Bit of an overthinking problem...?

Hi all, i'm getting really annoyed with myself.

This week i've been practicing my card combinations as per this excellent post on Biddy's site:
http://www.biddytarot.com/ultimate-guide-tarot-card-combinations/

I like that using combinations really brings more creativity into my readings but am having the side effect that with so many possible meanings, I just can't settle on one. As in at first I interpret them one way, and then I factor in what I know of the card meanings, and then something in the image strikes me....and gah! Totally lost with at least three different interpretations. I'd really like to nail this technique, though.

I think, in a nutshell, my intuition has got confused and gone on holiday and I have a pretty noisy, chatty brain anyway, which doesn't help.

I guess there's a lack of confidence on my part also - i'm always afraid of being ...not wrong exactly...but missing something important.

Anyone else ever feel this? Any advice, please?

I like this! There has been another blog around who did the same for three card combinations... in fact the author claimed she had invented this method. She posted different meanings for one combination on a daily basis.

But as you just see, knowing how to combine the cards doesn't train your intuition. It comes with time and practice! And if you're stuck, just don't read for a couple of days. Maybe you just need some rest. [emoji4]

As for the practice, the Reading Exchange forum is the ideal place to do so! Maybe that's the time to solicit the monthly Newbies Circle! [emoji6] (Come over, we have cookies!)

I agree with Farzon. It sounds like all you need is some practice--the inner chatter will die down with time.

Farzon said:

As for the practice, the Reading Exchange forum is the ideal place to do so! Maybe that's the time to solicit the monthly Newbies Circle! [emoji6] (Come over, we have cookies!)

Click to expand...

Wait, are there actually cookies? If so, I'm sold.

JackofWands said:

Wait, are there actually cookies? If so, I'm sold.

Click to expand...

Sorry, just a saying [emoji16]

Hi Nightvision,

My first answer to your question would be to try to do not stress about it if you doubt your intuition when pulling 2-3 cards together (for combinations). Making mistakes is also part of the process and you will surely improve over time.

When you have combinations in front of you, take your time. Look at the details and everything. Also, your very first impression can be important, but also modified after a couple of minutes with the addition of nuances that were not present firstly.

Also, try this tip if you are alone and have a confusing voice in your head: speak loud when you see the cards, as if you were explaining them to someone. It helps me sometimes when my brain is very scattered.

Hope it helps a bit

Inner chatter and madness is always there.

But with practice you just comfortably decide to stick to one interpretation.
The one that jumps out as best, according to the context of the question you're working with.

Have a break. Then come back again.

Different interpretations are not wrong - just different see? And for one sitter, one will make sense, whilst another will be a better fit for someone else.



*Thanks for pointing out this Biddy post - which I'm now going to go and read...

Thank you Farzon and Jack, you had me at cookies!

But you are right and I don't make use of all that this forum has to offer. Tarot reading shyness is not doing me any good at all.

Tarot_quest I am using the tip of speaking out loud and it is really helping!

Tanga, I think I am definitely waiting for one interpretation to jump out as best, taking a break does seem to help a bit, I am probably wearing out my attention span as I find every reading does leave me quite tired.

Many thanks all for your input

May I suggest that you do your spread...look at it without trying to work out anything...Just breathe in the essence of the spread and let it settle inside you....no working on it at all just yet....Then do something else, knowing that it's message is inside you just waiting to pop up when it's ready....

It will happen ...like POP!!

Then go with it ...regardless....If off the mark...so be it...if spot on ...so be it also....

the missing link to your dilemma is TRUST...and it strengthens the more you launch yourself over the logical abyss...Just like the FOOL card....

NightVision said:

Hi all, i'm getting really annoyed with myself.

