Thoughts, hopes, dreams, ambitions, fears, desires will be triggered as you do this, making associations and connections with each card. Sometimes some of the experiences you will be reminded of will not be happy ones, but in doing this exercise you will be clearing emotional debris out of your system. Better out than in!
The whole purpose of the Worksheets is to act quickly, to get the immediate psychological response which the image of each card triggers off, before the critical faculty has a chance to step in and create a blockage.
It is a good idea to cycle through the Worksheets, going through them fairly quickly at first, and then come back to them when you feel ready. Each time you go through a card, you will get something more from the exercise.
There will be some cards from which you get more than from others. Some will have a lot to say to you; others will have their say with you further along your path. Some of the experiences which come back to you will be very intense. With some of them you may laugh, with others you may well cry.
But to work with the Tarot is to work on yourself, in the sense of looking at your own limitations, your own blockages, and finding a way to clear them. After all, unless you’ve cleared these away for yourself, at least to some extent, how can you realistically expect to help others to do so?
You will notice that the sheet entitled ‘Neighbouring Page’ gives you the chance to write up all of your own more intimate and detailed reactions to the specific memories thrown up by each of the cards as you move through this set of exercises. The more you put into these exercises, the more you will actively participate in your own growth process.
Feel free to write up any residual emotions, regrets, realizations, hopes for the future, aspirations which you now have. Remember, you don’t have to show them to anyone.
We don’t often get the chance in life to actually sit down and talk much to ourselves, to simply sit there and be, and get into communication with our emotions and thoughts. All the time we are rushing from one sensory experience to another. Sitting down and working your way through the Worksheets is a wonderful chance to befriend yourself, to heal yourself of old wounds, and to determine and prepare for those things that you want to find in life in the future.
TAROT WORKSHEET
NEIGHBOURING PAGE
What happened here?
What did you learn from this experience?
What has this card to teach you?
SAMPLE WORKSHEET NO 1
SAMPLE WORKSHEET NO 2
SAMPLE WORKSHEET NO 3
Reminds me of Steve when he won the race – Everyone came out to meet him and he led the big celebration through the village
SAMPLE WORKSHEET NO 4
Time: July ’89 – November ‘90 I was confused about my life in general – I was bored and taking tranquillisers – I was getting out of it – I felt it was an effort to get up in the morning. Then, my daughter had an accident and I realised how precious she was to me. Suddenly I was able to snap out of it: I stopped taking the pills and regained control over my life
The purpose of going through the Worksheets is two-fold. The first I have already given you: it gets you much more in touch with yourself. The second is that it enables you to make more of an emotional connection with the person who is having their cards read. You are far more able to connect with them if you have connected with yourself first. To relate to someone on an emotional level is not an intellectual process. It is a matter of the heart. In a very real sense you will not be able to see in anyone’s cards what you yourself have not already been through. You will not see heartbreak if you have never experienced it.
Keep all your Worksheets in a special folder after you have done them and keep them in order, so that you can refer back to them and add extra pages on each card, thus building up the compendium of associated experience for each one.
It is very important that you thoroughly personalize each individual Worksheet for each individual card. We must get all the details of the specific experience or memory associated with each card, locating it all in time and space, with where, when and with whom. It is not enough that you just write down the ‘meaning’ or any other superficial attribution for each card. What we want is Who, Where, When, How, Why and What in connection with your most personal (and painful) memories for each card. You may well go through bouts of crying, anger, happiness, etc. But write down the details of each of these memories. To work with the Tarot in this way is soul-cleansing and therapeutic. Also, you will access a different realm of insight into what the cards are hinting at in each of your Querent’s spreads when you have tapped into the true emotional, gritty meaning of each card and how it is linked with your own emotional past.
Also make a point of writing down any cognitions, thoughts, realizations, hopes, fears, prayers for absent friends, etc. which emerge from these exercises. Again, don’t make a big deal out of these exercises. Get through them so that you can go beyond them. You can always come back to them and redo them. If you find yourself spending more than 10 minutes on any card, go on to the next one. Keep all your notes intact and in order. Write at the top of each Worksheet the name of the card you were looking at when you did the write-up, so that you don’t get them mixed up.
You share karma with the person in front of you. Therefore, by tapping into your own emotional reservoir of experience, you will be able to ‘see’ 1,000 times more things going on in your Querent’s cards than you would have otherwise. This is a powerful technique, but to get the benefit of it you have to go deeply into yourself and the experiences in life which you have felt. It takes guts. But you will end up a far more effective reader if you do it than if you don’t.
ABOUT THE HEIGHTENED MEANINGS
Here I am going to fill you in on some of the meanings of the cards. They are all oriented towards relating the meanings of each card to practical aspects of life and try to move beyond the simplistic meanings which you will find in the little booklets accompanying each deck. By the same token, they also try to get you thinking about the issues which are raised and to enable the Querent to become a little more determined by the end of the reading.
These