I can't use any more techniques for now or my head will explode! Just remembering to take into consideration the house the card is in, knighting, mirroring, and chaining, if needed, is enough for me after I read the card and its neighbors. Whew! Tired just writing that!
Hi MissNine,
You shouldn't feel as though you need to overload yourself with techniques. Rana has a lot of techniques in her book, but she's been reading for several decades and she was trying, I'm sure, to give the reader their money's worth, but she even says in the book that she doesn't use all the techniques all the time.
With houses for example, I haven't seen very many people saying they read every card with its house in a GT. I think many people simply read the houses for the significator card and perhaps some of the topic cards in the spread, but that's it. The same with knighting - I think these techniques are meant to be used judiciously.
Personally I think it's vastly more important to try to gain a feeling for each card and for how they work together in combinations before you start even thinking about other techniques.
For myself, I'm still working on understanding the cards and how they combine in lines. For GT, I'm looking at only the horizontal/vertical axis and the square of nine around the significator card, and that's it. I'm not even looking at knighting or mirroring, and I may never look at them.
As far as near/far, I believe Mary when she says a great many readers use it, but I also believe that there are a great many who don't. In recent times it's only become widely popular in the last few years, and although some readers (not referring to any member here) state vociferously that it's the "only real method," it's important to remember that these same readers were, just a few years ago, stating just as vociferously that what they were doing then was the only real method.
Personally I find the near/far method mildly intriguing but I'm not very interested in it at this point, and mixing it with the reading-in-lines method seems like mixing apples and oranges. Reading in lines is what attracted me to Lenormand in the first place, so that's what I'm going to concentrate on for now.
So, as far as I'm concerned, when one is near the start of one's Lenormand journey, no mirroring, knighting, chaining, near/far, or head-exploding are required.