How Often to Pull Cards

The habit I most often try to talk clients out of is the daily re-reading of a question that has not changed since yesterday.

Repetition erodes the question

The first reading of a question is asked by someone who wants to know. The fifth is asked by someone who wants a particular answer, and by then they have seen enough spreads to know which cards would give it to them.

That is not the cards failing. It is the reading becoming a negotiation with yourself, which it will win every time.

The answer that has not had time to happen

Most readings describe something in motion. Asking again three days later is asking for a progress report on a process that has barely started, and the honest answer would be that nothing has changed yet.

What people take from the second reading instead is usually a slightly different emphasis, which then reads as a contradiction and produces a third.

A reasonable interval

For a genuine question about a situation in motion, leave it until something in the situation has actually moved. In practice that is rarely less than a month, and often longer.

If circumstances change materially, ask again immediately. A new question is not a repeat, and the distinction is usually obvious to the person asking if they are honest with themselves.

What to do in between

Write down what the reading actually said, on the day, before it starts drifting. Memory is generous towards the parts that suited us and quietly loses the rest.

Then go and do the thing the reading pointed at. Almost every client who has been through a stretch of compulsive re-reading has told me afterwards that the problem was never the answer. It was that they already knew what it required.