Tarot Basics

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Reading Rituals: Grounding, Framing, and Shuffling

/ Bee La Rosa / 1 Comment

Originally published on A Lighter View’s March 2023 Issue

When I was starting to read tarot for others, I remember feeling clueless and concerned about what kind of rituals and practices I should be performing to open and close readings. Reading rituals come in such a vast variety, it can be hard to feel confident that you are doing enough or doing it competently. Rather than get caught up in whether or not you should be casting a circle or shuffling 11 times under a full moon, you want to make sure your reading rituals contain the following fundamental components: grounding, framing, and shuffling.

Grounding is a necessary part of any spiritual or intuitive practice. Grounding is essential to bringing spiritual energies or, for the more secular readers, your thoughts and ideas down to earth. When ungrounded, you may find yourself stuck like a deer caught in headlights while trying to give a reading. Reading also, in my experience, is significantly more draining without grounding appropriately. Giving tarot readings without grounding first can leave you feeling similarly depleted as pulling an all-nighter – wired and tired, anxious, unable to feel settled. So, how does one ground? 

For those who are cautious of metaphysics, grounding is about ensuring that you are mentally present in and aware of your body. This can be achieved through mindful meditation. You may consider introducing sensory experiences such as incense or an ice pack to the back of the neck, which stimulates the vagus nerve to promote relaxation. For those that are more comfortable with energetics, grounding is about one’s connection with the Earth through our energy bodies. You can achieve a grounded state by visualizing roots from your feet or the base of your spine anchoring deep into the ground or the core of the Earth. Consider also visualizing protective shielding around your aura, whether that is a literal shield or a shell of light. There are many ways to accomplish this, and guided meditations for grounding and shielding are abundant on YouTube for free. Do whatever makes you feel centered, aware of your body, and safely connected to Earth and your surroundings.

Now we come to what I’m calling framing. Framing is important for opening and closing readings. The purpose of framing is to set clear boundaries, especially energetic boundaries, around the reading. These boundaries are important for providing yourself containment, which promotes a sense of security and safety. Even for secular folks, framing rituals are powerful and important for preparing the mind to perform a reading and informing the unconscious that a reading is over so one can disengage and move on. Good framing rituals set the stage and mood for a reading and clearly define when the reading has ended.

To frame your reading practice, you’ll want to set aside a sacred space for the reading. This can be accomplished through the use of a reading cloth, but you don’t have to limit yourself to reading cloths. You can create a sacred reading space even if you only have room to spread a clean towel out on the floor of your bedroom – ensure the space is clean, free of dust and clutter. Consider adding candles or arranging crystals to form a boundary around your reading space, whatever helps you feel the magic. A framing ritual should also include clearing your mind with meditation or cleansing energy (in addition to, not instead of, grounding!!), especially at the end of a reading. 

Whenever I read tarot at fairs, I start and end my day cleansing myself with sage, but I use an aura spray made of essential oils in between readings. Whenever a reading has ended, I like to visualize sending the person’s energy back to them and my energy returning to myself. You can even say out loud, “The reading has ended, all my energy returns to me now, and all energy that belongs elsewhere now returns home.” The important thing is to remember to concretize the closing of your reading in some way. This ensures that your mind will be able to disengage from the reading and that your energy will be cleared of the other person’s energies, if you are reading for another person or your question involves other people. Even if your reading only involves yourself, it is a good idea to clear your energy.

Finally, consider what shuffling method you would like to use in your tarot practice. To choose a shuffling method, it is important to understand what the purpose of shuffling is. One purpose is to introduce randomness into the order of the cards so that you are not merely pulling the same cards every time. The other purpose of shuffling is to clear any lingering energies from previous readings. Another purpose of shuffling, for me, is to convince the ego that the cards that come out during a reading are not there by mere coincidence. An unconvinced ego is one of the biggest barriers to giving a good reading – accessing our intuition requires bypassing the logical mind. The ego has to surrender in some way for that to happen, so you need to get it on board with the reading.

