Maybe she just had one rough self-reading and decided nope. We really can’t know.
I work at a new age bookstore though. The amount of ‘rules’ I hear: don’t buy your own deck, wrap it in silk, never read for yourself, only shuffle this specific way. Every week it’s something new. I don’t know where they’re getting it from, but it can’t be their own experience because it’s not a thing.
In my experience (and I speak to a looot of new Tarot readers) they hear something and just keep repeating it.
You get to figure out what works for you. I’ve broken every single one of those rules (enthusiastically, even), and my readings still feel meaningful and connected. So there’s that.
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Self-readings can go places an outside reader just can’t reach. The High Priestess energy is real, your cards respond to your touch differently. Preparation handles that woman’s concern about bad energy.
I call on archangels before each draw. Michael guards the north and Raphael the east, the shadows just back off. My own spreads have gotten way clearer since I started doing this, when Death shows up, I know exactly what it means now.
Objectivity is tricky. Reversals help with the blind spots if you actually let them speak. Full moon self-reads hit different for me, but that might just be my practice.
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Utter nonsense. Self-readings can be a powerful way to work with your own energy centers. When I pull cards for myself, I lay them out in a chakra spread, root to crown, seven cards. The Tower almost always shows up around my solar plexus position. Third chakra. Personal power.
That tells me a lot about where I’m blocked, because I’m sitting with that energy in real time while the cards are in front of me.
That woman’s concern about bad energy, she might be picking up on unbalanced chakras during self-readings and misattributing the source. Happens a lot if you haven’t mapped out where specific cards keep landing in positional spreads.
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Honestly this helped me a lot. Next time you pull for yourself, photograph the spread and then read it like some stranger sent it to you asking for help. Just pretend you have no idea who it’s for.
The emotional fog lifts so fast. Kind of unsettling actually.
There’s an ethical responsibility to read for yourself before you sit down across from someone else. Personally I don’t know a single reader who doesn’t do this.
If you haven’t confronted your own biases, shadows, emotional triggers through self-reading, you might project your unexamined stuff onto their reading. They’re trusting you not to do that. I treat self-readings as part of my ethical hygiene as a reader. Self-reading has an ethical line too. If you’re pulling cards repeatedly on the same question because you didn’t like the first answer, you’ve crossed from reflection into compulsion. That’s where honest self-assessment becomes self-deception.
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