tarot reading

Pricing Tarot Readings

I want to talk here about why I have priced my tarot readings at their current rates because transparency is important to me. Pricing services can be such a fraught thing. I remember a few years ago when I did some freelance tutoring, I AGONIZED over what to charge. A similar challenge faced me as I decided to go into business reading tarot. This time around, though, I was able to mostly set aside doubts about my own worth and price my services based on the math: my financial needs, how much time I spend on my business overall (not just doing readings), and what I am willing to be paid on an hourly basis. The result is that my rates may seem a little pricey, but I also know deep down that they are fair. My prices are based on a few guiding principles:

1. It is OK to have financial needs and ask to get them met. It’s OK to price my services according to my needs.

2. I have reached a point in my life where I will not work for less than I think I’m worth. I am asking what I think my time and skills are worth now and slowly building a client base, rather than underselling myself now and raising prices later.

3. The practice of tithing (h/t Sarah Faith Gottesdiene r) is important to me. Asking for what my time and skills are worth is important because I am going to pay a substantial portion of my profits toward reparations. The more money I bring in, the more I can give away.

4. Accessibility is important to me, which means that I will always have sliding scale or another instrument of financial accessibility built into my pricing. Currently there are four tiers on my sliding scale and a long list of goods and services that I am willing to barter for.

5. I am worth a lot. I have four years’ experience reading tarot, but also a PhD in English (interpretation of symbolism; communication skills), 6+ years’ experience as a meditator engaging in formal spiritual practice, and a wealth of life and relationship experience. I am not the Font of Wisdom, but I have learned a thing or two, and continue learning.

But how did I come to the actual number I charge—in this case, $75 for a single reading? I’ll break it down here.

Each of my readings involves drawing the cards, making a recording of myself doing the reading, writing a document with journal prompts and symbols to consider based on the reading, taking a picture of the cards, uploading all of these files, and emailing them to the client. All in all, it takes me over an hour, so I am essentially charging a dollar a minute. Unlike a lot of other readers, I do not charge different rates for online and in-person readings. I believe that my clients get the same amount of value from both, even though they are different experiences.

One thing to consider about this dollar-a-minute rate, though, is that for every one minute I am spending actually doing tarot readings, I am spending at least 2 minutes working on other aspects of my business—social media posts, answering emails, bookkeeping, blog posts, etc. When you take that into account, I am actually charging $0.33 a minute, or roughly $20 an hour. (While these activities are not part of the tarot reading itself, I would not be able to run my business as a tarot reader without them.)

But that doesn’t mean I am making $20 an hour. I hold a quarter of that aside for taxes and overhead. I may need increase or decrease that amount after my first year, but we’ll see. Then, I take a third of what’s left over and give that away as reparations to black and indigenous people in the U.S. The rest is what goes in my pocket.

In terms of ACTUAL CASH, every time I receive $75 for a tarot reading, I set aside $18.75 for taxes and business expenses, I give $18.75 away, and keep $37.50. In terms of RATE, I am earning about $10/hr for my work to give readings and maintain my business. These are numbers that I feel comfortable with. $75 for a reading my feel a bit steep—even cheeky!—for a tarot reader who I just entering the scene to charge. But I feel that it is at the intersection of the value my services bring to others and the value I place on my own time and work.

I want to be clear that this is not a judgment on anyone else’s pricing. Everyone’s reality looks different and everyone’s needs are different. Because I have the stability of a day job, I can afford to charge higher prices in the beginning and build a client base slowly. Some people may need to build a client base as quickly as possible, while others just do readings for fun and some coffee money. Privilege comes into the equation, too, which is again why I want to make more money to give more away.

My goal is not to make six figures. Really, my pie in the sky goal would be to bring in US$1,000 every month with tarot. At this point, I am not even sure that I have the time or energy to do $1,000 worth of readings a month, but it’s my stretch goal. At this level, all of my household expenses would be covered and I would no longer have to pull money from savings, plus I would be able to give away over $300 each month. If I actually reach that $1,000 goal, then it will be time for me to reassess if I want my business to grow further.

