In my last post in the category of Tarot, I said that if a sitter asks for advice on how to improve a romantic relationship that I might personally think is undesirable but the cards give the suggestions to improve it, I give the sitters the information from the cards untinged by my own bias.  I think I should elaborate a little bit in case anyone has questions about why I do that.  The answer is really quite simple.

As we all go through our lives, we learn from everything we experience.  It all affects us in some way, even if it's only a smile from a passerby or stepping on a thumb tack barefoot.  We learn the lessons meant for us from every single thing.  My opinion of what my sitter should learn or what actions they should take based on my own personal life experience won't do them much good in most instances.  If they believe the information came from the cards and they follow it, the result might not work or might even be disastrous in their own situation.  

When I was new to reading, I felt really bad if the message I saw in the cards was something I knew would be bad news for the sitter.  There was a great temptation to slant the reading in a way I knew the sitter seemed anxious to hear.  Negative news needs to be  relayed honestly to the sitter, though, and it isn't fair that I not give them the information.  However, if I use compassion I can give the information in a way that isn't going to hit them in the gut but is still honest as to the message the cards show. It can be done with empathy and  learning to discipline ourselves to keep our personal opinions out of it.

I don't have a very good poker face.  People can usually "read me" by my facial expressions or body language pretty easily. I read others easily by those, too, even if they're just subtle clues. It took me awhile to actually understand the concept well enough that I truly took my own opinions out of the reading so they played no part in it and therefore wouldn't show in my face or body.  I had to give a lot of thought to the issue.  What I finally accepted was that my sitters were trusting me to give them information from the cards, not from me personally.  They came to me for answers for a couple of reasons.  One of those reasons might be because they faced negative reactions from friends and/or family and didn't want to face that again.  And/or they might have come to me because I'd read for them before and they knew my non-judgmental ways.  But the biggest reason I learned to take my personal opinions out of the reading was what I stated above----we all have life lessons to learn and it's not up to me to decide what lessons my sitter needs to learn or how they need to learn them.

Sometimes if I choose to share anything from my personal life experiences, I make sure my sitter knows this is coming from me and not from the cards.  But I don't use my own experiences to try to influence the sitter to my way of thinking.  I share with them to convey that they aren't the only one who has experienced what they're experiencing or that when I experienced something like that, it worked out well in the long run even though it was painful and distressing at the time. My aim is just to comfort and empathize with them.

There's a thread in the personal readings forum where I did give my own personal experience and I did hope to exert some influence, but in that kind of case, I do make exceptions.   And I did that because I could see clearly in the cards what the message was and I would have felt negligent if I didn't share my own experience.