Interaction
with the Psyche
The first interaction we’re going to discuss is the interaction with your inner self. We can call this your intuition, your deep mind, your Higher Self, or any number of other names. It’s the interaction you use both first and last. For some people, becoming more in tune with this part of themselves is a struggle, and if that’s true of you, you’ll find every other section of this book to be more accessible than this one, because they don’t deal with this area of struggle directly. But the whole time you’re working with other tarot interactions, you’re also working with yourself; you bring yourself to the table. So it makes sense to address this part of being a reader first.
Becoming Psychic
It would be gentler, at this moment, to refer to “becoming intuitive.” “Psychic” is a hot-button word for many people. It feels weird, or spooky, or nonsensical. I use the word precisely because it is jarring, and that feeling, that discomfort, is exactly where most people’s problem with releasing this ability lies.
Western culture treats psychic ability like a social faux pas. Partly this is because we are a rational culture that is primed to reject anything that seems irrational. People experience and believe in all sorts of “supernatural” things, but there’s an attitude that you don’t talk about it in polite company. However, I’d argue that this discomfort runs much deeper.
Propriety, in our culture, depends on keeping a certain amount of ourselves hidden. Just as we don’t walk around naked in public, we don’t reveal our psychological nakedness in public either. We keep up a facade. We are shielded, guarded, and private. This cultural norm varies from person to person, from region to region, from ethnicity to ethnicity, but in general, none of us are truly open except with those closest to us. It’s obvious that any psychic ability, whether telepathy (knowing the thoughts of others) or empathy (knowing the feelings of others), would violate the social contract that we don’t reveal our secrets in public. Thus, we have an unspoken agreement: Don’t show me yours, and I won’t show you mine.
Children don’t have to be taught most social rules. Sure, we pull little fingers out of little noses and tell Junior not to do that in front of people, but for the most part, kids learn social structure by observation, not by instruction, and one observation that a child can easily make is that adults don’t talk about one another’s secrets, and don’t even know them. Little Sally might get a timeout if she reveals something private about Aunt Margaret, and if she says she learned it by looking inside Aunt Margaret’s head, she’ll get a second punishment for being a liar. As we grow up understanding that being psychic is treated as a lie as well as rude, we suppress any psychic abilities.
But it goes even deeper. Remember: Don’t show me yours, and I won’t show you mine. As we grow, we develop our own secrets, our own pain and confusion and loss and longing that we don’t want to share. We have unrequited crushes, dark dreams, untold rages, sexual fetishes, violent thoughts, and personal traumas. If we break the code—if we agree that inner secrets can be known, and this isn’t a lie, and it isn’t rude—what’s to stop others from breaking the code and knowing our own secrets? The social contract only works if everyone upholds it.
For all of these reasons, we have a strong incentive to reject the very notion of being psychic. When we are psychic, we usually use other words to describe it: a hunch, a feeling, intuition.
You see, this is why I’m using the rudest word: psychic. It begins the process of poking a hole into a social structure that holds back your abilities.
The Three Tools of Any Psychic Skill
There are a large number of mind skills. A few paragraphs ago, I defined telepathy as knowing the thoughts of others, and empathy as knowing the feelings of others. A third mind skill used by tarot readers is clairvoyance: knowing the future or the past. There are many other skills that don’t concern us here. All mind skills rely on three tools: meditation, self-knowledge, and trust.
Meditation
Meditation is the first and most necessary step in developing any mind skill. It begins the process of giving you control over your mind, and also knowing its interior. Through meditation, you’ll gain knowledge of how your thoughts behave, how they are when they’re noisy, and how to go about quieting them. You’ll learn the sound of your inner voice, which is so important, as, for many people, the “psychic voice” sounds different from the ordinary voice of day-to-day thoughts.
Many people find meditation frustrating and assume they’re bad at it. It’s important to recognize that “bad at it” is almost entirely a misconception! If part of the purpose of meditation is understanding how your mind behaves, then observing it misbehave is right on target. When your mind wanders during meditation, instead of thinking, “Crap, I suck at this,” simply observe your mind wandering, and gently bring it back.
I liken this kind of meditation to what I do when I’m writing. I’m often distracted—by noises, by my spouse or my cat, by a game of solitaire—but ultimately I get back to writing. The distractions will happen, but I simply bring myself back to focus and continue writing. The measure of success is not “Did I experience distraction?” but “Did I write?”