Realistically, I would be happy if I brought in $1,000 during 2019 in its entirety. I know that by launching my business, I’m starting at a bad time (January and February are slow for tarot readers), and I need to build my client base. I am OK with growing slowly. I am also being realistic about my startup costs and understand that I need to cover them before I begin giving money away, which make take some time. My costs include: tarot decks, my logo, website hosting, and business cards.

Overall, this is my hope: clients will be attracted to me not only because they like my style, but because they will respect the fact that I value myself. I want this endeavor to be one that grows organically and in line with my values, rather than being about making money for its own sake. I deserve to be paid for my time and skills. But I am also looking forward to learning so much from my clients, the cards, and yes–my mistakes!

#polytarot: The Relationship Escalator

One thing you hear about in the polyamory community is the Relationship Escalator. I’m not sure who coined the term, but the idea is essentially this: the beginning of each romantic relationship is the start of a clearly defined trajectory that starts with two people meeting and ends with them making a permanent commitment to each other and staying together until death. Of course, most of our relationships don’t turn out this way, but in the mainstream Western culture there’s often the assumption that living a normal life means that you will find that one person with whom you can ride the escalator all the way to the top. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with escalator relationships—I myself made a lifelong, legal commitment to someone and have zero regrets about that. However, I do think many people waste a lot of time and hurt themselves and others trying to force every one of their relationships on to the escalator.

I’m talking about this because recently I noticed that I was about to do the same. For context, I live with my husband and my partner lives with his ex-girlfriend. For various reasons, I can’t even visit my partner at his place, so to spend any private time, we have to be at my place. But because I only have one bed, my partner and I can never spend the night together. I think we have spent the night together 6 times in the past 6 months. And to do that, we have to get creative (or expensive)—house sitting, camping, or outright splurging on an airbnb.

I’ve long been feeling that we need to work toward the goal of living together. We are both actively working toward the goal of getting married (even though we have no idea what that would look like), but living together is another story. The other day I finally asked my partner point blank why he doesn’t seem all that interested in moving in with me and my husband. He said he was really conflicted about it because he wants to be able to live with me full time, but also listed about a half-dozen really good reasons why living together would put a strain on our relationship, my currently existing marriage, and his relationship to my husband (with whom he is friends.) It’s not that he’s ruled it out entirely, but he wants to be cautious.

As he was talking, I realized that I had been holding on to a lot of unexamined assumptions. I had assumed that full-time cohabitation + marriage + joint ownership of property would be the best thing for our relationship. But it actually might not be, at least right now. And when I truly look at all the reasons why I want us to live together, only some of them actually have to do with our relationship. Many of the reasons have to do with removing inconvenience from my life, rather than strengthening our relationship itself.

So I asked Vessel about why I really want to live with my partner and got some interesting answers:

Choice, Freedom, Trust, Self-Care, Make, and Light.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the Love, Romance, or Connect cards didn’t show up here. Instead, these are cards about my relationship with myself.

Vessel is pointing out that I’m looking for more autonomy and flexibility in my life. What I really want is to feel like I have more control over my circumstances and a better ability to plan how I spend my time and energy. And note: it’s not that these things aren’t an important part of being in relationship to other people, but they’re also things that we have to prioritize and decide for ourselves.

I realized I have been riding the relationship escalator and was carrying a lot of beliefs that aren’t really true, such as: my partner isn’t really committed to me if he’s not committed to living with me; our relationship will be easier and better once we’re living together; our relationship will be “real” or legitimate if we are living together; and, if I am living to my partner, that will make me happy. All of these are assumptions that are half-truths at best.

I’m grateful to my partner for his skill and care with this question. It’s clear that he has thought about this a lot. He’s also applying lessons he’s learned from bad experiences with roommates and live-in partners, that I, fortunately, have not had. Once we began talking about this, things really opened up for me. Yes, we want to be close to each other. Yes, we want to have a lot of flexibility in when and how often we see each other. We also acknowledge that our lifestyles are different in a lot of ways—he wants to have guests over for dinner often; I want to spend quiet evenings at home alone. He wants a dog, but I have cats. (I love dogs, but my cats to not!) Once we began talking, we began to build a new vision of the future for ourselves. What if we buy a piece of property and have two small houses on it? That actually seems like the ideal solution.

