Category: professional tarot

The Plight of the Free Reading Requests

On By benebellIn professional tarot, tarot17 Comments

Bitstrips - Free Reading Please

So today I am going to talk about something no tarot reader has ever, ever talked about before. A novel topic, one not yet addressed by anyone. (Okay, truth: I am like the 39,458,323,492,345th tarot reader to talk about this issue. But I want to talk about it anyway.)

As a budding tarot practitioner, you will have done countless free tarot readings for folks, friend and stranger, before a light bulb goes off in your head and you realize you’re good at reading tarot and could go pro with it. So you do. Now you’re a professional tarot reader, or at least that’s what you’re telling yourself and everybody else. You have a price list up and you’ve sent out a press release or announcement notice to everyone you know that you’ve launched your own tarot business.

[Wait, hold up. “Press release? Announcement notice? What is this woman talking about?” I went on a bit about press releases in a previous post here. And here is a template announcement notice you can use to create your own to send to your contact list: SAMPLE ANNOUNCEMENT NOTICE FOR TAROT BUSINESS LAUNCH (PDF file).]

Okay, back to the topic at hand. As you can see in the sample announcement notice, assuming yours was something like it, you’ve clearly given out your pricing list and everyone knows you’re now a business. This isn’t just a hobby and your friends know that because you’ve told them. Complete strangers oughta know it, too, considering it’s clearly posted on your website.

Yet you would be a unicorn if you didn’t get any audacious requests for free tarot readings. It’s a plight every tarot reader deals with.

The Friend Who Wants You to Just Pull a Few Cards, Please, This is Important

Bitstrips - Friendly Request for Free Reading

Now that you’ve disseminated the announcement notice for your tarot business launch, the pro is lots of people are aware of your service and you are now on their radar. The con is at least a bunch of them are going to try to haggle a free reading out of you.

You’ll want to know what your own professional policy will be for handling such situations. Most professional tarot readers would probably advise you to say no and not step foot onto the slippery slope of giving out free readings. I would say it depends on how much free time you have, what makes you happy, and whether you have bills to pay.

If you say yes, then you’re enabling that person to come back to you again in the future for more free reading requests. And then what? What if you say yes for the first free reading and no for the second request? That friend will–whether she admits it or not–feel betrayed by you (because it’s basic psychology) and resent you for saying no because, after all, you said yes before. Now the appreciation for that first free reading is shot and your friend can’t believe you’re now saying no to her.

Continue reading “The Plight of the Free Reading Requests” →

Copyright Cease and Desist Letters for Tarot Professionals

On By benebellIn free download, professional tarot, tarot16 Comments

copycat

You are a tarot professional and like all other tarot professionals doing business in the 21st century, you’re on the Internet. You have a great web presence. You have cool content up.

And then this happens: You spent hours over the weekend writing content for your website and poured so much of your knowledge and effort into it. Or you went through the trouble of getting exclusive licenses to use cool photographs for your site. And now suddenly, a lesser tarot professional has ripped your stuff off your site and posted it on his own page. Your jaw hits the space bar on your keyboard.

What do you do?

You send out a C&D, fool.

Cease and Desist Demand Letters

A cease and desist demand letter (often referred to as a C&D) is basically a strongly-worded letter to someone requesting that they stop doing something that they shouldn’t be doing. It’s often used to get the legal ball rolling in defamation cases (libel, slander), alleged infringement of personality rights (such as right of publicity), claims of invasion of privacy, false light, or other claims of misappropriation.

Perhaps the one most familiar to us is the C&D notice sent out for alleged intellectual property infringement. That’s copyright, trademark, and patent, but also use of trade secrets. For the tarot professional, the one likely to be most applicable is the C&D notice for copyright infringement. Defamation and the other misappropriation claims I mentioned come up, too, but that’s for another time. Let’s focus on C&D for copyright infringement today.

C&Ds are often sent out by attorneys on behalf of their clients, and the client pays a couple hundred bucks for the attorney to drop the case file on a paralegal’s desk, who is going to open up a template not unlike the one provided below for your free download, input the applicable client information, and then print it on heavy, creamy, expensive lawyer’s letterhead. What you’re really paying for there, I hope you realize, is that heavy, creamy, expensive lawyer’s letterhead and the scare factor that it causes when someone receives it.

You can just as easily send out C&Ds yourself. It’s going to be less scary to the recipient, I admit, but sometimes that is all it will take to get the infringing material off the web.