Here’s the thing, though. Suppose I get distracted by my adorable cat. Suppose I then start thinking things like, “Darn it! I shouldn’t be distracted! What a dope I am to play with Callie instead of writing! I’m terrible at this!” Are those thoughts useful? Not really. You know what else those thoughts are not? They’re not writing. Beating myself up about my distraction is just another distraction.
Meditation allows me to experience my inner voices, my noises, my distractions, my self-recriminations, and to gently overcome them. That doesn’t mean they go away. I will continue to have stray thoughts when I meditate, just as I will continue to notice my cute cat. But as I learn to concentrate better, I can notice distractions without being overcome by them.
There are other parts of your mind besides a bunch of stray thoughts, and a meditation practice will allow those parts to come out. These include the psychic and intuitive parts.
There are a number of wonderful books to help you begin meditating. One of my favorites is Meditation: The Complete Guide (2011) by Patricia Monaghan and Eleanor Viereck. What’s great about this book is that it introduces a wide variety of techniques.
There’s no rule that meditation means “sitting with legs crossed, silencing the mind while reciting a mantra,” yet that’s what most people think. There are stillness meditations and chanting meditations, loving-kindness, zazen, walking, drumming, and many other varieties. Choose a technique that suits you, be kind to yourself when you struggle, and appreciate the journey without any preconceptions about the result.
I was first exposed to meditation in the 1970s, through friends who hung out at ashrams and were interested in Transcendental Meditation. Years later, my tarot teacher, Susan, gave me a set of written instructions for meditation. The instructions were simple: Start by picturing one thing, visualizing anything about it, for fifteen minutes. For example, if you visualize a tree, you can see, in your mind’s eye, any tree, and you can picture it through the seasons. You can imagine details of its leaves and bark, and you can picture climbing it or picnicking under it. You can imagine its scent, and feel the breeze blowing through it. Your mind can wander at will, as long as it wanders in a treelike direction. Eliminate only those thoughts that are non-tree.
The instructions go on to say that only once you feel comfortable with this kind of visualization should you move on to concentrating on a single image of a tree and attempting to hold it throughout the meditation.
I began with fifteen-minute sessions at least three times a week, increasing to twenty minutes after a while. I also added other areas of concentration. For example, when driving, I would practice thinking only about driving. Again, I would allow myself to recall past drives, think about my car, and so on, eliminating only non-drive thoughts. Even when I had advanced to “picture only the tree” during private, at-home meditation, I continued using the looser, visualize-anything style while driving, walking, and doing housework.
This was very effective mind training. It improved my meditation and visualization skills, and also allowed me to get better at being in the moment.
After years of that practice, I eventually became less disciplined. Currently I aim for once a week, though I frequently do less and occasionally do more. This is above and beyond when I practice the simple meditation of deep breathing and visualization for a few moments prior to any occasion when mind skills are called upon (such as when doing a reading).
I do a seated meditation that combines a short prayer with breathing and mala (meditation) beads. I take a deep breath, release it, say the prayer, move to the next bead, and repeat. I love the way beads free me from counting or using a timer, and also give me something to touch while I focus my mind. In addition, I regularly meditate in a hot bath. The hot water is relaxing and mind-altering, and I use it to visualize cleansing and release from stray thoughts and concerns while clearing my mind.
I have been meditating for almost forty years, beginning in my teens. It amazes me that even though I still catch my mind wandering frequently, the meditation leaves me better able to focus, relax, and reach a deeper part of my mind.
Self-Knowledge
Part of self-knowledge will come from meditation. You’ll learn the sound of your inner voice, your fears, your doubts, as they arise in the course of gaining more control over your own mind. But self-knowledge is more than that.
Remember the unspoken principle: Don’t show me yours, and I won’t show you mine. Part of what blocks your psychic talents (to the extent that they are blocked) is your willingness to uphold this bargain. You do this in part because you have inner doors that you don’t wish to be opened.
When there are parts of yourself that cannot be released—parts you may not even know about—it means there are places in your psyche where you simply cannot go. Your subconscious will stop you cold.
I had a student who was invariably attacked during guided meditation. We’d be going on an inner journey, and regardless of the instruction, it would turn violent. I might say, “You meet a kind stranger who gives you a gift,” and then ask the class, after the journey was over, to describe the stranger and the gift, and this one student would say, “The stranger strangled me and then shoved the gift down my throat.” My student wasn’t aware of how unusual—and upsetting—these incidents were, and had no conscious memory of violence in her past. Yet something was clearly wrong. We were unable to proceed with our meditation work until she did the psychological work necessary to free herself from these violent and violating images.
