The Power of Tarot: To Know Tarot, Read Tarot, and Live Tarot

Worth

Copyright © 2019 Liz Worth.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-9868-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-9867-6 (e)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 04/10/2019

Author’s Note

This book contains anecdotes from my work as a tarot reader. In all instances, identifying details have been changed to respect anonymity. The examples given here are provided solely for purposes of learning.

There are many ways to learn tarot, and there are many different tarot decks out there. This book offers teachings based on how I personally use tarot and covers many questions and lessons taken directly from classes I have taught. I reference the Rider-Waite-Smith deck throughout, but you can adapt these teachings to many other tarot decks.

This work is not meant to be an exhaustive compendium of tarot methodologies but rather a collection of techniques, thoughts, and experiences that work for me as a tarot reader and that I have successfully taught to my students.

I also rely on the elemental correspondences of earth, air, fire, water, and spirit for tarot’s suits, which is an integral part of how I work with tarot.

Why are there no pictures? Like my previous work on tarot, I have decided not to include images here. This way, your references for this book are not influenced by my choices in imagery. I also wanted to encourage you to play throughout this process. Don’t just read these words. Read your tarot cards, too. Pull them out when I reference specific cards. See the examples for yourself, and let tarot become part of the learning process.

Who Is This Book For, and Why Was It Written?

This book is for everyone. It is for tarot readers of all levels, from beginners to experts. It is for people who are seeking answers. Who are looking to make sense of the patterns they see in their lives. It is for anyone who is curious about different ways of thinking and different ways of moving through the world.

When I first started writing this book, I intended it to be a collection of tarot spreads. But every time I started writing, I kept asking myself, How can I create a book of tarot spreads without first explaining how I use tarot? Once I started following that question, I realized the answer was a whole book unto itself.

That question got me thinking about the way many of us learn tarot and the way we treat it. We tend to want to rush the process. We expect to be able to start reading the cards right away, even if we’re not fully clear on what tarot is or what we are engaging in when we use it.

We wonder about the proper way to shuffle a deck or if reading reversals makes a difference. We want to know what all the cards mean without wondering how the cards came into existence in the first place.

Reading tarot isn’t just about memorizing card meanings. It’s about understanding what tarot is, what it can and can’t do, where it came from, and what makes it relevant to our daily lives. It’s also about deciding what tarot means for you. And it often takes time and experience to figure that out. This applies to anything we practise, I think. Knowing where something came from and what it was intended for is key to understanding how to think about it and where it fits into our lives today. How can we expect tarot to speak to us when we choose to ignore its own stories?

Tarot is complicated because it has a convoluted history, which continues to echo on into the present. So I started this book by meditating on a question that many aspiring tarot readers have asked me along the way:

Where do I begin?

I realized that teaching people how to think about tarot is as important to me as teaching them how to read it. Knowing the technique without understanding the context of what you’re working with only gives you part of the picture. Reading tarot cards is a skill, and one that can be developed. But reading tarot isn’t independent of other characteristics you may already hold or have yet to acquire. I’m not talking just about intuition, either. State of mind, self-awareness, discernment, good communication, and creativity all come into the process of tarot reading.

When tarot becomes a regular part of our lives, the way we use it and what we glean from the cards seem to change as we do. If you are always growing, then your perception will grow with you. Details, ideas, and perspectives become relevant given the ages and stages you are living through.

Staying open to different perspectives by hearing what other tarot readers have to say about the cards is part of that journey. There will be times in your own tarot journey that will push you to see the cards in new ways. If you actively seek new knowledge about tarot, you will find that the world is full of resources to help you challenge your assumptions and experiences with the cards, all in support of your growth.

I believe we become better tarot readers when we stay open to new perspectives. In my years of reading tarot, I have heard countless people say that tarot is a journey, something that you never stop learning. I completely agree, and I live this truth myself. I believe that we can never truly master tarot, because it holds so many possibilities—and also because we as individuals change so much over a lifetime. Who you are when you begin to read tarot will evolve as the years go on. And as you continue to grow, the knowledge that you are able to bring forward will reflect that.

