Information on the new site (Feb 8th)

Hey everybody, here's a quick update on what is going on, and when you can expect it to happen.

The new tarot academy site is built but we still need to load it up with lots of fun tarot goodies. Most of this will take time, but I want to have all of the existing podcasts, videos, and articles in one place so that we can keep adding to them. More will be added every week, and I will email you guys the links to the free lessons. Just in case you are reading this and you did not get a chance to sign up for our free tarot lessons please click here for your free weekly tarot lessons.

I will be hosting a handful of free tarot workshops before we open the new site to the public. I will email everyone the links as these get set up, so make sure that you have signed up (above). These will be 60 minute tarot lessons with a Q&A session immediately after, where you can ask me anything about the tarot. I will also try to get some new videos and podcasts out before the new educational site is launched.

What is going on behind the curtains is that the decks are being printed and cut, and sadly the timing has ruined our chances of boxing them up as they should be without delaying them another two months. I dropped the ball. I simply was trying to do too much on my own and Chinese New Year came upon us (technically it is on the 19th, but the entire industry is shutting down for a few weeks, so no chance of getting boxes made and printed any time soon). That said, I will see if I can get boxes made after the fact. This is like what happened in 1909 when Art tried to get his deck out on time for the big show. Be that as it may, I will post pics on the site of the entire deck and get these mailed out in the next week or two.

More soon. Thanks for being here. Remember, we have TONS of videos and audio lessons already done if you need free education on the tarot, and the new site will teach even more. Once you are on the mailing list ALL of our public lessons will be available to you and you can go through them in any order you like, at your convenience. If you don't have The Easiest Way to Learn the Tarot—EVER!! or Advanced Tarot Secrets yet, you can get them by clicking on those links. As always, we recommend this deck to make learning easy and fast. This is the pocket edition (about the size of regular playing cards—much easier to shuffle).

Let me know if you have any questions. :-)

Dusty

How to use your cards to manifest stuff (yes, really)

Here are DOZENS of free live audio lessons on the tarot, personally taught by me. No frills, no goofy music, no sales pitches (other than telling you about my books). The newest lesson (today's) is all about maximizing the power of your manifestations. Several of the most recent lessons are also on using YOUR card to get "God" to give you stuff. This is practiced all over the world, by Christians, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Pagans, and just about every religious group, and maybe even agnostics.

I don't care what religion you follow. These are the techniques that get you in touch with your deity and ask for help. You ask, "God" answers. That is how it is supposed to work.

Here is today's free lesson (it is 37 minutes)

Click here to hear the lesson now (~37 minute audio -- take notes!): 
http://easytarotlessons.podomatic.com/entry/2014-05-28T19_25_45-07_00

Click here to subscribe on iTunes and get ALL of the audio lessons at no cost:

itpc://easytarotlessons.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

What makes YOU so special? (as a tarot reader) Finding your U.S.P.

There are far too many people who own a tarot deck these days who think they can read the future. They all need to be--

trained.

I hope you didn't think I was going to say "shot." The problem is that there are so few decent handbooks on how to master the Tarot. There are several hundred that promise to teach you how to read cards in fiver or ten minutes, or how to amaze your friends and see into the future, but seriously. There is a LOT more to accurately predicting the future, or helping find your neighbor's lost dog, than memorizing the meanings of the cards, studying numerology, or converting to Kabbalism. If you want to make $100-$1,000 an hour (and yes, you can make a LOT more than that) you need to know what I know.

. . .  which is why it is good that I am such a blabbermouth. I sincerely want to help you, which is why I give away free audio, video, and written Tarot lessons (FreeTarotLessons.com). There is no catch. Just sign up and get our emails two to three times a month, maybe four if we actually show up for work. You can even get your need for instant gratification filled by watching some free videos here if you like: (http://www.youtube.com/user/dustywhite2).

But let's get you on the path to Tarot fame and fortune right now:

You need a U.S.P. That is a marketing term that means "unique selling proposition," or something special about you that makes you stand out from an overcrowded world of Tarot enthusiasts all wanting to make money reading cards. There are several ways you can make a LOT of money reading the Tarot, but the first thing you really should do is to decide what it is that you really WANT to do. This gets into that "Know Thyself" thing that was on Delphi a million years ago. You have to figure out who you are, and what you like. Your day job is something you do to pay for your lifestyle. My lifestyle is something that pays for my breathing and eating habits, and my desire to sleep on a comfy bed. I would like to see you quit your day job and enter your lifestyle as a career. But we must find out what you like doing and focus on that, and only that area of your life.

