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In the 6th grade grammar lesson we were discussing word order in sentences in terms of subject and predicate, how the subject is always a “naming word” of which one asks, “Who or what is doing something?” and the predicate is always a “doing word.” The children were asked to formulate simple sentences and to name the subject and predicate in them. A game with SAGA images and the OH [original deck] word cards stimulated an “OH!” experience for all of them.
Each child drew one SAGA picture and one OH word card bearing a verb (I had sorted the cards in advance). The picture card was to be the subject and the word card the predicate. Each child constructed the shortest possible sentence with his card set — for example, “The raven takes” — and in doing so playfully and intuitively grasped the concepts of subject and predicate.
Edith Schuette ~ Teacher
Hamburg, Germany
Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communitcation, by Waltraud Kirschke.
During my first play with OH cards, brought by a visiting friend, I pulled the combination of “Failure” and a picture of an office desk. Since I’m still trying to remedy the career damage of an extended illness leave a few years ago, my first thought was, “What if I fail at work?” As I sat with that, feeling agitated, a second thought crossed my mind: “What if defining myself by my work is a failure as a person?” OH! I felt enormously better.
University Professor
Canada
Edward Chan, from Hong Kong, shares some of his experiences with using the OH cards…
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The first time I met OH Card was in a Couple Training course held in 1989. When I picked up a picture card and the tutor told me to associate with my own history, I said that the picture was in a misty way that I hardly match it correctly with any solid incidents happened in my life. Years after I still encounter some participants in our courses render the same comment as I did. I know the meaning of “rational.”
Being a tutor in social worker training courses, Mrs. Maria Kwong said that the faintness of the pictures is a very effective key to open the door of everybody’s interior world. It touches the field of feelings inside each person that helps to view the true self of each of them. When participant matches the picture card with the word card, it often brings a feeling of shocking on viewing oneself conception. Usually they find a deeper meaning of life for themselves by viewing the set of the cards, and the most important thing is that they find the path of hope in life. Mrs. Kwong always invites the participants to use their five senses to contact with the pictures. We hardly can know what happened in each of these participants in their lives after the training courses, but the fact is that most of them will buy one set of OH Card for their professional use.
Sr. Dominica Cheng, a spiritual teacher, often asks her students to describe what they saw on the pictures through their intuition with relationship to their experiences in their daily life. The “In and Out” traveling is very useful to achieve inspirations. Going in the content of pictures and coming out of it back to one’s life story in history, then stay away from the stories and go back to the content of the pictures in order to obtain more inspiration. The connection between the emotions begets from the picture and the actual life experience outside the picture creates amazing results. Here is one example: one picks up a picture card showing a man with a kid, the immediate connection she came out is the man is her father and she feels sad about her parent’s divorce. Coming back to the present life experience, suddenly she recognized the kid is her father – so week and helpless at the age of 70s.
Sr. Cheng said that OH Card is a very useful instrument for spiritual guidance.
When I see the OH pictures today and still think that the card is misty, I know that I am on the way to know myself better.
Edward Chan
Hong Kong
Excerpted from original material for the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communitcation, 2nd German Edition, by Waltraud Kirschke.
The first time I met OH Card was in a Couple Training course held in 1989. When I picked up a picture card and the tutor told me to associate with my own history, I said that the picture was in a misty way that I hardly match it correctly with any solid incidents happened in my life. Years after I still encounter some participants in our courses render the same comment as I did. I know the meaning of “rational”.
Being a tutor in social worker training courses, Mrs. Maria Kwong said that the faintness of the pictures is a very effective key to open the door of everybody’s interior world. It touches the field of feelings inside each person that helps to view the true self of each of them. When participant matches the picture card with the word card, it often brings a feeling of shocking on viewing oneself conception. Usually they find a deeper meaning of life for themselves by viewing the set of the cards, and the most important thing is that they find the path of hope in life. Mrs. Kwong always invites the participants to use their five senses to contact with the pictures. We hardly can know what happened in each of these participants in their lives after the training courses, but the fact is that most of them will buy one set of OH Card for their professional use.
Sr. Dominica Cheng, a spiritual teacher, often asks her students to describe what they saw on the pictures through their intuition with relationship to their experiences in their daily life. The “In and Out” traveling is very useful to achieve inspirations. Going in the content of pictures and coming out of it back to one’s life story in history, then stay away from the stories and go back to the content of the pictures in order to obtain more inspiration. The connection between the emotions begets from the picture and the actual life experience outside the picture creates amazing results. Here is one example: one picks up a picture card showing a man with a kid, the immediate connection she came out is the man is her father and she feels sad about her parent’s divorce. Coming back to the present life experience, suddenly she recognized the kid is her father – so week and helpless at the age of 70s.
Sr. Cheng said that OH Card is a very useful instrument for spiritual guidance.
When I see the OH pictures today and still think that the card is misty, I know that I am not on the way to know myself better.
Lessons from the OH Cards
 I’m constantly reminded by the cards that perception is an interpretation, not a fact. The cards with their images and words are facts but what we see is up to us. Take the clown card. I had one client who drew that card and then gave herself permission to put a smile on her face even if she was not feeling happy. She told me that eventually the act of smiling would spread to her actually being happy.
Yet another client who had insistently reported that all was fine with her, she didn’t really need counselling. Still, every week she made and showed up for her appointment with me. In frustration I used the cards with the hope that they could help her to verbalize whatever was causing her pain. And she drew the clown card. Only then was she able to speak of the abuse she had suffered as a child by people wearing masks. These were not happy memories but a shift had happened and she was ready to work through her pain. We always used the cards after that in our sessions.