The more you know what your inner blocks are and how they affect you, the more you bring your shadow into light, where it can be examined and explored, the weaker will become your internal commitment to Don’t show me yours.
Inner work can take myriad forms, from studying the work of self-help gurus, to attending workshops, to active imagination, inner-child work, addiction recovery, traditional therapy, and more. Don’t assume you can explore every dark corner alone. Therapy made me a better psychic, and perhaps the same will be true for you. Certainly if you’re like my student, and the inner blocks are violent and frightening, you’ll do much better, and feel safer, with someone else’s assistance.
Your psychic skills are only as free as you are. The freer you make yourself, in a psychological sense, the stronger your mind skills will be.
Trust
Imagine your psychic skills as a person residing deep inside you. As we’ve discussed, this person was once sent to hide. Perhaps she was berated, or called a liar, or called crazy. Perhaps anytime you’ve heard from her (hunches you’ve had, for example), you’ve said, “That’s ridiculous.” She’s been hiding inside you for most of your life, scurrying away every time she’s called “ridiculous.”
Gently, you’re going to coax her out. As with any frightened child, the way you’re going to do this is by establishing trust. How?
Don’t berate, criticize, or disbelieve her. Doing so drives her (or him—your inner child’s gender generally matches your own) back inside.
What will happen is something like this: You’re giving a reading, and you think to say something. You see the Justice card and you want to say, “This relates to a legal matter.” That seems kind of bold, though, so instead you rattle off a list of potential meanings of the card, including “a legal matter.” What you did was distrust the “Psychic Child,” and now she has retreated and has nothing more to say to you.
Instead, if you say exactly what you think, the trusted Psychic Child might give you more information. The next thought that pops into your head might be “family court.” Again, you could refrain from saying that, and the Psychic Child will feel distrusted and retreat, or you could take the risk and say it, and be rewarded with more and more information that is psychic and accurate.
I’ve experienced exactly this sort of cycle many, many times: trusting the inner voice and being rewarded with more information; distrusting the inner voice and feeling the source of knowledge dry up. I know many other readers who’ve experienced the same things. The power of trust applies broadly to almost any mind skill, from clairvoyance to automatic writing to lucid dreaming. Trust the inner voice.
Your querent may lie. People do it all the time. They may have secrets they’re uncomfortable sharing, they may be testing you by purposely withholding information, or they may simply not be thinking of the scenario that validates what you’ve said. I’ll give you an example. If you, as a psychic, told me that I had an Aunt Amelia, I’d tell you flat out that you were wrong. I had an Aunt Milly, known as “Mimi,” but I actually had to look up her given name in order to write this paragraph. I’d have guessed that her full name was Millicent or Mildred; I didn’t know it was Amelia, and I didn’t know her as Milly when she was alive, just Mimi. Yet, if your Psychic Child told you that I had an Aunt Amelia, she would be right and I, the querent, would be wrong.
So your job as a psychic isn’t to trust the querent. Your job is to trust yourself, trust the Psychic Child, trust the inner voice. The more trust you feed it, the more it will thrive.
How Tarot Helps in Interaction
with the Psyche
The three tools I just described are essential for developing virtually any mind skill. When working to develop the specific psychic talents that will help you as a tarot reader, you can allow tarot itself to help you.
Memorization as Intermediary
As you work to memorize card meanings, you’ll have a distraction from the self-doubt that accompanies psychic ability. Remember the Psychic Child—she shies away when treated with doubt. Yet we adults, raised in a culture that treats such knowledge as nonsense, cannot avoid having at least some small touch of doubt.
It helps, at first, to look at (for example) the Three of Swords and think, “Sorrow, heartbreak,” and just say that, rather than trying to experience an intuitive sense of the card meaning in this reading of your own. The cards are, in this way, a conduit.
Lots of mind-training techniques involve an intermediary of some kind. Meditating on a mandala (a sacred geometric symbol) gives the mind something to latch on to during the process, and makes meditating easier than just sitting in “no thought.” Similarly, lighting a candle allows you to focus your mind on a prayer. You could just pray, but many people light a candle, using the object (the light) and the ritual of lighting the way that a meditator uses a mandala.