With that being said, there are many shuffling techniques out there. Most people are familiar with hand-over-hand and riffle shuffling. I prefer the Mongean shuffle method because it keeps my cards from bending and it is very effective for randomizing the cards, especially if you do some hand-over-hand shuffling in between. It doesn’t matter how you shuffle or in what order, as long as you are sufficiently randomizing the cards and you are convinced the cards are sufficiently randomized.

I hope that you feel more confident preparing yourself to read tarot now. As long as your reading rituals fulfill the purposes of grounding, framing, and shuffling, then you can be sure that you are “doing it right.” There are no hard-lined rules for practicing tarot. What matters is that the practices you utilize are creating conditions that support the spiritual dimension of life. Thank you.

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Beyond the Booklet: Reading Tarot Intuitively

/ Bee La Rosa / Leave a comment

Originally published in A Lighter View’s February 2023 issue.

You heard about tarot and wanted to learn more so you picked up a deck or two. You’ve downloaded apps and eBooks and have memorized all the meanings of the cards by heart. You feel pretty confident about drawing a card or three and knowing the general gist of the message. Still, something feels a little off about your readings. You wonder how the tarot readers you see on YouTube are able to convey such rich, detailed messages and advice from just the basic definitions of the cards, while you feel like your readings are AI-generated. The secret is that professional tarot readers usually aren’t relying on the card definitions to construct their readings – instead they read intuitively.

As a beginner, it’s totally normal and perfectly fine to rely on the deck booklets and tarot apps to remind you what meanings the cards are generally associated with. However, it’s also really common to come up on a wall with this method eventually as the booklets and definitions begin to limit our perspective on what the cards may be trying to convey. This is where it can be helpful to learn to read intuitively. Reading tarot intuitively is a skill that can take some time to develop, but usually comes more naturally to creative types. That’s because this method of interpretation relies on using your imagination, not a dictionary, to construct the narrative that accompanies the cards. Here are some tips to get started:

  1. Connect with the cards, not the booklet. The booklets are there to help you learn about the imagery and symbolism of the cards – but they are not the cards themselves. It’s kind of like confusing a photograph of a mountain for the mountain itself. It’s easy to begin to think that the booklets and the definitions are the cards, but that’s not correct. The next time you pull out your deck to do a reading, try just looking at the cards. You may feel called to arrange them a certain way besides the way they came out. You might notice repeating symbols or details that jump out at you that wouldn’t have even been mentioned in the booklet. Notice what feelings or ideas come to you when you look at certain cards. How does it feel to look at The Devil, especially compared to Temperance? How do the colors, landscapes, and figures make you feel?
  1. Give the cards a story. It’s helpful to treat spreads like a storyboard. What are the events taking place from start to finish? Who are the main characters? What are their motivations? What is the primary conflict of the story? What is needed to overcome the conflict? Sometimes you might even see the same character across multiple cards, tied together by some consistent color or symbol. You might even spontaneously imagine an entire backstory to the cards that has little to do with the traditional meanings. Let your imagination take the wheel here and you might be blown away by how relatable your reading becomes. This is often where readings really start to come alive.
  1. Experiment with spreads or no spreads. Spreads, such as the Celtic Cross, can be helpful because they give a predefined purpose to each card. It gives structure to the overall narrative and arrangement of the cards. Sometimes this can just cause confusion instead. If you find yourself confused, try reading without a spread. Let yourself arrange the cards in whatever way feels right to you and allow the narrative to emerge organically. Just don’t forget to have a well-constructed question going into the reading, or you may find yourself just as lost and confused as before. How we apply language is important for cultivating specificity within a reading: too much, and the reading becomes formulaic and lifeless; too little, and the reading becomes too general to be meaningful.
  1. Let your inner critic take a backseat. When reading intuitively, doubting yourself is the surest way to throw off your game. That’s because acting on intuition is ultimately faith-based – you can’t be sure that your interpretation is going to resonate with your client or friend until you just go out and say it. Don’t hold back what you’re picking up from the cards – it may be that it takes a while for your message to make sense, due to external circumstances. The same goes even if you are reading for yourself. Also, it’s okay to just plain be wrong sometimes. Even professional readers are wrong sometimes – we’re not omniscient. If something isn’t landing, it can help to make your message more general and see how the querent responds. Perhaps, for example, you see the Knight of Cups appear and you think it could be about a lover or long-term relationship only to discover that the person you are reading for has no interest in romance. You can walk things back to something more general like “acting from the heart.” Reading intuitively isn’t an exact science.