Like I said, relationships that follow the escalator trajectory aren’t bad in and of themselves. But if we enter into a relationship with another human being and assume that the escalator is the only way to be in relationship, we can set ourselves up for some pretty big disappointments and ultimately neglect the needs of the person in front of us for a mere idea.

The Question is Insight

NOTE: I mixed up the 7 and 8 of Cups in the Thoth tarot. That’s what I get for working with a trimmed deck!

I’m not sure that we give ourselves enough credit for asking the question.

What I mean by this is: in tarot, we generally see the question as a means to an end, and the question itself doesn’t matter so much as long as we get a good or meaningful answer. Of course good questions are important–I’m not saying that the tarot community doesn’t think that. Nowadays, any tarot reader worth their salt will have a whole page dedicated to guiding querents in phrasing the question. But.

We also allow other people to ask the question for us, or, more commonly, a series of questions. These are called spreads. I have several myself that I designed for personal use, and then made public for others to use. It’s deeply gratifying to find that some of them have been useful to others. But.

A few mornings ago I sat down with my notebook and cards and some questions came forth. The questions in themselves are nothing spectacular, but they are not the same questions that I would have asked even a month ago. I’ve done a lot of tarot-assisted hand-wringing about what I want to do with my life, what’s meaningful to me, and how I can get there. I have wanted the cards to give me answers about how I can change.

But the questions that came forward were actually the result of change that’s been happening subliminally, in my emotions and my body. The role of the cards wasn’t so much to point the way towards the future, but to show me what changes have taken place.

Where should I be focusing if I want to get more done this year? Three of Stones
Where am I resistant to change? Seven of Branches
What do I need to add to my life? Three of Vessels
What do I need to drop? The Storm
What do I look like when I’m the Boss? The World
What do I look like when I let others be the Boss? Eight of Vessels

This term “the Boss” comes from a sudden insight that I had over the Christmas holiday, in which I really realized that I need to “Boss it up” this year. In 2016, I was very reluctant to apply for jobs that I didn’t think were exactly what I wanted. Actually, at the beginning of the year, I was reluctant to apply for jobs at all. I had this idea that I should take a break (very true!) which then transmuted into an idea that I was going through so much personal growth that if I got a job I would be hampered in the new understandings that were unfolding in me (sounds good, but a complete line of bullshit.)

By being the Boss, I don’t mean a stance toward the world in which I want to control or dominate other people. Rather, it’s about not allowing myself to be limited by stories and concepts, and about taking responsibility for my own life, even in–especially in–situations where the outcome is beyond my control. Being the Boss means the buck stops here.

It was only after having this insight that it became possible for me to ask these questions. And I have to say–as a tarot spread on its own, this set of questions looks pretty lackluster! But for me, asking these questions was my way of admitting to myself that yes, things do need to change in some pretty specific ways.

All of the cards held a significant message, but I want to focus on just one, the Eight of Vessels, which I think will illustrate what I said earlier about being limited by stories and concepts.

eight of cups.jpg — Eight of Cups/Vessels in several different decks (clockwise from the left): The Wildwood Tarot, The Wild Unknown Tarot, the Smith-Waite Centennial Deck, the Slow Holler Tarot, ~~and the Thoth Tarot.~~

The Eight of Cups/Vessels has long been one of my favorite cards. When I began reading tarot back in January of 2015, I was still in grad school and gearing up to finish and defend my dissertation, having already decided to leave academia for something more closely aligned with my strengths and values. When I first took a good look at the Waite-Smith card and saw the red-cloaked figure walking away under the silent moon, it touched something inside me. Seeking rocky, high ground, moving into the unknown, moving away from what was logical or easy–I found myself in this place. Just look at the header of this blog–it features the Eight of Cups alongside the High Priestess (my birth card) and a statue of my favorite bodhisattva, Ji-jang Posal. There was an ascetic streak in me at that time, for sure.