This week i've been practicing my card combinations as per this excellent post on Biddy's site:
http://www.biddytarot.com/ultimate-guide-tarot-card-combinations/

I like that using combinations really brings more creativity into my readings but am having the side effect that with so many possible meanings, I just can't settle on one. As in at first I interpret them one way, and then I factor in what I know of the card meanings, and then something in the image strikes me....and gah! Totally lost with at least three different interpretations. I'd really like to nail this technique, though.

I think, in a nutshell, my intuition has got confused and gone on holiday and I have a pretty noisy, chatty brain anyway, which doesn't help.

I guess there's a lack of confidence on my part also - i'm always afraid of being ...not wrong exactly...but missing something important.

Anyone else ever feel this? Any advice, please?

Click to expand...

I certainly had times like that when I was starting out. Maybe everyone does as in general we are brought up in a society that values logic and the scientific more than intuition and hunches. Tarot runs a lot on intuition and it can take a bit of work to get past the training to think things out logically that has been more or less drummed into us, as I see it.

At least that is my take on it.

I don't have times like that any longer because over time I learnt who I am as a reader, what works for me, and most importantly to respect and follow that. I follow what is conducive to my reading in the best way and steer away from what isn't. I think that's something every reader needs to learn. And the best way for each of us to read varies from individual to individual. You have to find that, respect it and follow it.

The reason I don't go there anymore is that I learnt about myself that I am an intuitive reader by nature. When I follow my impulses and feelings and go with it my readings get more accurate. When I stop to think or try to reason things out, my readings become less and less accurate.

I know this about me. That thinking in the sense of rationalizing things out ruin my readings. So I pretty well trained myself/learnt not to do that I read anymore. If my intuiition tells me something different from a book reading, and I have to choose, I discard the book meaning entirely if I have to. I only use parts of it IF my intuition tells me that is meant to be part of the answer. Overall, I know I am an intuitive reader and I work to follow that first and foremost.

If my brain tries to get to chatty, I know I personally will not be able to read well. I have to stop and walk away and come back when my mind has slowed down. Maybe meditate for a while, THEN come back and try again. I can't read when my mind is doing that and I don't try to. That is me anyway.

One thing I heard early on that helped me turn off my mind is that when your intuition is most on track your mind can't make sense of it. Your mind wants to think things our "rationally" but intuition is not that.

When the intuition is ON. you are getting information from somewhere (whether you call that bringing it up from your unconscious mind or forming a connection with the Divine....)...Wherever....that information is suddenly in your mind where a second before it was not. With no thought involved.

Then your rational mind gets confused as it does not understand exactly what happened and where that info came from. And that then creates doubt. Your mind does not understand how you came to that answer so it tells you you must have been mistakes or you must have just made it up out of thin air. And that creates the doubts.

Except that you did not make it up. Intuition is a very real thing.

So that is what I learnt. That THE MORE doubt I felt inside, THE MORE I felt I must have made up that answer, ....the more i had the feelings, THE MORE accurate my readings were. I came to understand that over time. This for me was an important lesson as a reader. That I learnt as I went.

That the more inner doubt I was feeling, the more my mind was trying to interfere and tell me I must be wrong and to guide me in another direction, the more in touch I actually was with my intuition and the more accurate the answers it was telling me were. I learnt that more and more over time.

And then as I did learn this, each time an answer came to mind that my mind was vehemently trying to talk me out of, I learnt instead to tell myself "WOW, my mind it trying hard to talk me out of this one so it REALLY must be accurate/Truth. And it always did turn out to be. :grin

And over time I learnt to not only doubt what my mind was telling me as a reader, but to know that the more it tried to talk me out of something, the more on track I actually was. And to trust my feelings more than my thoughts as a reader.

I then stopped listening when my mind talked in a reading more and more. I stopped taking what it said as if it were the truth. I laughed at it because i knew the more it told me i was wrong, the more right I actually was.

And after I stopped taking it seriously more and more. over time it stopped interfering in my readings. And then I put my trust in my intuition, not in trying to think things out. And you know what happens when you put more and more trust and faith into your intuition? It then grows even stronger and more and more reliable and accurate. It grows when you give it your trust, like a plant grows when you give it water.

