Once I was in a yarn store with a friend. I was teaching her to knit and we were picking out yarn. The yarn she wanted was in a skein not in a ball, so I told her had to wind it into a ball before she started knitting. She asked, “how do you wind it into a ball?” I cannot remember when I learned to wind yarn (or string) into a ball. I cannot remember not knowing. It never occurred to me that someone wouldn’t know how. That happens a lot, when people have known how to do things forever. Shuffling and selecting cards is a lot like that. I tell people to shuffle and draw the cards for the reading. They sometimes look baffled and I realize that they are waiting for instructions,

Shuffling seems like such a mundane part of the whole tarot reading process. But it is an important one and one that may have more important functions than you may think. It also carries decisions that you've probably made but never thought about. Because I believe that every act involved in a tarot reading is symbolic, I encourage people to think about what they do and why. You see, I think that in tarot there are really no set rules. But I don't believe that you should just "do whatever feels good." Rather, I think that whatever you do should have meaning, that you should make choices that reflect your beliefs. For example: 1. Probably the main reason we all shuffle is to randomize

A while back, I posted about shuffling techniques and invited readers to share their shuffling techniques. There were some excellent ideas and I wanted to highlight a few, plus add one of my own. Catherine says I’ve heard some pretty crazy methods and ways to shuffle and cut, but like most things in Tarot, I don’t believe there’s a right or a wrong way – just a lot of talking points! Perhaps one of the only things I really agree with is allowing the client to shuffle the cards as I feel this provides them with a sense of ownership over the reading, making it more pertinent to them – they shuffled after all! I don’t believe they put their energy or essence into the cards,

Over at the Aeclectic Tarot forum, there was a conversation about shuffling. Well, it started off as about asking the question, but wandered over into shuffling. Shuffling is something those of us who have been doing it forever don't really think about. But those who are new to tarot sometimes have concerns about doing everything just right. They have an idea that tarot is this magic formula that unless you do everything just so, then it won't work. There may be tarot readers who believe that. However, among my tarot friends and colleagues, the common belief is that there is no magic formula and that every practitioner has their own methods. I like the idea of making the shuffling