The cards can be shuffled so that they are upright or reversed (when the cards’ meaning then changes). The cards contain an equal balance of positive and negative so reversing the cards adds little to the overall reading and most of the time I ignore the reverse and work with the meaning only in the upright position. You can do many different types of readings, from simple questions and answers to more elaborate combinations.
It is said that it is impossible to read the tarot for yourself, and unfortunately in some cases this is true as wishful thinking and inner fears and expectations can get in the way. Again, like all psychic gifts, divination skills are to be shared with others.
A true psychic doesn’t necessarily need the cards to tell them about a person’s life and future. They are simply a tool for accessing information and are secondary to the psychic gifts you have. Trust your instincts and eventually you won’t even bother looking up the meanings of the cards, you will just trust your clairvoyant skills.
PREPARING TO READ THE CARDS
Before you begin your reading, choose a quiet room and prepare yourself. Do some deep breathing and practise some of the exercises illustrated earlier to prepare yourself to connect with your psychic powers.
If you have invited someone to come and receive a reading from you, remember that they will be nervous. Reassure them that you won’t tell them anything that will frighten them and remind them that the things you will say are the potential for the future, not actual fact.
Learn the positions of each lay that you may want to use – there are many. The most well known one is the cross, but experiment to find out how you want to place the cards and how the position occupied by the card influences the reading. Have a lay for specific questions and a longer one for a character reading or life reading.
When your client arrives, ask them not to tell you anything about themselves until you have had a chance to begin the reading. Knowing too much about the person will distract your intuitive flow.
1 Ask your client if there is a specific problem they may want to ask about, or if they would like a general reading.
2 Choose your pack of tarot cards and let the client shuffle them, then lay them out face-down on a table or on the floor.
3 First look at the cards that dominate the reading and bring up the most potent feeling, i.e. what you’re getting from your initial reaction to the cards. These pointers indicate which subjects you should be talking about.
4 Look at the individual cards: start each card with an interpretation, feel into the card, the reason why it is in that position and the imagery. Dig deeper for the real significance of why this card has been chosen.
5 Touch the card, close your eyes and watch the images appearing in your mind. Extend your sensing of the meaning, letting yourself go into what you pick up – don’t hold back as the cards will tell you lots more than the surface imagery, and your own intuition will tell you even more.
6 As you move through each card, it is like telling the client a story about their life and the people in it.
7 Consider all the other cards and the meaning of the position they occupy before seeing how they relate to each other and their significance. Let your logical mind take a back seat and free your intuition to make the connection between the images and symbols you see before you. Combine this with the psychic impressions that you may be picking up from your client and you will give readings that astound people.
There are many other tools for divination, such as tasseography, the art of reading tea cups. This has been around for centuries. The gypsies have practised the art, the Chinese believe that they invented it, the Romans used to read the residue left over in their wine cups and even Catholic countries such as Ireland have their psychic cup-scrying grandmothers. Cloud reading, palmistry, I Ching, astrology, graphology, runes, sand reading, the crystal ball – these are just a few of the thousands of fortune-telling tools. The key to using these tools is to learn how to connect with your psychic sense, and practise with your chosen tool for a period of time. Do this and you can master virtually any oracle.
Psychometry
Some people have referred to psychometry as ‘seeing through fingers’. It’s all about reading energy vibrations left on objects.
Psychometric vibrations are left on everything: buildings, jewellery, watches; even plants, flowers and crystals – anything that has been absorbing energy from living things. For example, a watch you have worn daily for years will have absorbed your vital energy and within its own vibration will hold yours. Therefore, when a psychic holds your watch they can read your personality by just feeling the vibration.
Objects that we own for a long time absorb vibration – just like buildings and places. Just as the magnetic tape of a cassette recorder has music imprinted on it that can be played back many times, so objects hold ‘recordings’ of the character, emotions and memories of the owner – and in some cases even those of the maker of the object, particularly if it is a religious or sacred object. A good psychic can read these ‘records’ of our lives and give a detailed history of the owner. Sometimes this may include names of family members, friends and places that the owner once knew.
Psychometry teaches you to sense the atmosphere of a place or read the history of an object. An extension of this gift is to sense the atmosphere of a person and become aware of people in the spirit world. Tuning into the energy of a person or place is the first level in learning how to interpret psychic information. When you practise psychometry you will be amazed at how accurate the information that you pick up can be.
Clare, a London-based PA, never considered herself to be psychic. During a psychic awareness workshop she was asked to pick up a ring which belonged to her partner’s deceased grandmother. She tuned in to the ring for only a few minutes before the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and she smelt a strong fragrance of perfume (the grandmother’s favourite). She surprised herself by opening up to psychic skills she never thought she had. She found out later that her grandmother had a talent for reading signs in tea leaves and had become well known in her village for giving advice and telling the future from what she saw in people’s tea cups.
Psychics believe that thought travels outside of the body and is absorbed by our environment. This would account for the sense of atmosphere that is felt in buildings. An ancient church, for example, may feel peaceful and sacred, whilst a stately home, which may be as old as a church, with centuries of activity may have an atmosphere that belies its tragic family history.
Tuning into a place uses the same principles as tuning into a person. As a psychic you are reading into the vibrational energy. Glimpses of history are sometimes a form of psychometry: a psychic inadvertently becomes aware of the atmosphere of a place and suddenly finds themselves replaying images from the past. These visions could be daydreams and fantasy but sometimes a person is psychic enough to be able to see directly into history.
Many researchers believe that ghosts are an etheric imprint left behind by traumatic events. Have you ever walked into a property and felt the atmosphere of the past and even in some cases felt there were ghosts lingering around? These places are very easy to read and are fascinating to use for practising in how to tune into places. This is how I learnt to have confidence in my own skills – by visiting haunted homes and ancient places. I could then follow up my visits with research to find out how accurate my visions and psychic impressions were.
Learning Psychometry
The impressions you receive when doing psychometry will at first come as a flood of mixed messages and images. The first step is to learn how to unravel these and build them into a coherent story. I have trained many talented students who began their training by accurately