If you feel like Tarot reading is, “Feeding your delulu” you might be using it for the wrong reasons
Professional tarot reader, Alex Reads Tarot and I have a chat about the reality of readers
Alex said, “Tarot is there to reaffirm your intuition, it’s not there to replace your intuition. It’s an inner knowing”
There are days when I can’t seem to arrange my thoughts in a linear fashion. I catch myself in moments like these and ask myself, what am I trying to align myself to?
I listen to music and await a lyric to collide in my mind to feel heard and define a state of misalignment.
I read books to familiarise myself with situations of a fictional character and believe that I was meant to read that one line in a chapter according to the universe’s clock.
It comforts me to know that in moments of despair and blinding confusion, art and spirituality exists to create a bridge that leads me out of a complex forest and into a community park where everyone re-energises.
Sometimes I lay on the grass with my eyes closed and an open book napping on my chest. Shadows of people eclipse the brightness of the sun behind my eyelids as they walk past me. And in the blissful presence of nature and humanity, I seek messages from my version of a spiritual podcast, a tarot reading video.
I’m fascinated by the soothing voices of tarot readers. I always wonder how radiant their energy must be in real life to sit down for hours and tune into intuitive channelled messages from the spirit realm.
How did they even begin? When did they know this is who they were meant to be?
My dear friend Alex Reads Tarot’s words resurfaced and her introduction to tarot amused me. She said, “I kind of sat one night and I thought, what am I doing? This is not me. Something in me just flipped a switch and it felt like I’m meant to be somewhere else.
I saw readers on TikTok, people like Curious Magpie and Madam Adam and I was just mesmerised. I thought, this is incredible. I’d only heard about tarot but this inspired me to get a deck of cards. I wanted the original. I’m very traditional. If I’m going to learn something, I have to do it the traditional way and then I can go for the fancy stuff. Ever since the first day I got my deck of cards, which I still have nearly five years on, I never parted ways. I slept with them under my pillow. I carried them around with me every day doing different spreads. I was just so invested in it, something just felt right. It felt like a missing limb that I’d finally found.”
There’s a purity in Alex’s connection to tarot that I understand now but I can’t lie when I say I questioned if tarot was even true. And if it is, I found the accuracy of the messages so bizarre that my belief turned into scepticism. How can an entire collective of people be going through the same thing?
There’s nothing sweeter than hearing the words, “They’re thinking about you right now. They wish to contact you.” The temptation of these words from a lost love filled me with hope and anger. Anger at the tarot reader who stirred my dormant emotions and anger at myself for allowing them to say the words I wanted to hear.
My ego convinced me that I was being fooled but a deep desire wished the message was true. It is true because it’s my desire, the tarot reader simply reflected the thoughts I hoard in denial.
I scanned the comments section to see if others felt the same way, I wanted someone to validate my doubts for a cheeky laugh. But to my surprise I saw people using words of hatred to demean the tarot reader, I wouldn’t go so far.
Among many nasty comments they famously say, “Stop feeding my delulu!” A valiant act to protect their own ego, so did I when I bothered to read the comments section because hurt can be a hard pill to swallow. The struggle to accept brews into hatred when we fail to acknowledge the simple emotion of missing someone, that we do wish they would contact us and that life feels sad without them.
Alex said, “The word ‘delulu’ really does irk me. But I’ve had to learn over the years to just let people actually delude themselves with their own delulu buying into it. Which to me is kind of ironic you know, you’re almost setting the intention that it’s delusional. You’re essentially saying that it’s therefore not possible for you. It’s the classic phrase, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. You can give advice, but it’s up to people how they use it.”
I wanted to educated myself, I googled, “What exactly is Tarot?” and the answer is quite plain and simple. Tarot does not predict the future, it gives you guidance and insight in the present moment. It’s a useful tool to align our current situation to our manifestations and our authenticity.
That became a healthy filter to have in my brain to navigate whom I can trust when I come across readers online, it urges me to be real with myself in the moment. I see a few readers who interrupt my scrolling to say, “STOP! This message is for you!” and I immediately think, don’t tell me what to do?
But there’s a few whom I intuitively feel drawn to, their aura matches mine and my energy feels safe to intermingle with theirs.
It could be their sense of taste, their style of delivering a message or just my intuition, the reasons are varied. But I ask my heart, do I want to receive this message? Does it provide reason for the voices I have circulating in my mind? And if it doesn’t, I do indeed scroll away.
Alex added, “I sometimes have readers that I don’t follow or haven’t come across before. And I get a bit of a feeling that maybe I wouldn’t connect so well with that person. I always listen to my intuition. But do I send them hate? No, I send them absolute love and I thank them for their service.
The best readers, in my own humble opinion (which is that there are no best readers), are the ones who can harness such a deep connection with tarot, you don’t just look for the generic meanings. You have to kind of overlay it with intuition. And that’s allowing that inner feeling to just go with it. It doesn’t have to make sense to other people. A 1000 people could look at a painting and interpret it differently. And that’s almost like tarot, you might be drawn to the knapsack or the colour yellow, or the symbology of the tunic. It’s allowing that intuitive nature to override and work with the generic meaning as well.”