Our world is always changing, too. Tarot can feel personal and self-reflective, but we have to remember that everything we experience is part of something greater. Each tarot card can hold numerous meanings, but those definitions are never static. They will always adapt to reflect the relevance of the times and the realities of their reader.

My intention for this book is not to give you everything you need to know about tarot but rather to help you form or deepen your own relationship with it. These pages are a collection of my own thoughts, experiences, lessons, and learnings with tarot. As you work with this book, you might read things that you disagree with or that differ from what others teach or believe about tarot.

That’s okay. Don’t be put off by differences. I am not presenting this book as the truth, only as my truth, in the hope that it might be helpful.

I trust that you have picked up this book for a reason. I also trust that there is value in new, unknown, or differing ideas. As you will find as you read on, the tradition of tarot is built on reinvention, not consensus.

Come to this book with an open mind, and leave with an open mind.

Within these pages, you will also find questions that only you can answer. Throughout this work, I have included many invitations for you to reflect on your own reactions to what’s here. You might want to keep a journal as you read along, and you might want to keep your tarot deck handy. You can take some of the questions here to your cards for added insight.

Above all else, I encourage you to come to your own conclusions.

Many of the chapters here are inspired by questions people have asked me about tarot and are also based on classes I’ve taught on the subject. I have also included many questions I wish someone had answered for me when I was first starting to learn how to read tarot.

Take your time with these words as you dive in. I think all authors want their books to be read from start to finish rather than by skipping, skimming, or jumping around. But if you do skip around, know that you might be left with some gaps. Even though there may be parts of this book you feel you already know or parts that don’t apply to you, I hope you will give yourself the opportunity to immerse yourself in the full experience.

You won’t find card meanings or individual card interpretations within these pages, though. I have already compiled my meanings in Going Beyond the Little White Book: A Contemporary Guide to Tarot. You can certainly use these books as companions, but remember that at some point, you will need to put the meanings away and just let yourself read the cards as they are.

If you’re new to tarot, you are probably wondering how to do that. Let me show you.

Part One: To Know Tarot

We All Get Here in Our Own Way

I didn’t take the most direct route into tarot. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a veterinarian, because I loved animals. But I also loved ancient Egyptian mythology, the supernatural, crop circles, and Stonehenge. My mother had always believed she’d seen ghosts and used to tell me about a UFO she saw when she was eight.

While I had friends whose parents taught them that all things occult were evil and should never be spoken of, my mom would let me listen to tapes of psychic readings she’d had. I was gifted a Ouija board for my birthday one year, and my friends and I would play with it in the basement while my parents made dinner upstairs.

As an only child, curiosity and imagination filled a lot of my downtime. I had many imaginary friends, including a black cat named Midnight that I would call upon to help me with seances at recess.

As I came into adolescence, I realized my grades in math and science weren’t good enough to justify a career as a vet. But I was good with art and writing, and so I decided to become a writer instead.

Throughout my teen years, I created my own zines, got an internship at a magazine, and started to dream up fictional characters for novels I wanted to write. I sought out open mic nights downtown where I could read my poetry and meet other writers.

I also tried to learn tarot. When I was thirteen, I got my hands on a little paperback book (which I bought at the grocery store, of all places) that taught me how to read regular playing cards. I spent a whole summer studying that thing. In the 1990s, the esoteric went mainstream thanks to movies like The Craft, but the internet had yet to really take off. It wasn’t always easy to find things like tarot decks or decent books on the subject. Especially if you were a teenager living in the suburbs, like me, and the closest bookstore was at the local mall. There, you’d be lucky if the New Age section even had as much as a whole bookshelf to itself. Usually it was taken up by Sylvia Browne titles and outdated horoscope guides left over from the year before.

When I was seventeen, I came across a dragon-inspired tarot deck and decided to buy it for myself. If only I’d known then what I know now about tarot.

First, I would have started with a more traditional deck (more on that later), and second, I would have done more work to learn what tarot actually is before trying to use it.

Instead, I eagerly unwrapped the deck, took the cards out of the box, shuffled them, and then, following the Celtic Cross layout in the little white book, laid out ten cards across my bed. I hadn’t even taken the time to look through them all first. As I turned each one over, I braced myself for a wave of information to rush over me.

I waited…and waited, expecting…

Visions!

