Liz Worth ~ Tarot

I don’t know about you, but I have been caught up in a flurry of activity these last few months. When life feels like it’s just go, go, go, it’s easy to forget to check in with yourself. When there is a lot to do, we can end up in reactive mode sometimes, just going through the motions in order to check off our to-do lists.

But I get out of sorts in all kinds of ways if I don’t take – or make – a little bit of time to get back to my inner compass and see how I’m feeling about my present moment.

Taking that time allows me to reflect on whether I’m spending time on what I intended to. Outside of my tarot business, I’m a writer, and if you do anything creative you’ll know what I mean when I say that writing is (unfortunately) often one of the first things that falls off the radar when life gets hectic.

We owe it to ourselves to pause and ask: Am I forgetting something as I rush throughout the day?

I don’t mean forgetting...

I’ve recently been inspired by a tarot reader friend who has been doing big, deep-dive readings for himself each week to get a sense of what to prioritize in the days ahead.

I know it’s popular to pull a card a day, but sometimes that can feel like information overload with a lot to take in and not enough time to carry through on all of tarot’s messages.

I like the idea of a weekly tarot pull to set the tone for the week ahead. I find in general that I’m most effective and focused when I start off my week with a clear sense of my top priorities. A lot can happen in the span of a few days, but I can also waste a lot of time if I haven’t clearly identified what I need to be moving forward.

And these days, it feels like there is so much to do: I have new writing projects I want to make space for. I have my new Tarot Study Hall community to build upon. And I have been busy with the little vintage resale business my husband and I started last year.

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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...

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...

Have you ever had a really good tarot reading?

I’m assuming that since you’re reading my tarot blog, you’ve probably had some kind of tarot reading before – either from another reader, or one you did for yourself.

If you’ve received a reading from someone else before and you loved it, what was it that made it so good?

I’ve had many readings over the years, some better than others.

Some of those readings have been predictive. Some of them were oriented to the present.

Some were introspective and decision based. Others channeled messages from Spirit.

It’s not the approach alone that makes for a good reading, though. Interesting predictions can be exciting to hear. Accuracy and resonance counts for something, too.

But in my experience, what good readings have in common with each other is specificity.

A good reading should feel personal to the querent. It should hit on some kind of specific truth, or a personal dream or desire that is aching to...

When I meet someone new and they learn I’m a tarot reader, they usually get curious – but also sometimes nervous.

“When you read for someone, do you connect to their energy somehow?” They ask.

I immediately get a vision of myself as a multi-tentacled being reaching into my clients’ auric fields to tap into their current states.

Which I imagine is what some people assume happens in a tarot reading.

While that might be kind of cool, in reality I’m not a supernatural being (much to my chagrin), and I’m not tapping into anyone else’s personal, psychic spaces during a reading.

But things do get personal. It can be an uncanny experience to receive a tarot reading that seems to cut through to the heart of your very soul.

And questions about energy between reader and querent go both ways. I’ve often had students in my classes ask, “How do I make sure I’m not absorbing someone else’s energy when I read tarot for...

You might have noticed that I’ve started a new online tarot community, Tarot Study Hall, to build connection and conversation around the art of tarot reading.

One of the things I’m encouraging Study Hall members to do is set goals for their tarot practices.

But why? What’s the point?

It feels so linear to set a goal: You see where you want to be in the future, and you start working towards it.

Goal setting makes sense in so many areas of our lives. People set goals for their careers, their finances, their health, and more.

But when it comes to goal setting and tarot, it can feel counter to what tarot is all about: Why not just let your intuition guide you on your journey? Why not just feel it out intuitively and organically?

Letting inspiration guide you can certainly be part of the tarot journey. But structure can help a lot, too. Especially if you’re feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to learn about tarot, or you’ve been studying for a while...

A common learning curve that tarot readers share is figuring out how to synthesize the information in their readings.

So many of us learn how to read tarot card by card. A popular piece of advice is to pull a card a day as a way to study each card organically. This can be a useful practice, and one that breaks down what can be an overwhelming 78-card deck into bite-sized actions.

But where card-a-day practitioners end up getting stuck is when they want to transition into bigger readings. That’s where they start to feel unsure about how to combine cards, or find the patterns between them.

Similarly, when we’re relying on guidebooks to build our interpretations, multi-card spreads can end up feeling clunky as we work through them one card at a time.

This can also happen when we’re not sure how many details to work into a reading. Confusing complexity for potency in tarot reading can become a huge block for readers.

You don’t need to layer your readings with a...

“Whenever I try to read my cards, I’m not sure how to tell whether my intuition is coming through, or if I’m just remembering something I read in my guidebook.”

This is a common refrain I’ve heard from aspiring tarot readers over the years.

I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but it doesn’t hurt to repeat it every now and then: I think that the assumption that every tarot reading has to feel like an intense psychic download is something that ends up blocking a lot of tarot readers from connecting with their cards.

Which is unfortunate when you think about it. So many of people are called to learn tarot specifically because they want to deepen their intuition and trust themselves more.

But once you’re putting tarot into practice, there can be a disconnect between you and your cards.

Maybe the messages don’t flow as easily as you expect them to.

Or maybe you’ve careful studied the little white book that came with your deck, but...

One of the main things I focus on when I’m reading and teaching tarot is the importance of the question:

What is the goal or the intention of the reading?

Early on, I was always taught to read tarot using spreads. So many guidebooks I came across recommended three-card spreads – such as past, present, future – or larger spreads like the Celtic Cross.

And as social media became a more common place for tarot lovers to share their passion for card reading, it’s easier than ever to access hundreds, if not thousands, of tarot spreads at this time, for all kinds of topics.

But when I started reading tarot for others, I often found tarot spreads to be too confining for the flow of conversation that often unfolded. For all of the spreads I’d studied, I didn’t feel adequately prepared for the wide range of questions that querents would pose.

The problem with spreads is that if you’re reading on a specific question, then the spread your using has to...