As a tarot enthusiast, naturally you’ll want to read for yourself, but we’ve all hand the experience of being “too close” to a problem to get an accurate reading. So we find ourselves shuffling and redrawing endlessly with the cards.
Simply put, intuition works best when you feel detachment from the issue at hand. Have you ever noticed that some of your most profound messages or psychic occurrences have happened when you were distracted with something else? This is why.
Anxiety, desperation, stress, sadness, pressure, etc., all block intuition. As a form of divination, tarot is highly intuitive. Cards can have multiple meanings and it’s really up to your intuition to determine which meaning is the one that applies. If you feel anxious or highly invested in the outcome, your intuition will not be able to come through.
Although I’m a tarot reader, I often wont use tarot when reading for myself unless I’m doing shadow work. In cases like these I’ll turn to Runes or Lenormand.
Because runes are so “black or white”, they are great if you are looking for a yes-or-no answer. One of the things we need to remind ourselves though is that if we are thinking that there are only two choices, we should probably talk this out with someone. Very rarely in life are their only two options. Something is getting in the way and “blocking” us from seeing the other options. This is where utilizing a counselor or another reader can be really helpful.
When reading for myself, my divination system of choice is Lenormand. At first glance, most people think Lenormand is Tarot, but it’s actually a completely different system. Both systems came about around the same time in the Rennaisance, with Tarot being based off of the Italian card game “Tarrochi”, and Lenormand being based off of what we know as “regular playing cards”. If you have a set of playing cards at home, technically you can use them as Lenormand, although I think it’s easier to use a dedicated set of Lenormand cards.
Where Lenormand differs from tarot is that the cards are highly specific. There is no intuition used here. The cards can only mean one thing and that’s your answer.
The way Lenormand works is that two cards are read together and give a unique and specific message depending on the pairing. This means that you can end up with over 600 oddly specific messages. For example, I’m having a lot of work done on my home. I’ve had bad experiences in the past with contractors so I consulted the Lenormand to see if the person I was thinking of hiring was the right choice. I drew 3 cards which gave me two messages. The answers I got were “quality work” and “fair price”. You can’t get much more specific than that!
One word of caution with Lenormand is that it is sort of like talking to that super-blunt friend. The cards will not mince words and will give it to you straight. Sometimes that’s a welcome thing and sometimes it isn’t. Unlike Tarot, there are definite negative cards in Lenormand. If something’s heading towards disaster, they’ll tell you. Sometimes we’re in a place where that’s too scary of a possibility and it’s best to just talk it out with someone rather than ask the cards.