Thinking of your book knowledge about tarot also helps you increase self-trust, which helps the Psychic Child emerge. The card means this because this is the meaning I studied and memorized. You are more likely to trust in learned meanings than in your own intuitive sense at first, but as long as there’s self-trust, and you allow yourself to speak from a place of self-trust, your skills will improve.
Tarot Gets You Past Social Barriers
Using the cards (or indeed, any divination tool) allows you to bypass the issue of social propriety. In many readings, I’ve said, “It’s not me saying this, it’s the cards.” I’ve even disagreed with the cards during a reading, but I still gave a standard interpretation of the card rather than my opinion. By assuring the querent that you’re reading the cards and keeping your personal opinion out of it, you can avoid the discomfort of inappropriateness. You’re not a clod saying the wrong thing, you’re a reader giving professional counsel!
Like you, the querent is more likely to trust the cards, at first, than the person reading them. This allows you to tap into that trust to build up your own self-trust, and the Psychic Child within is paying attention to both. Having a querent trust you can be daunting, but it also gives you a boost that lets you move forward with a reading. Most querents will find the cards somewhat spooky or fascinating or spiritual. The social contract, now, is that the two of you are engaging with a spiritual tool, and this different social contract will assist in freeing your psychic talents.
Ancient Power of the Tarot
Tarot cards have been around for almost six hundred years. Many of the symbols they depict have been used by occultists for far longer. The meanings of sun, moon, rivers, paths, swords, dogs, clouds, and so on have an ancient and archetypal resonance.
Using the cards allows you to tap into these ancient repositories of meaning. You’re drawing not just on the limited resources of one person (you), but on the vast resources of everyone who has read the tarot for hundreds of years, and of the collective unconsciousness’s almost infinite knowledge of its symbols.
Memorized meanings, the use of an intermediary tool, shifting the social contract, and tapping into ancient wisdom are all means by which the tarot allows you to improve your own psychic talents.
Three Phases to Becoming
a More Psychic Reader
Now let’s look at how you can use a three-phase approach to become more psychic in your interactions with the tarot. These phases assume you’re also doing the work necessary to develop your abilities with the three tools of any mind skill: meditation, self-knowledge, and trust.
Phase One: Let Go and Let Cards
Phase one is where you let the cards do the talking. Don’t try to determine if you’re psychic or intuitive or kidding yourself or what. Just read the cards. Work with memorized meanings, and read what you see before you.
It’s absolutely fine during this phase to study the little booklet that comes with any tarot deck. Those meanings are generally incredibly limited, and you’ll want to expand out from there, but the booklet will give you very short keywords that are easy to commit to memory. You can also use the short card meanings in appendix A of this book, and delve into the recommended reading in appendix C.
Get off-book as soon as you can, but don’t worry about “reading” anything except the meanings and positions of cards (we’ll get to that soon).
Phase one is all about using the power of the tarot to help you in your quest to improve your mind skills. It’s about letting the Psychic Child feel it’s safe to come out.
Phase Two: Interact with the Cards
Here, reader, is where the fun begins.
Simply start by asking yourself, What do I see? I’ll give you a hint: you’ve been in phase two all along. How? Well, as you’ve been memorizing, you’ve been remembering selectively. Memory, after all, is not perfect. You’ll remember some meanings more clearly than others, and once you’re off-book, those meanings might even develop subtle distortions. They will start to match up with the cards as you perceive them.
It’s going to be tremendously important, at this stage, to pick a deck you really like. Most tarot readers have several decks of cards, if not dozens, but most of us read with just one or a few. I’ll switch decks if I feel stuck, and if I’m feeling particularly “head blind” (not at all psychic), I’ll go back to the deck I learned on as a kind of renewal. Despite switching around, almost every reading I do lately is with the Robin Wood Tarot (illustration 1). Other decks I’ve read with in heavy rotation include the Rider-Waite, Hanson-Roberts, and Sacred Rose.
The point is that, if the deck is something you interact with, you should feel like that’s possible. Isaac Bonewits used to say, “Choose the deck you think is prettiest,” but “pretty” is a loaded word and may not be a word that works for you. Instead, choose a deck that you feel connected to, that resonates with you, that feels like yours. Do the illustrations make you snicker? Wrong deck. Are the cards laden with symbols that confuse you? Wrong deck. Conversely, does a lack of symbols feel like freefall, like there’s nothing to latch on to? Wrong deck. With the wealth of decks available on the market, it shouldn’t be hard to find a deck you can connect to, and if you switch to a different one at some point in the future, that’s fine too.
