Pour a cup of coffee and pull up a cushion, my beloved Earbud Coven.
Because in this episode, I’m talking about my favorite topic… Tarot. I’ve got guidance for both tarot seekers and new readers to get the most out of working with tarot cards. Today’s episode is going to debunk some myths as I share form years of lived wisdom slinging cards for my clients.
Whether you’re just picking up your first tarot deck or you’ve been reading cards for years, this episode offers something potent:
The truth about reading for yourself (yes, you can!)
Not only can you read for yourself … tarot is a fantastic meditation tool. One of the best ways you can become a stronger tarot reader is by working with your favorite deck.
Why I feel general readings can be a waste of your time with at a tarot readers table
I know its a bold statement… it’s my honest feeling though. You can get so much more from a tarot reading by asking about the things that are keeping you up and night, filling you with worry and brining you to the table.
Real talk on inverted cards and reading the nuance between meanings
Now, I don’t typically use inverted cards, many of my witchy sisters do. Let’s unpack this part of tarot reading. And please chime in on the Spotify pole. I wanna know if i’m the weirdo who isn’t reading inverted cards or if there is a general mix of preferences in the Ear Bud Coven.
- 00:00 Welcome and Introduction to Today’s Tarot Topic
- 01:45 Upcoming Events and Announcements
- 04:24 Debunking Tarot Myths
- 04:49 Meditation and Tarot
- 08:45 Advice for Tarot Readings
- 15:19 Inverted Cards and Their Nuances
- 20:38 Closing Remarks and Farewell
Come for the cards, stay for the soul. 💫
Transcript
Good morning. Hey there, Coven. How are you? I say good morning, but you could be listening to this at any time of the day. I just happen to be recording this in the morning, sharing my morning coffee with you. This is the witching half hour or so podcast where we talk about tarot, goddesses, and all things healing and delicious and witch crafty.
If you're new here, welcome to the earbud coven. My name is Jodi Anne. I have more than 25 years of experience walking this winding, spiraling path that is witchcraft. I'm happy to have you here as part of the earbud coven. And today's episode is actually gonna be about tarot. We haven't done a tarot episode in a while.
I'm excited to be offering this to you. I've got a great topic. We're gonna talk about what tarot is, what tarot isn't, how to start working with it, and what I wish people knew when they came to a tarot reader for a reading. It's gonna be a little bit of debunking some tarot myths , and talking about how the cards can be used and what we do as readers for our clients.
I hope that this helps those of you who are studying tarot, and I also hope it gives information to people who come to readers so that you can all get the best reading and give the best reading that you can. I'd also like to let you know that I will be at Pagan Pride Vancouver Pagan Pride. Again, this year I'll be running a workshop that I'm working on.
I don't have a title for it yet, but I'm really excited to be hosting. A workshop there. I really love this gathering. I hope to see you there if you're in the lower mainland. It's a great way to make connections, to meet the community, to just feel that community vibe that we've all been missing and craving in our collective.
It's a great place. It's on their website, Vancouver Pagan Pride Days. Go and Google it. It's fantastic. Also, I have started a live in person circle. The spaces are limited. It's hosted with my beautiful sister friend, Natalie that I introduced you to through our Ask a Witch episodes that we've been running this summer.
I'm really excited about this project. So again, if you are in the Lower Mainland, connect with me. Spaces are limited because we are hosting this in a home. Our circle can only fit so many bodies. If you're a member of the Facebook earbud coven, you will get notifications about this circle and how to sign up and be a part of it.
I think that's it for housekeeping. Yeah.
You probably know that tarot is a huge passion of mine. I love these cards. It's what brought me to witchcraft to begin with. I received my first reading when I was 17 through a friend of mine. We were hanging out in a basement. She whipped out these cards. She was reading tarot for everyone, and I just fell in love with them.
It resonated so deeply with me that I went out and I bought a deck of cards and I started learning and studying tarot. If you're counting, that means I've been studying tarot for around 30 years now. I didn't always have my cards in my back pocket ready to whip out at any moment. I have had natural stretches of time when I'm not actively studying the cards, but I have been working with them that long.
Even during times of my life that I wasn't reading for others or working as a medium for other people, you could find me at a table with tarot cards anytime I had a big decision to make in my life. So one of the first things I wanna tackle is this idea that you cannot read for yourself. I don't know where this comes from, but honestly, you can read for yourself.
I really love working with tarot as a tool of self-discovery, as a mirror, as a reflective meditation tool. I recommend that people do that. Just meditate with the cards, and a great place to start. If you're new to working with tarot and you want to teach yourself and you want to study the cards, work with them with meditation.
Pick your favorite card. We all have one. I know. We all have one. We all have a card that we totally resonate with, whether it's the name or the archetype or the art on that card. Start there and meditate with that card. Sit with that card. Look at that card. Don't look in the book my love. Look into that card.