Let's forget the psychic hotlines, free Internet readings, video readings over the Internet, and those "$5 specials" we see at retail locations all over the world. We want to enter the secret world of the professional astrologers and Tarot readers who make more money than most people do every year, reading for corporate clients and governmental agencies. To land one of these cush jobs you need "mad skillz" (which I am teaching you every week), and a head for business. The top experts in the world know their "niche." Yeah, I am speaking marketingese again. They have a U.S.P., whether it is financial planning experience enhanced by their ability to get additional information from the divine, or medical astrological knowledge, Tarot dowsing ability that allows them to find anything--or anyone--can you imagine trying to run from a trained Tarot bounty Hunter? Woof!

Dowsing with your deck can allow you to hunt for buried treasure, help police find missing children (and won't their parents be happy). This is not a parlor trick, and it is not some esoteric skill you can only learn by joining an order so secret that you don't know they exist until you are a member. It takes discipline and careful, thoughtful practice. It takes patience to learn and a desire to be better than the stock-in-trade readers who have read a few books and applied for a job online.

What if you could help your clients CHANGE their future? What if you could help them physically manifest what they wanted for their business, even against the odds. Napoleon Hill proved this can be done--and I say that it can be done even better with Tarot cards. Your cards act like a lens, or a focal point, that helps you tighten your focus, and psychic punch, to churn out what the unenlightened call "miracles." You can do this for yourself, and you can do it for your clients.

Blatant ad: Look, if you don't know how to do this, cough up 22 bucks and get a copy of Advanced Tarot Secrets on Amazon or at your favorite local metaphysical store (they won't have it in stock, but if you tell them I told you to buy it from them instead of Amazon they might carry it).

What else can you do with the tarot? Why not focus on relationships, if you have experience and expertise as a counselor on that subject? I do.

My point is this: You can do or be anything you want--including mediocre, just like so many others who fail to open their eyes to the possibilities the Tarot gives to you. You can choose your profession. You can make money every day (that you feel like working) doing exactly what you want with the Tarot, but you have to find your (here it comes again) "U.S.P." Don't worry, I don't like that term much either, but it makes sense. If you are going to be a jack-of-all-trades reader you will probably never earn a decent ($100k+ /year) living from the Tarot. So why do it? It takes no more effort to do what you like, and get paid sick amounts of money for it, as it does to just follow the herd, read the same books that everyone else is, or worse: trying to scrounge free information from the Internet and become a Tarot ninja.

Specialize. Choose your path. Make a list of things you would like to do with the Tarot. Put your brain to work and make it reveal what your life's purpose is. Make your work with the Tarot an extension of that. Too many people fail to take their Tarot studies seriously. I see this every day. When the message gets hollowed out by too many people trying to make easy money, the entire structure fails. Nowhere is this more true than in metaphysics.

STAND OUT FROM THE CROWD.

Stand out by standing for something. (Yourself)

Know you--and know HOW you help your clients. Don't "just read anything for anyone." Find your specialty and raise your rates. ONLY accept clients who need what you can provide. Then use everything I teach you to stun them. You should be seeing 20-50% tips on a regular basis, and even 100% tips occasionally. THAT is how good you need to be to play in the big leagues. Get yourself trained (I will do it--so will qualified teachers all over the globe: pick one). Get your head straight. Get off of the crack pipe of "general readings" and get yourself an area of expertise and study "real life" information about that so you can prepare your intuition to blend more completely with your conscious awareness.

All you have to do is click your heels three times.


Anyway, thanks for being here. Tell me what YOU think.

Advanced Tarot Secrets: Who am I? (new fun tarot game!)

Just in case you didn't know, we have TONS of free video Tarot lessons. Here is one now. It is a new fun Tarot game called "Who Am I?" This comes from the new book, Advanced Tarot Secrets, and it will help you deepen your understanding of the card images in any well-crafted deck. This will, in turn, help you develop a better understanding of how the Tarot reflects the daily realities of life, and that will make you a MUCH better reader.

You can get ALL of our free Tarot lessons here by signing up for our email lesson newsletter. (It takes all of 30 seconds). Please tell your friends (so they can play too!)

How to develop your power of focus by using your tarot cards

The ability to focus is essential in any form of divination or manifestation. To date the Tarot is one of the best tools developed for strengthening your focus (because my deck has not been released to the public yet).

If you want to transcend the mundane run-of-the mill Tarot readings (memorized meanings superstitions, and artificial systems of interpretation) too many readers give you must be able to achieve a level of focus not taught outside of a mystery school or temple. This week we had a lesson in focus. If you missed it but would like to sign up for our free Tarot lessons (written lessons, audio lessons, videos--all free, all taught by experts) please click here.

