Liz Worth ~ Tarot + Astrology

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 beginners?”

One of the most brilliant ...

When I first started reading tarot for other people, I was actually surprised at how many wanted to know about love.  

I thought I would be answering different types of questions about spiritual journeys and personal transformations.  

But I quickly realized how important relationships are to people, and how much is at stake when we are talking about love, commitment, loyalty and companionship.  

Some of the hardest questions I’ve had to answer as a tarot reader had to do with relationships.  

They can be really complicated. Especially if the people involved are cycling through a range of emotions: One day they’re on, another they’re off.  

Divining a clear answer about a relationship is not always easy to pin down when the people in question can’t be pinned down in the first place.  

Another challenge can arise when clients are impatient about the answer: They feel like they’ve already been waiting “long enough” for love and they don’t want to hear that this is not their year – ...

Whew! Is it just me, or is time flying by?

Sometimes I can’t believe how fast time is going. I’ve been noticing that lot of people are going through some major periods of re-evaluation in their lives.

There’s a lot of change in the air as many of us are rethinking what’s most important and looking at  what to de-prioritize in order to have more time for our families, friends, and ourselves.

Are you going through a big change right now?

When things are busy and hectic, and you’re feeling a bit (or a lot) unclear about what it’s all leading to, it can help to pull out your tarot cards and give yourself some space to reflect.

Instead of asking a predictive question, which can muddy the waters of the present even more, ask something like, “What can I do to stay true to myself right now?”

When you’re feeling pulled in a lot of different directions, it can help to come back to the here and now rather than getting lost in thoughts of what may be to come.

“How do I know what I’m actuall...

“What does this card mean?”

If you read tarot, chances are you’ve asked this question more than once along your path.

But one thing I’ve started to discourage tarot students from asking is that very question:

“What does this card mean?”

Why?

Because if figuring out a card meaning was the only thing standing between you and your tarot reading, you wouldn’t even have to ask that question.

Card meanings are everywhere. You can Google any tarot card and come up with all kinds of answers.

Or you can get a guidebook and look it up.

Or you can watch any number of videos on social media where people talk about their understandings of various tarot cards.

When someone asks what a card means, the problem isn’t that they can’t find that out on their own. Quite often, students who ask this question have already done their own studying. They already know something about the card they’re wondering about.

The problem is that the card meanings they’ve already studied don’t feel right, or ade...

One of the most common questions I get asked in my tarot classes is, “Should I be pulling a card a day for practice?”

I don’t assign daily draws and sometimes that makes people nervous. The practice has become so common that a lot of newer readers are under the impression that it’s a universal habit.

This isn’t to say I’m against daily draws entirely. I, too, was given the advice to pull one card a day, and did for a good long time when I was first learning tarot. I still have journals that I kept from that period, where I would record my daily card and the thoughts and ideas it inspired within me.

But I also came to see tarot differently as time went on. Which is what happens when you do tarot over a long stretch of time. Your relationship to it changes. You start to see new angles to it. And sometimes your old ways of doing things no longer fit the way they used to.
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One of the biggest shifts for me came when I stopped looking at my tarot deck as a collection of 78 individual cards...

How do you know you’re ready to read tarot for others?

How do you know you’re ready to start charging for your readings?

How do you know you’re ready to accept that invitation to read at your friend’s party, or to give a talk about tarot at your local bookstore?

These are all questions that you will likely have about tarot at some point in your journey. When I started learning tarot, I knew I wanted to be able to read for other people. I didn’t know right away that this was something I wanted to do professionally (that came later), but I did want to be able to give readings that were intuitive, insightful, and accurate.

Knowing where you want to go with tarot, even in the short-term, is important, because it gives you a goal to work towards. When you know what you’re aiming for, you can focus your studies and practices in a way that will build towards that result.

But what often happens along the way is that it can be hard to know when you’re ready to start doing whatever it is yo...

Tarot and intuition seem to go hand in hand: At least that’s what a lot of us are told when we start working with the cards.

But finding the synergy between an intuitive hit and following the cards as you’ve learned them can be a steep learning curve as a tarot reader.

Maybe you’ve found yourself wondering that very thing: “When should I go with the basic meaning, and when should I go with my first impression instead?”

Sometimes what sits behind this question is the fear of getting a reading wrong by going too off track with your interpretation.

I don’t think there’s a perfect answer or pat solution to this: Sometimes, you just have to be willing to go out on a limb with your interpretation to see if it resonates. Practice, experimentation, and patience go a long way to building your relationship with the cards.

Of course, what works for me may be different for someone else – intuition has its own ways of manifesting within each of us.

That’s why the piece about practice is espec...

One of my most unpopular tarot opinions is that intuition is not enough to be a tarot reader.

I know that goes against so much of the common advice out there when it comes to tarot reading:

“Just trust in the messages that come to you.”
“Go with your first impression.”  
“Listen to your instincts.”

And yes, self-trust is an important component of being a tarot reader: You need to be able to get to a point where you feel confident enough to rely on your abilities as a card reader.

But intuition alone isn’t the only thing tarot readers need to develop if they want to read for others. Whether you are working with paid querents or working up to that by doing practice readings on friends and acquaintances, there are a lot of other soft skills that can make or break the experience for you and your querents.

Here are three essential soft skills to develop as a tarot reader (alongside your intuition, of course):

Listening: Listening seems like an obvious one – we all want to think of o...

Do you feel like your tarot readings are “chunky,” moving from one card to another rather than synthesizing the full story? 

If you do, you’re not alone: It’s a common thing to get stuck on. There is a learning curve to tarot, and this is one of the bends that can take some time to move through.

The way a lot of us learn tarot is so focused on one card at a time. We learn that this card means this, that card means that. And when it comes time to put together a reading, we pull out a series of cards and try to add them together, only to realize our readings feel like they’re missing something. 

How do you start to summarize what’s in front of you?

How do you start to see the bigger picture of your tarot readings?

How do you stop sounding clunky in your delivery, and start articulating your readings in a way that sounds seamless and unique? 

Part of it starts with a willingness to try: To challenge yourself to push your readings to that next layer of information.

Another part of it ...

When people talk about learning tarot, the word “overwhelming” commonly comes up.

Maybe you have sat with one or more of these questions over time:

• “I can’t seem to memorize all of the card meanings.”
• “I don’t know if I’m supposed to go with the card meaning, or my intuition, or the imagery when I’m performing a reading.”
• “How do I know if a card meaning is getting in the way of my own intuitive impressions?”
• “Should I be going off the artwork, or the numerology, or the keywords?”
• “Does it matter if a card fell out when I was shuffling?”
• “I know there are a lot of layers to every card. How am I supposed to know which layer relates to my reading?”
• “Do I have to pay attention to the symbols and colours in the cards? If so, which ones are most important and why?”

One of the things I’ve realized is that there is a difference between what we think we need to be focusing on in tarot, versus what will actually move your tarot practice forward.

It’s so easy to get lost in the wee...