How I Got Into Tarot & Use It In My Business
Every time I post a tarot spread on my Stories, as well as a flurry of unfollows (!) I always get questions about what I’m using and how. Tarot is a tool I use daily as part of my year of being Powerful, with everything from morning intentions to big decision making, but just a little over a year ago it was something I would have never even entertained the prospect of. So today, I thought I would share how and why I got into tarot, how I use it in my business and the resources I use.
How it started
I’ve been listening to the Being Boss podcast for years, and they often mention tarot and have had several tarot entrepreneurs as guests on the show. I would generally listen to these episodes but be somewhat rolling my eyes and intentionally disbelieving and building a wall between myself and the content. I wasn’t brought up in any religion, but with clear parameters of what was ‘right’ and respectable, and the occult didn’t fit into those parameters. So, for a long time, tarot was never on my radar as something I would consider at all.
I remember distinctly, it must have been around the middle of 2018, I was driving to my parents and was on the A34 just outside of Oxford listening to such an episode where the tarot expert was talking about the ways she used tarot in her business. “That sounds like it’s actually pretty fun”, I thought to myself, “but it’s not for me”. On my business journey I’ve noticed how often in life I see things I like or want to do but dismiss them as ‘not for me’ without giving myself the chance. This was one of those occasions, and I didn’t do anything about it. But, this marked the turning point from tarot being something I would never do, to something I liked the sound of.
A few months later, at the turn of the year, I did Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year workbook for the first time, which includes a tarot spread that, obviously, I completely ignored and skipped over. A friend at the time was also doing the workbook and asked me whether I’d done the spread, and challenged me to just try it. So, I downloaded the Shadowscapes app, and did it.
This wasn’t a eureka moment. I remember worrying a lot about doing it right, and feeling confused about what this spread was supposed to tell me (it was more of a prophecy spread which even now I’m not hugely keen on anyway). But, it did show me that storm clouds and thunder didn’t roll in when you started looking at tarot cards. Being an ex-student of both literature and art history, I also really enjoyed the process of reading the stories and meanings and looking for symbols in the artwork. Most of all, however, I now had an app that I’d paid for on my phone, so if nothing else I was going to get my money’s worth and use it – and that’s when I started to get into tarot.
For a while I used the app to draw a daily card and think about what I might mean, but I struggled with feeling very on the surface. Within the app they had some spread suggestions, and at a time where I felt that I needed direction, I used the Celtic Cross spread – which I blogged about here. I found the experience so illuminating, clarifying and comforting, and that really marked my conversion to it. In April I asked for a set of physical cards for my birthday, and continued to dip in and out of tarot over the course of 2019. When I was reviewing the year, I realised that the times I felt most lost and out of touch with myself were the times that I wasn’t doing tarot. I know this was likely because I didn’t know what to ask, or it was taking everything just to stay afloat, but as I thought about how I wanted to embody powerfulness this year, I knew that tarot had a crucial part to play.
How I use tarot day to day
When you think of tarot you think of prophecy and fortune-telling, crystal balls and mysterious women behind velvet clothes tables – that’s certainly how I thought of it. However, the prophecy part of it is the thing that least interests me, and most tarot practitioners, I think, are trying to move away from that image. Personally, tarot is much more about the present and the internal, a way of accessing and communicating with my intuition and my true instincts. I use it as a tool to facilitate journaling, a method to bypass my chatty, overthinking brain and get to what my soul is trying to tell me.
I really struggle to have a journaling practice, for a number of reasons. I find it hard to prioritise it, I never know what to write, I feel the pressure of what journaling should be and just feel self-conscious, like some time in the future people will read the notebooks and judge them on their (lack of) literary merit. Basically, I can’t get out of my head enough to just sit and purposelessly write about my thoughts and feelings. Even writing about it now, I can’t quite communicate how alien a prospect it feels to just be able to do that.