When interacting with the cards, the first question is What do you see?
What do you see in the Queen of Pentacles (illustration 2)? Close your eyes for a moment, take a deep breath, and relax. (Do you see how meditation will help you as a reader? Quick access to a relaxed state is a big plus!) Open your eyes and allow them to scan lightly over the card. What do you see? Has your eye noticed the downcast gaze of the queen, looking at what she holds and not at the greenery around her? Have you taken in the mountains in the background? The bulls on her throne?
You’re going to scan this way multiple times. You’ll start by doing it as you study the cards. Some of it may be subconscious; you won’t even realize the way that your observation of a card affects the way you remember its meaning. Our old friend Mastering the Tarot (by Eden Gray) refers to the Queen of Pentacles as a woman who is intelligent, creative, good in business, good with gardens and children, and sometimes “melancholy and moody.” If you’re struck by the lush garden in the card, you’re likely to remember her creative, fertile, and productive aspects. If you focus on the bulls, you might think she’s “bullish” and recall that she’s good with money. (You might even remember that bulls are associated with an upswing in the stock market!) Or you might notice her downward gaze, in which case you’re more likely to recall “melancholy and moody.”
Some people find that scanning a card this way is enhanced by using a deck with lots of imagery, so that the eye may fall on any of the many details of a card. Others find that their mind’s eye fills in the details best with a card that is more sparsely illustrated. Similarly, your eye may find images better if the illustrations are realistic, or fanciful, or primitive, or if they’re colorful, or black and white. Everyone is different. Spend time with different imagery and see what works for you (illustration 3).
Illustration 3: Two Queens: The Anna.K Tarot (left) has a simple Queen of Swords, while the Tarot Illuminati (right) has a highly detailed Queen of Swords
Remember, we’re still studying; we haven’t gotten to a reading yet.
Think about actors. More than one film director has said that the most important decision is casting. The actor transforms the role, brings it to life, and finds nuances and meaning that didn’t seem to be in the script, often without deviating from the written page. Sure, sometimes actors improvise, but this interpretation and enlivening happens even when every word is kept intact, even when it’s Shakespeare or some other author whose words are never tampered with.
Like an actor, you’re taking the script (the interpretation of the cards that you’re studying) and breathing life into it simply by interacting with it. The actor reads, studies, imagines, and thinks about the script. You read, study, imagine, gaze at, and observe the cards.
An actor might do research. Actors might spend a day with police, with prisoners, with doctors, to try to deepen their knowledge of what it is to be those people. Tarot readers also do research, studying different books about the tarot, exploring different decks, taking classes, and chatting with other readers.
Finally, an actor gets to perform, on stage or before a camera. At this point, there’s a great deal more interaction, because there are other actors. There’s also the opportunity to try out different line readings: “I love you” is different as a whisper or a shout, or with a question mark at the end.
Your “performance day” is the reading. Your co-star is the querent, and your line readings are what you notice in the cards in that moment.
You’ve memorized the Queen of Pentacles and recall that she is fertile, good in business, or melancholy. Yet when the cards are before you, your eye notices the bull again and again. You decide to stick with the business interpretation and set aside the other meanings.
Your querent will respond better to “good in business” than to “maybe good in business, maybe a good mother, maybe a gardener.” Remember, the trust that you build with the querent is an energy you can tap into to help yourself become more psychic, and the Psychic Child will respond to that trust as well.
There’s another level of interacting with what you see, and that is seeing things that are uniquely your own.
To me, the Four of Wands always looks like a wedding (illustration 4). This is not an interpretation that you’ll find in books on the tarot written before the 1960s, but I’m not the only one who sees it that way, and this meaning appears in newer books. You’ll find, for example, that Robin Wood (Robin Wood Tarot: The Book, 1998) says the meaning of this card is “harmony, romance, a wedding.” The meaning comes from looking: it looks like a wedding, and so it became a wedding to many tarot readers. In other words, the meaning is based on interacting with the card.
Your interactions with the cards can transcend preferring one by-the-book meaning over another. You might see something in a card that a teacher hasn’t told you is there. If you see it, allow for the possibility that the card is showing it to you, that it’s interacting with you. (I’m not suggesting that cards are sentient beings, but this metaphor is the simplest way to describe the experience.)
Phase Three: Interact with Your Voice
This is the part of becoming psychic that involves trust, and releasing the Psychic Child. You’ve looked at the Queen of Pentacles and said, “Good in business.” By saying that, you’ve opened a door.