Insights!

Breakthroughs!

A full-on film reel of the future playing out before me!

Well, was I ever disappointed when I stared hard at those beautiful, brand new cards and felt…Absolutely nothing.

I saw nothing. My mind was blank. I couldn’t make sense of what the cards were supposed to mean. I flipped through the instruction book that accompanied them and felt even more lost. Some of the cards had only one or two words describing them: Betrayal. Deceit. Exhaustion. Loss. Worse, there was no instruction on how to actually apply those meanings to my life.

How in the hell do people do this? I wondered. Maybe I have to clear my head first. Maybe I should meditate or something.

I came back to the cards the next day. I closed my eyes, counted my breaths, and tried to relax. When I thought my head was clear enough, I shuffled the deck, laid out a few cards, and expected…

Fireworks!

Clarity!

Answers!

Wisdom!

Can you guess what I got instead? If you’re thinking…

Nothing.

Nada.

Zip.

Zero.

Zilch.

You are absolutely right.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but tarot requires at least two things: patience and practice. Over the years, I have heard of only a very, very small fraction of people who were able to take to the cards right away (assuming they are even being truthful about it). But for the most part, what I’ve observed is that tarot takes a long time to learn.

Especially if you want to do it well.

When I was in my teens, I hadn’t yet developed the patience the cards require. I also hadn’t considered the idea that learning tarot is like anything else: it is a skill to be developed, like musicality, artistic ability, or athleticism. Yes, some of us can take to these things more easily than others, but even though these individuals may be inherently gifted or predisposed to certain talents doesn’t mean they don’t require discipline and practice in order to master a craft.

I also didn’t yet have a connection with tarot. Like with any interest or hobby, we don’t always click with something right away, no matter how much we want to.

One of the problems was that I was treating my tarot deck like it owed me something. I didn’t really know what it could do or how I was supposed to interact with it. But part of the problem was that I hadn’t really thought about it much, either.

I had immediately assumed that it would gift me with some kind of ability to see into the past, present, or future. I had yet to learn that tarot isn’t a one-way street: the cards don’t do anything on their own. You need to put the work into it. And you need to allow your tarot-reading abilities to strengthen over time with practice. Discouraged and unwilling to challenge my impatience at the time, I put my new cards aside and slowly forgot about them.

It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that tarot re-entered my life. By then I had fully immersed myself in pursuing a career in media, communications, and publishing. I’d established myself as a freelance journalist before publishing my first book, an oral history on punk in Toronto in the 1970s, which I started when I was just twenty-four years old.

By the time the book was done, I was burned out and tired of the freelance hustle. The media industry was changing rapidly, and freelance budgets were drying up. Craving stability, I transitioned into the non-profit industry to do PR and communications.

At first, things were okay. I liked having a steady paycheque for once. My book had been picked up by a publisher, but its release date was still a ways away. I figured I’d work nine to five for a while until my book came out, and then I’d go back to freelancing or find a new path altogether.

On paper, my life looked great. I had my own apartment downtown, I had a good job, and I was soon to be a published author.

When my book’s release date came around, I handed in my resignation. This is crazy, my boss said. You can’t leave to do this. What will you do for money?

Something will come together, I said. Because something always had before.

But my boss was a practical woman. I’ll give you a three-month leave of absence instead. That will give you time to promote your book.

I took the offer, thinking that a leave of absence would buy me some time to re-establish my freelance career.

But something had happened to me: I’d gotten stuck in the comfort of the nine-to-five world, and I didn’t even realize it until I was released back into the world on my leave.

I wasn’t motivated to make any kind of change at all. I made half-hearted attempts to connect with some former editors. I tried writing a novel in my time off but never finished it. Often I found myself daydreaming about the things I would do with my paycheques when I went back to work.

My leave of absence came and went. I wound up back at my desk job. I didn’t know it then, but I would end up spending another five years in the non-profit industry.

As those years wore on, I started to feel that something was missing in my life. I have consistently described it as a spiritual void. I no longer felt any connection to myself. I had lost all sense of magic in my life, as though my relationship with the universe had fallen out of synch.

