Listener and Client Questions

Transcription Note: This post is a transcript of episode #58. If you’d rather listen, you can find a link below.

What’s the difference between a psychic reading and a tarot reading?

What’s the difference between a psychic reading and a tarot reading? Well, the primary difference – there are a few differences actually. But the first and foremost difference is that any psychic reading. The person doing the reading will always claim to be psychic. And when you are getting a tarot reading, you may or may not have your tarot reader make the same claim.

In a traditional psychic reading, the reader is pulling information, pulling energy out of the ethers, so to speak and translating that into information that they can share with you. They don’t need the tool of the tarot or the tool of astrology or the tool of, you know, whatever.  They’re able to tap into the psychic realm without having to have the support of those things. And for the most part, people who go to psychics are going to psychics because they want an answer to something that they either can’t figure out themselves or it’s too far off. And they just need to know very often people will go to psychics for, you know, definitive questions.

Am I going to get this job? What do I have to do to get this job? Am I going to …..? Does so-and-so find me attractive? You know, they’re very core in some ways, really simple questions. And I’m simplifying what psychics do. Right? I am simplifying it greatly because a lot of psychics are wonderful people and they will work with someone and ask a million questions.

So they can really dig into the question and provide their customer with a lot of value. So I’m not at all degrading psychics, not at all. However it is different from a tarot reading, a tarot reading is a reading clearly that is using the cards as the first wave of contact with the spirit realm.

 We’re shuffling the cards and we’re meditating on the reading. We are viewing those cards with your energy, with our energy, and the positive energy that we need to be able to respond to whatever it is that you’re asking of us as a tarot reader, the cards are drawn chosen, and placed in the spread.

And then the tarot reader reads the cards. You could have a tarot reader who is extremely didactic, someone who has chosen the writer Smith weight deck as their bible and that is how they’re going to be interpreting the tarot. They don’t have any interest in including intuitive information or intuitive downloads, or they don’t realize that they have that ability yet.

And so they’re just sticking to the book. So you can have that, you know, that by the book type of tarot reader, and you can have a tarot reader who is what I consider the best of both worlds, someone who is intuitive and someone who has the core knowledge, the foundational knowledge of the tarot. So they can combine the two of those things along with whatever’s coming in, you know, from an energetic perspective because of the energy that we’re putting into the car.

So, I guess maybe the simple way to say it is some tarot readers are psychic. All psychics are psychic. Some psychics read tarot and some tarot readers just read tarot – so there really is, you know, part of the need to clarify, right? So when you are looking for some assistance -when you’re going to someone with a question, if you’re looking for a really clear definitive yes or no answer, a tarot reading probably is not the best option for you. The tarot, while it doesn’t give us these ultra clear cut answers, it gives us the gift of a lot more nuance, a lot more opportunity to look at what might be causing the situation that you’re asking about, or you know, where you can find some insight into, maybe what’s blocking you in getting what you want and what you might be asking that psychic for.

So they really are, in some ways designed to provide similar services. However, the psychic reading is much more. I want to say esoteric – much more difficult to nail down because there’s no tool. There’s nothing that we can use. There’s nothing that we can compare it to. The only thing that we have to go by when we’re getting a psychic reading is what the psychic is telling us, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I’ve gone to many psychics and I’ve had great experiences, but as I said, I’m not getting that nuance. I’m not getting the story and the narrative that comes through with the tarot cards. So that is the difference.

I hope that that makes sense. Clearly, I am a tarot aficionado – and I am working and -have worked over the past number of years to really expand my intuitive gifts. So my goal is to be the psychic who does the tarot readings, right? An intuitive who does tarot readings because I want to be able to help people and I want to be able to help them at a little bit deeper level at a more relational level than can be developed in just one-off psychic readings.

The tarot is also much more conducive to coaching. The tarot is better at helping us see what we need to see. The tarot is great at triggering our emotions at triggering memories, all of those things that make up the tarot reading. As I said, it’s more of a relational thing and that’s always my goal is to help someone in one session, that’s the best-case scenario, but. there are times when it takes more than one session for someone to work through what it is they’re working through and that’s the gift of the tarot like I said or the gift of the coaching plus the tarot.

Why do readers and decks sometimes have different interpretations?

Okay. The next question is why do readers and decks sometimes have different interpretations? Of the terrible and that in a sense goes back to the whole psychic thing. Right? It’s the tarot is on one hand almost like a science or a process, right?

There’s a recipe for how we use the tarot to tap into what it is. We want to tap into people like me, who like to have that foundational knowledge are the ones often that are, that are saying, Hey, wait a second. Why is it that this interpretation is different from that interpretation? And this one is different from that one.

That is because we are human. And because we are all working to develop our own unique relationship with the cards, our own individual meanings of the cards are not unusual at all. And those readers who are tapping into their intuition, those readers who are tapping into any psychic ability that they may have – we’re in the process of developing that is going to be picking up on things above and beyond what they’re seeing in the tarot card itself.

