just the cards, ma'am...

When I do a tarot reading, the client will sometimes ask if I'm clairvoyant or if I 'just read the cards'.

Just read the the cards!?! Hmph! If I was a more sensitive soul, I might get a little put out by that!

No, I'm just kidding. But there's a lot of misunderstanding out there about exactly what tarot is and how it can help. I myself will often say to a client who seems to have very high expectations that I 'just read the cards' as opposed to famous people in related fields such as John Edward or Alison Du Bois who talk to dead people and appear to know everything about everyone they meet.

They don't - and if you read their own words, they don't claim to. Sure, television is necessarily edited in such a fashion to make readings appear easier than they really are; like any live TV show, they cut out the boring bits. Sceptics claim this as a great deception. 'It's all edited to make it look better,' some say, with a great sense of betrayal.

Oh, really? As opposed to all those TV shows that aren't edited to cut out the dull bits?

My point, however, got a little lost there! Just read the cards?

Yes, I just read the cards. There are 78 of them and each one has myriad meanings depending on which cards it is surrounded by and what area of the client's life it refers to; the six of pentancles will have a different meaning in a question about money than it does in one about relationships or work and there is a lot of intuition involved in discovering which meaning is right in the present reading.

You need to be able to focus on both the many meanings of each card and the process of listening to your gut instinct at the same time. It's kind of like patting your head and rubbing you tummy; it takes skill but you can look a bit silly while you're doing it.

I've been to readers who close their eyes or stare up at the ceiling or nod as though they are listening to someone who is not with us in body. I am definitely not knocking them; everyone has their own process and if it works, excellent! But I try not to do any of that stuff - it makes most people uncomfortable and therefore creates a barrier between the reader and the readee. More than anything, I believe that at its best, tarot reading is an exchange between two people. It is not a situation where one person tells another what will happen to them; it's a little circle of two into which you invite a third Mysterious Other (intuition, gods, dead people - I don't know) and from where you can uncover the information you need to best travel forward in life.


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what tarot reading MIGHT be...

Last entry, I told you some of the things I think tarot isn't.

So I'm sure you've been waiting ever since with bated breath for me to come back and tell you exactly what it is. No? Well, okay - I'll tell you anyway.

Tarot is a guide on how to best proceed in your life from your present position to get to where you need to be in order to discover or fulfil your life's purpose. Tarot, at its best and most useful, is a tool for revealing the things you need to know about yourself and your situation to make the right decisions for your future.

This is not to say a tarot reading doesn't come up with some pretty amazingly accurate predictions of the future. It does. It can also be very good at identifying what's going on now in your life - but your future is much less clear. I can tell you what the cards say you should do in any given circumstances - but you can walk out the door of my salon and do whatever you like, no matter what advice the cards may have given you. The future is not written in stone. You hold the power to make the best or the worst of any situation in your own hands. Don't try to give it away to me - I don't want it!

Many times, people will come to a tarot reader hoping for confirmation of an opinion they already hold. For instance, a woman once asked me whether she should begin an affair with a man she worked with. She was married and she loved her husband but the chemistry with her workmate was so strong, she didn't know how she could stand it if they didn't consummate their relationship.

I told her that I wasn't there to tell her what she should or shouldn't do and that she would have to make her own decisions based on her own ethics. But I was able to offer her some advice from the tarot; it was clear - the cards I laid down after shuffling were among the worst in the pack. An affair would be a disaster that would adversely affect her work and her marriage, quite possibly to the point of losing both. But her position was that she loved this man and still felt that she had to find out if her happiness lay with him.

Well, whoopsie! Her happiness, your happiness, my happiness, the milkman's happiness lies within that individual's own self and it can't be found by chasing stuff outside of that self. I don't doubt the woman might have had great sex with her colleague but great sex is not happiness; it's great sex and that's all it is. Fleeting and often very very messy in more than one sense of the word and rarely worth what it would have cost her in the long run.

I don't know exactly what happened in this particular case but the client returned to see me a couple of years later and she was no longer married nor was she with her work colleague. I didn't pry. I just laid out the cards again for her and read what was in them.


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what tarot reading doesn't do

Whenever I do a tarot reading, I always ask the client if they've had readings before. If not, I make sure they understand that tarot is not a window into the future with guaranteed predictions and outcomes.

A lot of startling truth almost always emerges from a good tarot reading - but you can't approach the future as though it's a book that's already been written and if you could just get an advance copy, you'd avoid the pitfalls. That's simply not logical. If the future is already written in stone somewhere, you can't change anything about it anyway so what's the use of knowing?

Some people say to me, 'I want to know what will happen so that I can be prepared.'

BEEP! Wrong answer! You can't be ever be completely prepared for every eventuality and why would you want to? The greatest part of our lives is the mystery of not being sure what will happen next.

So now I've told you what tarot isn't, I guess I should say something about what I think it is. In my next blog, I'll talk about just that.

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the mystery of tarot...

I've been reading tarot for thirty years now and it's an activity that I come to love more and more as time goes by.

To me, a tarot reading is a process that takes place between two people, a deck of cards and some mysterious Other. Some readers call it God. Some call it Angels. Some call it Guides. There are as many explanations as there are readers.

So, what do I think that Other is?

Well. Hmmm. Um.

I'm sorry to disappoint you but I have no idea! Oh, I suppose that's not strictly true. Of course after all this time, I have some ideas about what happens during the profoundly mysterious process of a successful tarot reading but I will never know for sure whether I'm right or not until after I go to The Big Reading Room in the sky.

All I really know is that a person, often a stranger, comes to me and we take a small amount of time to tune into each other by each shuffling the cards in silence. I do have a couple of mental rituals that I go through while I shuffle but these rituals are not noticeable to the person I'm reading for and are much closer to meditation than they are to magic. I simply try to clear my mind to allow whatever intuition is released by the spread of the cards to come through more clearly.

I've spent thirty years learning the meanings of the cards, how they relate to each other and how to hear the story they tell me - which is, of course, the life story of the person I'm reading for.


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