Depending on your familiarity with the practice of dowsing, you can perform a reading using nothing but a pendulum and your own intuition . You just need to hold the pendulum so that it hangs straight down, pose a query (one that can be answered with a simple "yes" or "no" works best), and then pay attention to how the pendulum swings. In Llewellyn's Complete Book of Divination , Richard Webster writes that the first question you should ask is which direction means "yes" and which direction means "no." Either say out loud or in your head, "What movement will mean 'yes?'" and wait to see how your pendulum swings. (And then do the same for "no.") That way, if the pendulum swings horizontally to the left when you ask it an in-depth question, you'll have already defined what that movement is meant to indicate.