Tarot Tip Tuesdays - Creating Customized Tarot Spreads

Whether you are new to Tarot and in the throes of building a connection with your Tarot cards or an advanced Tarot reader diligently honing your Tarot reading skills, I am putting out a Tarot tip a week to help you to consistently make Tarot a part of your everyday life.

So here goes your Tarot Tip for this Tuesday:

When I first started my journey with Tarot, I was taught to use basic 1-card, 2-card and 3-card spreads.  The positions were fixed, for example, a 3-card spread had cards representing past, present and future,  Then as I got more comfortable, I expanded my repertoire to classic spreads involving 6 cards or more, for example, the Horseshoe spread and the Celtic cross spread.

I think that is well and good when you are still at the beginning of your tarot journey because it lends structure to your reading.  However, as you grow more confident as a tarot reader and indeed if or when you turn professional, do bear in mind that  unlike the fixed positions you see in a tarot spread, life generally is not experienced in a highly rigid, fixed and structured manner.  

So why use a "cookie-cutter" tarot spread?  What is stopping you from customizing a spread to your querant's needs?  

When you do a reading, go ahead and engage your querant.  The spread should always be structured out of a 2-way dialogue with your querant. With this dialogue, you will find that the spread can be layered on with more cards focused on a specific question about the issue to get closer to the root of it and hence provide a more focused advice later.  

You might want to consider 2 basic rules when customizing a tarot spread:

1) When you keep the question focused, the cards will provide a focused advice.  

It all starts with some basic line of questions and I encourage you to approach your querant's issue with as much curiosity as you can muster.  As you approach a friend when he or she shares a problem with you, you should approach the cards in the same way.  Start with finding out where your querant is at now with the situation? How did he or she respond to it? What would he or she like to see coming out of it? What is blocking him or her from achieving this outcome? How can he or she turn the situation around? What tools or resources does he or she need to effect the outcome that he or she wants? How would the situation pan out in the end?  

2) Layer the questions to provide greater depth to the reading.

An example of this is when you ask the question about what is blocking him or her from achieving this outcome, you may layer it after that with additional cards to find out what are the internal and external influences contributing to this blockage.   When you ask the question about what the outcome would be, you may layer it with more cards addressing the additional advice he or she needs to make a good outcome sustainable or the advice he or she needs to to move forward from an outcome that appears to be not in the querant's favourite.

I do not use a fixed spread for my clients.  I usually rely on my intuition to design one specific to their questions. A spread could use anywhere from 5 cards through to all 78 cards in the deck depending on how I layer the questions.  They also do not have to have a "shape" unless I intend to create a theme around it like during Christmas when I use a Christmas tree spread perhaps. I normally do not care whether it looks like a cross, a horseshoe, a star or the zodiac wheel even.  Usually, I would just pull the cards and put it on the table in a linear fashion, just so I can clearly see a story building around the situation.

However you design your spread, remember that it is your responsibility as a reader to provide as much "bandwidth" as possible to your querants to open their minds to the multitude of options available to them.  So go ahead and pile on the layers to the questions and keep the questions focused.  Most of all, have fun with your cards.

May your Tarot cards provide you with a full deck of possibilities throughout your day.

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About The Writer:

The writer of this blog post is a marketeer by trade, and a tarot card reader by accident. She was awarded a Certified Professional Tarot Reader qualification from the Tarot Certification Board of America (TCBA) and is also a certified numerologist.  She is currently running a Tarot consultancy based in Singapore called Sun Goddess Tarot,  which provides confidential intuitive readings combining the metaphysical disciplines of Tarot, Numerology and Astrology via face to face and emails as well as readings at corporate and private events and workshops.  A member of the American Tarot Association (ATA) and the Tarot Association of the British Isles (TABI), she is also a reader for the Free Tarot Network and mentors Tarot protégés on behalf of the American Tarot Association

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