Same (or better) reading as you would get in-person
Lower cost than in-person
No appointment needed
It’s a learned skill.
And an internet meme.
James Bach, author of “Secrets of a Bucchaneer Scholar” once posted on social media that “People get defensive because they have something to defend.” It’s a normal, natural response and part of the learning process. After you read Tarot professionally for a while you learn not to take it personally. They’ll get over it. Or not. It’s up to them.
Sometimes the thing people are defending is something they actually need to change. Sometimes the “it” they are getting over is an honest answer that they didn’t want to hear. Nobody enjoys being called out on their s**t.
Sometimes being called out is exactly what we need.
As much as we enjoy indulging our confirmation bias, tempers flare when our biases are challenged instead.
As I read the cards, Tarot is usually a world of ideas, empowerment, encouragement, expanding horizons and gentle nudges. A little diplomacy goes a long, long way.
On the other hand, if subtle messages and gentle nudges are ignored, after a time our spirit guides (or however you think of these things) roll up their sleeves and break out the frying pan to the face method of communicating.
That’s the case here. Cups cards deal with emotions and close relationships. The emotion in question for the inverted four is moping and self-pity. There is no nonsense around the card today. Short, sweet and to the point, kind of like a caveman club over the head, the reversed four is telling us to stop moping, it’s time to move on. Wallowing in self-pity serves no one here. AKA …Knock it off!
Fire alarms aren’t quiet, subtle or diplomatic. They are loud and in your face and don’t care about feelings.
It isn’t fun for anyone when things get tense or feel confrontational. That’s never the intent of a Tarot reading. The intent is to shake us out of a stuck place or turn up the volume on a spirit message loud enough that we can finally hear it. The more important it is for us to hear a message, the more blunt, loud and direct the spirit message will become. A good Tarot reader can reflect that sense of urgency without being mean about it.
Even when spirit is telling it like it is, a little Tarot diplomacy (and humor) can go a long way.
Thanks so much for reading! Please follow the blog to get all of the latest posts direct to your inbox. See you at the next sip!
For the record, I wrote the bulk of this post yesterday, so no (private client from this morning) this isn’t directed at you. We all need a little bit of brutal honesty from the cards every now and then.
Sage Sips Blog is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip your coffee
YOU CHOOSE:
Your choices are everything. They are the cause that brings your future into effect. Tarot helps to guide those choices so you can make good ones.
Tarot doesn’t tell you what will happen in life. Tarot helps you figure out what to do when life happens.
Death: OF COURSE this is your eclipse day card. Eclipses symbolize change and transformation. That is exactly what the death card is about. Only an empty cup can be filled. Let the old and toxic go and welcome the new and better in.
Five of swords: The price of victory is too high. Is this really a hill worth dying on? Redefine your goals. Work toward a victory that makes sense. You don’t have to prove your point based on blind principle.
High Priestess: Magic and spirituality come only from within. Yes, it really is nothing more than the moon’s shadow. The magic and mystery is up to you to feel and find. music via youtube shorts Allyman’s Tarot Deck used with permission @publishinggoblin1072
Science is the best way humans have to learn about the physical world and navigate the public sphere. In the physical world and civic life reason is our ultimate guide.
Yet, the subjective inner world lies outside of science’s grasp. Psychology comes close. There are reasons that there is much overlap between the work of Carl Jung, Taoism and Tarot. Science and spirituality are two sides of humanity’s coin so to speak. Tarot can help us understand and navigate the inner, spiritual world as much as reason must guide us through the outer one.
I’m no expert.
NASA says there are 2-3 eclipses a year. There are various degrees of solar coverage, and they happen in wildly different spots all over the globe. Total eclipses are just one of several types (partial, annular etc). To have a total eclipse land in your front yard is, indeed, a once in a lifetime gift.
And that is just the global perspective.
Open the perspective to the galaxy. Or the universe. How many planets have a moon that is just the right size at just the right distance in just the right orbit for a total eclipse to happen at all – ever? Somebody like Neil DeGrasse Tyson will have to answer that for us, but I’m guessing that it is mind blowingly, achingly rare. No one knows how many planets have intelligent life. How many places do both of those things converge. How many planets in the universe have eclipses like ours AND beings who can understand and appreciate them? Even if it’s not rare, it is a beautiful, powerful experience well worthy of every bit of hype and reverence it receives.