And then there was my handsome client who some perceived as arrogant and having everything he wanted in the world. Others claimed he had to be shallow since he seemed to enjoy a life without pain. He drew the clown card and the word card “NAKED.” Smiling, he nodded his head and commented without hesitation, “This is obvious. It is easy for me to be physically naked before others. It is much harder for me to be psychologically naked so I wear a mask.” All I could say was, “Wow!” We have our own answers inside us. And others, books, movies, and yes cards can inspire us to go within and rediscover our own truths.
Dawn Brown, M.Ed. (Counselling) has over 20 years of experience as a psychotherapist, teacher, and trainer specializing in life transitions. In addition, Dawn is an international speaker and the author of That Perception Thing! She heads Perception Shift, a company dedicated to creating a healthy approach to living.
Excerpted from original material for the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communitcation, 2nd German Edition, by Waltraud Kirschke.
It was in fact Saturday – the day had come. And panic swept over me as I began asking myself, “What was I thinking?” I had sent out the invitations and now I had to show up. I continued to create internal dialogue around my lack of expertise in working with the cards. Until I thought, “Okay, what’s really going on here? What do I need to know to move through this?” And I pulled out my OH Cards.
One-Card Spread: Word (Expert) Image (#8 Hand Dealing Cards)
And I knew from this spread exactly what I needed to know in order to move through. In fact, I didn’t need to be an expert. We are each our own expert in receiving the insights available to us. OH is a powerful tool when we understand that the knowingness lives within us and these words and images help draw forth that knowingness by placing it before us using concrete images.
I continued with my plan for the gathering with my family. In attendance were probably sixteen or seventeen people, male and female, and of varying age groups. And we each held one question: “What do I need to let go of in order to move forward?” And the results were astonishing! In the normal comings and goings of life the people in this room hadn’t seen each other in a couple of years, but with the power of OH at hand each of us had been moved to very raw and vulnerable places. Even my grandmother, whose age is still in question, was available to what OH had to reveal to her. The evening went on with each of us exploring what was before us, what we needed to know, and discovering what forward moving action looked like for each of us individually.
Today, I’m most grateful for that then-dreaded day. I saw the power of OH.
Talisa Wisniewski
Chicago
Excerpted from original material for the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communitcation, 2nd German Edition, by Waltraud Kirschke.
Way back in October of 1999, Janine Moore’s article “OH Cards: The Game of Inner Vision” appeared in Connections Magazine, Issue 45. The full article is available now on the Positive Health Online website.
The article introduces the OH cards and suggests different ways to use them, but also gives us insights into the process Ely Raman went through to create the original OH cards, as well as information about his life.
From the article:
“If you need an ice-breaker in a room full of strangers, open up a deck of OH cards. According to their creator Ely Raman, ‘The cards will get people talking and you won’t be strangers for long.’ ”
“The power of the cards lies in their ability to tap into the unconscious and perhaps bring to the surface buried feelings and emotions.”
A contributor to the Child Therapy and Mental Health website posted a short article about using various OH genre cards in therapy practice with children. The article, “Associative cards,” was posted by blaxter on December 15, 2008.
Team Training for Leadership
 During the last ten years the “human factor” (that is, acknowledgement of the emotional level) has also gained in consideration in the industrial sector. Emotions, naturally, have a direct influence on achievement as well. It is now acknowledged that a well-functioning team does not hesitate to address conflict and is practised in discussing problems and issues.
We often work with the OH cards in seminars and workshops. Spreading them out on the floor so that everyone can see them, we try to home in on an emotional quality in the participants by asking them each to select a card which corresponds approximately to their feelings at that moment in their current situation. A question at any seminar, for example, could be, “With what feelings did I come here today?” The OH cards present many possibilities in answer to such a question. The associative cards function as a catalyst both for communication and for the experience of closeness among the participants. This feeling of closeness is important because the success of our work as trainers is dependent on the participants opening up during the three or four days they are together – that is, that they reveal themselves more readily than they might in a normal, more formal situation.
Our workshop and seminar participants come from various domains of business, are usually from the industrial or service sectors and are often managers and their assistants – a colourful assortment of people, really, not only from Audi but also from a broad spectrum of the free market economy.
Sometimes I use the SAGA cards as well as the OH cards, especially when the topic is leadership: these images with their figures of highly symbolic characters facilitate a ready comprehension of particular group mechanisms having to do with leadership.
Ralf Linde ~ Trainer for the AUDI Academy
Ingolstadt, Germany
Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communitcation, by Waltraud Kirschke.
A group of people were playing OH at a centre where workshops on personality development are held. One of the participants was only observing. During a break he commented that OH is too simple. One of the payers suggested that he draw a set himself and find out what it meant to him. He drew the word WAIT and a picture of children at a playground. Without thinking about it he explained that what occurred to him in looking at this card combintation was that he had a wonderful relationship with his sons and that he could hardly wait to be back home with his family.
The next day he spoke again to the workshop participant who had suggested he draw a set, too. He admitted to having behaved rather arrogantly and said that he had not slept well the previous night. He kept thinking about the cards he had drawn. “I do have a good relationship with my sons,” he said. “However, the word WAIT does not refer to ‘wait’ but to another word that sounds exactly the same: WEIGHT. I have been fighting against my excess weight without success for years. I have long since gained the impression that the entire shell of fat I have built around myself is none other than a defense against my feelings. During the night it became clear to me that my being overweight has something to do with the fact that I have a hard time accepting the love and affection that my sons have for me!”
Ely Raman ~ Artist, teacher, creator and painter of the OH, SAGA, and PERSONA cards
Victoria, Canada
Excerpted from the book Strawberries Beyond My Window: Games of Association for Opening the Door to Creativity and Communitcation, by Waltraud Kirschke.
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