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Forums Forums Tarot Sometimes I have trouble understanding a reading.

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    muckwicket
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    What do you all use to help you interpret things? Books? The internet? Your intuition? All of the above? It’s hard to understand what the cards are saying at times. How does one get around this? For instance, my last burning question was about my chronic anger and how I should approach dealing with it. Also *why* I feel this way all the time. I pulled two of wands, ten of cups (r) and page of pentacles (r). I have a book to help me out but honestly I dont see the correlation to my question(s). What am I doing or not doing?

  • Sometimes I have trouble understanding a reading.

     muckwicket updated 1 year, 2 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
  • Uisgah

    Guest
    January 25, 2023 at 4:29 am

    I seldom dip into a book any more (unless it’s the Book of Thoth since that’s my main deck). I usually just follow James Rickleff’s advice for understanding ambiguous cards: “Let then simmer in your consciousness, they will eventually make sense; they always do.” Sometimes bringing your imagination to a creative view of the images can inspire new insights. I often use metaphors or analogies to come up with storytelling ideas (for example, I call the RWS 10 of Cups the “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” card because it looks like “Desmond and Molly Jones in their home-sweet-home, with a couple of kids running in the yard”).

    Regarding your specific cards, I just did a reading for someone where the 10 of Cups came up within the context as “abundant good will.” Perhaps reversed it could mean denial of good will, or maybe a hostile or skeptical attitude toward the idea that such abundance is possible. The Page of Pentacles has been called the “student” card (all of the Pages are, really), so reversed it might mean difficulty in understanding the message of the reversed 10 of Cups.

  • calicosmoke

    Guest
    January 25, 2023 at 4:29 am

    When I was first learning tarot, the best advice that anyone ever gave me was that it was my job to take the cards that I was given and turn them into a story. Each card is its own standalone entity, but the cards that came out with them and the question asked became the full context to figure out which of the many meanings that each card has made the most sense. Doing that for each card and then bringing them together in that “story” can really help elevate a generic reading into something that becomes much more personal and meaningful. (At least, that’s just how it works for me, and other things work for other people!)

    So if we look at this logically, you’re asking about your anger and how to deal with that. It makes sense to start by individually looking at the meanings of each card. (I won’t list every possible meaning, but just a few for each card.)

    2 of Wands: a decision that needs to be made, being torn between two options, working together with someone in a business kind of sense, travelling overseas, waiting for something, restlessness, disconnect and detachment.

    10 of Cups reversed: unhappy family (the “family” here can be a literal family, or close friend group etc), feeling isolated or abandoned from loved ones, pretending that you’re in a loving situation with family when you aren’t, divorce, emotional abuse.

    Page of Pentacles reversed: bad news about a material situation (i.e. money, job, bricks-and-mortar home, physical items, etc), not taking good opportunities, laziness and general bad behaviour causing difficulties, a lack of loyalty, instability.

    When you look at the above, considering that you’re asking about your anger issues and how to deal with them, (unless there’s specific personal context that makes sense), it’s highly unlikely that the 2 of Wands is signifying you working together in a business with someone else, and is much more likely about you being torn over an option, or waiting for someone else’s action about something.

    The same context makes it much more likely that the 10 of Cups reversed is about conflict within your family. Then, the Page of Pentacles reversed doesn’t make much sense talking about bad news in a material sense, but more about you holding yourself back.

    Only you will know the full context about what sparked the anger (even if you’ve suppressed it). Considering that you basically asked three questions and took three cards as a general answer to all of them, I would take those three cards as a general, “What’s the most important thing to understand about my anger?” as that covers all of your frustrations and desperation to get to the bottom of the question.

    So, if I were given those cards in that context, I would say that it looks like some disconnect between you and your family (whether family-family, marriage-family or friends-family), where you expected more from them, but there’s isolation and a lack of support from them. The Page of Pentacles reversed then would signify that instead of you focusing on yourself, you could be (subconsciously) waiting for them to change, when you need to be the one to move on and improve yourself. I don’t mean that coldly or cruelly in the slightest, or mean it in a “you’re to blame” kind of way. (Text is hard to convey tone, ugh.) I mean more that from those cards, you can’t wait for improvements from others, but need to put yourself and your healing first, especially if you come from a dysfunctional kind of family background. It’s much easier said than done, though, but therapy for anger is a good idea, because you don’t deserve to feel like that.

    I hope that helps, and I wish you nothing but the best!

  • honorthecrones

    Guest
    January 25, 2023 at 4:29 am

    I believe that therapy works better to understand why things are the way they are. Especially when you deal with issues like anger or depression. Those answers can unleash emotions and pain that are not always safe to explore without professional guidance.

    Tarot I think, can be more of a help with questions like “What steps can I take to bring more joy into my life?” “How can I successfully remove this anger?” Try to frame the question in such a way that you receive practical tools to augment the more mundane solutions.

  • ReflectiveTarot

    Guest
    January 25, 2023 at 4:29 am

    You’re asking two separate questions and pulled a bunch of cards with no definition, so this was always going to be a little fuzzy.

    The deeper question is how much this affects you and whether you should look for a therapist, because wonderful as Tarot is, if you’re wrecking jobs or relationships, you need help faster and more thoroughly than a pack of card gives you.

    I’d look for either one spread or two, but my instinct is to separate them because this isn’t a one-off, you talk about ‘always’, so there may be a number of things going on in your life. I’ve had good look with googling [topic] tarot spread and looking at the images that come up, so you can experiment a bit – ‘why am I angry tarot’ ‘how to calm down tarot’ for instance bring up spreads you can then follow and poke around to see what speaks to you. I also find the spreads on Interrobang Tarot useful for going deep, so that’s a place I like to look.

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