Now listen to your voice saying that, and see if there’s more to say. Sometimes, when we say something definitively, it unlocks a second statement, and perhaps a third after that.
If you’d said, “Maybe business, maybe gardening,” that might have been a moment to discover that the next words out of your mouth were, “No, definitely business.” On the other hand, if you were thinking “business” but hedged your bets with the “maybe,” you might have frightened off the Psychic Child. You see, the key to this phase of interacting with your voice is never hedge. If you have the thought, speak the thought. That doesn’t mean you have to be certain of everything you say, and it definitely doesn’t mean you should pretend to be certain when you’re not. It means to speak the words your inner voice is saying. Often, we have an inner dialogue that sounds like this:
Inner Voice: That Queen of Pentacles … good in business.
Rational Mind: I can’t possibly know that. I should say “maybe.”
Inner Voice: Fine, ignore me. I’ll just go sit in the corner.
Speaking the words of the inner voice is what’s crucial here. Sometimes the inner voice itself will say “maybe,” and that’s fine.
I find it’s often easier to look straight at the cards when I’m speaking these thoughts. Eye contact with a querent is going to get me thinking about her, about how she’s reacting, and about whether I’m being offensive to her. This is a card-based interaction, and looking at the card helps. Ultimately you want to be able to look at the querent, of course, but when I find that my flow of words feels interrupted, I look down at the cards before me and speak my words directly from the images that inspire them.
Suppose you didn’t reject a thought and went straight to “business,” or got to “business” with your “maybe,” which was all you had in that moment. Now there might be more words. You might be able to describe the specific business, or the specific job within the field of business, going from “good with business” to “someone like an accountant or finance person.” Speaking from a place of confidence and intuition opens up more words. And speaking those words can open still more words.
This process will get easier with multiple cards, and chapters 3 through 6 will give lots of examples of multi-card interactions that will allow your interaction with your own psyche to flourish. It took me years of reading tarot before I was really good, and really psychic, with a single-card reading.
Notice how interacting with the cards through words has its own phases: first through standard card interpretations, then through riffs on those interpretations, and finally, through spontaneous interaction with your words alone.
A beginner can always rely on an outward flow, from standard interpretations into a larger understanding. Indeed, after reading for more than thirty years, I still often go back to that. It’s a good place from which to find one’s voice, to clear the psychic throat.
But you can also push yourself out, away from the cards, into really flying with your voice. Ultimately, you can speak straight from a deeply intuitive place, as if the cards aren’t even there. A “cold reading” is a reading without any divinatory tool (cards, stones, tea leaves, etc.). There are times when you can read as if “cold,” except the cards are present. This intuitive speaking can be challenging but also rewarding, and if there are times when building from the basics outward doesn’t seem to be working, an “almost cold” technique can be an effective way to shake things up and get the psychic juices flowing.
Speed
This technique pushes you to reach a different part of yourself. Because you are laying out cards very fast, you have no time to think. With this technique, you can’t study the cards or try to remember what they mean. This pushes the Psychic Child to come to the forefront, taking over from logic and reason, because there is no time for logic or reason.
To use speed to train your psychic skills, you should be grounded and centered. Before you start, take a few deep, cleansing breaths. Then begin by sitting down with a querent. When you’re experimenting, querents can often be friends and family. This technique does work alone, but the discipline of moving rapidly is enhanced by having someone else there to impel you forward.
The querent asks a question, then you lay down the first card and say immediately what you see. The minute you begin to hesitate, drop the next card directly on top of it—and then the next, and the next.
Here’s a sample reading I did to get a quick snapshot of a friend’s relationship problems (illustration 5). The entire thing, from beginning to end, took one minute, during which I recorded myself speaking.
Six of Wands: Victory experienced. Starting something great, and that was beautiful, and uh …
The Moon in reverse: It’s really hard to understand what’s going on right now, and uh, howling doesn’t help …
Ace of Wands: Very phallic, time to start over, very sexual, sexually related, um …
Ten of Wands: Carrying the burden all yourself, yeah, this is accurate to the question, uh …
Five of Swords: Being a little sneaky with the victory, laughing, um, being apart, uh …
Queen of Pentacles: Um, a loving and kind and fertile solution, fertile outcome. Okay, this feels like an outcome card. I’m going to stop.