Yes, solar eclipses are just the shadow of the moon falling on parts of the earth. Period. Our internal subjective experience of this wonder of the Cosmos is where the magic resides with all the validity of science and shadows.
@SpiralSeaTarot on Threads, who shares my preference for smaller layouts, brought up the topic of a Solar Eclipse Tarot layout. I don’t know of any existing ones offhand, but it seems like an easy one to write.
I think the energy path reading that we do here all of the time could be adapted and amped up a little to meet the occasion.
Card 1: Waning Light
This card represents issues and energies that are fading away. This is something we are strongly advised to release once and for all. This is what must happen for our transformation, for life to progress to something better. The death card has turned up frequently lately in readings I’ve done and in social media posts by other well respected readers. Eclipses are traditionally associated with transformation and change. Change energy may be both ancient and a modern collective, but that doesn’t make it any less valid or powerful. Eclipses are a portal to change and this card hints at what must change for good and for all – or at least be put on the back burner for a good long while.
Card 2: Totality
The eclipse at totality looks like a portal to another dimension. This is a moment ripe for total communion with the spiritual experience of being a conscious human at this place and this time. Of every being in the entirety of the universe, you are here, now, witnessing this beautiful, unique thing. It can be, it must be, a moment of full presence.
In this layout, this card represents your spiritual guidance in this moment. This is what the universe most wants you to know. This can represent a moment of being your most powerful and profoundly authentic self. This represents your life path and life calling in this moment. This points to your portal, your connection to your highest and best.
Card 3: Emerging Light
This is hope and optimism and the other side of your powerful transformation. This is the thing to reach for, the thing to choose, the path most open to you. As the light of the sun returns, it spotlights the place to put your hopes and energies. It spotlights the path to take and direction to go. This card lights up the way and path forward.
Here is a solar eclipse reading for the collective, but I encourage you to get or do a reading for yourself. The profoundly spiritual is the profoundly individual.
Waning Light
Stop pushing. You don’t have to be in control. You don’t have to push and strive every moment. If you are content with the way things are, you’ve already won. If you aren’t happy, maybe you are courageously pursuing the wrong things. Hold up a moment. Is all of this frenetic action serving you, or some idealized purpose? Figure out what you really want. If you have it, great, call it a day. If not…charge in that new direction. If it is the right thing, you’ll get there without all the fuss and fury.
Totality
The essence of change is a new beginning.
The death card led us here. When you change what you do, what you think, how you live, how you show the world who you are, then the old thing, the old way, the old you essentially dies to this moment. BUT time – and you- continues. Moment slips into moment, and as the old slips away, the new emerges. Alan Watts famously said that “you are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.” This eclipse is the perfect opportunity and excuse to make a change and let the new you make a grand entrance. Physically, in the real world, do what you need to do to be safe. For your inner world – this is your permission from the universe to begin to fearlessly be who you really are and always wanted to be. Do it! Now is the time! Let yourself be yourself, no matter how carefully you let the world in to your new beginning.
The way to your highest and best is to stop waiting, and simply begin.
Things don’t have to be perfect immediately, but they can never progress if you don’t start to move. They say it is the journey that matters, not the destination. For there to be a journey at all, you must take your first step.
Emerging Light
The new you is magic.
The knight of swords is active power. It is yang power. Now is the time for yin power. Magnets can be powerful. This is the time to attract. Draw your power and best life to you like a lightning rod. But that requires that you do your part. Working magic means working, albeit working smarter not harder.
To catch lightning in a bottle you have to brave a lot of storms.
If you want to attract attention, you have to let your light shine where people can see it
Transformation requires change – releasing and beginning.
It is circles and cycles within circles and cycles – just like the literal eclipse.
Watch the eclipse in person if you are able. Watch online if you can. If you are night side or far away – know that eclipses exist. Reach out with your intuition and imagination and know that its energy of transformation and magic exists for you too.
After all, you are an Earthling with the privilege of living on a planet where a total solar eclipse occurs.
Sage Sips is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip your coffee.
Get a personalized reading HERE. Private reading purchases support the this blog and its YouTube channel.
CHOOSE your card from the snapshot above, then watch the video to reveal your card and get the reading in video description or below.
Strength: Never confuse blind fanaticism with strength. The strength you need requires a presence of mind and compassion not just brute physical endurance.
“Digger” Death: Change is not only inevitable, sometimes it is a relief. Bury that thing and walk away. Let it go.
