I Was A Victim Of A Holy Man Scam

You Have A Lucky Face

It all started like this.

I took a walk out of the office in the afternoon, as I often do, and was on the way to get some lunch when a tall, heavily-built Indian man approached me along the street.  He had a kind face, a warm smile, and looked indeed like a holy man as he wore a string of prayer beads around his neck, and talked to me softly with his hands clasped together at his heart centre as if in prayer.

He started the conversation by greeting me then proceeded to tell me, “Sister, you have lucky face.  I can see from your forehead, you lead long life. When you grow old, you die, no pain, no sickness. You die peacefully.  Your life is quite spiritual. Always trying to help others. You always wear happy face.  Outward happy.  But inside always think too much. You worry about many people.”  My eyes lit up a bit because he touched on something close to my heart.  So I whispered a word of thanks and was about to continue on my journey.  However, he stopped me in my tracks when he held me back with even more insights.  “Another thing sister, you have a very bad habit.  Very hard to change.  But you must. Your bad habit cause you plenty problems.”  That was interesting, I thought.  I did not gamble, I did not smoke, I was not an alcoholic, ok, I was obsessed with Pizza, but that I was sure would not constitute a bad habit unless it was the perspective of my personal trainer.  So what bad habits could I have?  I asked him of course to qualify what he had just said.  He replied, “ You speak from the heart.  You are too straight.  You do not know what to say when. You are over-honest.  When you tell people everything from your heart openly, others can use it to hurt you.”  Bingo.  That was really spot on.  Throughout my life, that had been one of my biggest issues leading to misunderstandings, miscommunications, lost opportunities, and lost friendships. Mom often chided me for not having a filter between my brain and my mouth.  So when he revealed this about me, my guard came down abit more. 

He then proceeded to ask if I could spare him some money “for my travels”.  I was about to reach into my purse to get him a $50 note but he said, “If you small wealthy, you give $100.  If you medium wealthy, you give $200.  If you many wealthy, you give $300. Sister, I think you medium wealthy.  You be bless if you give me money for my travels from your medium wealthy.”  So I did.

I saw that as $200 gone to helping someone who might truly need it.  So I tried very hard not to think too much about it and decided to proceed on my journey to get myself a cheaper lunch instead.

However, this Indian man gently pulled me back and said, “You have a lot in mind.  Because someone close to you trouble you. That person plenty negative.  No good for you. Talk behind your back.”  I laughed at that and told him many people both close and not close to me troubled me. So he pulled out a red wallet from his pocket and took out a small, square bit of blank paper, wrote something on it, crumpled it into a ball, whispered an unintelligible prayer and gave that tiny crumpled ball of paper to me.    He asked me to name the name of the person who most troubled me.  I need not have a second thought to that.  So I gave him the first name of that person who had been on my mind lately.  He then asked me to open that crumpled ball of paper and read what was written on it.  To my horror, I found the person’s name in that paper.  My first thoughts were, “What sorcery is this? I was highly intuitive and even I did not have that gift!”

Do Not Worry I Meditate For You

He patted my trembling hands lightly and said, “Do not worry.  I meditate 7 days and 7 nights for you so that you do not need to be troubled by negativity.  But I need $35 a day for each day of meditation to buy prayer things like candles and coconut, and incense..etc.”  I was not sure what possessed me to be that compliant, but I dug into my purse for the last $250 that I had which I  had originally allocated for the week and gave it to him.  

He gave me a little gem stone and instructed me to buy 2 fish to release them into a river as a gesture to release all that negative thoughts that was plaguing me.  I said my thanks and we parted ways, hopefully never to meet again. Of course, I never released 2 fish in the river over the weekend either.  David said that was the stupidest idea ever, allowing the poor fish to be bird food at that storm drain,  just near our home.

As I arrived at my lunch venue, I was quite shaken by what had taken place.  Obviously, I had woken up from my temporary slumber.  I always pride myself for being quite smart.  How did I fall into that trap of allowing someone to take advantage of my vulnerability when I was consumed with so much thoughts and an immensely busy schedule to manipulate my mind into parting with my money?

I called David immediately to relate what had happened to me.  He was beyond furious, and was about to take the cab down to where I was to start a man-hunt for “that charlatan so that we could stop him from tricking other unsuspecting people with his hocus-pocus nonsense.”  I stopped him of course.  I only had myself to blame.

