Personal tarot/divination.

I’ve been telling people I would start putting up free lessons to help get started in Shamanism. Here is the first one I start people with so they see how they already have some skills from birth that can be trusted. Self reliance is a good trait for everyone, Shamanic or not.

An easy way to start this project is to buy the standard 3×5 index cards from an office supply store. You’re going to use the blank side to draw a picture or symbol of a thought, perception or thing and on the lined side you will explain why the drawing on the blank side represents what it does. For instance, if you drew a tree to represent life, you may explain that it has a cycle and gives life…whatever. You can draw extra stuff in the picture that you are just seeing in your mind that you may not be able to explain now.

You will start of with at least 30 aspects of “life”. Things like:

Life, Death, God, Goddess, Chaos, Balance, Transition, Stagnation and whatever else you want to throw in. I suggest always adding the antonym of a new symbol for balancing your set.

You can do more than 30. I just start people on that number because it’s easy to do. You might find that you take a symbol and break it into two or more aspects later. You might not use any that I listed and chose things that I wouldn’t think of. Perfect. I’m not here to teach you my way. I’m here to help uncover what you already have. We can build on that later. You may have a completely different way you want to start off with or use a different system of categorizing life all together and that’s fine but you do have to departmentalize aspects so you will be able to give a reading in time sequence or give circumstantial and influential information.

The beauty of this is there isn’t any incorrect way to do it as long as you can give a picture to read and understand it. Wrong things to do would be to think about it too much, criticize your work, have distracting energies around you and hold yourself back. These cards are mirrors for your mind to see both sides of itself. The symbols or pictures come from the right side of the brain. That side has no time, no speech, no logic, its art and the whole picture. The left side of the brain that has math, logic, time and speech will articulate what is drawn. This process will give you the absolute truth of who you are and how you see things. There is no better source of divination than from your own source.

There are a few ways to start your readings. I suggest the first being to shuffle the deck as you ask a question. Set the deck on a flat surface and lay them out and pick a card. Keep it simple. Ask a question for the day and see how it plays out. Then ask for a personal issue and watch how life plays out for that personal question. Remember that you are learning a new dialect and there will be small mistranslations as would happen in learning any dialect. Some of what may be seen as mistakes may be openings for new symbols. You may also have new symbols come to mind as you watch things happen in everyday life.

After this exercise and the public info one (remote viewing) you will feel more connected to the “community”. After all, it’s impossible to be alone, right?

In doing readings you are asking for the truth. You have to be detached from the outcome or reactions of other people when giving readings. You have to be able to accept the truth about yourself. In the higher levels of these practices you need to agree to do the pictures. If you ask how you can do to help someone to get through their shit and you see yourself being a total asshole to them, then that’s what you do. They may come back thanking you for it later. The same can be for being lovers in the moment.

The best readings I’ve received were from people in the beginning of their deck. They had no idea what to do or how they were supposed to do it. They weren’t worried about being wrong or way off base. Their focus was on the cards and symbols in front of them. In a class setting I will write the bigger concerns in my life and things that occupy my thoughts the most on a piece of paper before I get my readings from my students. After the reading I will read aloud what I wrote on the paper. It’s surprising how good the beginners are at their first readings. Children have gone in deep and really surprised me and even been good in readings of the future. Oh, how we get screwed up when we grow up.

You don’t have to stay with or even start with the cards, it just makes it easy to begin with something flat and uniform. I have a set of small flat stones from the beach I use. I’ve seen people transfer their symbols from their cards to seashells, wood chips, ceramic runes and all kinds of other things. The more unique you make them, the more they are you. I have taken a symbol and made two symbols from it after an instance in life showed me different aspects of the first symbol. I encourage people to be open to amending and expanding their system. Why not? Flow with it and see where it takes you. After all, that’s what the first Shamans did.