“Bones” Death: Look for what lies beneath. Knowing the whole story can change your perspective, your feelings, your decisions. In other words, knowing the whole story changes everything.
Deck: Alleyman’s Tarot by Seven Dane Asmund used with permission
Spiritual growth is not an exercise in mass consumerism.
It isn’t a contest to see who is the most woke, the most pious, the most serene, the most wise, the most anything.
It isn’t a sprint. It isn’t even a marathon. It is about the quality of this present moment. It is about you being happy with you – right here, right now.
The most important lessons in our personal growth and evolution and maturity and autonomy are often learned the hard way. They are often hard-won over significant amounts of time. So it is important not to diminish those lessons by moving on too soon.
The two of pentacles is about balance, but it is the quicker, dynamic equilibrium of a unicycle rider. Temperance is the balance of a glacier, it is the balance of Stonehenge.
Temperance is more than just balance, it is about integration.
Balance can be juggling two different things. Temperance’s type of balance is about integrating those two (or more) things into a stable, foundational new thing. The two of pentacles is a balls in the air, juggling kind of balance. Temperance is a low center of gravity, “weebles wobble but they don’t fall down” kind of balance. To borrow from Frank Herbert’s Dune, Temperance type of balance comes from Usul, the strength of the base of a pillar.
When a hungry person eats, they must then digest. The same is true of insights and epiphanies. The work of finding them is lost if we don’t integrate them.
We must change the big lessons and the big progress from a ball in the air that needs to be balanced into the integrated base of the pillar that imparts balance. This is why integration and transformation are integral parts of the Temperance card’s message of balance.
Live as your new self. Live your new truth. Make the new you an integral part of the old you. Then you can move forward again in certainty and – you guessed it – balance.
Next up: more “My Side of the Table” Tarot behind the scenes
Sage Sips is Tarot in the time it takes to sip your coffee (or whatever you like to sip this time of day)
Seven of Pentacles: Wait. Give the seeds you planted time to grow. Don’t meddle…if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Just wait.
Seven of Swords: Mischief is afoot. Watch your stuff. Don’t fall for phishing. Be on the lookout for petty bs and swat it down if needed.
Nine of Pentacles: Enjoy what you’ve achieved. As one project wraps up, it’s good to take a minute to appreciate what you and your team have done before moving on to the next big thing.
Card doesn’t fit or feel right? Enter the card or any keyword in the search bar on the right side of the page (or scroll down on mobile) to browse the archives. Your message will find you – all you have to do is look and listen.
We are having a blissfully rainy day here in the ‘burgh. The energy this week has been kinda chaotic and funky. Weird even. The energy right now is the reset we need to shake off the funky mojo and get back to the normal squirrel rave of life.
If you are working this weekend – thank you. Stay chill, hang in there until your next time off. If you have this weekend off, stay chill, do what needs done and relax when you can.
I do weird things on the weekend like think about reverse engineering. Reverse engineering Tarot to be exact.
It is an interesting exercise at any skill level of Tarot reading to take an idea, anything, and try to find a Tarot card that best exemplifies that concept. Instead of going from a random card to its keywords, go from a random idea to its key card.
It doesn’t always work. Sometimes it takes a few cards to capture the essence of the idea, but I would guess that is why card layouts were invented. We’ll get back to talking about layouts another day. For today, I’ve been thinking about which one of the 78 cards best communicates the idea of authenticity.
Authenticity is a big, stage of life, personal growth, life-lesson kind of concept so my first instinct is to look toward the major arcana. Of those, my attention is drawn to the World card.
In my opinion, this card are best summed up by not just “the World” but by “Cosmos” and “Gestalt.” Together, it gives the feeling of the biggest of big pictures and everything in it.
Everything in the world includes the masks we wear AND the beauty behind them. Everything, the Gestalt, the cosmos includes truth, lies and everything in between. That includes the authentic self of each and every human being. Whoever you are, whoever you want to be, however you want to be perceived – every facet of your true self – is included, accepted and connected with the grand everything that The World card symbolizes.
Authenticity is a part of that everything.
Every part of you is a part of that everything.
That everything-ness of the World card in particular and of Tarot in general gets behind our social masks. It flows both ways. When you allow a reading to touch the real you and not all the “could” “should” and “will” you get a higher, more potent level of guidance and help.
Should you choose to work with a professional reader instead of taking the DIY approach, the reader’s level of authenticity also enhances the quality of your reading experience.
