Holding Space at the Tarot Table

This post is for anyone who reads tarot for others, either professionally or casually.

This post is about some of the most difficult moments we encounter at the tarot table. That is, moments when we see our client’s grief, moments when we must suggest that our client’s perception of something may not be accurate or helpful, and moments when our client exposes an aspect of their personality or belief system that we ourselves find distasteful. There are certainly other difficult moments that might happen in a tarot reading, but we will leave those for another day.

Obviously, when dealing with many of these sorts of issues, a good tarot reader will strongly and firmly suggest counseling, therapy, or other mental health services. Very often we tarot readers are the first line of defense when it comes to emotional well-being. We can’t diagnose or treat our clients. We can help them see and normalize the fact that they might need treatment and encourage them to get it.

Holding Space for Grief

It is good and healing for readers to offer hopeful perspectives. Readers who see danger and despair at every turn and insist that their clients are in denial if they don’t see things this way can do real damage. At the same time, toxic positivity is pretty damaging, too. A good reader will not sugar-coat. However, a good reader will have difficult conversations with finesse and a delicate touch.

Very often, though, the most grievous things we see at the tarot table are not future potentials, but real tragedies which have already occurred. We may work with a client who has suffered a recent loss, or who has just received a devastating diagnosis.

A good example of a card that can let us know such a thing has occurred is the Five of Cups. This image often shows a person grieving over three spilt cups, when two remain standing. There are times this card can suggest a poor attitude, a victim mentality, or crying over spilt milk. Yet, over the years I have learned that when we see grief at the tarot table, whether in this card or others, we must acknowledge the pain rather than minimizing it. Accusing a person of being negative before we discover the circumstances is a newbie mistake no good tarot reader wants to make.

Some clients will be victims of their own spiritual bypassing and refuse to acknowledge their grief. When that happens, we can’t be pushy, but we can suggest that a time might come when they will need to experience their grief. Some of what we say in a reading may not be helpful initially. Sometimes pieces of a reading will stick with the client and be recalled at the right time, long after we ourselves have forgotten the reading.

Some clients will be holding on to a story of grief and loss from which they refuse to heal. In this case we need to acknowledge their pain before we offer strategies to help them move past it.

When clients are in real grief, we have to be careful to not minimize what they are feeling. When a loved one is recently deceased, we need to hold space for their pain and loss. We cannot offer comfort until we acknowledge how hard the process is. We cannot give clues for the way forward until we help them feel strong enough to walk that path. We cannot offer messages from the deceased without acknowledging that, while a mediumship experience is comforting, it is not the same as enjoying a meal in person with a loved one.

Many tarot readers are empaths. We must be able to experience a client’s grief with them without taking on so much that we impair ourselves, or let it stick with us after the reading is over.

Managing the energetic aspect of the reading is super important when the reading contains grief and sadness. We do that by having good psychic protection techniques in place throughout the reading process.

Holding Space for Truth

We see a lot of denial, anxiety, and fantasy at the tarot table. Many times, people come to us with a particular story. Over time I have learned to pull cards to check in on everything a client might tell me that could possibly be subjective. For example, ‘My boss hates me’, ‘My husband is a good man’, ‘I’m not very smart’, ‘I know this is the right relationship for me’, and so on.

Sometimes people build their entire life on a belief that turns out to be false. Sometimes they discover that belief is false in a tarot reading. When we are about to disturb the belief structure upon which a person’s life is currently built, we have to be very, very sure and very, very careful.

When we do this correctly the client ends up feeling free, empowered, and hopeful. When we humans lie to ourselves there is always a part of us that knows we are lying, even if it is deeply buried. For example, if my client believes her husband is a good man, but I see in the cards that he is behaving inappropriately in some way and the client confirms what I see, a golden opportunity presents itself.

“So, you and I both agree that you are abused in your marriage. If this is true, how does hanging on to the idea that your husband is ‘good’ help you?”

Once disabused of the story that her abuser is ‘good’, the client is free to decide how to best move forward. Then, we can pull cards on all the possibilities that are now accessible.

