Intention Setting in Divination
I know. The title is super unsexy. I could’ve called it “This 1 Cool Trick Will Have you Reading Tarot Better in No Time.” However, I respect y’all too much to do that.
But it’s true.
Setting clear intentions before you divine is the best way to improve your divination, whether you’re using tarot or oracle cards or Lenormand or runes or astrology or whatever.
When I work with readers in private lessons, half of their problems can be solved by setting clearer intentions. I realize that I’m giving away free lessons here, but everyone deserves to hear this piece of advice. It is universal.
It doesn’t matter what cards you use or what spread you use or whether you know what the more complex cards mean or if you pull a clarifier. If you don’t know what information you’re looking for and how your divination tools can help you get it, your reading is almost always going to be less clear than it could be.
So how do you set clear intentions?
First, know what you’re asking. Divination is a form of information gathering. What is the information you seek? Even intuitive and psychics who don’t use specific tools or ask specific questions are looking for a message of some kind. They’re not going to accept channeling the phone book (that’s a giant book of publicly listed names and phone numbers for a certain area code that used to be delivered to every front door every year—you girls keep me young) as a divinatory outcome. And they shouldn’t. No one intends to get that information from divination.
Knowing what you’re asking can be general or very specific.
You can say that you want to do a love reading, but that may not be enough for a clear reading. What do you want to know about love? Is it about what’s at the root of your current slump? Patterns in your past relationships that you want to understand better? When you’ll meet your future husband?
Once you know what information you’re looking for, it may be necessary for you to specify your questions and the spread you’ll use, if any. Words have meaning. And the way you handle your divination tools, if applicable, can also have meaning. More importantly, when you set these intentions ahead of time, you don’t have to second-guess those aspects of what you’re doing. And eliminating that confusion makes for much clearer readings.
Join me for a little story time.
When I first started exploring tarot on Instagram, I quickly discovered tarot challenges. I was doing 100 days of tarot and, frankly, I needed content for those 100 days, so they were the perfect prompts for creating posts. But when I asked my cards some of the questions, I would pull a card and have no idea how it answered the question. It was almost always because I didn’t understand the question for that day.
The creator might have phrased things in a way that made the meaning ambiguous, or they might have used a word incorrectly, throwing off the meaning of the sentence. And since I didn’t know what they had intended, I had to reframe it. But I hadn’t realized that until I’d already drawn the card because I didn’t ask myself what information I was really try to get out of the cards. I wanted the cards to give me an answer to a question that they also had to ask for me!
There’s a lot of room for error when you don’t understand the meaning of the questions you’re asking. And there’s no reason to wait until you’ve seen the card to clarify your question. You might start to second-guess how much work your rational mind was doing at that point, rather than what your intuition and unconscious was letting you discover.
Ask the questions you can answer.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of setting the intention to divine in a way that you believe is possible for you. That might sound obvious, but it’s important.
If you don’t believe that the future is knowable, then don’t ask when something will happen. Instead, ask how you can help make it more (or less) likely to happen. Or if you do believe you can know the future, but you also believe that it’s contingent upon things continuing on their current trajectory, then your predictions should be based on that contingency and trajectory. And it’s worth investigating what might affect that trajectory.
And if you believe that your cards are inert pieces of paper, your runes are nonmagical pieces of wood, or your charms are just random trinkets that all open you up to psychological self-reflection but nothing else, then look for information that psychological self-reflection can provide. Don’t ask the gods for advice. You’re not going to believe the answer even if you are able to articulate a meaningful answer.
Plenty of choices can affect your divination.
Your card layout, how you read your runes when they show up reversed (upside down), and how long you’ll steep your tea leaves for tasseomancy can all affect the way you interpret the results of your divination.
If you don’t believe me, pull some cards and rearrange them and see if you don’t find different messages in that new arrangement. Imagine what a reversed rune might have to say in response to your same inquiry. And try reading tea leaves that have steeped for only two minutes versus five minutes versus twelve minutes.
There isn't one right way to use these tools. But these choices have consequences. Often, your choices will provide different results. Is that wrong? Maybe. Maybe not. But what it can do, especially if you’re learning, is add confusion that takes you out of the moment of divination and potentially divine connection.
Is there a limit to the intentions you set?
Probably in real terms, yes. But lots of little things and some big things are yours to control. Since I’m most familiar with tarot, I’ll give you a few examples.
Reversals are when tarot cards are interpreted differently in an upside-down position. If you plan to read reversals, you may want to limit the potential meanings of the reversals. But what you definitely need to do is shuffle in a way that allows for reversals. You also need to decide if you will flip cards over the top (the short edge) or over the side (the long edge). If you flip cards over the top, they are upside-down compared to how they were in your deck. If you flip cards over the side, they are rightside-up compared to how they were in your deck. That makes a 180º difference. And yes, you can go with the flow and do what feels right, but I don’t recommend this until you’ve gotten very comfortable with your intuition and truly believe that everything in a reading is meaningful and as is best for the reading.
Skewed cards, such as those with strong negative or positive leanings for you, can really throw you off if you haven’t thought ahead of time how one of those cards might answer the question you’ve asked. For example, if you’ve intended that card #3 will show you a positive aspect of your relationship, it might be jarring to see the Tower, which is typically seen as negative. But if you have thought ahead of time about how you will need to look for positive messages in “negative” cards, then you can start pulling up those meanings ahead of time. You’ll be more primed and less confused.
Court cards are the most complex cards in a tarot deck, and they can mean many different things, from other people to parts of your personality and from abstract energies to specific time periods. Because of this, people get easily overwhelmed by seeing a court card. So set the intention of how you plan to read the cards. You don’t have to keep all meanings on the table. It’s your reading. It’s your intuition. Set some boundaries. If you’re asking about a pivotal future event in a career change, and you pull a court card, it would be helpful for you to know ahead of time whether that would mean another person entering into the scene to affect the situation or if that would mean you need to bring a part of you into the situation to see the results you want.
Shuffling and cutting the deck can cause confusion if you don’t have a good system for knowing when to stop shuffling or where to cut the deck. If you pull a card that you don’t like or don’t want to interpret, you might chalk it up to cutting in the wrong place. Or you might wonder whether you should have cut the deck freshly or shuffle again before choosing the next card. And if you pull two cards that were both in your previous reading, you might start to wonder if you’ve shuffled enough. (This is especially true for a deck’s first reading.) And all of that adds uncertainty that can remove you from the magical moment of reading.
Those are just some of the ways that you might choose to “set your intentions.” Sometimes they may affect the actual physical characteristics of your divination, such as the tendency of your tea leaves to clump together or the way your card layout can provide more or fewer directional cues. But often, it just helps you clarify for yourself what you’re doing and remove doubts that interfere with your ability to connect with your inner wisdom, whatever its source.
Did you learn something?
If so, you may love my Saturday seminar on Getting Intentional. It was part of my Fall 2023 semester of tarot, and a recording is now available.
And if you want to join in on the fun live, join my upcoming semester of tarot. It includes new one-time seminars, ongoing courses, and rich discussion time with me, your instructor, during office hours. Or check out my intensive fundamentals course for new and experienced tarot readers, Read Tarot like a Nerd. It’s self-paced and available all year-round.