Talking to spirit with tarot.

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Jun 20

Welcome to the Samhain Tarot Blog Hop: Walking Into Life With The Dead! Hopefully you have arrived here from Raine Shakti’s post over at Tarot of Change. If not, you can check it out afterward by following the “PREVIOUS BLOG” link at the top or bottom of this post.

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My primary offering this month during the thinning of the veil has been delivering messages from loved ones in spirit through Spirit Tarot Readings. So I thought I would say a few things about how this works. Our blog hop organizer, Aisling the Bard, has asked that we share our views on spirit. I believe by the end of this, you will have some idea of my views.

Why use tarot to communicate with spirit?

You may be wondering why someone would use tarot when psychic mediums communicate with spirits with no such tools. Here are four possibilities:

1) You’re not a medium.

Clearly, if you yourself are not a developed psychic medium, you are not receiving messages from spirit without tools. Without getting into too much detail, psychics and mediums pick up the information they do through their “clairs:” clairvoyance (clear seeing), clairaudience (clear hearing), etc. Basically they have developed the sensitivity of their 5 physical senses. If you have not developed yours, tarot can help! Some people have even said that they started with tarot and then didn’t need it anymore. Personally, I love working with tarot and feel pretty sure I’d find another use for it if I no longer needed it for a specific task.

2) The spirit you want to contact may communicate differently than you.

Most people can tell you which of their five senses is the strongest. Even school teachers employ this understanding by teaching to different learning styles: visual, aural, kinesthetic, etc. In the same way, most psychics and mediums have one or two “clairs” that they specialize in, or at least prefer. You could be naturally gifted in clairsentience (clear feeling), but if spirit is communicating to you visually, you may not be looking for the message and miss it. If you know which of your clairs, or senses, is the most developed, it doesn’t hurt to go ahead and tell spirit, “hey it would help me out if you could speak the answer to me.” Or, if you are better with visuals, ask for a visible sign.

3) Not all spirits know how to communicate with the living.

Just like not all living people know how to communicate with spirit, not all people in spirit know how to communicate with the living. They are still human after all. There is a common tendency to assume one becomes all-knowing and all-powerful after death, but this is not the case. So if you are not getting signs from spirit–tarot can help! Just as you would tell spirit if your preferred mode of communication were visual, you can instead tell spirit that you wish for them to send their message through the cards.

4) Not all spirits are available to communicate.

Even a highly developed psychic medium will tell you that not all spirits show up just because they’re called upon. There could be many reasons for this. We can only assume that things are just as busy on the other side as they are here. With tarot, we can still tap into the energy of the spirit and perform a distance reading when this happens.

What should I ask my loved ones in spirit?

Again, people do not become all knowing and all powerful when they pass over to the other side. If your loved one wasn’t psychic, skip the predictive questions like will I get the job or how many children am I going to have? You can ask tarot those questions, but this isn’t the time. Instead, think about what you’d want to know if this person could call you on the phone right now. You’d probably want to know how they are and what they have been doing. There is likely something in your own life that you would love their opinion or advice on. And if they were a religious person in life, you might want to ask for a prayer or a blessing. Basically, all the things you’d talk about if they were alive.

What if I don’t believe in ghosts?

I’ve met atheists who don’t believe in god but do believe in all sorts of other things including spirits of people who have passed. I’ve also met atheists who don’t believe in anything that cannot be seen, heard, smelt, tasted, or touched. Those in the second category will likely find the idea of communicating with spirit problematic.

Regardless of whether you believe we live on past death in spirit or not, you have likely wished to see or speak to a passed loved one again. Perhaps you have even dreamt that this person was still alive. I don’t know anyone who, upon waking from a pleasant dream where they held their loved one again or received valuable advice from that person, would say that it did them any harm. This is what speaking to spirits through tarot can provide whether you believe it is truly spirit or just imagination. If speaking directly to spirit is problematic for you, try simply speaking to the cards: i.e. What advice would my grandfather give me about selling the house?

What if the message I receive from spirit isn’t real?

This goes hand in hand with the question above since if you are atheist, you naturally won’t believe the message is from your loved one. But if you do believe in spirit and are concerned that the message isn’t real, let me say this: our creative imagination is a boundless and powerful tool.

Too often we use our creativity to maintain negative thinking loops where we constantly relive that mistake from ten years ago. But we also use it to relive the best moments of our lives and to bring back to life what we have thought was lost forever. Of course, we can also use our creativity to create new realities. Real or not, it is through a process of imagination that we derive these messages from the tarot.

When I explain this to my atheist clients, I often hear a sigh of relief. Laws require readers and psychics to say: this is entertainment only. I.e. we are just playing a game. However, because this approach often works to take down psychic barriers, we more often than not find uncanny messages coming through that seem they could only be from spirit. One of my oldest clients identifies as an atheist and I prepped her for her first reading by explaining it in the context of psychology. By her second reading she was exclaiming: How do [the cards] know?? I just said: oh, yeah, and then there’s that..

xo
kim

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Thank you for stopping by and I hope you are enjoying the Samhain Tarot Blog Hop: Walking Into Life With the Dead! Please continue on to Arwen Lynch’s post over at Witches and Pagans by following the “NEXT BLOG” link at the top or bottom of this post.