Daily readings falling flat

[mosaica]

I can't seem to come up with a daily spread that is meaningful. I've tried several and almost always feel like I am grasping at straws when I try to connect the cards to anything in my day.

On one hand, I want to study a card a day. On the other, I want to have a reading that is as meaningful as it usually is when I ask a specific question.

I've tried doing readings at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day. I've tried one card per day, I've tried three cards. I've tried drawing seven cards at the beginning of the week. I've tried both looking for daily trends and asking for daily advice.

I just can't seem to connect with the cards on a daily basis. If I wait until I have a legitimate question about my life -- which gives me the most meaningful and rewarding readings -- then I may not have a specific question for several days, and I may not draw cards for several days. When I don't draw cards, I feel like I'm not learning or continuing to develop my relationship with them.

Perhaps it's like a relationship with a person -- you can't expect fireworks all the time.

Thoughts? Thanks.
Mosaica

 

[Aulruna]

Hi Mosaica,

I've experienced the same thing and I have to say that I have by now switched to a weekly, sometimes even monthly card to reflect on.

When I was still doing it, this was what I did after drawing a card and trying to record the connection to my day did not work out so well:

- The first exercise was going through the deck one by one and coming up with as many parallels to either past events from my own life or past and present events I picked up from my environment. Everything was game, from work to newspapers to advertisements!

- Then I started to randomly draw cards again, again looking for e.g. "Hierophant moments, symbols and events and recording them.

- finally, I combined the daily draws with an oracle or meditiation card draw, mostly from decks like Trust your Vibes or Soul Lessons, to determine in which areas of life I should apply the daily Tarot messages.

This last one has worked best for me ... I might just dig out my old journal and start again

Hope some of these ideas were helpful to you.

 

[Moonbow]

Try drawing seven cards at the start of a week and leave them out for the whole week.

Don't try to make them fit by looking at today's card before your day starts, but at the end of each day look back and see if the card was telling you something.

This is also a great way to get to know a deck well.

 

[mosaica]

- The first exercise was going through the deck one by one and coming up with as many parallels to either past events from my own life or past and present events I picked up from my environment. Everything was game, from work to newspapers to advertisements!

- Then I started to randomly draw cards again, again looking for e.g. "Hierophant moments, symbols and events and recording them.

- finally, I combined the daily draws with an oracle or meditiation card draw, mostly from decks like Trust your Vibes or Soul Lessons, to determine in which areas of life I should apply the daily Tarot messages.

This last one has worked best for me ...

I don't own any oracle decks, and most of my tarot decks are RWS clones, so they wouldn't really give me a different kind of information. But I did just preorder Tarot of the Crone and perhaps that will help.

I may give your other suggestions a shot, or just keep muddling along until I find something that works consistently!

Thanks, Aulruna.
~Mosaica

 

[Maelin]

If i am drawing one card a day, I try not to ask it to have a great deal to say in advance! If I draw the knight of Pentacles, then I just look for what could be the knight through the day - draw the two of cups, and then look for that moment in a coffee with a coworker, a Toast after work, a fountain on the way home, the kids pouring water in the bath.

If you have multiple decks, you could try this - not my idea, but one taken from a great book "Tarot out of the Box"

Draw your daily card from your deck of choice - now pull the same card out of the other decks, to give it a richer maeaning, and an alternative perspective. Read them as if they were a spread, with the question " what does this card say to me?"

 

[mosaica]

If i am drawing one card a day, I try not to ask it to have a great deal to say in advance! If I draw the knight of Pentacles, then I just look for what could be the knight through the day - draw the two of cups, and then look for that moment in a coffee with a coworker, a Toast after work, a fountain on the way home, the kids pouring water in the bath.

One-card daily draws do keep your focus on one card throughout the day and help you to learn meanings. I just don't completely like the feeling of grasping at straws to find events in my day that fit a card. Most people's days don't differ so much that they will fit different cards each day. At least mine don't. My days feel so mundane, and the cards are so anti-mundane -- especially the majors. The two don't always jive for me.

Maybe they shouldn't, or don't need to. Daily draws are probably more for (the mundane task of) learning, anyway.

I do have the Tarot Out of the Box book. But I found that using too many decks overwhelmed and confused me. (I tried to use all 15 of my decks at once for a while!) It's also very time-consuming and I need to keep my study as simple and quick as possible.

I may go back to drawing seven cards for the week and just think of it not as a reading, but as a fun exercise in learning.

Mosaica

 

[Starling]

Before I started the 21 Ways Study here I was drawing one card, sometimes 2 if another one fell out of the deck, mainly as a learning exercise. I wanted to re-learn the cards. I wasn't trying to actually see the card as a focus on the day. On the next day sometimes I could actually see what the card had symbolized for the previous day, and sometimes not.

What was interesting over time was the kinds of cards that came up, and the advice they were giving me, which did fit my life situation. Maybe I wasn't having a Hierophant day, but needed to think about Hierophant situations to improve my life.

I still think a daily draw is a good learning tool, but I wouldn't expect my day to necessarily match the card. If it doesn't match the card it might just be something that is missing in your life that needs to be there.