Notice that I moved as quickly as possible. When I found myself saying “uh” or “um,” I laid down the next card. I said everything out loud, including the idea that this was accurate; in this way, I kept the words flowing and affirmed to myself what I was seeing. I slowed down a little at the Five of Swords (a card that often slows me down), caught myself, and quickly laid down the next card. As you can see, just six cards at about ten seconds per card can give an accurate assessment of a relationship, which was confirmed by the querent. (This couple is doing fine and they are basically happy, but they were going through a rough patch that was affecting their sex life and making the querent feel lonely.)
Confusion
Planned confusion can be another way of bypassing the rational mind. I’m going to explain this by telling a story.
I fell in love with the Tarot Art Nouveau the first time I saw it (illustration 6). It’s simply beautiful, and I’ve been a little obsessed with Art Nouveau since I was a teenager. I purchased the deck but found it difficult to use. Because every card has an illustration on it, I didn’t realize that the Tarot Art Nouveau is practically a “pip” deck. A pip deck is a deck in which the major arcana have images, but the minor arcana just have pips (symbols of the suit), like ordinary playing cards, so that the Four of Wands has no image besides four wands.
The Tarot Art Nouveau deck actually does have an image on every card, but there’s a sameness to them that makes them difficult to read. Facial expressions and body language convey meaning, but it’s far too subtle for me. The minors, for me, are almost unreadable; I have to rely on my memory of what cards mean, essentially visualizing other decks’ versions of a card. The fact that the main labels on the cards are in Spanish (bastoni for wands, espadas for swords) makes that harder. This deck, beautiful as it is, is almost impossible for me to connect to, and even the majors feel distant.
So there I was, giving a reading with my new deck, and feeling lost. I got a kind of floaty feeling in my head, like I didn’t know what I was saying. Having spent years training myself to interact with my voice and release my Psychic Child, I just kept talking. The whole time, I felt confused, and fluttery, and a little anxious. When I was done, I felt exhausted. At the same time, it was one of the most psychic readings I’d ever given, and the querent was amazed.
My son was around when I gave that reading, and felt that the psychic experience was caused by my confusion. Because I had no rational way of connecting to the deck, I got pushed into an irrational and intuitive mindset. On subsequent occasions, he would suggest that I use that deck and would often request it if I was reading for him. Sometimes I would agree, and always with the same result—a floaty, almost panicked feeling, and astonishingly accurate content for the querent.
I rarely use that deck anymore. I like the result, but I dislike the feeling of achieving it. However, I encourage any reader to try the same experiment. Work with a deck that feels too blank (if you like a lot of detail) or too crowded (if you like a sparser look). Work with a deck that feels outside your comfort zone. Note not just your feelings but also your results.
Exercises
Exercise 1: Meditation
Most people who begin a meditation practice try one method and stick with it. Perhaps you already have a practice that works for you, but perhaps you have only ever used one method, or you do not meditate at all.
Try at least one method of meditation that is new to you. Use this method at least twice a week for at least a month.
Examples:
• Walking meditation
• Drumming
• Buddhist loving-kindness meditation
• Candle-gazing
• Use of a prayer or mantra
Exercise 2: Journal
Begin keeping a journal of your tarot readings. Note the date, the deck used, the querent’s question (if any), and the cards. You can also note how things turned out, if possible.
Throughout the rest of this book, you’ll be asked to write the results of various exercises in this journal.
Exercise 3: Speed Reading
Do this exercise with a companion as your querent. If you must work alone, speak out loud, as if to a querent. You can record your voice for noting in your journal later.
1. Take a series of deep, calming breaths. Make sure you feel centered before you begin.
2. Shuffle or mix your cards, and allow the process of shuffling to continue centering you.1
3. Lay down the first card and immediately begin speaking. Don’t let yourself pause for a breath. Say whatever comes to mind, whatever you remember about the card. Spend no more than ten to fifteen seconds on the card.
4. Lay down the next card on top of, or next to, the first card. Remember, don’t stop to think, just keep talking.
5. After you have laid down five to seven cards, put the deck down.
6. Ask your querent what worked and what didn’t. Make notes in your journal.
7. Repeat this exercise several times. Use it anytime you feel psychically clogged up to reconnect to a sense of spontaneity.
1. Throughout this book, I’ll instruct you to “shuffle.” Many people don’t know how to shuffle cards, or feel uncomfortable doing so. Wherever you see this instruction, please read it to mean “shuffle or mix as you prefer.”