That tarot card is likely simply a catalyst or a starting point for useful information to begin flowing in. And so, I could sit down with someone who just had a reading with someone else we could pick the, exactly the same cards and. Our interpretations are likely to be at least a little bit different.

The longer we work with the cards, the more of a personal relationship we develop with them. And the more we’re able to look at the broad possibility of interpretation, as opposed to sticking very closely with the book. The more you do the tarot, the more you do readings, the more you work with it, and you’ll start to see that you just kind of work with certain cards in a certain way.

And the cool thing is, it usually resonates. So just because I pulled the same cards as someone else, and I gave you kind of a different reading, it doesn’t mean that my reading is wrong or the other person’s reading is wrong. It means that we were able to pull different content, different information different energy out of the cards because of who we are as card readers.

When someone develops their own deck, you know, you will find that in a lot of decks that you purchase here’s a book that goes along with the deck that provides the artist’s interpretation of their cards. And then it’s going to be up to you to decide, “Do I want to use this deck based on the artist’s interpretations of the card?” Or, “Do I want to use this based on my memory of the Rider Smith Waite deck and just correlate the cards?” So that’s a good reason. It’s a good reason to take the time to learn the traditional meanings of the cards, because at that point when you have the traditional meanings down and you can’t visualize the cards, you know, you can visualize what a three of cups looks like, you can visualize what the Empress looks like. You can then take that knowledge and use it to broaden your horizons in terms of the number of decks that you can use. But just be aware that yeah, it could be different, right? You just need to decide before you start to work with that deck, how you want it, how you want to work with it.

It’s just a simple decision of, okay, this is the deck that I work with the most is called the Crow Tarot by M J Cullinane, and I choose this deck almost always because I swear that it talks to me. Sometimes it really, really resonates. I find it easy to read. I find that it just works for me.

I don’t necessarily find it the most aesthetically pleasing deck. There are others that I like a whole lot more, but with this one, I have developed a relationship with them for whatever reason. And. This is the one that is the easiest for me to read. So you will, you know, go through your tarot journey and purchase new decks (because we can’t help ourselves) to play, learn what secrets it has to share, and feel out if it’s a potential key deck in your reading collection.

As a tarot reader, there’s like no better Christmas present, right? But you are going to probably want to choose a deck that is different. So just remember that. Just remember that we all approach the tarot with our own background, we all approach the tarot with our own energetic imprint. We approach it with our own personal relationships.

And so, readings are going to be different decks are going to be a little bit different, but it doesn’t make anything, any less valuable. It just provides another perspective.

All right, this is a good one. And I get this a lot, not so much the specific question of, “Can Tarot cards predict time?” but people who want me to tell them when something, if and then when something is going to happen.

Yes or no questions are very difficult to answer. And that whole free will thing.

In terms of, when something is going to happen I avoid it as much as possible. I don’t want someone making some sort of definitive plan or making a decision for someone else based on what the tarot cards say now. I think you know me well enough to know by now that I read the tarot from a different perspective – that I read the tarot from the perspective of using it as a tool to tap into ourselves, our blocks, energy, all of those things.

I do not use the tarot, under normal circumstances, to tell someone when they’re going to meet their soulmate. Okay. Now I could, I could play around with it. I could make an effort. I could draw a card and then choose based on my intuition and what that card is telling me. Kind of, sort of when I think something’s going to happen.

I personally don’t think that is the best approach. Now, there is another way of looking at it and there’s a book called The Holistic Tarot by Benebell Wen. The holistic taro is an ungodly amount of information. I don’t know how this woman who I believe is also an attorney, ever sleeps.

She has put together a bible and it has so much information. And that is one of the few places that I’ve seen that will make an effort to sort of prescribe a timeframe to a particular card or a particular set of cards, that type of thing. But in general, I would say. The tarot cards are not the best tool for predicting time.

And if you want someone who’s going to be able to tell you when something is going to happen, again, I would reach out to a psychic that, you know, and that you trust. My coach is intuitive and I don’t think she ever calls herself psychic, but she’s amazing. And I would feel comfortable asking her when something might happen or when something might not happen. And even she would probably say, well, You know, it looks pretty good up until this date or it looks good after this date. She’s not likely to give me a, a clearly-defined clearly defined date of when something is going to happen. The world just doesn’t work like that. Unfortunately! If I had my way, the tarot would be a science and we would just, it would be very clearly defined, everything would be replicable and everyone could, you know achieve the same wonderful results if they followed the rules. But – that’s not how the tarot works. And so we’ve just got to learn to be open, learn to accept it for what it is and use it, use it for its strengths and not ask it to do something that it really isn’t very good at doing.

Do long-distance readings really work?

Okay. Do distance taro readings really work? Yes, they do. I have done 99% of my tarot readings distantly. I have done them from my office in Michigan, USA. For people who live in Finland, for people who live in Ghana, for people who live in India, for people who live in Australia, I’ve done readings for people, literally all over the world.

