Rather than look at a specific card this week, let’s talk a little about how to use tarot effectively.
Do you know folks – or are you one – who run to the deck for every little thing? Those are the folks who’ve lost their ability to make a decision without drawing a card. They no longer have hopes, dreams or desires. They’ve essentially put their fate in the draw of the cards.
I’m all for taking the information of a spread and putting it to good use. But we want to factor in our own feelings on the matter. And we want to keep our own intuition active. Tarot as a crutch is going to limit life severely. You finally have that spontaneous romantic encounter but you can’t go with it because you don’t have time to draw a card. Really? That’s a level of very sad that I don’t want any of you to reach. You’ve got a decision to make in a job interview and you have to stop to pull out your deck. Say bye-bye to what could have been a brilliant opportunity.
If you use tarot as a crutch, count on life to kick it out from underneath you.
Here’s another ineffective way to engage with tarot that I see regularly. You throw a spread and it doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. So you throw another. And another. Eventually, you might get something close to what you want and you triumphantly exclaim victory and then do what you wanted to all along.
You’ve just told your intuition that tarot is a tool that you’ll only listen to when it tells you what you want to hear. So when you use it, you’ll get two possibilities. One is that you’ll get gobbledygook from your spread. The other is that you’ll get an unreliable sycophant telling you what it knows you want.
If you don’t listen to tarot, it will stop talking with you.
No one really knows how tarot works, but I’ve got my theory. It’s based on resonance and attraction. Our beautiful vibrating energy system attracts symbols and occurrences that vibrate in harmony with it. So, when we cast a spread, we’re looking at the energies that surround us. Tarot gives us an opportunity to get conscious about some of the energies that have been below our perception horizon.
And that leads us to one of the best ways to use tarot: as guidance from our own trusted soul to our selves. We still need to choose the actions we’ll take. And we still need to take those actions ourselves. We’re interacting with tarot in the context of our lives.