A Victim Of My Own Vulnerability

You see, I had a very bad week.  It was a week filled with misunderstanding, miscommunication, arguments and unnecessary negativity.  I was usually one that let it all go and never took anything like these to heart.  However, at that moment, fresh off managing these negative issues, my emotions clouded my judgement and I made that irrational decision to place my trust on a mere stranger who was quick and intuitive enough to sense that I was so preoccupied with my thoughts, and that within my eyes, I was looking for quick answers and sheer hope.  He played on that moment when I gave my emotions away.

Losing that $450 was not that painful.  It was money I could earn again through hard work.  However what hurt most, was that his tactics and unsavoury intentions to earn a quick buck from someone in a vulnerable state, had cast a shadow on people like myself, who did do intuitive work with the intent of genuinely helping others. 

I can now fully appreciate how some people, who had been taken advantage of before, would have such little trust in me when I tried to support them with my passion as a Tarot reader and Numerologist.  And why shouldn’t they be more careful, right?   That is why, I abhor Tarot readers and numerologists who call themselves fortune-tellers.  How could anyone erroneously put false hopes in someone’s head by promising to tell someone’s fortunes?  Even I cannot predict the future and tell someone’s future with whatever metaphysical tools I used.  I have always stuck to the belief that one is a master of one’s own destiny. The only thing I could do as an intuitive consultant was to  use our tools to provide the advice with which one could choose to use to influence his or her own outcome.  Damn it, that was how I would always preface my reading with a client so that he or she would not get false hopes.   Besides, I am a marketing professional.  I made a living from marketing solutions that I truly believed in. My experience and knowledge gained over the years, have made me discerning enough to weed the crap marketed to me from solutions that genuinely added value to consumers.  How could I have not picked up that what he sold me, was just sheer crap?

When I was talking to that “holy man”, why did these values, this train of thought, not kicked in to warn me to back off? 

I was vulnerable.  I allowed my own negative thoughts to expose my vulnerability.  Over the weekend, I related this experience to Mom and Joel as well.  More than anything, I wanted to warn them so that they would not get cheated the way I did.  By then, David had soften his stance about wanting to find the “holy man” to beat the shit out of him.  I learnt a valuable lesson that cost me $450.  It was a lesson in never allowing myself to wallow in negativity, to the point that I would be sold false hopes by dishonest people.

I connected with a few people who were victims of the same scam before.  If you are interested to read their experience, it had been detailed succinctly, in exactly the same way as I had experienced, within this blog post written by Adrian Hon. 

https://mssv.net/2011/06/20/you-have-a-lucky-face/comment-page-7/

 The kindest thing you can do for others, would be to share my post with others, warning them to always be vigilant.

 

About The Writer

The writer of this blog post is a Marketing and PR professional for over 20 years.  She is a passionate observer of life bent on inspiring others to live life positively through her writing by combing through moments worth celebrating every day.   Due to her ardent love for sports especially boxing and MMA, she is also a freelance sports writer on the side, contributing articles to several sports media when time permits.  She works in partnership with her husband, David Ash, who is an avid sports photographer from www.singaporemaven.com.  She enjoys Boxing and nurtures a dream to fight competitively one day when her coach stops making fun of her.  She is also a psychic intuitive by birth and runs a consultancy that does tarot and numerology readings under her brand, Sun Goddess Tarot.  This blog is affectionately called "The Crazy AngMo" as she is married to one, although she has not yet explained to THE Ang Mo that when translated, he has been labeled  “the bloke with ginger hair”.  

Writing From The Heart

Writing From The Heart

It had been almost a year that I had made that conscious choice to stop writing for a while.  All these years, every word written for my blog was done out of my hope to share a point of view that I felt strongly about.

Increasingly, I found this difficult to do as I tried very hard to juggle writing about what was truly authentic to me, with managing the sensitivities of others.  “Was that post about me?”, seemed to be the  frequent text message I woke up to in the morning.

I even had my husband once told me to “take down that blog post because while you don’t have to deal with them, I do.”  That became the cause of our regular rows where he maintained that I needed to have more tact while I insisted that the world needed to be aware of the difference between what was true and the pre-engineered fizzy koolaid that they had been sold.  My father had always taught me to be true to myself under any circumstance, and he brought me up in an environment where he encouraged me to fully express myself.  I found it hard to come to terms with having my voice stifled because I had to be mindful of what others thought.

