We recently connected with Laura Graving and have shared our conversation below.

Laura, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

The why behind my mission statement starts about 9 years ago, so bear with me – it’s a bit of a story.

In 2015, I moved from Dayton, Ohio to Cleveland to start a commune with friends. We bought a house together, and planned to buy farmland to create a sustainable community. That was the beginning of the end for me. This attempted commune steadily devolved into something that resembled more of a cult over the course of a year, my substance abuse got out of hand as a means of coping, and life was turned upside down and backwards when I learned my best friend had lied so much that I didn’t know who she was anymore. Around March or April of 2016, one of my roommates just came back from a reiki and tarot session. They raved about it so much that I figured, “What have I got to lose?” So, I scheduled a session.

It changed my life.

I’m keeping the details vague as it’s something incredibly personal, but the reading brought up things I hadn’t thought about in decades, and the reiki helped me release it. When I fully processed the session, I realized I had to get back into therapy. From there, my therapist suggested I get sober as it would make therapy more effective. (“Well, shit. You’re probably right.” I thought.) So, I got sober. I went to reiki circles, which supported the work I was doing in therapy. I got my reiki I and II certifications – eventually my Masters/ART certification as well – and started practicing both reiki and tarot professionally.

This is where tensions began to grow within the commune-cult. Because I was working a full time job, and attempting to start a business, in addition to developing hobbies that were solitary in nature, I was spending most of my time away from the group. Turns out, neither communes nor cults really like it when you do your own thing, and I eventually got kicked out. This was the best blessing I could have asked for, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I was homeless and couch surfing for two months before I finally got a place of my own. The culture shock was unreal. I went from living with 4-5 other people, 3 dogs, and 3 cats, to living entirely by myself. My first night in my new apartment in February of 2017, I ate a bowl of ramen for dinner that I cooked with a pot I bought earlier that day, because I had almost nothing, let alone cookware. I sat on the floor of what was supposed to be my dinning room (I had no furniture except for my mattress and box spring, so it was an empty room), eating my ramen, and crying. It’s one of my best memories, because, as overwhelmed as I was at the time, it was the beginning of finally living my life for myself.

That was by no means the beginning of my happy ending. I’ve had many ups and downs over the last 7 years, but for brevity’s sake we’ll fast forward. In August of 2020, everything fell into my lap to move to NYC from the Cleveland area. I’ve dreamt of living in NYC since I was a child. It feels like as soon as I was old enough to know what and where NYC was, that I decided I would live there someday – that’s how long I’ve dreamt of this. And I hardly had to lift a finger to make it happen. The money fell into my lap, as well as a roommate and an apartment. Moving out of state during a pandemic went surprisingly smoothly. And a couple months after moving, I found a day job that allows me to pay all my bills while only working three days a week, giving me the remaining four days to focus on my practice. Starting my tarot and reiki practice from scratch was a challenge, especially given social distancing guidelines. But things eventually picked up, and continue to grow even now.

I haven’t mentioned my mission statement, but it essentially boils down to one thing – accessibility. (“To provide accessible spiritual healing and guidance as a means of empowering those who are disheartened by life’s obstacles – especially queer, BIPOC, and disabled communities.”) Tarot and reiki have helped me heal and change my life in such beautiful and profound ways that I want them to be accessible to everyone. These things should not be luxury items. Healing should not be a luxury item. So I keep my rates affordable, and offer sliding scale and barter payment options for those who don’t have the budget for these offerings. I provide discounted rates for readings at pop up events to reach more people. Additionally, I have daily and weekly tarot pulls on my social media platforms, where I also discuss dream working/interpretation with my followers.

And here is my next challenge. As my practice continues to grow, I will have to limit the number of sliding scale/barter sessions I can offer. I will have to increase my rates. I will have to create less personal, but more affordable offerings (such as pre-recorded guided meditations, or self-paced classes/workshops via Patreon or my website – offerings that still provide guidance on your healing journey, but prevent me from connecting with you one-on-one). I will have to balance making spiritual guidance and healing accessible with preserving my sanity. I learned the hard way that I cannot sacrifice myself for the sake of my community. It’s a lesson I’ve learned too many times, and I’m determined not to learn it again, especially since it’s a message I’m constantly preaching to my clients.