Continue reading “Copyright Cease and Desist Letters for Tarot Professionals” →

Practice Tips for Tarot Professionals Who Offer Online Services

On By benebellIn cartomancy, divination, professional tarot, tarot37 Comments

onlinetarotbiz

This article will focus on practice tips for tarot professionals who offer online reading services. That can mean you advertise or market your tarot reading services on a business website, offer tarot reading services delivered by e-mail or other electronic means, or will in any way be engaged in commercial transactions online with clients or prospective clients. If that sounds like what you’re doing, then you may or may not find something practical in this long, verbose blog post. (Yes, this is another one of those doozy posts by me…)

Continue reading “Practice Tips for Tarot Professionals Who Offer Online Services” →

9 Easy Ways to Increase Publicity for Your Professional Tarot Services

On By benebellIn divination, professional tarot, tarot23 Comments

tarot_cards

Hey you, budding tarot professional, you. Trying to figure out how to get the word out about the tarot business you just launched? Looking to work for hire as a tarot professional but the concept of PR and marketing intimidates the crap out of you? Here are 9 easy ways you can start. You can do all 9 of these this week, right now, I promise.

So. Treat this post as a checklist. Don’t know where to start with your PR and marketing? Start here, 1 through 9. Complete all of these and you’ll be off to a fantastic start. [This is kind of assuming you’ve already done the social media basics, like gotten your own domain name URL, created a Facebook page for your new business, and created a Twitter or Instagram account.]

Continue reading “9 Easy Ways to Increase Publicity for Your Professional Tarot Services” →

Triggering Creativity with Tarot: Replay of a Free Webinar

On By benebellIn divination, free download, Holistic Tarot (book), personal spirituality, professional tarot, promotional, tarot, tarot community, tarot symbolism1 Comment

On February 21, 2015, North Atlantic Books hosted a free webinar where I talked about intuitive-creativity and tarot. You can check out a replay of the webinar above.

About the Webinar

Albert Einstein attributes his most ground-breaking insights not to logic or mathematics, but to intuition and inspiration or, as artists and writers often express it, to the muses. However, the one trait believed about the muses, about how intuition and inspiration hits us, is that it comes only when it comes, almost divinely, and the artist or writer cannot call upon it at will.

Yet through tarot, learn how to harness intuitive-creativity at will. Tarot facilitates the transcendent experience needed for the muses to speak to us. Learn how to use tarot to trigger your intuitive-creativity and apply the tarot fundamentals taught in my book, Holistic Tarot to remove creative blockages.

Preview_Slides
Presentation Slides Preview

In this 45-minute webinar that will be invaluable to any artist or writer, I’ll be lecturing about how to use tarot cards as an intuitive and inspirational tool for creative and artistic passion projects. The lecture will cover attunement, how to exercise the intuition muscle, and specific techniques for using tarot spreads to read about your creative projects.

When I say “intuitive-creativity,” I’m talking about the muses, about divine inspiration, about that “a-ha” moment. Learn how to use tarot to identify your creative focus, mind-map your project trajectory, perform character analysis if you’re writing a novel, explore the themes of your project in greater depth, and generally trigger your own inspiration with tarot card imagery.

Download the Handout

There is also a handout in PDF format that goes along with the webinar. Please be sure to download it as reference for the techniques and exercises discussed during the webinar.

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD THE HANDOUT

Preview_PDF

Tarot and Socioeconomic Class: My Thoughts After drawingKenaz

On By benebellIn cartomancy, divination, opinion, personal, professional tarot, tarot, tarot community, traditional witchcraft13 Comments

Thorn Mooney recently shared her thoughts in her vlog, “Paganism, Tarot, and Class.” You really should watch her video first before reading onward, but to give background for my thoughts here, I’ll try to recap.

Mooney talks about witchcraft as a practice occurring lower down on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a practice that is more concerned with practical applications, like talking to the dead, love spells, money spells, or getting jobs. She uses the phrase “real world, tactile, necessary things.”

Those who endeavor into the esoteric or metaphysical, she says, are more concerned with self-actualization, per Maslow’s hierarchy, which is at the top of the pyramid. They’re working through long-term emotional or spiritual concerns, striving to be their best selves, and can endeavor with these concerns because their basic physiological needs have been met.

She then talks about how all that translates in her professional tarot readings. She has found, per her own experiences, that those who request readings from her online tend to ask about issues relating to purpose in life, spiritual direction, meaning, connection to deity or deities, which she acknowledges are very “important,” but “not critically important in the sense that, oh, ‘I might be evicted from my home tomorrow'” important.

