Given some of the things shared, challenged and confused herein, I thought I’d pull together a little outline on what it means to be a Reader and how one should go about developing said skills. Understand, we haven’t the room for me to go into extreme detail but I think a decent and fair portrait can be made that will answer some of the questions a few have posed.
What follows is based on what I teach established students from the magician’s world when they start asking about doing Readings and where they should start. The answer to that question is to start by finding one single Oracle that strikes interest in you, learn all you can about that one discipline based solely on what the “shut-eye” (non-magician/non/skeptic) sources tell you. This is the first step but it has a companion…
Applying that knowledge!
Take physical action and start doing Readings using only this base information. Do as many Readings as you can and take notes – get feed back! The objective is to do no fewer than 3 Readings a day (preferably 5 or more) so you are no longer working from wrote but more intuitively. It’s akin to what the Martial Arts masters would say about learning to throw a kick; once you’ve thrown a kick 100 times your body knows what to do with it; once you’ve thrown it 1,000 times you no longer have to think about it, it will simply happen as it must when you are placed in the circumstance of having to use it.
Almost everything in life works this way; we train ourselves how to unconsciously connect with an action such as writing, reading a book, riding a bike, etc.
Using Tarot as an example; we’re looking at a foreign language and it is only through repetition and “immersion” that you will become fluid and fluent with it. When it comes to the Tarot, or any Oracle for that matter, just knowing what the pictures mean by name and design isn’t enough – that’s just the surface – the top layer.
There are literally dozens of different ways of laying out the cards, each one giving you different correspondences based on card position, frequency of a number of suite showing up as well as the Major Arcana cards, Pages and where they lay in conjunction to one another. It becomes a very in-depth “science” of sorts complete with rules, boundaries and exceptions.
I honestly doubt anyone could “master” something like the Tarot in a year’s time, but you can become reasonably familiar with it and if you are hitting the frequency of Readings – even short 5 minutes bits – then you will be noticing a kind of “second nature” with things as you move into each session.
To be fair I would never ask a student to stick only with one Oracle for a full year, life’s too short for that and in order to be a proficient Reader you a minimum of two (preferably 3) alternative systems. If I were to do things all over again I would have started with Palmistry, Numerology and then the Tarot which is exactly what I encourage my students to consider (though most will start off with the Tarot or Runes for reasons I can understand but feel to be “poor”)
PALMISTRY is at the top of the list because 99.5% of the folks you meet in the world have two hands. If you but learn the basics about hand, finger and finger-nail shapes, and length, etc. you will have an arsenal at your disposal. But when you learn the mounds and lines, even at the surface level, you will have access to more information than you know what to do with. Especially if you familiarize yourself with the medical aspects tied to Palmistry as well as the Folkloric side of the craft.
NUMEROLOGY also hosts a logical reason behind why I position it high on the list or Oracles every student needs to know; everyone you meet is going to have a name and a birth date and voila! That’s all you need to know. From nothing other you can deliver an amazing array of information to you sitter and I promise you, it will connect so well to them, their personality and life experiences that it will make goose bumps creep across your spine more than every once in a while.
TAROT is simply a classic and one that’s easy to master compared to most others. The reason is likewise logical; they are cue cards… that is to say that once you learn the basics around each card and its meaning you have started learning the language of the cards and just as you learned how our alphabet makes up words, you will begin to see how the artwork and symbols within the cards reminds you what the meaning is and more importantly, you will start having specific portions of each card kind of “jump out” at you as you Read them… this is your subconscious cuing you and trying to wake up your intuition as to what needs to be said to the sitter, not what the script says (as in the book meaning behind each card).
The Tarot can get complicated because of the diversity around it but learning it is a very important part of your first year’s study in that its symbols will come in handy as you move into the second year’s scope on things.
But Where’s the Trickery? The Psychological Stuff?
, we'll get to it!
I can't believe the enthusiasm on the Tea Leaf Readings... well, here's all you need to know