So here I am. Both passionately loving the path I’m on and the work I do, and also feeling conflicted about the business decisions that await on the horizon.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Laura Graving, the one woman show behind Eso Cleric. I’m a tarot reader, reiki practitioner, dream worker, and I guess spiritual consultant for lack of a better phrase. I offer one-on-one sessions, workshops ranging from how to read tarot to guided meditations to led self-reiki, collective readings on my social media pages, tarot readings at pop-up markets, and dabble in making intention-infused jewelry and talismans for funsies, among many other things. I grew up in Ohio, and was raised Catholic, so – given the “tarot is the devil’s work” message I was surrounded by during my formative years – it’s a bit ironic that I ended up as a tarot reader. I received my first tarot reading from a friend in high school (an all girls private catholic school, of all places). It was surprisingly accurate, but I brushed it off as a coincidence at the time. Later, after an uncannily accurate horoscope, and my mother’s own anecdotal evidence of psych admissions increasing in the ER during the full moon, I decided to write a high school research paper on astrology to see if there was any legitimacy behind it. These spiritual practices continued to call to me like this throughout my life, with another friend giving me a reading and then gifting me the tarot deck in my post-college days, and various other synchronicities and affirmations of my intuition occurring.

It wasn’t until the move up to Cleveland that I really began to sink my teeth into The Work. I had been playing around with one of my roommate’s tarot decks so much after the move that they suggested it was time to get my own (they were 100% right. The deck I had been gifted years prior I didn’t feel a connection with, and I eventually gifted it to another friend). The deck I found – The Dark Exact Tarot by Coleman Stevenson – was exactly me. Black and white, minimalist and geometric in design. I’ve never felt more seen by a deck of cards. I remember the first card I drew from this deck: The Eight of Pentacles. A card of hard work, apprenticeship, and mastering a skill. “Stick with me kid, and you’ll do just fine,” is how I took it. And it was right. I learned so much from The Dark Exact and Coleman’s work that I now teach tarot workshops to readers of all levels. I don’t know if Coleman realizes just how influential her deck has been in my tarot journey, or my life as a whole, but I’ll never not be grateful to her and the work she’s done as an artist and esoteric practitioner. Her deck has taught and guided me well, and I continue to use it, albeit in a lesser but more personal capacity, today.

I’ve talked a lot about how tarot, reiki, and my personal spiritual practice in general has helped empower me to step into myself, and live my life for myself, but I haven’t talked a whole lot about how that translates to the work I do with my clients. I find I primarily encounter people who are in a similar place to where I was roughly 8-9 years ago. People, usually women, who are sacrificing themselves to make others happy, who are making themselves small in order to make others comfortable. This could be a “market trend” that is symptomatic of a toxic, patriarchal society, or it could be vibes – I went through something similar, so on a subconscious, gut level, these people know that I have something to offer them. Maybe it’s both. Who knows. However, more often than not, what comes up in a reading is a message of prioritizing yourself (especially in readings where the querent asks about love and relationships). Because I have lived this message, and, in a way, made it my life’s work, I am able to offer useful advice and tools to help clients reclaim their own life for themselves. This part is probably the most rewarding and difficult part of what I do. I have to accept that I cannot fix, help, or heal anyone. I can only tell them about what helped me, and have faith that they figure out how to use it in such a way that it helps them similarly.

This may or may not be what sets me apart from other spiritual practitioners who offer their talents to their communities. I find many healers feel obligated or even burdened by the self-imposed responsibility to fix, heal, or save people. This is such an unhealthy and even toxic mindset to hold, because it strips away the autonomy of the person who has come to you for guidance. This mindset ultimately stems from a need to control, and often indicates more inner work that needs to be done on the practitioner’s part (speaking as someone who used to hold this mindset before starting on my spiritual journey, which is, with time, what helped me unlearn it). I don’t want to fix, heal, or save anyone. I want to offer support while witnessing others fix, heal, and save themselves. It sounds so counterintuitive for a business that focuses on spiritual guidance and healing, but, in my experience, there’s no other way to do it.

Have you ever had to pivot?

