My Tarot Journey Part 2 – Reading the Tarot for Others
In Part 1 of my Tarot Journey, I wrote about my introduction to the tarot and how I began to read for other people. Here I will share how I progressed in reading the tarot for others and became a professional tarot reader. As I wrote last time, so much has changed in the way that I now work with the tarot and it has been an interesting exercise for me to remember this.
Reading from a Distance
All the readings I did in the first year of using the tarot were face-to-face. At that time I had many friends in other countries. These were people I had corresponded with as penpals back when I was a teenager and we had developed real long term friendships. When some of these friends heard I was reading the tarot, they wanted a reading too. This was the first time I actually felt nervous about trying something new with the tarot. For all my previous readings, the other person had shuffled the cards themselves in front of me, while they thought of their questions. I just read the cards. How could I shuffle the cards for someone else? In the end I decided it would be like doing a reading for myself, but instead of asking a question for myself, I would ask for my friend. So I did the reading, wrote out the messages and mailed them to my friends. Yep, snail-mailed, not e-mailed. This was the very first time I practiced reading for others from a distance and put that reading into writing rather than just saying what I saw. At that time I still preferred reading face-to-face, but I was intrigued by this new dimension to my readings.
Tarot Reading in the Workplace
About two years after I began working with the tarot I had a post-uni, pre-‘real-world’ job in one of the lounges at Heathrow airport and a few of my colleagues asked me to bring in my cards, so I did. I did several readings over my lunch break. Now that was a strange experience; I was fine reading for my colleagues, but when there were people from management who wanted a reading as well, I felt shy and awkward. Still, I gave it a go. One of the ladies I read for was a manager I had always felt very intimidated by. She approached me for a reading and as we sat in that tiny, cramped little break room, she told me she did not believe in the tarot and for me to give it my best shot. I did her reading for her, and she had an answer for everything I said “Someone must have told you that”, “Yeah, well that’s not very specific” and so on. At one point, I told her that around December, which was in a couple of months, her role as a mother was going to be of the utmost importance and I mentioned a pregnancy. However, before I could give any further information she told me she was too old to be pregnant and that it was Christmas time, so of course her role as a mother would be important. I tried to tell her it was more than that. But she decided to end the reading there. Anyway, in December I found out that this manager was taking some time off work to look after her daughter who had been pregnant but had sadly lost her baby. When that manager returned to work in the New Year, she gave me a long hard look the first day she saw me, but then never said a single word to me again and actually went out of her way to avoid me.
Needless to say I learned two very important lessons from this incident. Firstly, the work place is not an acceptable place to do readings, because the messenger will be shot. Reading for friends that you happen to work with is one thing, but reading willy-nilly for anyone and everyone is not a good idea. Secondly, if someone says they want a reading but don’t believe in the reading, it is not just OK, but necessary for me to refuse to do the reading. If they don’t believe in it, they won’t lose anything from not having the reading, and I, as a reader, do not have to prove myself to people who do not believe.
In the last twenty years I have worked in a variety of jobs, but I never ever made the mistake of bring a tarot deck to work again. I did make friends that I read for, but this was something totally separate from our work and the readings were always conducted either at my house or my friend’s home. I think it is unprofessional to read the tarot at work and you do a disservice to both the job you hold with the company and the work you do as a tarot reader.
Professional Tarot Reader
Now the good news about the readings I did at that workplace is that someone told their friend about me and I was asked if I would come and do a professional paid tarot reading at that friend’s home. This was my first paid tarot reading gig and as with everything else I had done, I jumped in with both feet! I was nervous about going to a stranger’s home alone, but this friend was an elderly lady who also worked at the airport for another company, so she was known by a few people and even my mother knew her. In fact, the lady wanted me to read for her because she liked my mum and knew she could trust me because I was her daughter. She asked me if I would also read for her friends while I was there, as she wanted to have a dinner party and have me as the ‘entertainment’. I told her I would read for up to four people in one sitting, that I would like to have an area to one side where I could read for each person privately, and please could everyone lay off the booze until after their reading. One thing I had learned already from reading for my friends is that drunk people do not make good clients.
When I arrived at her house, I was shown to a separate room from the guests and they asked me if they could record the reading as they had a tape recorder set up. I was perfectly fine with that, and the readings all went off without a hitch. In fact with the money I made that night, I got some business cards made and bought myself a tape recorder and some cassettes because I knew that I would be doing more tarot readings.
By Professional Tarot Reader I mean that I knew the cards well enough to be able to read for others and charge for those services, but as I learned, there is much more to being a professional than that! I will share that with you in the next part.