Imagine a client who believes himself to be less than intelligent. His understanding of his career and relationship possibilities are limited by that belief. The cards that you see in the reading tell you that your client is quite smart. The hard time he had in school was for reasons related to his environment, rather than his abilities. You can ask questions of the cards to help you build a case to your client that offers logical examples of his ability to learn and to process information. Now you and your client are free to explore new possibilities for his future.

The tarot techniques that work best in these situations involve asking many questions of the cards. Allow both logic and intuition to guide those questions. Use as many cards as you need in order to clearly find the information that will help you help your client best.

Holding Space for Growth

We don’t have to like all of our tarot clients. We don’t have to share the same political views, or the same taste in music or fashion. It is inevitable that we will find within some of our clients severe personality differences or character traits that we find distasteful.

It only makes sense to gently point out these areas of concern if you determine that they are negatively impacting your client’s own experience of their life.

For example, you might notice that your client is overly talkative and then discover they are having problems at work because of their communication style. At that point it might make sense to use the cards to explore why your client is so loquacious and to give them ideas on how to make changes.

Your client’s homophobic comments might understandably make you angry. Yet, it may not be helpful to enlighten them about your opinion of their belief system. However, you might see in the cards that their attitude is hurting them because it is hurting their relationship with a family member. Then, you might be able to pull some cards to help them find a different way to process what they have so far refused to understand. When you are able to do this, you can make a lifelong difference for an entire family.

We may not always like or enjoy our clients. Yet, we can hold them in compassion, and hold space to help them find a way to grow.

Very often, people seek tarot readings because they are going through difficulties. We tarot readers must be prepared to hold space for people who are not at their best. We need to be our best selves when others are at their worst. By doing so, we can offer the opportunity for healing, and a hopeful way forward.

How Tarot Helps When We are Suffering

Suffering is part of the human condition. Most spiritual thought and psychological study, is, in great part, an effort to understand and ease suffering. As a professional tarot reader, I often feel that my job is to help clients identify, understand and mitigate the things that cause them unnecessary suffering, and to help the manage the suffering that cannot be avoided.

While our current pandemic has sharpened everyone’s focus on the many problems we face, there were certainly problems before the pandemic, and there will be problems even once our current crisis is solved.

I have always been interested in the concept of suffering. I remember as a child asking my father, a Methodist minister, why God allowed people, or perhaps caused people, to suffer.

In college, I was fascinated with a book that was required reading in my psych 101 class, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. You are probably familiar with his premise, that we can tolerate a great deal of suffering, as long as we can find meaning in that suffering.

Often, I find that a purpose of tarot reading is to find meaning in difficulty. The process of divination with tarot lends itself well to discovering these sorts of insights.

When we study tarot, we realize that tarot study is not simply memorizing seventy-eight cards. Tarot study introduces us to the archetypes of tarot. That is, the characters, themes, lessons and experience that are common to all and understood by all.

As we learn these archetypes, and find that commonality of experience, we learn spiritual lessons to help us on our own journey through life. Over the past fifty years this process has come to be known as ‘The Fool’s Journey’.

Each Major Arcana card has a lesson to teach us about how to live life, find our balance, and journey toward our spiritual enlightenment. What is interesting is that none of these Major Arcana cards address suffering specifically, although all people suffer. While the Major Arcana cards address a host of issues, including things such as oppression, addiction, fairness, closure, patience, wisdom, compassion, mastery, responsibility, loneliness, self-awareness, education, meditation, and change, there is no Major Arcana card that is specifically and exclusively about suffering.

I think there is a lesson in that. Suffering is not the event, or the situation, but a reaction to the event or situation. The Hermit may speak of our loneliness, but whether we are suffering in our loneliness or handling it with patience is up to us. The Tower may reflect an uncomfortable occurrence, but how much we suffer with the Tower will depend largely on us.

In the Minor Arcana there are certainly cards that can speak of suffering. The Three, Eight, Nine and Ten of Swords, for example, or the Five of Pentacles or Nine of Wands, can all depict suffering.

Sometimes, in a reading, acknowledgement of our discomfort and misery is helpful. Sometimes holding space for our struggle is an important part of our healing.

