Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
I know that I’ve covered this week’s topic piecemeal across several other articles, but I thought that, right now, it was worth taking another look at it: that is, how you know when a tarot reading is working for you, and how you know when it isn’t.
As Amanda Painter writes in the July 27 edition of Daily Astrology:
I have a feeling I may not be the only person around who spent far too much time yesterday twisted up in some kind of mental/emotional knot, desperately looking for a loose end to pull … In fact, that knot is making writing anything remotely ‘helpful’ or ‘balanced’ in this space very challenging at this moment that I’m writing.
From the macro of world events, to the micro of personal experience, and encompassing the idea that nothing exists in isolation — that all of our experiences are interwoven on a level that is perhaps unknown and, for the most part, unknowable to us — I don’t think I’m stepping far out of line when I write that many of us have been having our fair share of challenge.
It is usually when we meet with challenge that we seek out answers — tarot being just one of the ways that we’re able do this. From my own experience, when things are going smoothly, my tarot deck barely gets a look-in. On the other hand, when I’m faced with confusion or pain, and when there are more questions than answers, that’s when I reach for my cards.
And here is the challenge: that moment when we most need a reading is the moment when we are most vulnerable to the very things that can compromise it.
When we are so deep into our stuff that we feel unable to step back from it, it is hard to look at the cards we’ve been given with productive objectivity. Because that is really what is going to be of most value when we read for ourselves: the ability to see what is rather than what we want — or don’t want — it to be.
The more we can look at something objectively, the better equipped we are to see something new and unexpected that can lead us out of the loop we are caught in. Unconscious reaction simply leads us back into that loop, where we are most often bound to repeat it. Conscious action based on fearless inquiry can break it, and it is only by approaching the cards that we are given without our story — without forcing them to conform to a particular idea that we have about ourselves or others — that they can tell us something new about ourselves, and consequently about how to act, to think, to feel.
These are some of the things I try to bear in mind, to watch out for, and to apply when I’m reading for myself so that I remain as open to the possibility of a shift as possible. It doesn’t always work — sometimes I’m simply not able to hear what it is that the cards are telling me — but, applied consistently, the message eventually makes it through. Remember: we may be fickle and impatient, but the cards are not. When we are ready, there they will be, gently whispering to us what we failed to hear in the past.