And we have no problem whatsoever getting that connection. And I’m working, I’m working on finding someone – and I’m having a really hard time – who can come on as a guest and explain the physics behind why distance tarot readings work and why readings work in general.

But I haven’t been able to find someone. So all I can really tell you is yes, they absolutely work. It does take a certain level of, you know, taking some time to connect with the energy of the person for whom I’m reading. Sometimes I’ll email back and forth a couple of times just to make sure that I’m understanding everything.

I do ask for birth dates as well because that gives me a little bit more information to work with and I can find out someone’s birth card before I do the reading, which is just a nice little contextual thing. So, so yeah, there’s no problem whatsoever. If I was forced to try to articulate why the distance tarot readings work.

I would say that everything in the universe is energy. We live in an illusion of sorts. Energy travels very easily. It doesn’t know the bounds of space or time. So when I want to tap into someone who lives in India from an energetic perspective, there’s really nothing there in my way, other than myself.

So that’s the best explanation I can give you. But yes, they absolutely do work. I have received some amazingly touching emails from people from halfway across the world.

Okay. And then the last one that I wanted to talk about today is what are the ethics of the tarot – of doing a reading for someone.

I wanted to bring this up because I have been getting a lot of reading requests lately that are asking me to, without permission, tap into someone’s energy. I’m getting reading requests From people who want to know what so-and-so is thinking or what so-and-so is feeling about them, or, how so-and-so is likely to move forward on this, that, or the other thing. My rule is that I absolutely will not read for the purpose of spying on someone. I will not read to invade someone’s personal or energetic space. We just talked about how everything is energy and it really just takes the ability to tap into it. So my ability to tap into it doesn’t mean it’s appropriate. I just don’t think that it’s appropriate for me or any other tarot reader to be trying to explain to someone why they were broken up with when the person who broke up with them, isn’t comfortable sharing. That’s an extreme example, but you get the idea.

And people – we’re just human. We want to know, “Why did this person hurt me? Why did this person do that? What are they thinking?” I totally get that. You’re not alone. I would love to know what so-and-so is thinking, or if so-and-so is going to do this or that, but I’m just not comfortable going there. And in my opinion, an ethical, any ethical tarot, reader’s going to tell you the same thing.

Okay. Another ethical bump in the road is for the tarot readers who claim that they can tell the future – those who claim that they can tell you when something’s going to happen and claim that they can do so with a lot of accuracy. Now I’m not saying that some people are not capable of that, but I am saying that when you are looking for someone to read the tarot for you, it really is important to do your homework and choose someone who resonates with you in a way that that’s just comfortable – that you trust. You know you don’t want to have a tarot reading done by someone that you wouldn’t want to have a cup of coffee with, right? So so yeah, keep those things in mind.

Another sticky wicket is not being honest with your clients. And I say that not because I think that people are intentionally dishonest most of the time, but I do know that a lot of people have a difficult time delivering less than desirable news.

So when we do a tarot reading, we see what is there, right? At a certain point. It becomes black and white boom, boom, boom, boom. These four cards in a row. This means this, this blends in with that blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when we look at a reading and we see something that we either know or suspect that our client is not going to want to hear, we really have to buck up because if someone is paying you for a reading, they deserve the truth. Even if it’s not the truth that they want to hear, they’re paying you to hear the truth. So, you know, if you’re in a reading where you’re seeing something really challenging, you can ask the person, okay, I’m seeing something pretty challenging here. Would you like me to share it with you? They can choose to say yes or no.

They want to just kind of remain in the dark about it. That’s completely up to them. If you’re not comfortable, just speaking it, ask them, you may also want to think about asking them while you’re, while you’re preparing to do the reading. Ask people how blunt they want you to be, because, you know, we, we do have a tendency to tippy-toe around sometimes and put things in the best light because we want our clients to be positive and we want them to be happy and we want them to you know, we want their lives to be good.

So it really stinks to have to tell somebody that “No, I’m sorry. It, it really, you know, there’s something here that’s blocking you and you’re going to have to work on it. It’s not going to get better on its own.” You know, those types of things. So a good tarot reader, an ethical tarot reader is going to tell you what they’re capable of, and what they’re not capable of.

They’ll explain how they do the reading. They’ll explain how they. You know, sort of their level of intuition or psychic development, they’re unlikely to tell you something’s going to happen at a very specific time and they’re likely to steer you away from a yes or no reading.

Okay. So those are some of the questions that either people have asked me or that I have had come up repeatedly in the readings that I do. So I hope that you know, this provides a little bit of insight for you, insight into things that you might not have thought about, or just haven’t even gotten to yet as yourself because you are in the process of learning. But if you’re going to learn, you should learn the right way and you should learn. The ethical way. 😀

So thank you for listening. I’m super glad that you did – so glad to have you here! You all be well until next time. Bye-bye .

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