::nods:: I get that.

In contrast, reading requests she gets from the shop she works at (i.e., in-person readings, I presume), clients are asking questions like “I don’t have any money to afford a lawyer and my ex-husband has filed for full custody of my kids and the court hearing is tomorrow. What is going to happen? Am I going to lose my kids?” or “My child is physically ill and we can’t afford healthcare. What do you see happening to us?”

“I am obviously not qualified to offer legal or medical advice,” Mooney remarks, “and yet I am repeatedly put in the position where I am asked to provide input, and technically [that input] is not from me, it’s from the cards, but that’s a really blurry line.”

Mooney continues, describing the nature of these lower-level-per-Maslow’s-hierarchy questions as “gritty,” noting that it’s rare for someone in that context to be asking her about finding higher meaning in the world.

And Mooney hypothesizes that it’s tied to socioeconomic class.

Continue reading “Tarot and Socioeconomic Class: My Thoughts After drawingKenaz” →

New Faces of Tarot: BuzzFeed Article

On By benebellIn cartomancy, divination, professional tarot, tarotLeave a comment
buzzfeed
Screen grab from BuzzFeed

I wrote a Community Post on BuzzFeed about the Millennial generation of tarot professionals. I reached out to my arm’s length network of both tarot professionals and the professionals of other industries who seek the counsel of tarot professionals.

In retrospect, I regret not having interviewed male tarot readers. I will have to make up for that in future work that I do, somehow. Considering other recent articles on tarot, like “The Tarot Card Reader” in the New York Times blog or [the not as recent] “Psychics: The New Therapists?” that BuzzFeed published two years ago or the interest in The Atlantic about fortune-telling and the law, I do believe the practice of tarot is on the verge of a new phase.

Well, it has been for some time, with the interest in the intersection between tarot and psychology, spearheaded by folks like Art Rosengarten, Katrina Wynne, Kooch and Victor Daniels, among others.

Now Millennials are really making tarot trendy, from The Wild Unknown tarot deck garnering a ton of attention from the fashion blogosphere to tarot being taught as a creative writing tool in MFA classes.

For the longest while, whenever tarot made an appearance in Hollywood film, it would be ominously. Some of the depictions I’ve seen in recent years have been, at the very least, neutral, and on a few occasions, in a manner that tarot professionals would find much more agreeable.

Please join in the discussion on tarot in the comments section below the BuzzFeed article, direct link here.

Triggering Creativity with Tarot: Free Webinar this Saturday, Feb. 21

On By benebellIn divination, Holistic Tarot (book), professional tarot, tarot, tarot symbolism11 Comments

 webinar

Join me on February 21, a Saturday, at 10 am Pacific Time (12 pm Central or 1 pm Eastern) for a free webinar sponsored and hosted by North Atlantic Books and NAB Communities.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

There is also a handout that goes along with the webinar. Please be sure to download it as reference for the techniques and exercises discussed during the webinar.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE PDF HANDOUT

Preview_PDF

* * *

Albert Einstein attributes his most ground-breaking insights not to logic or mathematics, but to intuition and inspiration or, as artists and writers often express it, to the muses. However, the one trait believed about the muses, about how intuition and inspiration hits us, is that it comes only when it comes, almost divinely, and the artist or writer cannot call upon it at will.

Yet through tarot, learn how to harness intuitive-creativity at will. Tarot facilitates the transcendent experience needed for the muses to speak to us. Learn how to use tarot to trigger your intuitive-creativity and apply the tarot fundamentals taught in Wen’s new book, HOLISTIC TAROT to remove creative blockages.

Preview_Slides
Presentation Preview

In this 45-minute webinar that will be invaluable to any artist or writer, I’ll be lecturing about how to use tarot cards as an intuitive and inspirational tool for creative and artistic passion projects. The lecture will cover attunement, how to exercise the intuition muscle, and specific techniques for using tarot spreads to read about your creative projects.

When I say “intuitive-creativity,” I’m talking about the muses, about divine inspiration, about that “a-ha” moment. Learn how to use tarot to identify your creative focus, mind-map your project trajectory, perform character analysis if you’re writing a novel, explore the themes of your project in greater depth, and generally trigger your own inspiration with tarot card imagery.

2/27/2015 UPDATE:

Watch a replay of the webinar HERE:

So the actual webinar on Saturday (2/21) had a video camera of me yapping away at the corner of what would have been your computer screen as the PowerPoint presentation played, which I would assume would make the webinar more engaging. (Maybe.) However, in the upload, the video camera of me is no longer there. (Also, now I will never get to see how I looked during the webinar. If there were boogers hanging out of one nostril throughout the thing, now I will never know.)

