Hands Can Speak

I met Claudia Patricia Campos (born December 3, 1963) at Krishna, the local Hindu vegetarian restaurant in Palermo, Buenos Aires. Beneath pictures of Jesus with an open heart and various gopis playing flutes, she told me that she had been practicing quirologia (quirology) since 2002. Shortly after Reiki initiation, she became interested in knowing more about how hands expressed the person. She found Lidia, a teacher who was giving a short course. Within six years, Claudia had read about 250 palms.

Claudia distinguishes between quirology—the scientific method in which she trained—and quiromancia (quiromancy). Quiromancy relies, she says, purely on divination. When people come to see her seeking divination, she encourages them to go somewhere else.

She is more interested, she said, in reading the hand as part of the body, which can provide context for how the person came to have the hands he or she has. Hands speak a lot, she says, about how the person got where they are in life; science, as a part of medicine, can tell us many things to help with healing.

Claudia’s friend and partner in the founding of Center of Light, Maria Eugenia Bustelo (born November 5, 1964), spoke up by saying that the trouble is, when people come wanting to know the future, they give up their wills. This ultimately turned Claudia away. The last palm Claudia had read at the time of our conversation was the palm of a young Spanish man, in 2008. When she realized that people were looking for divination, not for improvement of interior life, she changed routes, delving into body and mind core energetic therapy.

Claudia experiences channeling when she works on the body. She explained that she channels things she does not know when she works with people, no matter the part of the body—even (but not especially) the hand.

In her course with Lidia at an institute where methods like Tai Chi were taught, Claudia remembers from a class of 12 two psychologists, a ballerina and a singer. “Sensitives,” she called them. She and her partner started their center ten years ago. They offer Diksha twice a week, once in Palermo and once in another neighborhood, into which I had moved just the night before. The center is inspired by Oneness University, with Indian teachers Amma and Bhagavan. Diksha is very powerful, like an energy-giving enlightenment. Claudia’s friend took the initiation more recently (a few years ago) and was involved in starting centers in Mexico and Cancun.

While not practicing divination, Claudia says she still incorporates hand work into her practice because hands show the stress of the person. Hands can suggest the conflicts in one’s mind or a lack of flexibility. And she can suggest mudras—positions into which to put the fingers in order to redirect energy. She learned mudras also in a short course.

Sometimes Claudia also suggests meditation, visualization, or physical exercise to clients on the basis of reading hands. When people come for a reading she makes sure they understand that she is not doing divination. She proceeds to give a description of the hands, covering things that they may or may not have known about themselves, but that she definitely didn’t know; she never met them before she read the hands.

“I use hands as a tool… like body energetic work—not as a diviner,” she emphasized. “For me, the reading of hands is simply another tool to gain knowledge.”

Shirley Sheck was her teacher of mudras. Claudia and Maro both studied core energetic with John Pierrakras, the founder. Ann Bladney is one of the teachers in California.

We parted ways near the corner of Paraguay Street. I headed off to the subtle (subway) and Claudia and Maro to do the marketing for a workshop they were giving next week. Maro wanted to translate in the workshop I was going to give, and Claudia wanted to come to learn to read feet.