January 14th, 2016

I've been doing some tarot work the last few days. After seeing some ideas floating around on the web, I decided to do a spread to look at each month of 2016. It was... a bit of a trip, I'll just say that. There's a video up on my YouTube page talking about my results a bit more if anyone's interested, but in the meantime, I'll just put down a few suggestions in case anyone else would like to give it a go.

For starters, I recommend you have a journal. If you already have a tarot journal, or a grimoire/BoS you write in regularly, that would work. Otherwise, I suggest either getting one, or if nothing else, writing down your results somewhere you won't lose them so you can refer back later. I plan to reference mine throughout this year.

Feel free to set up your reading however you would normally. I personally like to put out a reading cloth and a crystal, and then cast a Circle, but that's just me. You could burn incense, play some music, meditate first, or whatever else speaks to you.

I went with a pretty simple spread. I just asked, "What do I need to keep in mind for the month of ___ in 2016?", shuffled, and drew a card. I repeated this for each month, reshuffling every time, but you could also just shuffle once and put down 12 cards simultaneously.

From there, it's a pretty simple matter to interpret each card for every month, and figure out how your year is shaping up.

As an addendum, I will say that my reading threw out a lot of reversed cards. I know not everyone reads reversed meanings, but I do, and that to me was suggesting that there's still a lot of blocked energy in my field to deal with, so I did another reading today to figure out the causes.

Essentially, I drew one card to look at the overall problem, and then I drew one card for each reversed card I had in my original 2016 reading, to determine what was blocking my energy in those months.

Also, while I did this with tarot, this kind of a reading may actually be better suited to oracle cards, if those are something you use.