Do some journaling about that card. What does that card stir in you? This is how we learn the tarot cards. This is how we get to be really good readers. Let your intuition guide you and dive into what this card is stirring in you and why you're doing this from a place of learning and connecting to the energy and the archetype that the card is representing.
Then go to the book, right? I want you to trust your intuition. So I want you to take your favorite card, focus in on it, journal with it, meditate with it, see what it says to you, how it speaks to you, what it stirs in you. Then go read the beautiful book that came with your beautiful deck. Learn what you.
Tuned into, get the validation of how attuned you are by finding your meaning first and then comparing it to what the designer of the deck, the author of the deck was putting into that artwork. You will find that more often than not, you've picked up on the essence of the energy in that archetype. That is one of the best ways that you can start working with these cards.
It takes a lot of the pressure off trying to read and divine for another person. Go internal with it. Use these cards as a way to connect to your truth and to your spirit guides, and to your intuition. You'll get to reading for others by learning these fundamentals and building a foundation of understanding the archetypes in the car.
And that's kind of what I tried to do when I put together the episodes in the back catalog of this podcast. I went through the tarot cards one by one. If you look, those episodes are woven through the first three seasons of the podcast. I haven't gone back and looked at any of them. They're posted as they are.
So the first few will definitely reflect my inexperience at podcasting, but I still think that the messages in them is valid and that there's really good information [00:08:00] for all of you who are studying tarot and tarot is something we study over time. It's quite a divination system. A lot of people read Oracle cards.
Oracle cards are beautiful. I have no problem with Oracle cards. I just prefer tarot. I love the big esoteric system. One of the things it allows you to do is use spreads and get really specific information. I find that's what I love the most about tarot. You do a mini Celtic cross and you really look at the position of the card, the meaning of the card, and how that relates to the question.
So here's my advice for people going to a tarot reader. Please my beautiful clients, all of you seeking information, think about what you wanna know, 'cause a good tarot reader. Can get you specific information about specific areas of your life, about problems you are wrestling with. A really good tarot reader will have an arsenal of spreads they can use and apply to the issues that you're bringing to them.
We can't tell you what to do, but we can give you a really good outlook and a really good idea of all the energies swirling around you and how you can move through the energies so that you get a good outcome. And I know that can sound a little bit abstract, so let me put it in real witchcraft, real practical examples.
Let's say you're unhappy in your job or your career, so you're going for a reading and you might wanna say to your tarot reader, extraordinaire, should I leave my job now? Honey, I can't tell you whether or not you should leave your job. I'm not gonna give you direct orders. What I can do as a good and experienced reader is tell you what skills you have working for you.
I can tell you about the energy of the job you want. I can talk to you about steps you can take towards a better career. We can look at what is blocking you in the career you're in, what's blocking you from happiness. We can dive into all kinds of levels of the problem of I'm unsatisfied at work. One of my favorite tarot spreads is actually to put down an either or spread where you look at the different choices you have in front of you and the energies surrounding them and the lessons that will come up if you take path A, path B or path C.
So in the practical example of, I hate my job and want to stab my coworkers, you would look at option one. Stay in the unhappiness. What can you shift in your life? So this is bearable. Option two, leaving your job. What steps do you need to take so that you attract a better job? Option number three, maybe you want to go back to school.
What are the energies surrounding that option? And a good tarot reader can take all of that and give you a forecast. What could materialize for you? We can't give you the lottery winning numbers. If I could get that as a medium, I wouldn't be on this podcast. I would be living on a beach full-time. You all know that.
What we can do is give you good guidance about problems in your life. We can channel messages from dearly departed. We can bring wisdom. From your guides, through the cards, through the reading, and point you in the direction that will best serve you. And because this is my podcast, I'm going to say a very unpopular opinion, and that is that general readings are generally a waste of everybody's energy most of the time when you are coming to a reader or a psychic or a medium.
You are there because there's something going on. You are there because you have a burning question, you have a problem, you have something you are working through. We want to help you. We wanna give you insight. We wanna give you the spiritual counseling you're seeking. So ask us. Ask us about your love life.
Ask us about your career. Ask us about your finances. Ask us about your sister-in-law, who's driving you crazy. Ask us. I think that the practice of sitting across the table from someone and asking for a general reading and asking to be given the message that you most need, part of that comes from this idea that the psychic or the medium needs to prove themselves to you, that we need to prove to you.
That we are picking up on the right energy, and if you give us information that you are leading us to an answer or you are, what's the word I'm looking for, that you are somehow giving away things that we should be able to pull out of thin air. Does that make sense? So, so I get that. If you're at a psychic fair with someone that you don't know who's a new reader to you, you need to trust that they've been vetted.
And in the context of a psychic fair, if you are five or 10 minutes into a 20 minute reading and nothing is connected, you can get up off that table, you can walk back to the host and you can ask for a different reading. Any fair I've worked at has had that policy that if you don't connect with that reader, that you can walk away from the table and you can get your money back.
