It occurred to me this morn­ing that I had no idea what my next blog post was going to be about. When I pulled up my feed read­er and Ayslyn’s Cor­ner issued an open Tarot Chain Chal­lenge. I only found her blog a few days ago, but so far I’ve enjoyed the posts that I’ve read. So here is my answer to the Tarot Chain Chal­lenge and if you read tarot cards join in and share your answers.

What was the first deck you ever used/received/played with?
I got an old copy of a Rid­er Waite Smith deck, I don’t even remem­ber where and I don’t actu­al­ly remem­ber doing any actu­al read­ings with the deck though I am sure that I did. The deck didn’t real­ly speak to me so short­ly after that I went out and bought the Osho-Zen tarot deck.

How long have you been read­ing the cards?
Around 17 years. I start­ed read­ing tarot cards when I was in high school.

What is your pri­ma­ry deck and why?
I actu­al­ly still use the Osho-Zen deck most of the time.  The pic­tures are love­ly and the deck deals a lot with our inter­nal state. I think we have to under­stand and change our inter­nal state in order to under­stand and change our exter­nal life.

Do you have dif­fer­ent decks for dif­fer­ent purposes?
I also have and use the Joie de Vivre tarot deck. My mom picked it up for me last year because my dog’s name is Joie de Vivre. I am start­ing to use it at times when I would use the Zen deck and find that I real­ly like it as well. I also have Lucy Cavendish’s Ora­cles of Shad­ows and Light. Which is a weird funky ora­cle deck that I enjoy using. I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly use one instead of the oth­er for a dif­fer­ent pur­pose, but I’ll usu­al­ly ask my guides which deck to use before doing a reading.

What time if day do you like to read the most?
Again this is most­ly intu­ition based. If it is some­thing major that I need insight on I will usu­al­ly do it in rit­u­al, wait­ing until night unless I feel drawn to per­form the read­ing out­side in the sunlight.

Do you use oth­er forms of divination?
I’ve dab­bled with runes and pen­du­lums, but haven’t used either of them reg­u­lar­ly.  How­ev­er I just cut a bunch of wood­en disks and picked up a wood burn­ing tool to make a set of hand­made runes.  I’m going to try adding those in to my rou­tine. I’ve always had much bet­ter results with tarot, but I’ve been read­ing cards for so long that I can’t help, but think that some of that could be experience.

What was the most pow­er­ful read­ing you’ve ever done?
I’m not sure what I would qual­i­fy as a “pow­er­ful” read­ing, but prob­a­bly one of the deep­est and most help­ful read­ings I’ve done was to get insight into a friend who was hav­ing some issues. The read­ing showed me the inter­nal rea­sons for her mood swings, neg­a­tiv­i­ty, and anger/depression issues. Under­stand­ing some­thing makes it eas­i­er for me to be com­pas­sion­ate. And allowed me to inter­act with her in a way that was ben­e­fi­cial to us both.

 

If you are inter­est­ed in read­ing tarot cards I have two pieces of advise for you. The first is lis­ten to your intu­ition and the sec­ond is when prac­tic­ing with friends and fam­i­ly don’t have them tell you their ques­tion. By not know­ing the ques­tions you are stuck with just the cards and your intu­ition with­out your per­son­al feel­ings about the sit­u­a­tion get­ting in the way.

If you want to par­tic­i­pate in the Tarot Chain Chal­lenge head over to Ayslan’s Cor­ner and check out the orig­i­nal post. And if you have a favorite tarot deck let me know in the comments.