No two readers are alike. Some are con artists. Some are artist-artists. Some are voices from a higher realm. Some are practical, grounded, roots as deep as a tree. Some are therapists in artists clothing. Most of us are out here doing our thing just trying to make it through life ourselves and hopefully help some folks along the way.
You’ll know the difference when you see it. You’ll know when someone genuinely believes in what they are doing, or at least what they think they can do. The trick is finding someone whose authentic self vibes with your authentic self. Unfortunately there is no way for us readers to know when that is the case. It’s up to you to listen to your inside authentic self.
Thank you so much for reading today. Next up: You Choose interactive reading. See you at the next sip!
Pick a card from the picture above. Watch the video to see the reveal. Get your reading below.
Magician: This is a card of manifestation and transformation. It is also a card of co-creating, in other words working with the universe to bring your intentions into reality. Often this kind of magickal working is heavy on the WORK. The magician must do their part.
King of Pentacles: Survey your kingdom. Focus on what you have. Don’t spend your energy wanting what you don’t have this week. Once you see what you have on hand, it becomes clearer what you truly want, what you need and how to get what is really missing. Wanting what you have is contentment.
Death: Change is inevitable. Seven Dane Asmund, creator of this Tarot Deck (Alleyman’s Tarot, used with permission) He calls this the “dancing death” of the several versions of the Death card in this deck. Dance with this moment. Embrace it. Fully be a part of it because, for better or for worse, this moment will change momentarily.
Two of Wands: Prepare. Plan. Get ready. Change or travel may come soon.
Nine of Wands: Live your enlightenment. Live the hard-won lessons you’ve learned. May them your own before you press on
Hierophant: Know what you don’t know. Don’t guess or feel your way through this time. If you don’t know, get help. Go find the knowledge you don’t have right now.
Looking at all three cards, there is a sense of “on the precipice” but in varying degrees. There is a feeling of something about to happen – soonest for those who chose the two of wands, slightly less soon for those who chose the hierophant, longest for those who chose the nine of wands. For all three cards, moving forward depends on you. Either there is some piece of knowledge or information you need to find in order to move forward well, or there is some bit of preparation you need to do for a good outcome, or it just plain isn’t time to move. Go for quality, not quantity in all three cases.
It’s President’s day here in the U.S. so the fam is home for the day – That’s where my energy is at the moment.
If you have any questions or comments, leave ’em below. I’m happy to answer any questions you have here in the blog. Next time: Learn With Me: BTS
I’ve made minor attempts at this since New Years Day, but this time I’m going to back up and do a proper run at some introductory material and give you a real behind the scenes look at how my particular style of Tarot really works. No nonsense, lots of transparency and plenty of shameless self promotion.
”Only an empty cup can be filled” as the proverb goes.
Cups in Tarot has to do with emotions in general as well as emotionally close relationships; sometimes romance, sometimes family, sometimes found family – any relationship. Today, the energy is focused on the general side more than a specific relationship side of the card.
The Ace of Cups today is reversed. Different readers deal with reversals in different ways. I always start with an intuitive gut-check. Does it feel significant or is it just a coincidental by-product of shuffling and handling the card deck? If it feels coincidental, I just flip it upright and keep going with the reading. Today it feels meaningful, so it stays upside down.
In a larger card layout a reversed card can mean that whatever the layout position is about is blocked or turbulent or troubled somehow. In a one card reading, it isn’t that the card takes on an opposite meaning or is somehow bad or negative – it also points to a problem or blocked/turbulent energy flow. In a one card reading it might be a little harder to pinpoint the area of concern.
Of course, here, we are working with general collective energy. It’s a mood, not a crisis.
“Emotionally drained” comes to mind.
So does “catharsis”
The analogy between water in a cup and important emotions is a particularly apt one in this case.
Water left stagnant in a cup can become contaminated, dusty, undrinkable. Ignored emotions can also grow unhealthy. Pouring out, experiencing and coming to terms with emotions is difficult. It can make you feel exhausted and drained in its place. That is the benefit of a little harmless catharsis (have a good cry, vent into the void of a journal, play your favorite song just a little too loud, go for a run, take a long walk)
Emotionally drained is probably better than emotionally toxic.
Only the empty cup can be filled.
May your cup be filled with healing good things.
Next up: You choose card of the week for Feb. 19 (tomorrow)
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
You must be logged in to post a comment.