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 tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
Given that quite a few of my recent articles on tarot have focused on specific tarot cards and how to read them, I thought we could take a step back this week and look at one of the issues in approaching a tarot reading: that of coming up with — or not coming up with — a question.
This is a subject that, at first, seems relatively straightforward. But as you start to think and feel your way into it (and you will already be familiar with these if you have done readings for yourself or others) then you can find yourself facing all manner of choices, quandaries and contradictions.
The first of these being:
Not everyone knows what they want
Which means that not everyone knows what it is that they want to know — or, therefore, how to ask for it. Very often as a tarot reader, you are squaring up against this particular psychology when you embark on a reading.
If you’re reading for another person, it can take some time to really listen to what they are saying, and to crystallize a question from that. A strange but somehow fitting comparison I can draw upon comes from my days in advertising. Sometimes, the creative team that I was a part of would get reams of information from clients who knew their business back-to-front and inside-out, but who were at a loss to understand what this meant for a potential customer. They needed a “positioning statement” — something that summed the company up in a single line.
A question in tarot plays a similar role: a client may have many different threads of experience that they want to incorporate in a reading. How to frame a question so that it makes sense of who a client is and respects the complexity of their lives is a skill unto itself, and one that can prove very valuable to a client. An experienced reader will often be able to achieve this by using their perceptive abilities, intuition and a certain canniness, which beginners can hone with practice.