When I had to start thinking about being sensitive to the feelings of others, taking into account the ramifications my writing might potentially cause with every word I wrote in my blog, and every post I published across my social media platforms, I decided that I could no longer pen another word in my blog.  I also decided to veer towards neutral topics across my social media platforms, sticking to the regular fitness and food posts.  But I became more disillusioned as months and days passed by, simply because I lost my sense of self.  I was no longer writing or speaking from my heart.

When I cut out the writing out of my life for a while, and made myself devoid of that only channel for self-expression that I was most familiar with, I was forced to deal with my emotions on my own by internalizing them.  I  withdrew into myself and walked through an introspective journey for a year.

The past year had been a year of deep learning for me about myself.  I learnt to accept my vulnerability – it was okay to feel that deep sense of hurt and disappointment, nurse it, then move on.  I learnt the importance of drawing the line between interpersonal relationships – friends, colleagues, staff, clients, family, and acquaintances, each of them had a role to play in my life and I should not be setting almost equal expectations on them.  I learnt that no matter how much I could do to pull family members, a team, a situation, a crisis, together and lead from the front, the honest truth, was that I had to stop being the school principal all the time, trying to get everyone to play on equal footing at the playground.  I learnt that when someone has a problem, it was not my problem.  I could not keep taking on that responsibility to try to solve it for him or her.   I learnt to make peace with my inner child – a traumatic past in my childhood need no longer bind me in fear, anger and hatred.  I learnt the value of forgiveness – more than anything else, letting go of hurt and anger was not about acknowledging that a dishonest, hurtful situation did not take place.  It was just my way of giving myself peace of mind.

So if I had to fill the pages of my blog with every incident that described this path of learning, I would not have enough pages left.   I was determined not to let my hurt and disappointment experienced, cast a shadow of doubt on the people I had invested time and energy over the years as  I tried to lift and inspire them with positivity. 

I felt that if I could no longer fill the pages of my blog with authenticity, then I could no longer write that blog. 

This point of view also took a toll on my passion for freelance writing for sports events.    I was disillusioned when I was delivered key messages about athletes during interviews, that had been “massaged” by their PR teams, painting them to be “inspirers of community with a personality governed by humility and a great work ethic..” then see a couple of them behave like depraved thugs.  How could I bring myself to share an article with the public with the objective of convincing them about how wonderful an athlete might be when he clearly was not?  Strangely enough, the current environment was one where many took a dig at fake news.   I was not going to be a perpetrator of fake news.

The start of my recuperation from all of last year’s “bullshit” came in the form of a family trip back to the UK.  I stopped writing.  I just took lots of photos.  Writing could hide my disillusionment. Photos could not. When I had to be present to my family for 3 weeks in the UK, I spent less time on emails as well as reading through all the social media news.  I just made time for self and I had meaningful conversations with my family.  I had no contact with drama, toxicity, inauthenticity and anything that drained me.  And most importantly, I came out of that trip making a pact with myself, that I would always choose to walk away from any form of drama and never allow anyone or anything to invade my peace. I would never allow anyone to feed me with untruths and expect me to sell otherwise.  I would never allow anyone to tell me to stop writing or saying something, just because it would “open a can of worms” and not aligned to what was written on that label pasted on that pre-engineered fizzy koolaid. If I was forced to do anything, or say anything  outside of my values, I would rather not have anything to do with it. 

I am starting to write again.  Slowly just getting back into it. I remain adamant about walking in the light of what is true, never writing or saying something unless it came from the heart.

 

About The Writer

The writer of this blog post is a Marketing and PR professional for over 20 years.  She is a passionate observer of life bent on inspiring others to live life positively through her writing by combing through moments worth celebrating every day.   Due to her ardent love for sports especially boxing and MMA, she is also a freelance sports writer on the side, contributing articles to several sports media when time permits.  She works in partnership with her husband, David Ash, who is an avid sports photographer from www.singaporemaven.com.  She enjoys Boxing and nurtures a dream to fight competitively one day when her coach stops making fun of her.  She is also a psychic intuitive by birth and runs a consultancy that does tarot and numerology readings under her brand, Sun Goddess Tarot.  This blog is affectionately called "The Crazy AngMo" as she is married to one, although she has not yet explained to THE Ang Mo that when translated, he has been labeled  “the bloke with ginger hair”.