Answers to Your Questions about Tarot: What I Wish I Had Known

Our question comes from a tarot student. She writes:

I would appreciate if you could tell briefly if there was one thing you wish you'd known when you started your professional career, what would it be?

At first the question seemed simple. It’s actually taken me a little while to figure out my answer; much longer than I thought it would.

I have very few regrets; my tarot business has been, and continues to be, successful. I continue to enjoy doing what I do.

But, I’ve thought of two things I really do wish I had known. One might be a cautionary tale for you. The other, well, the other is one that may be unavoidable.

I wish I had known just how much writing would be an important part of my business, and I wish I had treated my writings – class plans, handouts, articles – as the precious things they were.

When I had a new computer with just five documents in it, it never occurred to me to use proper naming conventions. I couldn’t imagine that, in a few short years, I would have thousands of documents and no way to sort through them.

I wish I had understood the subtleties of the way tarot speaks, especially when predicting the future.

There are some things you learn with experience, and there is no way around that. The good news is that we tarot readers just get better as we get older. The bad news is that there were times I had to get it wrong in the beginning to be able to get it right, now.

If I could narrow that bit down, it would be this. In tarot, there is something I call the “minority report,” after the Tom Cruise movie. You might be looking to predict an outcome, and get three cards. Two that strongly predict one outcome, and a third with a different message. As a young reader, I may have had a tendency to gloss over the minority card, and focus on what seemed like the stronger prediction. Sometimes that worked in my favor, and sometimes it didn’t.

The cards never lie. Sometimes the truth they tell is that there is more than one possibility for the future, or that the future is still up for grabs.

Tarot is a helpful tool for getting a glimpse at the future. Now, I know to pay attention to all possibilities, even ones I hadn’t considered. I know to ask more questions of the cards, even questions my client hasn’t verbalized. I know to use my intuition to expand the reading to include all possibilities, not just the most likely or the most desirable. I wish I had been able to do that in the beginning of my career, but I think sometimes skills and wisdom are born of experience.

Thanks for a great question. If you have a question about tarot, please email me!

Enjoy the video!

Christiana Answers a Question about Getting Started as a Tarot Reader

Video of Christiana Answers a Question about Getting Started as a Tarot Reader

Five Reasons to Blog about Tarot

Why do tarotists keep tarot blogs? There are literally hundreds of tarot blogs on the internet. Professional tarot teachers offer free instruction on their blogs. Tarot students share their musings on the cards. Tarotists of every level of experience offer tarot-related recipes, games, poems, stories and exercises.

Tarot Blog Hops happen regularly where tarot bloggers agree to blog at the same time about the same topic.

When I first started reading tarot in the 1980s there were no blogs. The internet existed, but average people didn’t know about it. Tarot information came from books, rented videos and in-person classes (if you were lucky enough to find one).

Now tarotists have a wealth of tarot information, perspectives and ideas at their fingertips every day, for free.

I encourage my students to blog about tarot. In fact, anyone can have a free account on this Tarot Topcs Community Blog to share their thoughts and ideas about tarot.

A few of my students, both amateur and professional, have asked me to explain the value of keeping a tarot blog. So here it is -  five good reasons to keep a tarot blog.

1. The best tarot readers are also tarot writers. Tarot is by its nature a creative, spiritual and intellectual pursuit. When we write about the cards we become better at working with the cards, and better at hearing their messages.

2. Just as the early occults and tarotists did, just as the Golden Dawn did, we are constantly evolving tarot. As we share our thoughts, ideas and experiences about tarot we are adding to the tarot corpus. What tarot is and how tarot is used is constantly changing. Our blogs document our experiences. That documentation demonstrates how tarot is evolving, and keeps a record of its growth. This allows us to build on each other’s work as we all work together to create tarot's future.

3. I implore my students to keep a tarot journal. While a blog may not replace a journal it certainly serves a similar purpose. A tarot blog helps us see our own progress and learn from it.

4. Blogs build community. When we blog about tarot we are sharing our knowledge and wisdom with our community. This strengthens us as a community.

5. Blogging builds understanding. There is so much misinformation in the world about tarot. The more we share thoughtful, intelligent posts about tarot the more we work to spread the truth about what tarot is and what tarot isn’t.

It doesn’t matter if you blog about tarot every day, every week or only once a month. There are very few things we can do in life that benefit ourselves as much as they benefit our community. Tarot blogging is one of those things.