We see that tarot divination can help us find meaning in our suffering, can help us find our place on our journey toward enlightenment, and can help us acknowledge our suffering. Divination can also help us find solutions for our suffering that are both practical and spiritual.

Tarot can also help us see the suffering of others.

I often think that the world divides itself into two types of people. There are those who have suffered and therefore want others to suffer as well. There are those who have suffered and want to help others avoid those same difficulties. The lessons of tarot that we learn in tarot study and find in tarot divination tend to steer us toward a path of compassion. In this way, tarot helps us heal ourselves, and each other.

Suffering is part of human existence. Tarot helps us understand our suffering, manage our suffering, heal our suffering, and learn from our suffering.

Tarot makes us aware of the suffering of others, and often holds us accountable to act with compassion toward others.

How Tarot is Helping a Person with Aphasia

I didn’t know the word ‘aphasia’ or what it meant until a dear long-time client was diagnosed with PPA a couple of years ago. I am writing this with her permission. I won’t give any identifying details.

It seems important to share this story for three reasons. I want to highlight tarot’s phenomenal abilities to be the tool we need, even under difficult circumstances. I want to share the tarot-teaching techniques that are working in this situation. I want to encourage tarot teachers to embrace sharing tarot with students who struggle with speech and language difficulties, dementia, or other neurological issues.

I will call my client ‘Jenny’. I’ve been conducting tarot readings for Jenny by phone for almost a decade now. I’ve only met her in person twice, when she happened to be visiting my area. On the first visit we did a reading. The second visit, just a month ago, I spent the day with her at her request, teaching her tarot. We have had two further tarot lessons by phone since then.

Jenny is a smart, active, dynamic woman. She was a life-long educator, and a leader in many community organizations. She travels the world, and always thinks to send me a present from wherever she visits.

Just as Jenny was planning her retirement, she received a startling diagnosis. Jenny has primary progressive aphasia, a form of dementia which is slowly robbing her of her speech and language abilities.

Jenny and I do short readings on a monthly basis. She calls it her ‘weather report’. As she was dealing with her diagnosis, her cards said that when a door closes a window will open. For Jenny, the opening window would be her intuition. What she would lose in human communication she would gain in communication with Spirit.

Over the past couple of years since her diagnosis Jenny has maintained an active lifestyle and is amazing her therapists with how well she is doing, despite the fact that her PPA is advancing. I can see evidence of its advance. I can also see evidence of how Jenny’s spiritual strength shines through. When she stumbles for a word and then finds it, she says, “Thank you, word, for being there for me”. When she can’t find a word she waits patiently, and one or the other of us figures it out.

When Jenny told me she was serious about learning tarot, I wondered how the aphasia would affect her ability to work with the cards, and my ability to teach. We both felt that tarot would be good for her. Yet, I harbored some misgivings. I knew I wouldn’t be able to teach her the way I would have prior to this cruel disease.

It was silly for me to doubt tarot’s ability to make itself understood to each person in accordance with their needs and abilities. All I had to do was be less didactic and more intuitive!

Years ago, Jenny, no doubt, could have become a truly talented professional tarot reader. Today, that is not what she needs to do. Tarot is versatile in its uses and has this amazing way of being the tool we need at the time, if only we will let it.

Today Jenny uses tarot to help her communicate with Spirit, and to help her with her language skills. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; that Jenny can use a picture to replace missing words helps her stay grounded and find her words. She tells me that pulling a card a day helps her focus on the positive things in her life. She also uses cards to create prayers and chants.

Sharing tarot with Jenny has taught me a lot, too. As a tarot teacher I tend to stress certain knowledge, traditions and practices. None of those things are important in this situation. What feels important is that this tool be accessible and useful to Jenny. Seeing how much tarot is helping her fills me with delight.

If you have the opportunity to teach tarot to a person with aphasia, or other neurological issues, don’t focus on what the student can’t do, focus on what they can do. Allow intuition, rather than structure and lesson plans, to guide your teaching.