I feel like my life consists of constantly pivoting, but I’ll speak specifically to my business/practice over the last year and a half or so. When one of my two roommates moved out in May of 2023, I wanted to turn the empty bedroom into a home office. And I did, for about a year. However, after a season of pop-up flops, it became clear that I needed to pivot – otherwise my home office wouldn’t be sustainable for much longer. So, I switched to hosting workshops (Tarot 101 being the most popular), and paid $75-$150 for 1-2 hour space rental, instead of paying $100-$200 for a vendor fee at a 4-6 hour long market where, for most of 2023, I had been breaking even. It was less work, less time, and a larger profit all things considered. Unfortunately, focusing on workshops wasn’t enough to sustain my home office.

Towards the end of my home office’s life, I had a dream that my remaining roommate sent me a text saying it was time to start looking for an additional roommate. In the dream, I was relieved. When I woke up, I was panicked. “That’s not what I want!” I thought anxiously. But it was. I just hadn’t realized it yet. The home office had become too much of a financial burden, and was starting to hinder the growth of my business. All of my profits went towards paying for it, which left me nothing to put towards workshops, markets, marketing materials, or anything else. And my dream was right – when I finally decided it was time to let go of my home office, I was relieved and felt myself coming out of survival mode. It took several months to see things financially turn around (surprises like a stolen phone and wallet didn’t help), but I’m now in a place where I can seriously start planning and strategizing for how to make my dream pivot – making my business my primary and only gig – a reality.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

I’ll tell you how I keep in touch and stay connected with clients, but I don’t believe in brand loyalty. It’s inherently oppositional to the work I do. I’ll get more into that in a second, but I want to answer the easy, straightforward question first.

Social media, primarily, is how I keep in touch with clients. Maybe it’s because I’m neurodivergent with an unhealthy attachment to my phone, but if I follow you on Instagram, I’m aggressively liking your posts. I reply to your stories – sometimes starting a genuine conversation, sometimes just sharing a related and relatable anecdote that starts and ends there. I’ll send you a post that made me think of you, or is about something I know you’re interested in. I don’t follow unspoken social norms that may or may not exist in the social media world. I celebrate your wins with you, and offer compassion for your losses. If I follow you, and you share your life online, I’m engaging with it. And saying all this here makes it sound like this is a marketing strategy I’ve intentionally created and implemented. I wish I was that good at marketing, but I’m just not. This is all coming from a place of just genuinely wanting to connect with people. That’s it. It’s that simple. Outside of social media, I also have a newsletter that I’m not very good at remembering to send out, but that people seem to appreciate and respond well to. Developing that more will probably be my next project.

As for brand loyalty, I don’t want to be the only person my clients see for spiritual guidance. Most of my work is centered around empowering people to take the lead in their own life and start calling the shots. If I focused on brand loyalty, and I became the go-to person for my clients when it comes to tarot, reiki, and dream work, I’d be taking that away from them. They’d become reliant on me – trusting my guidance more than their own intuition. Brand loyalty is inherently harmful to the work I do with my clients. If a client finds another spiritual guide that resonates more with them, I want them to consult that person over me. If my clients find another practice (such a yoga, or a meditation studio) that helps them make more progress than the offerings I have available, I want them to pursue that. I want my clients to create a spiritual practice that serves and guides them without my help – and if that means they have to seek guidance elsewhere, or pursue a self-study of some sort, then I very much support that.

I still have returning clients, who I very much appreciate (I also hope they know I won’t take it personally if they consult someone else). I also have had plenty of one-and-done clients, who I also appreciate – maybe they recognized I wasn’t for them, or maybe someone else could better deliver the message they needed to hear. Whatever their reason for not seeing me again, I’m happy they listened to what their intuition told them. I know, when it comes to business and marketing, that I’m not supposed to think like this. That it’s supposedly bad for my bottom line. But fostering brand loyalty would just make me a charlatan. It doesn’t make sense for my brand to try to foster loyalty. Besides, I’m based in NYC. There’s plenty to go around here. There’s more than enough for everyone.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.esocleric.com
• Instagram: @esocleric
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/esocleric
• Other: Tiktok: @esocleric
  Email: [email protected]

Image Credits

All photos taken by Laura Graving.