The concept of tarot runs across generations as a form of witchcraft, taboo and mystical voodoo. The representation of tarot in films and shows have always been about a kooky woman dressed in either ragged clothes or absurd ornaments in a dingy lair that accentuates her connection to the unknown.
The undertone of portraying them as crazy women or evil witches can cause a stereotype for our automatic rejection towards it. Alex said it best, “People often fear what they don’t know.”
In recent times, tarot has transformed into an entertaining practice that people do for fun as a party trick, while some rely on it to seek guidance or advice. What’s more, literally anyone can learn tarot! Try it, you’re not going to burst into flames.
But there exists a community of extreme religionists who wish to send the art form its messengers to hell before they can even attempt to live out their purpose.
Alex shared a similar sentiment by saying, “As readers, we’re kind of expected to take on the brandishing that we are satanic, that we’re demonic and that we are evil. I get told quite a lot that I need to turn towards the light, and that I need to repent for my sins. And for me, I’ve always been very accepting.
I don’t care if you’re a Buddhist, if you’re a Hindu, if you’re a Christian, there’s such a big Christian and Catholic community in my AlexReadsTarot community and they are very respectful. They see it as God’s work or however they view it. You can have your faith and still enjoy tarot. As long as you’re not using your faith as ammunition against someone’s choice for how they live.”
When you’re divinely connected to any art form, there’s a powerful journey an individual takes to solely focus inward. It’s not easy to maintain the perfect measurement of self-confidence all of the time but it matters very little what others have to say about the inexplicable relationship between an artist and their art.
It also comes with the realisation that not everyone can be pleased and that someone will be disappointed. A portion of people will retaliate, ridicule, resonate with it fully and obsess over it more than they need to. They accept the rejection and move along the course of satisfying their soul.
Alex continues, “I think the biggest thing that I’ve kind of come to, I think it’s for my own comfort, because being any kind of creator on social media, you are expected to take the rough with the smooth, you are expected to take people’s hatred, people’s negativity. And for me, I do fortunately have a very good support system. But I’m still a human being.”
I have personally misjudged tarot readers and spiritual healers a lot too. I thought they dressed simple, were out of touch with material pleasures, embodied a holier-than-thou persona and slept with a cross on their nose. I assumed that nothing could break their resilience, that anger or sadness were fleeting emotions after much penance and are always at peace in the face of all adversities.
After meeting a lot of professional psychic mediums, I realised I was wrong; they live just like us and are learning about life just as much as we are. They only wish to pull out an inner wisdom that resides within us. And offer words that reverberate a positive, healing perspective.
Alex agreed and added, “But you know, it’s not a 24 hour kind of hotline. Your tarot reader is not your therapist or best friend. I get a lot of people asking me, do you do emergency readings? I’ve always vowed that I would never do an emergency reading because for me as a reader, a huge red flag in a client is when they use phrasing like, this is urgent I’m struggling! I actually message these people privately and say, what are we actually talking about here? Because for me, if you’re in such an intense need for reading, I don’t know if it’s always the right thing to do because then you’re depending on a reading. When you’re not then actually listening to yourself.
I do have compassion for people in a sense, because some people are just really lonely and struggling. And a lot of people say, I can’t speak to anyone about this, you’re the only person. And I do take that on with such care and compassion with anything. But there have been the odd occasions where people have crossed over that boundary repeatedly. And I think it has taught me to make sure that my boundaries are clear.”
What I admire most about some of the professional tarot readers I follow is that they level with me, they’re unafraid to tell me they go through the same struggles, they’re silly and yet so unique. They allow me to see them for who they are while delivering exactly what I need to hear and not what I want to hear.
I thoroughly enjoy readers who let their hair down and express that they’ve had a bad week. Or that they followed a similar pattern of toxic relationships and took a long time to make peace with difficult family situations. It’s human, ordinary but magical at the same time.
Alex concluded by saying, “I think that for me personally, it’s understanding that you don’t have to just meditate or journal. Some of us are just not equipped to deal with things in such a calm way. We need something that’s a bit more fiery and aggressive to get it out. Like I go for a drive and blast some loud music. So that’s really how I kind of do it, which I’ve learned how to accept. I’m not like a 5D Star Ascension love and light person. I’m very real. I’m just like, yeah, let’s get angry and then let’s get through this and then we’re okay.
Some of us experience happiness in bigger waves than others. But the beauty of being human is that it’s a spectrum. And if you deny yourself essentially half of that, you’re denying yourself of exploring half of who you are.
Accept that you are going to be aggressive, you are going to be annoying, you are going to be mopey, you are going to be maybe anxious at times and a bit of a nervous wreck. If you can accept that, you’re just going to be accepting who you are. And that is what we’re here to do.”
To book a session with Alex Reads Tarot, visit here.
2Shades Magazine 