Jenny has done very well staying focused on the Major Arcana only, although I have given her an overview of each of the seventy-eight cards. Usually I give a student a week or two to work with the Majors only, then I add the Minors in right away. In our last session we pulled cards to determine whether she should continue to work just with the Majors for a while. The answer was clear. The twenty-two keys are working well for her, and she is still absorbing their wisdom.

I have taught her the Majors as spiritual lessons. She embraces these lessons eagerly. Yet, she also sees herself and her situations in the cards. In our last lesson, she pulled the Magician and Justice. She saw herself as the Magician, and Justice as the fact that she is working with attorneys to correct a legal situation within her family. The cards helped her describe what was going on in a way that seemed much clearer than she might otherwise have been able to express. The cards, wonderful story-telling devices that they are, are helping Jenny retain her ability to talk about her life.

When it is time to add in the Minors, I will not add the entire Minor Arcana at once. I may add the Aces and Twos only, for example, let her get used to that, and proceed in that fashion.

Another difference in the way I am working with Jenny is that, after our first introduction to the cards, I am not asking her to study the cards in numeric order. Rather, I ask her to pull some cards at random for us to study. Then, I ask her to tell me which cards she has questions about.

I’ve given Jenny charts with keywords and interpretations which she relies on. I have not asked her to memorize the cards. Yet, she is able to look at the cards and the charts, and from there she can extrapolate a reading even better than many neurologically well students do.

Tarot is helping Jenny keep her language, stay positive as she battles her disease, and stay connected to Spirit.

Pro Tarot: When Compassion Makes You Crazy

Many years ago, in my office in Central Village, CT, I had a client who asked me a question that stuck with me for years.

The question was, “My boyfriend just got out of jail for allegedly molesting a child. I need daycare. Do you think I should let my boyfriend watch my child while I work?”

I found the question shocking and scary. I answered it without consulting my cards.

“Of course not! Why take a chance with your child?”

Years later, I’ve come to believe that I handled this situation badly. I should have kept an open mind, and done the reading.

Somehow, at the time, honoring the question with a reading seemed like participating in, and propping up, a certain kind of unhealthy thinking.

Just this week, in a conversation online, I was reminded of this when another reader posted about a seemingly obvious question that she refused to read on, for much the same reason that I had refused to read on that question so many years ago.

Most professionals have specific go-to analyses and advices. If a doctor sees your jaw is swollen, she will automatically assume you have a dental issue. If a police officer sees you driving erratically, he will automatically assume you have been drinking. A marriage counselor may always advise communication. A physical trainer may teach the same exercise routine to people of similar age and gender.

Sometimes these assumptions do turn out to be erroneous. Nonetheless, these assumptions allow professionals to efficiently serve their clientele.

These sorts of assumptions do not often help tarot readers.

While we tarot readers develop theories about life and spiritual beliefs that inform our practices, I think we need to avoid those professional go-to assumptions. If we catch ourselves talking about cards, people or situations in definitive, sweeping terms like “always” and  “never”, we have stopped being oracles and have started simply vomiting common wisdom.

I once knew a reader (thankfully no longer practicing) who, every time she read for a young girl in love, would put down the cards and launch into a pre-canned lecture about hormones, pheromones and neurotransmitters, and how the existence of these things proves there is simply no such thing as true romantic love.

While I have certainly met those who needed to understand the role biology was playing in their feelings and actions, this couldn’t have been sage wisdom for each and every young girl she read for.

Clearly, this older reader was coloring her readings with her jaded and unhealthy view, that love is impossible and nonexistent.

When I refused to do an actual reading for the client who wanted her ex-con BF to babysit, I was also inappropriately coloring my interaction with a client.

The social media friend who posted about refusing a reading said something that made me think. She said that the question she was asked made her angry out of concern for the client’s wellbeing.

This made me ponder the very few times in 25 years I have gotten angry at the tarot table. It happened, much to my dismay, just this past week, for the first time in many years.

Reading my friend’s comment made me consider something I had not thought of before.

It may be that we tarot readers, in our process of empathy, intuition, divination and communication, develop a strong desire for our clients’ happiness and wellbeing, perhaps because we can so clearly see their possible happy outcome.