Tarot gives me the framework. It gives me a way in by providing pictures and meanings for me to unwrap and apply to myself – if this card is about rejuvenation and letting go of one thing to make room for another, how does that apply to my life right now? Because I’m writing about the cards rather than just myself, I somehow feel less self-conscious, less like this is something for future people to judge. And crucially, I find things out this way. A card will confirm something I know I’ve known all along, or it will prompt a thought to pop up where I think ‘well that’s interesting’.
This year I bought the Biddy Tarot 2020 Planner (this is the one you’ve probably seen in my Stories). I bought on a bit of a whim, seeing it right while I was in the heat of the excitement of setting my word of the year and I thought it would be a really useful framework for keeping me accountable to my Powerful intentions. I now set a (more or less, sometimes I forget) daily intention using the planner – I draw a card, think about what it means and set an intention for the day based upon that meaning. (Side note – I heard somewhere that a good way to start a new habit is to attach it to an existing one, so I do my thinking about my intention while I’m brushing my teeth). The planner has space to write the intention and a reflection, so each morning I write down my reflection of the previous day and my new intention. It is absolutely not necessary to have the planner to do this, you can do it in a notebook, but I have the planner so I use it.
I must be honest, there are some days where I kinda phone the intention in. Perhaps I’m running late or I have a busy day and I just scribble something down to feel like I’ve done it. But mostly I try to make sure the intention is meaningful, and I am finding that it’s helping me stay tethered to my big picture on a daily basis.
The other thing I do regularly is a spread on the full moon and new moon. Again there are spreads for this in my planner, but I tend to supplement them with other spreads too – in the resources I’ll share my favourite places but you will get a ton of spreads just searching on Pinterest. Whereas the daily card is a quick way to be more thoughtful, the moon spreads are a deeper dive. I love doing these as it means that twice a month I have the opportunity to review what we’ve been doing, think about what I need, what’s still true to me, and think about what steps I need to take next. Again, this is all stuff you can do with a journaling practice, but the tarot spreads I find help me to really delve deeper below the surface. Sometimes you see a card and it all rushes out and you just know exactly what it’s telling you, other times you have to really mine for it. In either case, it’s always such a useful check in.
How I use tarot for business
So that was my regular tarot practice, the daily intentions and twice-monthly moon spreads. Obviously, these are also being used towards the business because most of my daily intentions are about what I’m going to do each day and the moon spreads tend to reference my business plans too.
However, I also do some more ad hoc spreads when I need to. At the beginning of the year I used the goal-setting and planning spreads in the [affiliate link] Everyday Tarot book (although very similar spreads are online here and here), to help add depth to my goal setting and run what I was thinking past my intuition. I will generally repeat these spreads quarterly, or if I’m having a wobble, to make sure everything I’m doing still feels in alignment and recalibrate if necessary.
I turn to tarot spreads when I need more support too. Perhaps if I’m feeling out of control, I need to decide between two things I want equally, I’m not sure what to do next or I’m trying to figure out if I really want something, I’ll search for a spread to help me. As I said earlier there are so many spreads on Pinterest, so searching for things like ‘decision tarot spread’, ‘direction tarot spread’, ‘what do I want tarot spread’, will get you loads of results and you can pick the ones that resonate. I tend to use pre-created spreads rather than make my own mostly because it’s the framework that I crave. I’m reaching for the tarot because I don’t know how to form the questions myself, but this is probably something I’ll try to develop in the future.
Below I’ve created a resource list to help you explore further if you’re interested, and if you have any more questions shoot me a message on Instagram.
Shadowscapes app – it costs $3.99 and is a good starting point before committing to cards (which are expensive)
[Affiliate link] Prisma Visions tarot deck – this is the deck I use, I chose it because I liked the detail and symbolism in the imagery, but you must choose a deck that speaks to you for your own reasons
Little Red Tarot – an online shop with a good selection of diverse cards
Biddy Tarot – I love Bridget’s approach to tarot, she specialises much more in tarot for business and is less ‘mystical’ so a great introduction
Biddy Tarot tarot meanings – I read these every day when I’m looking for more depth with my intention
Biddy Tarot spreads – there are lots of great business spreads here
Modern Seer – I like the spreads this account shares
Labyrinthos – more spreads
