Liz Worth ~ Tarot

If you read tarot for others, or want to one day, this is a question you might already be familiar with.

I’ve been thinking about accuracy in readings a lot lately. Recently I’ve seen the question come up in online conversations, especially around whether it’s okay to check in with your querent as you go along. 

Sometimes readers hesitate to check-in because they feel like they have to show that they know it all. A lot of us come into this path with unrealistic pressures on ourselves to be all-seeing.

But if you don’t give your querent an opportunity to at least tell you whether a message is relevant or not, you risk wasting time and energy following an interpretation that might be totally off.

It’s not uncommon to pull cards and see several different directions a reading could go in. 

When this happens, I choose the one that feels most prominent and away we go. If it doesn’t immediately hit home, though, then that tells it might be...

Most of my client readings are focused on work or relationships.

I think that’s pretty common for most tarot readers, as those are the topics that people are usually most concerned with.

But every once in a while, I get some really fun – and unusual – questions.

I was reading at an event in a small town a couple hours away. It was nearing the end of the day when a young woman sat across from me said, “I’m not sure if you can tell me this, but is my house haunted? Because I feel like it is but no one will take me seriously when I tell them.”

I had been asked a lot of questions before this, but it was my first haunted house reading.

I shuffled the cards like usual and had my querent pull a few. When I flipped them over, we both peered down at them and paused.

The Seven of Cups, Wheel of Fortune and the Hanged Man stared back at me.

It’s not always easy to navigate such a direct question: Asking “is my house haunted” is essentially...

Several years ago, I was teaching a class at a little occult shop in the east end of town. The class was focused around my methods of using tarot to write your own spells and rituals.

I started creating rituals for my querents based on intuition and organic conversations during readings.

It’s not unusual for someone to ask how they can act upon the advice in a reading once they leave a session. Or they might want to know if there are certain “next steps” they can take to implement a piece of insight.

And sometimes querents will even flat out ask for advice about rituals that they can work themselves in order to release, let go or manifest something we’ve read on that day.

I started to build out personalized rituals based on my readings.

In the class I was teaching, I was taking students through some examples of previous rituals I had created. One involved inviting a querent to self-select tarot cards from my deck.

A student raised their hand: “What if...

I am in the process of doing something I never thought I would attempt.

I am learning to drive.

I know that in many parts of the world, and especially in North American culture, driving is a necessity. And getting your license is seen as a rite of passage by some.

But I was never interested in driving. Maybe it’s because very few women in family learned to drive, either. Something seems to run in our blood to avoid it as much as possible.

My dad drove, though not always very well. My mother was a nervous passenger, which probably didn’t help.

And her nervousness quite likely rubbed off on me: I have always preferred to be a passenger, or a pedestrian.

I also spent most of my life in Toronto, a city where you can often get by without a car. There are streetcars, subways and buses to take you where you want to go. I don’t have many friends there who own cars of their own; a lot of them have let their licences expire out of lack of use.

My husband and I didn’t...

All year I’ve felt like I’m competing between two identities:

There is the part of me that reads and teaches tarot, and the part of me that is an artist.

I used to feel like these two things co-existed to a certain extent, though of course they are distinct and pull from different parts of me.

The part of me that is an artist needs long stretches of time to write. This means being offline and undisturbed. It means being free to be with my own thoughts and feelings. And it requires a certain level of privacy, as writing takes time to develop and is often only revealed when it’s ready for an audience.

The tarot part of me is present, visible and social. It requires that I’m available, responsive, and openly sharing.

These two things sound like an ideal balance on paper. One allows for quiet and solitude, and the other allows for service and community. And both can trade places, with tarot being a gentle ritual and writing eventually being for public...

Whenever I pull cards for a tarot reading, I always take a moment to see what's there.

I call this "taking a breath," and I find it works best when all of the cards are face up so that they can be studied as one group. 

But that long, quiet pause? Boy does it ever make some clients nervous! 

Sometimes people worry and ask if I'm "seeing something bad." Or they think I'm about to deliver the worst-case scenario.

But I’m only concentrating. Thinking. Taking it all in and looking for patterns between the cards, or making decisions about what strikes me as the most interesting starting points. 

Tarot takes a certain level of focus. Even though many of us associate with intuition, that shouldn’t mean we assume or expect it’s always going to be easy and instant.  

It takes practice to tune into your intuition – to figure out how your instincts kick in, and to separate any distractions from the messages at hand.  

Tarot readings can...

Ever since the start of the year, I’ve been hearing more and more tarot readers talk about their struggles with imposter complex.

Imposter complex is something that gets all of us at one time or another. No matter how much work you put into your craft, and no matter how much positive feedback you receive on your readings, there will be days when you question whether you’re cut out for this.

One of the things I think is important to do when doubt creeps in is to sit within the awareness of it. Ask yourself: “Why is this feeling coming up? Where might it be coming from?”

Sometimes imposter complex rises up when readers are trying too hard to do something spectacular. That might look like an attempt to make a wild leap of a prediction, or it might come from pressure to impress a querent by knowing something they haven’t revealed.

When we try to force the uncanny, or when we assume we have to perform omniscient feats, doubt is often in the corners, waiting...

I can’t figure out if January is going by fast or slow. On one hand, I can’t believe it’s already January 22. 

On the other, I feel like I’ve been slowly easing myself into the year. A couple of weeks ago, I had shared here that I was scheduled for dental surgery.  

But when I was at the dentist’s office two days before the appointment, I learned of a major miscommunication in regards to this procedure. My gut told me to hold off and seek out another opinion, which is what I’ve decided to do. 

Luckily this isn’t an urgent issue: I am grateful that I can take my time with it. 

I thought I would feel more relieved, though: No surgery? No pain? No recovery? Great, right? But I was mentally and financially preparing for this treatment for months. Having it suddenly come off my calendar really threw me off for some reason: All of that energy spent building towards something that might not even be right for me. 

It...

This year I want to roll out a ton of new tarot workshops, while also rebuilding my platform as an author. I have so many ideas I want to share outside of tarot, but I don’t want to let go of either aspect of my work: My writing and my tarot readings have to coexist.  

I have been writing longer than I have been doing anything else, and people have often asked me how I find time to create – especially on top of running a business.  

In all honesty, there is no “hack” or magic secret I can offer. I set my priorities and try to be realistic with myself about what is possible in a single day.  

Learning how to do that has been a process. It has taken me time to learn how to focus my energy and how to set realistic expectations upon myself.  

My natural tendency is to think I can accomplish way more in a day than is possible, and when I do that, I set myself up for failure. And that sends me into disappointment in thinking...

When I heard that Theresa Reed, aka The Tarot Lady, was releasing a tarot book about grief, loss, healing and other hardships, I was excited.

Finally: A resource that will help tarot readers take their skills beyond the usual Tarot 101 fare and learn how to work with common yet challenging topics.

If you have tried to learn tarot based on guidebooks alone, you might have found yourself hitting walls along the way. Standard card meanings can offer a stepping stone towards your foundation, but when it comes time to actually perform a reading and answer a querent’s specific concerns, those general meanings can fall short.

And yet so many people seek out tarot readings when they are facing challenges and looking for support.

That’s why Theresa’s work with The Cards You’re Dealt is so important: This book helps to fill a gap for tarot readers of all levels – especially those who read for other people, or who aspire to.

“Is this a good book for...