When we see a client thinking or behaving in a way that feels unsafe and unwise, we sometimes get mad. I have often questioned what the trigger is for that anger. Now I realize it is compassion for the client, and frustration that we see they are making things harder on themselves.

While we are all human, becoming angry with a client for any reason doesn’t seem conducive to a good process. I know I have felt terrible the few times it has happened.

My desire for my client’s wellbeing and happiness is a good and natural thing. Most readers share that desire. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t do the work we do.

I think the mistake happens when we let our empathy for our clients become an attachment. Much like the physician who must accept their patience’s nicotine addiction, perhaps we must meet our clients where they are. We can suggest changes they can make, we can offer new perspectives, but we mustn’t attach to the idea that they have to change, or listen to us, or take our advice.

Many readers have complained to me about the clients who never seem to listen to them, but always come back with the same questions and problems.

It occurs to me that, not only must we release attachment to the hope that our clients will allow themselves to make positive changes, we must also never give up hope that they will, one day, heal.

Sometimes an addict must go to rehab many times before they really enter recovery. It took me many tries to quit smoking successfully.

Healing takes time and false starts, and people can’t heal until they are ready.

I think we tarot readers are at our best when we strive to be patient with people, and speak in gentle tones, rather than angry ones.

At the same time, the fact that our compassion for our clients is great enough to spark anger may be an important part of the psychic and energetic connection we make with them.

As in all things, balance is the key.

Twelve Tarot Cards that Teach Compassion

Compassion may be the most difficult, most necessary and most rewarding spiritual lesson of them all. Many people don’t understand compassion.  Compassion can be a difficult concept. Common misconceptions of compassion are expressed in ways like this.

• I’ll save my compassion for the people who deserve it.
• That person will never change so compassion is wasted on them.
• I can’t have compassion for that person because that person is dangerous to me.

Here is some truth about compassion.

• Everyone deserves compassion, just like everyone deserves air.
• Compassion is not in limited supply.
• Compassion may or may not heal a difficult person. Compassion always heals the compassionate.
• It is possible, and often necessary, to practice detached compassion. That is, we sometimes need to practice compassion from a distance for a person with whom we avoid contact.
• The people who are hardest to love are the people who most need compassion.

There are many tarot cards that teach and describe different aspects of compassion. Here are twelve of them.

The Empress:
The Empress teaches the unconditional love of the mother. The Empress also reminds us that people who are raised without a mother’s unconditional love will almost surely become people who are difficult to love.

Strength:
Strength reminds us that love is our greatest strength. Love is more powerful than our wild and animalistic nature. We must use our strength to control our anger and act with compassion, even when dealing with those who have the power to hurt us.

Justice:
The spiritual lesson of Justice is simple. We must treat others fairly even when we have not been fairly treated.

The Devil:
Often the behaviors in other people that hurt us most are the behaviors that trigger our own dysfunctions. The Devil holds a mirror for us to see our own wounds and our own behavior.

The Star:
The Star reminds us that healing light is available from a limitless source. There is no end to the abundant healing power that is poured onto the Earth.

Judgment:
Judgment reminds us that we all have the opportunity to make closure with the past and be reborn into something new.

Ace of Cups:
The Ace of Cups is the healed heart and the open heart chakra. The Ace of Cups suggests the ability to give and receive unconditional love and compassion.

Two of Cups:
The Two of Cups reminds us of the healing nature of love and compassion.

Eight of Cups:
The Eight of Cups teaches us to walk away from the things that no longer serve us. Sometimes this is the most compassionate act possible.

Page of Cups:
The Page of Cups teaches us to speak kindly of  and to one another.

Four of Pentacles:
The Four of Pentacles teaches us to protect ourselves against those who would hurt us. This is an act of compassion towards ourselves. When we choose not to let someone hurt us we are holding them in compassion as well.

Six of Pentacles:
The Six of Pentacles is the traditional card of charity. To be charitable is to be compassionate.

As a book of wisdom, tarot offers important spiritual lessons that are relevant and applicable in our lives. When we learn and practice these twelve lessons of compassion we help to heal ourselves, heal others and heal the planet.