Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Tilt.
Another one of the eye openers I had while in Daytona was realizing that I do have a gift for certain things. It’s just not necessarily in the way I thought it would be or should be or in the way that others have their gifts; therefore, to me I felt ungifted.
Case in point, when my High Priestess friend and I read Tarot cards for each other, I was a bit nervous. I knew she wanted me to read for her, yet I did not fill adept. Not only that, but because I know of her skills as a reader and intuitive, I was downright intimidated. I was so sure I would make a total fool of myself.
I’d brought my favorite deck of cards with me, the Arthurian Legend Tarot, and she’d brought her favorite with her, the Witches’ Tarot, based in Kabbalah, which I know just enough about to be dangerous, as they say. We went back to my hotel room so I could get my cards and so that I could show her my Lemurian crystals I’d brought with me. I couldn’t find my cards or the guide- book that went with them. I found the box I kept them in but the cards were not there. I was sure I had packed them and positive they hadn’t been stolen. I’d had them in the room already, playing around with them, but when I needed them or I thought I needed them, they absolutely were not there.
I went through every suitcase, looked under the beds, through the drawers, nothing. My friend was getting impatient.
“Just use mine,” she offered.
Uh, no. I so didn’t want to do that.
After years of reading cards, even from my favorite deck, I still need an effing book as a guide. I can read somewhat for myself, at least well enough to meditate on them and have a fairly good clue of what my intuition is telling me about my own situations.
When reading for others with all kinds of possibilities out there? And if I don’t know what’s in the guidebook, how will I know what possibilities to offer up? At least that’s how I’d always thought about it.
My friend must have sensed my hesitation. “Just do an intuitive reading,” she said. “You don’t have to know what every card means, but since you haven’t worked with this deck before, just tell me, gut-instinct, what you think they’re about.”
We went back to her hotel room for peace and quiet since the girls were in my room and we both needed to talk in a private setting. The Witches’ Tarot deck possesses some extremely powerful intuitive imagery, and I’m positive that I’ll be meditating and blogging on my insights about certain cards and what they represent in my life.
She read first for me, and I felt so much more at ease until it came my turn to read her.
My heart was pounding hard as I turned over some of the cards. I knew what some of them were supposed to mean, according to the Major or Minor Arcana and the number and description of the card, yet that wasn’t always what I thought when I first saw the card….
I put aside logic and repeating back what I knew to be true supposedly of each card and instead talked about what I saw on the card and how I saw it applying to her. Some of the cards, logic told me, were about certain things, even certain things that I knew to be true in her life but I shoved that aside and instead talked about what I first thought of when I saw the card. Things that didn’t really seem to have anything to do with the card at all but rather something that it triggered deep inside. I just opened up and let it flow, let intuition speak without any- one there to tell me I was wrong or that there was a better answer.
Unlike a couple of phony psychics I’ve dealt with, I
didn’t ask her questions that would help to yield an answer that I could parrot back to her. I did ask a few questions that seemed to be what I was getting, but by putting it in question format, I found it to be a way simply of saying it to her, not so much asking for the information from her as asking if it’s true what I was seeing or thinking based on the card…yes! Based on intuition.
She purposely did very little to respond. Occasionally she gave me a slight nod of her head but she was mostly quiet during the entire reading. When I was done, she filled in the blanks for me about how much of her life I had nailed and yet things I had no idea about, areas of self-sabotage and areas of pain, areas of joy she had not tapped yet.
It was the first real reading I’ve ever done for anyone else. She claimed it was powerful for her, as powerful as any therapy could ever have been, and then pointed to the first card in the reading and explained that whenever that card shows up, that it means you’re getting an accurate reading. She waited until then to tell me.
But as powerful as the experience was for her, it was far more so for me to find that I had a gift where I’d always thought I had a deficiency. A few hours later, after dinner and drinks, I went back to my room, opened my suitcase, and found my cards exactly where I’d left them…exactly where I’d looked before.
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