Try putting these tips into practice and see how your readings evolve over time. Eventually, you may find yourself not even bothering to flip through the booklets of new decks you buy – not that there’s anything wrong with doing that. Booklets often contain valuable information about the deck they belong to and it doesn’t make you a worse reader to refer to them. Tarot ultimately is a medium for channeling messages and advice, and booklets can serve as that medium as well. What’s important is understanding that channeling is an intuitive act, which can be difficult to grasp when you are first starting out. Using these tips will help broaden the perspective with which you approach your readings, so that your approach is not exclusively logic-dominated. No matter what techniques you use to do a reading (booklet or no booklet, spreads or no spreads, etc.) your experience will benefit from finding ways to allow your intuition to participate.

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Clear Guidance from Tarot: Reveal Choices, not Answers

/ Bee La Rosa / Leave a comment

A common mistake to make when approaching a system of divination like tarot is approaching it with the intention of having it give you answers for what decisions you should make.

I will preface this article by admitting that I am incredibly guilty of trying to use tarot to make decisions for me, particularly when I am feeling my most vulnerable. Everyone goes through challenges where they wish someone or something would tell them irrefutably what action they should take or what choice will bring them the deepest sense of security and contentment. It’s easy to project this kind of authority onto systems of divination, or even onto friends, family, spiritual mentors or Spirit itself. It is tempting to seek the comfort of absolute certainty about our choices and curtail any risk of failure or setback, but we need to resist this temptation as much as possible.

The ability to make a choice of action is one of the few things in life we have any control over. When you look to external sources to give you answers and tell you what choices to make, you disempower yourself and perpetuate a fear-based cycle of doubting your own authority to know what is best for you. There are many reasons why someone can end up in this cycle – a history of interpersonal trauma, such as gaslighting or attachment injury, is a big one. The message you send to yourself when you disregard your own agency is that you are not trustworthy or able to be relied upon to make sound decisions – and if you grew up in a dysfunctional household, then you may very well just be repeating the pattern you felt towards your own guardians when they failed to be reliable and trustworthy towards you. I know all too well what this feels like, and it can absolutely be terrifying to depend on yourself as an adult if you never experienced what it is like to be in the presence of a safe and trustworthy adult. However, part of healing this means we have to make choices and live with whatever results from them, and sometimes it’s really difficult to bear. The lived experience of making choices – whether for good or for worse – is critical in developing confidence about your identity and needs, as well as learning to trust yourself. How else do you discover what you like, dislike, want, need, or desire if all your choices are made for you? You are depriving yourself of the opportunity to connect to your natural-born intuition when you outsource your agency to external figures or systems.

Receiving answers or revealing choices?

In terms of tarot and divination, asking for answers usually looks like coming to a reader or busting out a deck with a question along the lines of “What should I do about my situation?” Especially questions like, “Should I end my relationship?” or “Should I leave my job?” You’ll notice these questions all have “should” in them – which is a great indicator that these questions are asking an external source to confirm or make a decision that is not theirs to make.