More recently, when I saw the Eight of Vessels in the Slow Holler Tarot, I also fell in love with it–dark, moody, laden with sorrow and strange symbols, sadness and potential for rebirth (and amazing use of perspective.) But when it came up in this position in this reading, I got a very different message: I have been holding on to the energy of this card for too long, and it is time to move on.

Two years ago, the energy of the Eight of Cups was fresh and piercing; the card was a descriptor of what I was trying to do at that moment in my life. But now it’s stale. I am still in the posture of walking away rather than walking toward. But what is there that I still need to walk away from? Leaving academia behind, actually, turned out to be as easy as dropping a stone in water. Yet I am still allowing ideas about my personal growth in this period of transition get in the way of the one thing that I actually need right now: getting out in the world and doing things, even if it’s not my dream job. I will discover my dream job, my strengths and potential, through trial and error, not through sitting around and doing nothing.

Although I say I’ve always liked the Eight of Cups, it’s true that I’ve never liked the Thoth version–Debauch. Withered lilies dripping green slime, no thanks. But now I see that I’ve moved into that place, that what started out as the ascetic’s journey has ended with self-indulgence. [The Seven of Cups is actually pictured above, but here’s a picture of the actual Eight of Cups–Indolence, which, in retrospect, applies to what I’m saying even more.] But I never would have come upon this insight if I hadn’t first understood that I’m not being the boss of my life right now. That insight came first and pulling the Eight of Vessels refined and deepened it.

Gathering In 2017

As we move into 2017, I think the most thoughtful and pithy thing I’ve read about it is this XKCD comic. I hope you had as good a 2016 as possible, and that 2017 brings everything you need and desire in spite of the confusion and challenges that the world is moving into politically and environmentally.

Last year, I got really, really in to this whole New Year thing. I worked through Susannah Conway’s Unravelling the Year Ahead workbook (which I am now doing again for the 3rd year in a row), did a giant 36-card year-ahead reading, and invented a New Year spread. My word for the year was UNKNOWN, and my overall year theme cards were the Emperor and Failure. Yup. All told, the giant year-ahead spread didn’t amount to much, so I skipped this this year. But I did choose a new word for the year, AWAKENING (or rather, the Slow Holler Tarot chose this word for me) and drew the Traveler of Stones (Knight of Pentacles) and Illuminate for my year themes. I want to talk a little bit about how this year theme thing has worked out so far, and then jump into this year’s Gathering In spread.

In some ways, I’m glad that I had Failure on the table right from the very beginning, because that’s what this year felt like in a lot of ways. My failure to get a job in particular was something that I really wasn’t prepared for. I apparently wasn’t really prepared to search for a job, either, and I find myself at the end of this year reevaluating my strategies and priorities.

Looking back on my posts about themes for 2016, I’m struck about how I interpreted the Emperor, though. I located the Emperor outside of myself, seeing them as representing institutions and authority figures that I would be up against. Now that I look back on it, it was a strange way to approach the year, to assume that this year would be focused on petitioning large, authoritarian institutions. (Although the Emperor turned out to be a very fitting card for 2016 as an election year.) It wasn’t until a few days before Christmas that I remembered the Emperor card again and wondered–“What if I was supposed to be the Emperor?”

Given the theme of the Traveler of Stones and Illuminate for this year, it seems correct that I missed out on my chance to be the Emperor in 2016 and I’m now being sent back to the drawing board. I look at the equivalent of the Emperor in the Slow Holler Tarot–the Navigator–and wonder if I would have approached the year a bit differently if I had pulled that card instead. (Probably not–I think I needed the experience of this year to learn the lesson.) The Traveler of Stones tells me that I’m going to have to go back to basics, put my nose to the grindstone, and be prepared to sacrifice and let go of some things that I was clinging to in 2016. There are no guarantees of success, but Illuminate echoes the theme of awakening and suggests that this process will awaken me to new possibilities that I hadn’t considered before.

