AUTHOR’S NOTE: I’ve just returned from Italy after a seven-day Mediterranean cruise and a destination wedding outside of Pisa (for the record, I’m convinced that Italy lived through its cultural glory days in the 15th and 16th Centuries and I have no intention of going back even though the Tuscan countryside, the country people and [some of] the wines are endearing; from a sociological perspective, they can keep the cities and their insane motorcyclists who treat every two-lane highway as having five lanes), I’m now rummaging through my backlog of draft posts that I didn’t publish while away because I couldn’t get my iPad to connect after leaving the cruise ship. So before I write anything new I’m going to present them in decreasing order of significance (in my own estimation).
The tarot readings and interpretive commentary I see in the online community are frequently superficial, making me think that the posters have either created them out of idle curiosity and are looking for someone to tell them what the cards mean, or they have leaped right over more conventional approaches to problem-solving and decision-making in hope that the tarot will offer them a panacea that will get them off the hook for having to make the hard choices. The presumption is that the reading will offer a narrower scope of proposed actions that they can undertake and pretend that everything is good outside of that focus area, although the cards may not get the hint and still give them more than they bargained for.
Although I haven’t done so yet, I’m thinking of asking my clients in a non-threatening way before we begin a reading to tell me what they have tried or have considered trying to address their issues before they sought my services. What I hope to hear is that they’ve tried everything they can think of (and are willing to enumerate) and it hasn’t worked, in which case I can steer around those options in search of other answers. If, on the other hand, they have done nothing but pursue a reading, I will tell them that I can give them only a broad overview of a range of possible results and it will be up to them to decide whether one of them looks reasonable and, more importantly, achievable.
While I still maintain that the cards should be given an opportunity to communicate directly with the sitter’s subconscious before I stick my nose in, if I have something concrete to work with in the way of a well-defined scenario, I can be more effective than if I’m shooting in the dark and questing for illumination. The idea is not to fall back on the methods of “cold reading” in which I learn more about the subject from sources other than the cards, but rather to get all of that out of the way so I can strike right to the heart of the matter once the fog has been cleared.
At present I don’t want to know a seeker’s exact question in advance so the cards can “speak their piece” free of my subjective bias, but it is a good idea to get a topical (life-area) fix on what would otherwise be a moving target that could cost me a lot of time and effort in running it to ground. If the querent has tried “A, B and C” to no avail, I can propose “D or E” depending on which way the cards point. In other words, if I know “what’s up” at least in a general way, I can better predict “what’s coming down” in a more specific manner.
I’m a firm believe in seekers taking ownership of the outcome of a reading, but if I know how far along the path they’ve progressed toward a solution before I jump in, we will both be ahead of the game. The tarot is not a magic wand that the diviner can wave to make all of the sitter’s problems go away (although far too many querents are silently requesting exactly that), it is a key that can open doors to their subconscious so they can find a way to their own answers. I will once again quote astrologer Isabel Hickey’s maxim “The stars (or in this case the cards) don’t compel, they impel,” and if I can get them to impel my clients toward realization of their own power, I will have accomplished what I set out to do.