While it is perfectly normal and acceptable to seek guidance and advice on issues that face us, there is a subtle difference between seeking guidance to gather data and explore a situation and seeking guidance to have a decision made on one’s behalf. Typically, we turn to external sources to make decisions for us when we are scared, confused, and unsure – which will inevitably be reflected back to us. With tarot and oracles in particular, my experience has been that the cards really function to reflect what I already know back to me – in messages and symbols that are arranged in such a way that I either perceive additional insight and confirmation into my situation, or experience further confusion and doubt. If I am confused, scared, and doubtful about the decision I have to make, I always pull cards that state this plainly, and often in my fearful state I take these cards to mean that I am making a bad choice. No matter what the situation is, every option will seem scary or incorrect if you approach it with this state of mind. This is why the way you frame a question and ask for guidance can make such a huge difference in how much clarity you gain from a reading.

I believe tarot and other divination systems can be incredibly useful for processing and organizing how we are experiencing a situation, leading to new perspectives or revealing ways to think about a situation that bring about clear, confident solutions. Tarot – or astrology, runes, or whatever other divination system you prefer – is best used to reveal choices, not provide answers. However, in order to make the most out of tarot you have to be conscious of the mindset with which you approach it.

An example situation might be that someone is burnt out on their job, though they feel a lot of affection for their colleagues and the work that they do. In spite of this, this person is struggling to make ends meet and feels incredibly stressed about the situation. They start drawing tarot cards over and over, asking, “Should I leave my job?” In my experience, time and again, this type of approach leads to confusing messages – cards that simply don’t make sense, or trigger fearful reactions. This person just wants to be told what will make them the most happy – what is the correct way to act? But the mindset in this approach is inherently powerless – they do not trust their own ability to know what would make them happy, and it shows in the cards. They need to reorient their mindset to an empowered one before they can receive empowering messages.

Shifting Mindsets

What would an empowering mindset look like? If you relate to feeling confused, unsure, or like you strongly fear making the wrong choice, try imagining this instead: what would it feel like if you trusted yourself to know what you really want, so long as you have access to enough information? Furthermore, what if you know that you possess what you need to obtain enough information to make a satisfying decision? What if you could always create a solution to any challenge or setback you experience?

Launching from the previous example, it’s likely a person in such a situation, deep down, already knows whether they want to stay at their job or find something else – the problem really is that being able to access this inner knowing is easily blocked when someone is experiencing doubt and fear. Someone can live in this state 24/7 – as I have experienced in my past. There are many exercises and tools you can use to recover your connection to your inner knowing if you think this applies to you. In my previous article on ambivalence, I outline steps you can take to access the part of you that already knows what you need.

The person from the previous example may be passionate about what they are doing and feel incredible kinship towards their colleagues. With a fear-based mindset, this person will notice the burnout and the financial struggle and become worried that they may have to leave their job in spite of loving it, so they begin asking “Should I leave my job?” with the desire to be told what to do to save themselves. In a secure mindset, where the person is aware of what they want out of the situation, the question with which they approach the cards may look drastically different: “How can I improve my job?” or “How can I make more money?” Notice how these are open-ended questions, which create space for the cards to paint a picture of your situation and reveal solutions. When you approach your queries this way, you are claiming your agency and empowering yourself to create solutions, rather than resigning yourself to being a passive participant in the unfolding of your own life. This is really the essence of The Magician, by the way.

The impact of your mindset extends to pick-a-card readings on YouTube or selecting a reader too – when you approach your query from a mindset that is grounded, confident, and curious, you may find yourself drawn to different readers or piles than you would have selected when you were perceiving yourself as powerless, vulnerable, and lacking judgment. At least, that has been my experience.

I know that it is hard to channel this mindset if it does not come naturally to you. I hope that by explaining the issue with using tarot for answer-seeking, that you can notice when you are doing this yourself and utilize the tools I linked earlier to re-center and re-approach your queries with an empowered mindset. It becomes easier over time to catch yourself and reorient your thoughts. Try it out and let me know how it works for you! Since I started approaching tarot this way, I feel more confidence in my decisions even if they don’t always yield the best results. I know now that I possess the ability to create solutions to any challenge that meets me in life, because I trust in my own authority to know what is best for me, and I want others to feel the same way.