Yikes, now watching this replay (without the webcam of me, which I really don’t know whether it added or took away from the webinar), this looks kind of boring. So sorry. Thank you even more to those who stuck it out with me to the end!

Holistic Tarot Free Study Guides: Advanced

On By benebellIn cartomancy, divination, free download, Holistic Tarot (book), professional tarot, tarot, tarot symbolism5 Comments

Holistic Tarot Study Guides Advanced 4

Okay, people, I get it. I’ve heard it. Holistic Tarot is a big book. How does one even wade through that thing? Fear not! I’ve got study guides! To demonstrate how the book can be used as a textbook for the independent study of tarot, I’ve created study guides that will help you navigate the book at a beginner level, intermediate, and advanced. Here are the first two study guides:

Don’t forget the supplements! Those are very helpful (or so I claim). Be sure to check out all Holistic Tarot study guides and supplemental downloads here.

Now I bring you the Study Guide for the Advanced Tarot Student, and also for the tarot practitioner who is seeking to go professional. If your objective is to go professional, however, this study guide alone (and the Holistic Tarot text) is not going to suffice. That’s why I have several great book recommendations in the study guide that I know will be indispensable to the aspiring professional.

Who might find the Advanced study guide helpful?

The Advanced study guide may be right for you if…

  • you have been reading Holistic Tarot by following along through the Beginner and Intermediate study guides and now see there are still chapters that the guides didn’t cover and you want to cover those chapters, or
  • you’ve been studying tarot for some time under the Rider-Waite-Smith system, are proficient at the Intermediate level, and now you want more, or
  • you’re thinking about going professional with tarot and offering your reading services to the public.

If that sounds like you and you want to continue your studies with Holistic Tarot, then download this study guide and the recommended supplements.

Holistic Tarot Study Guides Advanced 3

STUDY GUIDE FOR THE ADVANCED TAROT STUDENT

Click on the radio button below to download the PDF.

download-study-guide

The Study Guide for the Advanced Tarot Student presumes that you have completed the Study Guide for the Intermediate Tarot Student, are proficient with the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, and have a copy of the Holistic Tarot book. For Session 4 in the Advanced Study Guide, it is also recommended that you have a Tarot de Marseille deck and a Thoth deck to work with. Click on the above button to download the PDF. Also be sure to download and save the below supplements. Note: In traditional esoteric tarot teaching approaches, astrology and the Qabalah basics would be taught at the beginner’s level concomitant with the tarot basics. The approach here is to integrate these areas of knowledge after a strong foundation in tarot has been built.

Supplemental Downloads

Sample Code of Ethical Conduct for Tarot Professionals

DOCX

PDF
Glyph Correspondences for the Opening of the Key

PDF
Interpreting Tarot through Astrology

PDF
Sample Written Reading Templates

DOCX

PDF
Log of Professional Readings, Events, and Parties

DOCX

PDF
Detailed Summary of Professional Readings Log

DOCX

PDF
Sample Privacy Terms for Tarot Reading Websites

DOCX

PDF
Sample Schedule of Fees and Terms of Service

DOCX

PDF
Sample Services Agreement (for Parties and Events)

DOCX

PDF

You can order your copy of the book on Amazon, through the publisher’s website at North Atlantic Books, or through the distributor, Random House.

All Holistic Tarot study guides and supplements are available for free download here on this website at HOLISTIC TAROT STUDY GUIDES. I hope these study guides are helpful in your learning and if you do use the Advanced Guide, please let me know about your experience with it!

“Out of the Tarot Closet” by Ménage A Tarot

On By benebellIn cartomancy, divination, Holistic Tarot (book), professional tarot, tarot17 Comments

IMG_7133

The amazing folks at Ménage A Tarot, David Dear, Kate of Daily Tarot Girl, and Ronda Snow, put out an amazing podcast, “Out of the Tarot Closet” that I’d like to talk about. Click here to hear the podcast.

The group has put out several podcasts already and let me tell you– these people are going to rise very quickly in popularity among tarot folk. My only complaint is that they don’t put out enough podcasts! I love them so much, I get very impatient in between each podcast waiting for the next!

Their most recent one is about coming out of the tarot closet. It’s a topic close to my heart since in significant ways, I’m still in it.

Continue reading ““Out of the Tarot Closet” by Ménage A Tarot” →