Btw, sometimes you will miss something important and so what. I think we just have to accept that NO human being on the face of the earth can ever be perfect. We can do our bests and strive to grow and improve. But some days you will make mistakes and forget to add in things. We all do, we can all only be human. Humans make mistakes, we're not gods. Can't be helped.

That is only as important as you make it. It doesn't have to be if you don't make it so. Mistakes can be fixed. I have even at times forgotten something in a professional reading and thought of it the next day. I just wrote a PS to the querent and told them the additional info I had seen. I can do this as I only read online but the idea is that it's not serious and things can be fixed.

I also tend to believe that we and the querents are "guided" so if by chance you forgot to tell the querent something and there is no way to reach them and tell them later, that that means they were not meant to know. IF they were, you would have been guided to say it at the time. Those are my beliefs...

Hope that helps.

Babs

For me, creatively and imaginatively blending card meanings is where most of the fun in reading lies, and also some of the most instructive lessons. (It also gives me a perfect opportunity to play with quirky metaphors.) But finding a workable "structure" can be a dilemma. The need for some kind of "hierarchy of significance" soon becomes apparent.

For example. let's look at three-card combinations.

Some people read them as a time-line progression (past/present/future - it doesn't really matter in which direction); in this case, the "future" or "outcome" card becomes the critical factor to which the others contribute. Other people identify one dominant card as the "focus" of the reading (often but not always the center card in the sequence) and then consider the rest as modifying "feeds" into that card's core meaning.

If one card stands out as more powerful or relevant to the subject, that one can be treated as the "focus" regardless of where it falls. If a single Trump or Court card appears with lesser cards, it can become the "point of access" for starting to "unpack" the meaning of the spread. It might be overtaken by the other cards in the final analysis, but I've found it a reliable place to start. Sometimes that card jumps right out in an "intuitive flash" depending on the question being asked.

As a working model, I like to turn them into a simple "sentence:" if there is a dominant card, that becomes the central "thought" describing the "what" (or "who"), "why" and maybe something of the "where" and "when" in rare cases, while the modifiers act more like adjectives and adverbs showing the "how" ("in what way, by what means"). It's not a perfect analogy, but it's functional. If there is no stand-out card, I fall back on other methods.

The relative "friendliness" or "unfriendliness" of the cards to each other is one way to synthesize their meanings. This could be by elemental quality (Fire/Water/Air/Earth), by number (repeating, odd, even, etc.), by orientation (upright or reversed), by rank or simply by their inherent characteristics. Cards that cooperate well together can result in the matter working out in the way that is most advantageous to the joint expression of their natures, while antagonistic cards often produce some "hiccups." Frequently, it lands somewhere in the middle, requiring finely-tuned judgment to sort out; that's where experience is just about the only dependable solution.

Really, any kind of preponderance or deficiency can be a useful indicator for where to take it. For example, no Cups in the set could show a lack of emotional potential in the matter, and the challenge becomes to determine how that might drive the querent and what offsetting factors might be present as a "way out."

Two-card combinations can be handled as a truncation of this approach, with a "dominant/subordinate" theme. This can be trickier, especially with cards of relatively equal potency. Sometimes they just "agree to disagree" and produce static instead of harmony. This is where some people resort to clarifiers, but I just try to dig a little deeper to find whatever common ground I can. Intuition is often the only reliable way.

The key point is that no card functions in a vacuum (unless, of course. you're doing single-card draws); "one thing leads to another," as the saying goes. They play off one another in any number of imaginative and creative ways. The trick is to figure out which is the "lead voice" and which the "chorus." Lacking that, it becomes what folk-rock singer Tom Rapp once said at a concert I attended long ago: "Last night the audience was so dumb that I could hold my ear up to their mouths and hear the ocean."