I began to get depressed. Is this how my life will always be? I wondered. It seemed that my life was on hold. When I got to work in the morning, it was as though a big, invisible pause button got pressed, putting out my soul and spirit.

I started following the work of a local astrologer named Phil Booth, finally deciding to book a session to have my natal chart read. Despite my keen interest in tarot, astrology, and other esotericisms throughout my childhood and teen years, I hadn’t given much consideration to these things at all in my early to mid-twenties. Too much of my focus had been swallowed up by work and ambition.

Do you read tarot? Phil asked. He said he had other clients with charts similar to mine, and they were all into tarot.

The question struck something in me. I hadn’t thought about tarot since my teens.

You need spiritual connection in your life. What’s your spiritual path? he asked.

This question hit me, too. It was the reason I’d come. No wonder I felt a spiritual void: in astrological terms, I was neglecting my basic needs. But even if you don’t subscribe to astrology, it pays to consider the famous saying by philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

I had cut myself off from my spiritual side. Although it wasn’t intentional, I had nothing to nurture it or stay connected to it.

I had to admit that I’d put a lot of distance between my current self and all the interests I’d had when I was growing up. I had always considered myself a spiritual person and had always found inspiration in magic and the unknown, and yet at the time, I had nothing in my life representing those things.

After that astrology reading, I went out and bought a tarot deck.

Things started to happen. One day while walking to work, I noticed a small pile of books someone had put out on the curb. At the top of the pile was Eden Gray’s classic A Complete Guide to the Tarot.

Playing cards started showing up everywhere. I always walked to work, but I would take different routes every day. No matter which roads I took, I would find a playing card along the way. Over the span of a year and a half, I collected over 150 cards.

When I changed jobs just before the holidays, one of my new colleagues gifted me with a tarot deck. I saw this, and it made me think of you.

Even though I’d turned my back on tarot once before, there was no escaping it now. The universe was putting it right in my path.

When I sat down with my new tarot deck, I had a little more maturity than the first time around. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to learn, and I was right. But I also knew by then that if I were serious about learning tarot, I would have to make a commitment to it. The world had also changed a lot, and it was so much easier to find books, blogs, and other resources about tarot than a decade prior.

Before I knew it, tarot was a full-on hobby, becoming a regular part of my life. I studied it, read for myself, and asked friends if I could practise on them. Eventually, after being self-taught for a few years, I started to take classes.

I wanted to understand tarot as deeply as possible. The cards had me hooked, and this time around, I wanted to do tarot right.

I didn’t realize it then, but as those years went by, tarot was slowly transforming me. Every time I pulled a card, it revealed something new or helped to affirm my direction.

And as I slowly learned to put away the books and let my own knowledge guide my readings, I noticed that my life was growing and changing in all kinds of ways because of tarot. It was making me see that there were many ways to look at a situation. It was deepening my self-awareness. And it was showing me the lesson behind events in my life, teaching me how to appreciate frustration, delays, and roadblocks.

This is why I always give beginner tarot students an enthusiastic warning: tarot will transform you. Who you are when you begin to use tarot might end up looking very different as time goes on. Why? Because tarot pushes us to pay closer attention. It puts us in touch with our thought processes. It challenges us sometimes to examine why we think the way we do or why we want what we want. Tarot helps us become more conscious of our actions, beliefs, and potential—and the impact these things have on the people around us.

The things you learn from tarot and the pace at which the learning happens will be unique to you. The way it shows up in your life will be, too. While it seemed to me that I couldn’t get away from tarot if I tried, you might not necessarily have the same synchronicities that I did. Or any at all.

I believe that anyone can come to tarot at any time. All kinds of people have attended my workshops, from high school students to retirees, from parents-to-be to grandparents. I have taught tarot to people who have always believed they have an intuitive gift and to people who never considered themselves intuitive at all.

Don’t be disappointed if tarot feels boring, confusing, or overwhelming at first. Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t feel like fireworks or if it lacks magic early on. Because in my experience, the magic begins simply in showing up with sincerity, openness, and a willingness to learn.

Before you dive any deeper into this book, I invite you to set an intention for yourself as you read on:

38246.png What has brought you here today?

38246.png Where are you at in your practice? Are you a beginner, a professional, or somewhere