As for the Gathering In spread, last year’s was quite warm and fuzzy, but this year’s is more elusive and abrasive. And I think that’s a good thing.

1 Fire of this year: 2 of Knives. What is it that motivates me? What is it that I actually want to do with my life? The answer isn’t so clear. I want to work on tenderly exploring this impasse, rather than remaining defensive and stagnant. I have a lot of very specific ideas about what I want to do and the context in which I want to do it. I’ve got a long list of stuff that I don’t want to compromise, and I may just have to make some compromises.

2 Air of this year: Traveler of Vessels. Let’s let the intellect roam–a year of being a dilettante, not an expert. The question is: how do I bring this out as a strength? Because my lack of discipline means that I got almost nothing written in 2016, and therefore not even close to getting something published. I have so many ideas, but shoot them down before I get too far. The phrase in my head popped up this morning: “Write first, ask questions later.” Did I make that up?

3 Earth of this Year: Ace of Branches. HERE is my fire and inspiration! I may be more motivated this year by finances and the prospect of stability, rather than my ideals. This has been a source of tension for me lately–I could get a job doing something that I don’t want to do, but I’m having a hard time finding jobs for what I actually want to do. Do I change my ideals? Do I just take a “job job” and try to squeeze in other stuff around the edges?

4 Water of this Year: Four of Stones. Notice any tendencies to close off or isolate myself from others, or, conversely, to rely too much on others. How do I preserve emotional boundaries without making them into a prison?

5 Spirit of this Year: Six of Stones. Operating from a place of scarcity isn’t going to cut it. I really need to open my spiritual practice up. This year began to shift my understanding that my spiritual practice isn’t about me, but it’s about all beings, myself included. My head is beginning to make that shift, but my practice is not there yet. I need to come out of that defended, self-centered place and be more generous and giving (which translates to: practice more and take it more seriously.)

6 My Guiding Light: The Devil. Well, this is one to think about! It’s probably prodding me toward a more, well, devil-may-care attitude toward things, being less cautious and less picky. This Devil card is so abrasive and unsettling, but for that reason I kind of love it. (Also: body hair and uneven boobs: yes!)

7 My Personal Power: Student of Branches. Remembering that I’ve got a lot to learn and a lot to build. I’ve been getting a lot of the Student and Traveler cards lately, a reminder that I’m not in a place of mastery. I’m entering a new discipline via work and I am also entering a new world with a radically altered political landscape. Learning and hard work are the main modes that I need to move into. I’m not going to beat myself up about slacking this year, since I did just finish a DOCTORATE, you know. But time to get back to work.

8 How to respond to what I can’t control: Architect of Vessels. And yet the one thing that I can achieve a sort of mastery over is my relationship to my emotions and how I respond to other people. When shit happens, taking care of my emotions, watching my emotions, and watching how I relate to other people’s emotions, will be key.

9 How to take care of myself: 10 of Vessels. I got the 3 of Cups (Vessels) last year, so this is a progression in a theme. Do not isolate! Seek friends and lovers for comfort. Cultivate gratitude and awareness of others’ gifts.

10 What is AWAKENING? 5 of Knives. I really love this card–which is strange, since 5 of Swords isn’t a card that has ever really attracted me. When I saw 5 of Knives come up here, I went “ouch,” but in a good way. Awakening is about understanding hurt: the ways I hurt myself and others, and the ways that I am hurt by things outside my control. It’s time to take a good, long look at this stuff, whether it be understanding my privilege or exploring how I’m carrying old wounds into the present and doing little things that hurt others. I love this interpretation of the card because it’s about the skeletons in the closet–time to get them out, to take out those old knives and put them to work in the kitchen.

Rather than looking at this spread as being predictive, I’m looking at where I am now and what it illuminates as I move forward. This spread isn’t what the year will be, it’s what I need to do.

I hope you move into the New Year with grace and power. Please let me know if you use the Gathering In spread, if you’ve got a word for this year, or if the cards have given you some good insights about the year ahead!

Tag Archives: tarot reading