The Magic Moment
The Magic Moment
Let me be blunt and get this over with quickly. People do not come to you for advice. Do you really think that people want a reading from you because of what you advise them to do? How could this be?
Most people know what they should do. One of the common reasons people come to a Tarot reader is to find out about their relationship. They want to know whether or not the relationship they are in is going to work, or why it is stuck, or what to do to create a feeling of excitement again. Sometimes they want to know if romance is on the horizon, of if the new person they met is right for them, something like that. So you lay out the cards, get the basic situation, and tell them where the energy needs to be put to move things along in a way that feels good for them. For example, you may see a three of swords in the past and a reversed three of pentacles in the present and tell them that getting over a past heartache is keeping them from doing the work that they need to do to be present with the person they are currently interested in. You may advise them to do the necessary grieving (for whatever reason they are not, according to other cards in other positions) to clear the past that they are hanging onto in order to be present and attentive to the person in question.
They are astounded, of course, at the accuracy of your reading, and they should be. If you are a disciplined and trained Tarot reader, you should expect, because the cards work just like they said they would, that you will produce the effect of blowing your client’s socks off every time you do a reading. But do you think that the advice based on their reading is what they want? Listen, by the time they get to you they already know what to do and don’t need you for that. If a person is withdrawn, and waiting for someone to come into their life, they already know what to do. They already know that they need to get over that part of their personality that keeps them afraid and isolated, and to get back out where there are people, initiate a few contacts, and let other people connect. They already know, if their relationship is constricted and boring, to move energy around in this domain or that, start doing more things, get over the past hurt, or in some cases to let the relationship go because it hasn’t met their needs for an extraordinary amount of time.
Doing a good reading is great. Balancing what to tell them from the reading, offering suggestions intuitively and ethically as to what to do with the reading and what it says, according to your own understanding, is an inevitable part of what is expected. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that is why people come to you for readings. If we are to believe that people come to us primarily for advice, we have to con ourselves into believing that people follow advice in the first place.
Test this out on your own with your own situation. Isn’t it true that you have a good handle on what you should do in virtually every area of your life, and probably aren’t doing most of it? Maybe you know that you should lose weight, maybe you know that you are dissatisfied with your job, maybe you know that your relationship needs work. Pick an area where there is a deficit. Do you really need outside information as to what you should do to make the situation better? I didn’t think so. Most of the problems that we have are not a matter of now knowing what to do. Most of us don’t listen to that much advice from outside sources anyway, even ones that we admire.
The same is true when you do a reading for someone. Sure, they may be so startled by the accuracy of the reading that they may listen to what you have to say because they figure they should, but most of the time they won’t, and you shouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about that. They come to you for something, don’t they? It really couldn’t be because of what you advise them to do, because none of us really want that, even if we were inclined to listen to it. We should be excited not to have to worry about that anymore, and we should be equally excited to focus on or discover what it is that they come to us for. In other words, we should spend more time giving our clients a better product.
The other concern is that advice of any kind doesn’t come from the Tarot. When we do a spread for someone, we assess what is going on in their lives (mostly according to our memories and our own experience) and then we put together something that we think they should do about it. We give them not only where we think the block is, we can’t help but offer friendly suggestions about how to move through or avoid those blocks. This is fine, but we should realize that has nothing to do with the Tarot, that is what we would do about it, and why do we think that has any application to another person? What if you draw the reversed Hermit in the present position, see that the person is unduly withdrawn. You check around the spread and see a four of cups and further assume that the person is blocked because they are not “out there in the community”? So you encourage the person to re-establish contacts, get out more, and start integrating back socially. What if the person is a serial killer or some other kind of predator? The Tarot will indeed give you an in-depth glance at the client’s situation, but could advice really be something that we can pick up on? When you add to this that most people have a set idea of what they are going to do before they come to you no matter what you say, can we really state that any kind of advice is the main thing the Tarot is meant to be used for?
That is not to say that a few well-placed, open-ended suggestions don’t have a place in working with clients. But that can’t be what people mostly come to us for. Besides, we are not short of sources for advice these days. There are mental health professionals, friends, self-help books, audios, videos, and enough on-line resource to sink a battleship. People already know this, so again, it should dawn on us that they are seeking us for other reasons.
Personally I believe that it is a good possibility that they come to us for a moment of magic in their existence. We are so embalmed by what we think of as the real world, with all of its concerns, stresses, and stimulation that we become entranced by it. We tend to think of it as the only world. We let it take over our lives, take away our sense of wonder, and replace it with a non-stop roller coaster of ever changing economies, job situations, and ever-increasing pace that we have lost the art of cultivating our inner sense of creativity and wonder. More so today, with what most would agree is an increasing sense of uncertainty and rapid change. We lose sight of the wonder and mystery that life has to offer us if we would only stop once in awhile and engage it.
People come to Tarot readers primarily for a reminder and an experience of this mystery. They want proof that it still exists. They want something to be awed about, something that is more powerful than the latest electronic wonder or CGI effect in the latest movie. They have let go of most of their meaningful human connection and want proof of some kind that we are more than a reduction of our parts. We are a race of beings who are connected at the deepest levels, and a good Tarot reading will put a person squarely into the middle of this experience. When someone experiences a good reading, one that comes from a studied, disciplined, reader, they experience a moment of real magic. They experience evidence that the world we have created, this high-paced, over-stimulated, information frenzy that is burning us out and isolating us a break-neck pace, is not all that there is.
People will rarely tell you this though. They will fumble with a question to ask you, even though they probably don’t care about either the question or what you have in terms of advice to offer them. They want you to be right. They want an accurate reading, because they want to feel connected to you. They want that little bit of sparkle in their lives, sparkle that doesn’t come from their IPOD or television or latest innovation in the computer gaming world. They want to be reminded that there is more than the world they are currently burying themselves in. They don’t know what to do with that experience, because they haven’t been told what it means. We don’t generally know what to do past the one-time accurate reading because we haven’t been trained to look at anything else either.
For right now, we have no real choice to give them what they ask for according to what they think the Tarot experiences’ value is. People are trained to believe that you ask a Tarot reader a question because you really don’t know what to do about a particular situation. We are obliged to spread the cards, answer as best we can, and maybe offer a few suggestions. That is all for now until the true experience of the connection offered by the Tarot is more thoroughly explored.
We can, however, start exploring it ourselves. We can examine what it actually is that our clients come to us for. We don’t have to tell them, they can appreciate what we provide for whatever reasons they want. But as we watch what our clients come to us to experience, we will find that it has little to do with information and more about the whole experience itself. As we begin to examine this more honestly and less arrogantly, we will begin to naturally explore ways to enhance the product that people are actually buying from us. This is our obligation, not theirs.
