AUTHOR’S NOTE: I often describe tarot reading as being among the “helping professions,” which means loosely that, for a fee, we assist people with their problem-solving, decision-making, conflict-handling, relationship-wrangling, career-managing challenges, e.g. anything to do with self-awareness, self-betterment and self-application of an anecdotal rather than clinical nature. But I’m ambivalent about whether its OK to do so without possessing some form of relatable pedigree beyond being an empathetic human being with a pack of cards and a desire to help. In my own case I rely on wide-and-deep exposure to metaphysical philosophy for my professional credibility.
I stay far away from anything that might be construed as an attempt at formal “healing,” even if a return to wholeness is the goal and end-result of my work from a mental or emotional perspective. I would feel a whole lot better if I had more than undergraduate-level psychology and sociology at which to point as my sole qualification when what we do can come dangerously close to psychoanalysis, psychotherapy or social-behavior remediation, and in our zeal to “make a difference” we can be led down that path by a needy client before we’re aware it’s what we’re being asked to do.
Some legal jurisdictions have tip-toed around this issue by saying that tarot-reading for profit can only be performed “for entertainment” (even though particularly grim counseling sessions are anything but entertaining), while others call it a “personal service” and keep their nose out of it except to collect their taxes. But while some of us bump our head against the “glass ceiling” of officialdom, others sit comfortably at the prosaic end of the spectrum as “life coaches” who seem to have nothing to recommend them beyond having lived for a respectable number of years without self-destructing. They may in fact have advanced degrees or specialized training, but from the legal point-of-view they don’t need them so such enhancements become a marketing strategy.
I too have lived a long life and have made many good choices (just ask my wife, she will tell you she’s one of them) along with a few bad decisions, none with lasting impact, and I have the semantic skills and sympathetic ear to be able to turn that experience into effective pointers around which I wrap my tarot narratives. But I don’t feel drawn to the calling of “coach” because (from one troglodyte to another), my impression is that “it’s so simple a caveman could do it” (as long as the other caveman has less life-experience). It’s all too easy to set oneself up as an “expert” when, as the even older cliche goes, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” We can also say that where there’s an identified need, there will always be an opportunist knocking at the door to service it.
The advantage of traditional divination is that, if we choose to seek out the source material and not just “wing it” on our own intuitive authority, the documented experience of many lives lies behind it and that background has been codified into what is known as “core” (or baseline) knowledge that anyone can access who can read with critical comprehension. Tarot is (or should be) a “thinking person’s” pursuit, not just a social pastime, and this is where it has the edge over simple Pavlovian “button-pushing” where reward automatically follows the anecdotal mentoring purveyed by the entrepreneurial dispenser of cultural wisdom, as if collective “fitting in” and not self-realization is the high-water-mark of personal success. (To be fair, this may not be true of all instances of life-coaching so I could be overly cynical, but I suspect it happens often enough to be noteworthy.)
Probably because it has been around since the days of the early tribal shamans, divination at its most profound has transcended the instant gratification cachet and superficial “pop” mentality of the mundane “advice-mill,” and it operates at a more rarefied level of insight. The challenge for the advanced diviner is to “de-tune” this high-vibration outlook on the Universe so it aligns with the pragmatic context of most situations that are put to the question. Being able to instantly choose just the right words to make this happen without too much “verbal tap-dancing” is the mark of the seasoned professional.
