Even after more than twenty years of full time tarot reading, the cards in action still amaze me.

I had any interesting reading while providing tarot entertainment at a teen birthday party this weekend. (When they are too old for clowns and too young for strippers, hire a tarot reader!)

The trick to reading for people who are radically different that you in age, gender experience or culture is simple. You have to read from their perspective. For instance, the same romantic cards will appear to talk about the love life of a thirty-year-old or a thirteen-year-old. The reader has to recognize the difference between a grown-up Two of Cups experience and a young teen Two of Cups experience, and structure their interpretations accordingly.

Sometimes, though, the cards will appear in an improbable way.

This weekend, when reading for a person who was clearly too young to be employed, I saw issues about a current job.  Oddly, it didn’t appear to be a typical kid job like dog walking or lawn mowing, it looked like a lifelong career in which the child was already working. How could this be?

My sense of this was so strong I had no choice but to address it. I told her what I was seeing. Turns out, my young client was indeed employed as a child actor, and expected a life-long career in show business.  From there, I was able to give her an age-appropriate reading that truly addressed her unique set of issues.

This reminded me of two of the fundamental rules of professional tarot reading. First, as long as it isn’t hurtful or dangerous, say what you see without worrying about whether it makes sense, or whether it’s a long shot. You don’t have to understand the reading as long as the client does!

This second is this. Although we must make some demographic assumptions in order to read for a diverse group of people, we really can’t assume that anything is or is not true about a client. We must get the information that we receive from the cards, from intuition and from Spirit, without the filter of our assumptions.

Each time we go to the cards to read for others, we have the opportunity to learn something about tarot reading itself, and about ourselves.