fragile and they need to use their energy very carefully, maybe they’re more mental, so their body energy suffers a lot.

The life line also has on it a way of timing events. You can get an idea of what times in your life might turn out to be kind of rugged in the future, and this is based on the present. Everything in the future is based on now.

For example, maybe you are not handling a difficult situation right now, you’re not really meeting it head on, you’re not confronting it, but instead you’re kind of putting it on hold by drinking alcohol...every night. You’re slowly becoming an alcoholic because you’re increasing your alcoholic intake.

If that’s the pattern of the present, it’s easy to see on the life line that at a certain point you may get liver disease. That doesn’t mean you’re going to get liver disease, it just means that the pattern projected into the future will look like that. If you change the pattern of the present, then the future will change.

How do you combine the different aspects into a reading?

To be accurate, a professional chirologist must be observant and trained to quickly combine all these features together in order for the general principles to emerge. For this, a certain aptitude for deductive logic is necessary. However, logic alone is not enough; it needs to be combined with a trained intuition for the details of one’s life to further emerge from these principles. This dependence on the equal mixture of intuition and logic demands that a circular or holistic mind-power be called into play. This fact is probably the main reason that chirology (and astrology for that matter) has been repudiated by modern western science, which bases its interpretations on linear reductionisms and a medieval conception of the separateness of body and mind.

Approached in the correct, holistic way, a hand reading can empower a person by offering a balanced understanding of what has prevented him or her from the free development of the personality and spirit. In order to grow, we all need to know what events, experiences, and unexplored feelings have determined defensive, protective strategies in ourselves. We need to discover what has had a modifying or stultifying effect on our essential nature. Hand-analysis can increase awareness of personal potential through pointing out the obstacles to that potential. For that reason, chirology becomes a unique and important form of dialogue therapy. Hand analysis can be a rich and valuable clarifying process bringing greater order and control of one’s complexity, helping a person to understand one’s self and others, as well as underscoring the preciousness of life itself.

If one is interested in palmistry would you advise a person not to make any rash assumptions based on what they’ve learned from a book, or a pamphlet, or say, a magazine article?

Well, I think there are two ways to look at that. Elementary palmistry that you get from a book or a magazine can be a lot of fun, but if you want to learn how to do it seriously, or get it done properly and accurately, you have to go to an expert or an expert teacher and learn how.

Justin Pomeroy is the director of the Chicago-based Life Gate Center, a holistic, alternative medical center that offers courses in Oriental medicine and chirology. For private hand-reading consultations contact Justin at 773 281-4450. Fax 773-404-6471; e-mail lifegatecenter@yahoo.com

The Hand of John Belushi

The Hand of Timothy Leary

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