All of the readers at a fair are there to be of service to you. We are, yes, trying to expand our client bases with the exposure of a psychic fair, but for the most part, we all have clients and we all get referrals from our long-term clients. So in the service of your hard earned cash, bring your question.
You will get a lot further with your reading if you sit down across the table and you say, this is my problem, or This is the area of my life I'm having issues with. Or, can you give me information about this? So that's my advice to everyone here listening in the Earbud Co. Who goes to a reader? Think about what you wanna know.
What is your burning question? Bring it. And don't you worry if you have a dearly departed or a guide that has advice for you that you must know it will come through. Even if you're asking about your crush. And if your crush likes you back, your messages about your life path will also come through. Don't you worry.
Let's talk about inverted cards. Because it's such a neat topic to me. I know a lot of readers who read inverted cards, and I typically don't. I did when I was first learning and I stopped reading inverted cards. I don't even know if I a hundred percent remember. Let me see if I can figure it out here with you.
I know I was reading inverted cards when I first started and when I was working on the psychic line. I think it must have been at some point when I was doing a lot of readings out of bookshops and metaphysical shops because so many people would shuffle my deck. I get my clients to shuffle my deck, and then everything got [00:16:00] so wild and crazy and it didn't feel like the cards were always inverted.
It felt like people would shuffle them and then they'd hand them to me and yeah. I know that now when I'm reading, the way I pull them out the deck is I flip them and I flip the card so that their face up and all the pictures can be seen by the client. I think the cards are beautiful. I think the artwork's beautiful.
I want you to see them upside. Right. I don't need to see them upside. Right. It's my deck. I've been working with it for a long time. Inverted cards are great when you're learning. Because it helps you differentiate whether it's the positive or negative aspect of the card. Every card has its meaning and then it has its reverse meaning, which is its opposite.
Meaning what I have found over the years is there's upright meaning, there's the reverse meaning, and there's kind of like this continuum between the two. So I stopped reading inverted when I started realizing that sometimes a card is not black or white. It's the shades of gray in between the lessons.
Let me give you a real example. Let's use a card that's pretty easy to polarize like the emperor, right? The emperor talks about strong. Authoritative Mars style, powerful, angry energy. Uh, upright Emperor is usually about that authoritative energy and really diving into willpower. That's like a pretty crazy energy right.
Now inverted. That can be power over. That can talk about really rageful people that can talk about inner rage, right? But what about all the places in between? What about different aspects of authority and different aspects of anger? If you're only ever looking at an upright card or an inverted card, you are missing so much of the lesson.
Using your intuition, you're not limited to the positive or negative or the upright or inverted aspect of the card. With the emperor, it could be that an inverted emperor isn't actually talking about rage. It could be talking about someone who doesn't know how to step into their willpower, but if all you're reading is rage, you're gonna miss that nuanced bit of the energy of the emperor.
So if you're new, by all means, learn the upright and the inverted. But if you've been reading cards for quite some time, I would love to challenge you to dive deeper than that. I would love to ask you to look at what are the steps between the upright and positive or auspicious meaning of a card and the inverted or difficult or challenging.
Aspects of the card, what shades are in between those? If we look at the emperor and that idea of rage or, or authority, right? We can look at positive leadership versus negative leadership leading by example. Stepping into your power, stepping into your will. What about if you're someone who's uncomfortable stepping into your will?
That card could come up in a positive upright, but it could actually be telling you that your client is afraid of their own power, afraid of their own voice, afraid of their own will, and not taking agency in their life. But if all you're doing is reading upright and inverted, you're gonna miss that nuanced message that can come from the emperor card.
I am interested to hear your take on this. Let me know all of you out there, what are your feelings about inverted cards? What are your feelings about asking specific questions? What are your feelings about using the tarot as a meditation tool? How did you start learning and understanding the tarot? Talk to me.
I'm here to listen. I'm probably gonna put a poll on this just to see how everyone's feeling about some of these topics. I love talking tarot. I could talk about tarot all day long. Unfortunately, though, I need to get to some of the other things on my to-do list today, so I have to leave my beautiful coffee with you, my love.
And do some actual muggle grocery shopping and things. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for spending time with me in your earbuds. I'm honored by the time you give me out of your day for the conversations we have. For the community we have together. Speaking of community, there is the Facebook group, the earbud, coven, witching, half hour or so, you can reach me on the Instagram.
I'm sometimes on TikTok doing things. I now have a Substack, which I'm excited about. 'cause I'm gonna be doing, I don't know, it just feels really magical. The Substack feels really. Like glittery and and magical, and I'm not sure what it's gonna evolve into. Who knows? Who knows? Go check it out. If you are on substack, it's under the witching half hour or so as everything is.
Thank you so much for joining me. Blessings my dear one.
Jodi Anne 
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