Circling Back and Stepping Forward

I’ve been reading tarot for a long, long time.

Since I started young and am now “getting older,” I can truthfully say I’ve been reading tarot for about 35 years. I’ve read professionally since 1993, though I’m a bit out of practice now, as I lost my last few regular clients during the early pandemic. I did a few psychic fairs back in the day, and I used to hire out as a fortune teller for parties. I even briefly worked for a 900-number psychic hotline, but when I say “briefly,” I mean it: I only lasted a week on the job. I’ve been around the divination block!

I got into tarot as a teenager because it was slightly spooky and witchy, true, but it was also fun and interesting. I enjoyed working with the cards, but to be perfectly honest, I stuck with tarot mainly because it was an easy way to make money on the side. Please understand, I wasn’t out there relying on carny tricks to grift clients; I have always been an ethical and genuinely intuitive reader. But I approached it more as a commercial enterprise rather than a deep spiritual practice.

I used to prefer I Ching readings for self-guidance, and rarely read my own cards. Oddly, the longer I’ve been away from client work, the easier it has become to read tarot for myself. I don’t think money was poisoning tarot for me or anything dramatic like that. I am firmly in the “get that bag” camp, and if you have skills people want to pay for, let them pay. I’m still happy to read for money. (PayPal me $30 right now and see what happens.) I think I had a more subtle emotional block: Tarot mostly felt like work to me in the past. It was literally a side job, so it felt more like labor than play.

Lately, I’ve been drawn back to tarot, but now I’m approaching it more like I did when I was first starting out. I’m reading newer books about the subject and studying the cards from different perspectives. I’m maintaining a sense of experimentation. I’m staying open and flexible, and most importantly, I’m having fun again.

I feel like I’m combining long-held expertise with a state of beginner’s mind, allowing me to take the practice deeper than before. It’s a satisfying breakthrough.

Looking Inward and Pursuing Clarity

Fortune-tellers always include the phrase “for entertainment purposes only” on their marketing materials for a reason. Sure, from a business perspective, it’s important to spell this out. A reader isn’t giving you legal or medical advice (and frankly, you shouldn’t ask for these things in the first place), but even beyond that serious perspective, this caveat serves as a way to manage expectations.

People do bring serious questions to a tarot reading, but it’s important to acknowledge that the future is ultimately unknowable. Even the canniest psychic (if they’re honest) can only tell you the most likely outcome of your current path, and that answer is dependent on whether anything nudges your trajectory in a different direction. Humans crave certainty, and despite its reputation, divination can’t deliver an ironclad result. Folks want to know when they’ll get a better job, whether that person they have their eye on is also eyeing them back, and if that weird mole on their back is cancer (see a doctor, seriously, not a psychic). Tarot doesn’t work that way. Fate is always mutable, and you can’t know what’s truly in someone else’s head or heart.

I still think tarot and other forms of divination can be beneficial when used strategically.

The best metaphor I’ve heard for divination is that it’s like turning on your car’s headlights when driving down a dark road. You can’t see limitless miles ahead, but you can see a little farther than before. You’re still looking at what’s directly in front of you, but you can see the road more clearly and evaluate where you’re heading. Is this what you want, or is it time for a course correction?

In my opinion, tarot is especially good for assessing the energy surrounding a situation or whether a specific action will be beneficial. I like to do dual readings as a sort of A/B testing, contrasting what’s likely if I do A or choose B instead. Tarot isn’t good for far-future forecasting (or answering yes-or-no questions), but it can help clarify decision-making and is a valuable tool for self-reflection.

Sometimes you really can have flashes of intuition and accurately predict unlikely outcomes from a tarot spread, but those are exceptional and rare occurrences – at least for most readers. Mostly, tarot helps to “parse the vibe,” if that makes sense. It works best as a tool for sorting out what you’re feeling and what you truly want while taking a quick peek ahead.

Seeking Calm and Accepting Uncertainty

We’re still muddling through the aftermath of a pandemic that never really ended. We’ve barely acknowledged the collective trauma of the past decade, and now we’re staring down a period of ceaseless crisis. We’ve had no time to heal; most of us are walking wounded at this point. Many of us are more likely to lash out than to look inward. There’s a lot of pain and anxiety floating around.

I think we’ll see increasing interest in divination as we live through these challenging times. Astrology has already become widely popular over the last decade or so, and I expect other divinatory practices will follow suit. The more out of control we feel, the more turbulent our lives are, the more we seek the comfort of reassurance – whether we find this in mainstream spiritual practices or more esoteric pursuits.

However, effective divination requires a kind of stillness and inner calm to work well. Here’s a question: Do you feel still and calm? I know I don’t most of the time.

I think it’s worthwhile to search for that inner stillness, especially now. You can even use tarot or some other form of divination as the inspiration to chase down that quiet feeling. We need to think clearly and trust our instincts. These aren’t mutually exclusive states, even if it seems that way on the surface. Once you reconnect with your intuition, you need to use rational discernment to understand how to respond.

Meditation helps (it has definitely helped me), but it’s far from the only thing you can try. Take a long break from social media. Stop spending every free moment in front of a screen. Find the empty parts of your day and refuse to fill them. Lean into the absence of “busy-ness” at those moments and just be. Stare out a window. Go for a walk without listening to a podcast. You may find nothing inside your head but a constant litany of anxious thoughts (ask me how I know), but that’s more authentic than AI slop. It’s real. With persistence, you can find that inner hush, even if you start in the noisiest, most freaked-out sector of your brain. It just takes time, repetition, and patience. You’ll eventually be able to dip into that stillness more easily and stay there longer – and your intuition will start waking up.

Tarot cards are merely pieces of paper with beautiful art printed on them. They’re not magical in and of themselves; the tarot is a tool. We invest these cards with meaning by creating meaningful narratives with them and translating our subconscious perceptions into stories we (or our clients) can understand.

We can’t know the future; our lives are ultimately unpredictable. But we have to move forward, all the same. The practice of divination can help us to find peace in the face of uncertainty.

I think peace is worth pursuing, even by unconventional means.

• This piece was an absolute ramble. Thank you for coming to my tarot TED Talk, LOL.
• Sorry about all the em dashes. I promise this was 100% human-written; I just like fancy-ass punctuation. (You’ve surely noticed this before now!)
• Actually on topic, here’s a fascinating video from the V & A about tarot decks in their collection.
• The Oatmeal’s take on AI art is worth reading if you haven’t already seen it.

This post brings us to the halfway point of our October series, but that means we still have half to go. OKAY, BYE! 🖤