asking tarot the right question

One subject that's been coming up a lot for me lately is the importance of asking Tarot the right question. It can only be a helpful tool for life if you are prepared to do that and it's come to my attention that many querents don't.. It's easy to become fixated on the focus area that's troubling you, but recognising that it's troubling you fairly consistently also means having to accept that you need to move beyond it. I truly believe that you can't have the best future possible if you haven't yet dealt with the negatives from your past that drag you down in the present. I strongly advocate querents raking over old ground in order to level it and make it suitable to build on. This is an important part of the process. But how much is too much? Recently I've been helping several querents who feel the deep-seated needed to address a relationship from the distant past, analysing why it went wrong, what they could have done differently and what the future of the connection might hold. Although I appreciate the importance of finding closure, one querent in particular has entered into a discussion with me regarding her apparent inability to accept the answers and put the issue to bed.

So, how many times should you use the cards to address the same issue? I would suggest that too frequently using the cards to explore it can lead to stagnation and a certain degree of emotional stubbornness when it comes to then letting the pain go. Almost every reading I do touches on something that needs to be faced up to and dealt with. The cards can only point to that need and offer advice to make the transition smooth, but it cannot do the work for you. That is where you need to trust yourself to put the lessons into action and you have to want to do that. Letting the message of a reading permeate your consciousness and nurture you means leaving the cards alone afterwards. Too many readings will begin to create conflicting messages and leave you more confused. Respecting the power of Tarot as a system to generate new perspectives means allowing a reading to do its thing. Once you've asked a specific question, make sure that if you're asking it again you have a good reason to. Why can't you move on to the next phase? Why are you delaying the acceptance portion of the programme? Why do you feel the need to keep receiving different answers to the same query? Is it because you're not prepared to accept the responsibility you have to yourself to eventually move on? Maybe you actually need to be asking the Tarot a different question. One which you're less likely to want the answer to but which will help you much more in the long run. For example, instead of continuously asking, 'Why didn't he want to spend his life with me?', ask 'Why am I having so much difficulty accepting that he didn't want to spend his life with me?' And instead of asking over and over again, 'Is he going to somehow realise he was wrong in the future and come back to me?', try asking, 'How can I productively contribute to my own future so that I stop fantasising and start living for myself?'

I don't have many qualms these days about telling a querent that they should recognise the counter-productive act of asking the same question or fixating on some element of the past that is already dead and gone. It's not easy to accept that some element of your past didn't bear fruit or go the way you wanted it to. But that recognition can lead directly to higher ground, so it's worth a try. There's only so much time you can devote to 'looking through the photo album' and only so many tears that should ideally be shed over a situation that hurt you.

If you're a querent who continuously wishes to explore the same subject, or you're currently working for a querent who seems unable to move on, I'd suggest promoting honest discussion on this. Tarot is a bottomless well of information and suggestions, but if you're not actually seeking the answer but instead seeking to prolong your own pain by staying stuck in the past, Tarot can't do anything for you except frustrate and upset you.