Thought of the Week

You can feel it before you’ve even turned the card. There’s a moment when you know what the person across from you is hoping you’ll see, and a pull to give it to them. This week I’m looking at what happens when you do. Why telling people what they want to hear is the easiest part of the job. And why it’s almost always the wrong move.

Everything that comes into a reading stays in that room. The booking details, the personal situation, what came up in the cards, what they told you between sessions. And nobody’s legally requiring you to hold any of it. That’s exactly why it matters. Week two of ethics month is about confidentiality: what it actually means, how to talk about your work without putting clients in hot water, and the one exception where breaking it is the right call.

Nobody handed me an ethics policy. There’s no governing body for tarot readers, no regulator, no exam you have to pass to be allowed to sit across from someone in a vulnerable moment. Which means the ethics are entirely down to you. This week opens five weeks on ethics in tarot: why that matters even when nothing is enforced, how I built my own policy through trial and a lot of error, and the lines I draw that I won’t cross.

You pull a court card and your brain starts doing what everyone’s brain does: desperately trying to figure out who it is. This week I’m looking at the kings and queens differently. Not as literal people but as elemental energies. Queens as leading from the heart, kings as leading from the mind. And what changes when you stop asking “who is this” and start asking where this energy is showing up for you.

You’ve felt it in a reading. That moment where you’re more interested in making your point than in whether it’s actually landing for the person across from you. This week is about that shift, and what it costs the client when you miss it.

You’ve been pulling cards, looking up each meaning one at a time, and trying to stitch it all together at the end. But the reading doesn’t live in the individual cards. It lives in what happens when they start talking to each other. Once you stop reading a shopping list of meanings and start hearing a conversation, everything about the way you read changes.

You’ve been thinking about doing tarot readings online but something about it feels off. Maybe you’re worried the connection won’t be the same, or that the tech will get in the way, or that you’ll spend the whole time holding cards up to a webcam while your autofocus loses its mind. Most of what makes an online reading work has nothing to do with your equipment. It’s about how you hold space, how you handle silence through a screen, and how you make sure the reading actually lands for the person on the other end.

When a reading doesn’t land, the first instinct is to wonder whether the cards got it wrong. The cards didn’t get anything wrong. They’re bits of card. What actually happened is one of three things, and knowing which one it is changes everything about what you do next.

Reversals. Half the tarot world reads them with fixed, consistent meanings. The other half ignores them entirely and just treats every card as upright. And somehow, both camps are getting accurate readings. So the question probably isn’t which approach is correct. It’s what a reversed card actually does for you, in this spread, with these cards around it.

You’re mid-reading. A card lands and your gut tells you exactly what it means. Then you open the guidebook. And suddenly you’re saying something else entirely. This week: a live three-card reading with no reference material, and the case for trusting what you actually see.