About Tarot Coaching

A reading, and then a step further

Most people know what a tarot reading is: you bring a question, the cards come out, and someone tells you what they see. Tarot coaching starts there and keeps going. The cards open the conversation; the coaching is what we do with it — the goal we name, the pattern we notice, the one thing you decide to try before we speak again.

I trained in this with Biddy Tarot, whose Transformational Tarot Coaching™ course teaches tarot as a coaching tool rather than a fortune-telling one. If you'd like their explanation of the difference, it's here: Biddy Tarot

How I read tarot

Non-predictive. I make no predictions. I don't tell fortunes, foretell events, or claim any psychic or supernatural ability, and nothing in a session is a forecast of your life. The cards don't know what's coming, and neither do I. What they are very good at is something else.

Bringing the unconscious forward. Carl Jung described the personal unconscious as everything you know but aren't thinking of right now — what you've forgotten, what you noticed without noting, what you feel and want without paying attention to it, and "all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness." A tarot card is a picture with no fixed meaning, and when you look at one and say what you see, what you see comes from there. You project onto the image — the person on the card is tired, or trapped, or about to leave — and in naming it, something that was under the surface is now on the table between us, in your own words. That is the whole method. The card is the occasion; the meaning is yours.

Archetypes. The seventy-eight cards are a catalogue of the patterns every human life is built from — the mother, the child, the journey, the loss, the turn of the wheel. Jung called these archetypes: dispositions laid down in the psyche that shape how we meet life, and that we can only ever know through images. Tarot is one of the oldest and most complete sets of those images. That's why a card can land with such force for someone who has never touched a deck: the picture is new, the pattern isn't.

Secular. None of this needs the supernatural. I read the cards as psychology and story, not divination — the approach The Secular Tarotist calls "tarot without the mysticism." The philosopher Will Buckingham describes consulting the I Ching not for answers but to loosen the false certainties he already holds, so that an either/or decision opens into a dozen paths; he calls it an uncertainty machine rather than a certainty machine. Tarot works the same way here. You arrive sure of two options. You leave having seen a third, and the assumption that was hiding it.

Compassion-led and trauma-informed. You're in charge of what a card means and what we do with it. Nothing is pushed. If a card touches something tender, we can sit with it or set it down, and we go at your pace. This way of reading owes a debt to Lindsay Mack, whose Tarot for the Wild Soul community I'm part of.

The middle path. A reading meets you where you are — accepting who you are right now — while the coaching looks toward who you'd like to become. Holding both at once, without collapsing into either, is the whole practice. It's the balance the Wheel of Fortune tool is built on.

What a session is, and isn't

Tarot coaching is coaching. It is for personal growth. It is not therapy, counseling, or mental-health treatment, and it is not a crisis service. I hold a mental-health licence in Washington and practise therapy separately, under a different name, with different people; I am not your therapist here, and nobody I've seen as a therapist can be a coaching client. If you are in crisis, call or text 988.