We don't find it strange to think that we can get a feel for someone's character by looking at their face. Online dating sites are built on this premise. But recent brain research has shown that the colossal number of motor and neuron connections to the hands and fingers is 14 times larger than that assigned to the face, including the eyes and mouth. About a third of all brain activity involves the hands. Handwriting analysis is thought to be a reliable gauge to character, or was, before people were given computers and iphones and lost the ability to hold a pen. To a large extent, we ARE our hands.
This model was made to show how our body looks to our own brain. It does have a name but I can't find it on Google at the moment:
I haven't forgotten your question but, in my own ponderous way, I just need to back up a little. There are several systems of palmistry, each with its own vocabulary for discussing how to interpret lines and various types of information visible on the hand. The most popular in our culture is based on the Four Elements, which as metaphors for various aspects of human psychology are very familiar to us from the 4 tarot suits. The palm itself is divided up into quadrants that correspond to earth/air/fire/water. There are four main lines on the hand that are common to just about everyone - life/head/fate/heart - and each of these is also associated respectively with earth/air/fire/water. When you understand the language of the hand it is actually very similar to doing a tarot reading.
The development of palmistry as a respectable science came about by the collecting and analysing of masses of data correlating features on the hand with observable behavior. Isn't that how astrology built up its associations of zodiac signs to different personality types? Both astrology and palmistry are branches of empirical science, though admittedly still in their infancy even after several thousand years of data collection.
Interpreting the lines on the palm is actually a small part of palmistry. There are hundreds of pieces of information that need to be evaluated in a full reading, including fingerprints, palm ridges, nails, the fingers, their size and shape and spacing, and how they lean towards or away from each other, the relative length of the phalanges on each finger, the mounds and the base of each finger, skin texture , the firmness of the flesh, and even hand gestures. The lines on the hand might be thought of as rivers of energy, showing how we apportion energy to different areas of our life.
A real palm reading takes at least a couple of hours and involves a magnifying glass and ink palm prints of both hands. I like to take home the information and sleep on it before I put my reading together. There are so many individual bits of information to correlate, most of it contradictory, since we are all such a unique combination of conflicting qualities that, as in a tarot reading, the conscious mind is not up to the task and we need to rely on the much faster and more subtle intelligence of intuition.
For example, I noticed in my first quick glance that a certain client's fate line on her right hand began, not as usual low down on the hand just above the wrist, but above half way up the palm; she also showed indicators of advanced communication skills (a little finger that stood away from the other fingers); and she had a long clear deep upward-curving heart line suggesting a warm heart. Without even thinking it popped out of my mouth, "You didn't take up teaching until your own kids had left home, did you?"
Isn't that similar to the way our mind works when we are doing a tarot reading? The indicators point to a specific scenario that is the only way to reconcile them all. We might even get a picture in our mind, a sort of misty vision, of the client teaching in front of a class. Our intuition has even worked out that she was teaching young children between the ages of 6 and 8, though it was probably factoring in more than the three indicators mentioned above.
The constant back and forth comparison of both hands is also essential since, by and large, for a right-handed person, the left hand shows what we were born with and the right hand shows what we have done with that. A tiny little Chinese woman who worked nights in the bakery where I worked for 15 years and who ran the place and could do the work of 5 men had a remarkably discrepancy between her two hands. The left hand was a mess - she should have been in a mental asylum or dead - whereas the right hand was a model of balance and health. It turned out she was very sickly as a child but her grandmother was a wizard at acupuncture and had devoted 10 years of intensive treatment, hours every day, to her beloved grand-daughter. She had essentially rewired the entire nervous system.
The lines on the hand are in no way related to the way we habitually fold the hands during our daily occupations. In fact the basic layout of the lines on each individual's hands is established after just 3 months in the womb. This suggests that we come into this life already programmed to be one way or another with specific skills and abilities. Isn't this what DNA research tells us too? Palmistry and DNA analysis have a lot in common.
Having said that, we are not chained to that way of being. If we change our behaviour we will also make observable small changes to the lines on our hands. It's fascinating to takes palm prints every two weeks for a year and then compare them to diary entries for the same period. Losing a job or boyfriend or even buying a new car will initiate microscopic or dramatic changes to the lines. Quite detailed medical issues can be picked up in the lines months or even years before a doctor has examined you. The unconscious knows your body has a problem a long time before it is felt or is outwardly noticeable.
But to answer your original question, some people are highly analytical and stubborn about surrendering conscious control to allow themselves to go into trance. This is the sort of person who is highly anxious and self-conscious and can never be persuaded to get up on a dance floor or let their hair down. A very long straight head line could be one indicator of this type of person, but there are dozens. If the head line droops down at the end to move into the lower quadrant of the palm on the percussion (non-thumb) side of the hand, or even splits into two ("the writer's fork") the client probably has a talent for trance.
The analytical type will tend to resist direct commands from a hypnotist, and you need to be more subtle about planting suggestions and about hypnotising them with a different set of techniques. For those who are more at home in the world of the unconscious, the hypnotherapist will adopt a more forceful personality (more like a stage hypnotist) and give simple direct commands. Between those two extremes there are shades of difference and a quick examination of a few pointers on the hands will give you a snapshot of the kind of person you are talking to.
After a while the whole process becomes quite intuitive. A skilled palmist can glance at a hand the same way you glance at someone's face out of the corner of your eye. I don't make a checklist and consciously decide to adopt one course over another. We do this all the time when we get a feel for someone we have just met. A woman hypnotherapist with a sharp sense of intuition won't even need to worry about palmistry. She will just pick up on body language, or a vibe, and find herself behaving in a certain way to the client and selecting a certain technique without any analysis whatsoever. I don't have that level of sensitivity so a few palmistry pointers help me to get a feel for each client.
Usually once I have checked out someone's thumb and forefinger, and maybe the head line, I don't need to know much more, though there may be unexpected contrary indicators here and there. The thumb is how we grip things, our great evolutionary advantage, so not surprisingly is linked to how we use our willpower. A big powerful long stiff straight thumb indicates someone of the "highly analytical" type, a tough customer. If he also has a longer than average forefinger - the one we point at people to threaten them - this will confirm the diagnosis. The forefinger usually relates to issues around the ego. Some like Trump will overcompensate for a smaller than average forefinger. Hence the bluster. Hilary Clinton has a huge forefinger, so a bit overconfident.
People with long fingers in relation to their overall height and hand size are always detail-oriented. Jewellers and watch-makers all have long fingers. People with short little fingers will be more impatient, less methodical and cautious and more , well, more "suit of Wands". That is what we are born to do and will find easiest, but many choose jobs to which they are not suited at all. I'm amazed how often I find super-sensitive psychic types in high stress jobs in the city, suffering like hell, when they would be much happier and more fulfilled renting deck chairs on a beach somewhere.
I hated those questionnaires that we junior hypnotherapists were encouraged to give to clients to help us decide how best to hypnotise them. The conscious mind fills out questionnaires, and the conscious mind, the ego, is terrible at evaluating one's own true nature. Hands, which are expressions of unconscious wisdom, are a lot smarter and more reliable.
JM, I hope this answers your question. Ask me again if it doesn't. I'm sure I can be brief and to the point if I put my mind to it. Part of the problem is that I don't spend much time thinking nowadays - I grew up all Swords but switched to Cups after I had children - so it takes me a while to figure out what I actually think about these issues myself.
) many times with other people. I notice what it is about a person's gait, a little hitch in the hip or shoulder, an odd position of the foot, a lean forward or to one side, whatever it is, and then I try it. It really puts me kind of inside that person's skin in a really interesting way.
)