Right now let's just consider what this skill allows you to do when you have been properly trained. The Tarot is simply a set of cards with images on them. To bring out the amazing results masters and professionals do every day you need to strengthen your focal powers. Your clients are coming to you with problems (or if you  are your own client than you come with problems) and their concerns are a weight on your mind as you seek answers. It is a pressure as if you are being sat on. You are being watched and judged while you "perform on stage." You are in the spotlight, doing your thing, while one or more people sit expectantly awaiting you to work your magic. Pressure like this in any field of endeavor is bad enough but when you add the fact that the nature of Tarot is that you have to open yourself up psychically (which is eerily similar to opening yourself up emotionally), and now you are absorbing that pressure into you while you are searching psychically (feeling around like an ant with your invisible antennae) for the threads that connect the question to the answer.

The cards help you focus. When we attempt psychometry (scrying or fire/crystal gazing, holding an object . . .) we have no "easy tool" like a deck of cards to help us. The images on the tarot cards point us at the answers we seek but they do not do the work for us. We need to expand our awareness and simultaneously tune out competing sensory input. I cover this in great detail in the new book (Advanced Tarot Secrets), which just went to the editor last night (9 p.m. Pacific). I want you to focus your attention on the question you are asking and allow your awareness to "breathe in" a bit more information, but keep your eye on the cards, or your shuffling, or the images in front of you. It is a bit of a balancing act, like the 2 of Coins, where you are keeping the question you ask front and center in your mind, followed by the cards, and then your client at a distant third.

This is the process of channeling by the way. It requires moving your conscious awareness around inside your brain. I remember an exercise long ago, from my early days, when I was told to move my consciousness around various parts of my body. It seemed ridiculous at the time but I did it anyway. It was hard! This is much easier, but it still requires effort and discipline--but we are correctly reading the future here not learning how to make a bowl of cereal. The more intelligently applied effort you put into this the more powerful you will be, and the exorbitant rates you will command.

Work on your focus. Study your cards while other people are talking, or the TV is on. Don't "read" and drive, but find ways to challenge yourself to split your attention in two, and then in thirds as you go about your daily duties, and include your cards--and questions--in the mix. You will be stunned at what you can do once you master this one facet of reading.

Thanks for being here. More next week, please let me know what you think.

Why should we bother learning tarot history anyway?

The tarot evolved from cards brought to Italy in the 1300's.

So... who cares? How does that affect me?

The problem with the tarot is that the centuries of lies, myths, and superstitions have done their best to destroy any factual evidence of the tarot's origins, and it is only recently that scientific analysis and the ease of long-distance communication among many sources throughout the world has shed light on what really happened long ago. We can now easily talk to someone on the other side of the world who has a scrap of information that acts like a missing puzzle piece in our quest to find out "the Truth" (note the capital "t").

This may seem basic, but this instant information age we live in is only a decade or so old. Even now many are only slowly coming to the internet, even as the web is 18 years old. Stepping back to the 1960's when all we had were phone lines and snail mail, or worse, in the 1700's, 1800's and early 1900's when we had things like horses and ships to carry mail, there was little to no chance of assembling all of the parts of history together on ANY arcane subject with any great accuracy. Try as we might, the facts were simply too diverse, too widely scattered for us to understand how things originated without being served large doses of opinion, superstition, and outright misinformation. Simply put: for the longest time (literally "centuries") people believed in all kinds of garbage we laugh at today. Unfortunately their beliefs about the tarot are resurging in popularity as more and more faux authors and faux tarot scholars discover the ease and lack of expense in reprinting public domain texts. These "wannabe authorities" print the lies and mistakes people made throughout history in an attempt to make easy money and get laid at cocktail parties.

All of that nonsense stops here (and I will name names--some of them QUITE FAMOUS if I have to). The reason we learn tarot history, even a little, is to protect us from the mistakes, lies, and superstitions of idiots and those too lazy to do any level of actual research. If you are assaulted by an angry xian who says that the tarot is demonic (because they think so--and thus they know more than "God") you can reply that the Church NEVER had any problem with the tarot, and that there is more Christian iconography in the tarot than there are in any other card decks in the world. In fact, there are several flavors of Christian tarot, from saints, to angels, to Jesus decks. But you have to do a little research to know this.

Similarly, if someone tells you that the tarot came from Babylon, Egypt, or Greece, and you have not done ANY research, you will get sucked into the beliefs that the tarot came from Atlantis, and that hieroglyphs are coded tarot messages. This may not sound like much of a damper to your abilities, but when you start trying to force the tarot images into meanings that have nothing to do with their design, you will join the millions of people who have fought and lost the battle of mastering the tarot. This problem has been going on throughout the centuries as people try to make the tarot "cool" by adding useless information to it. Simply by knowing where the tarot came from (um... Italy, then Switzerland, Spain, and France) you can easily understand why the images are there and what they mean. The images of the tarot are simply a reflection of life during that time period. In order to read the cards accurately we must transpose new understandings ("technology," and social advancements such as Democracy) over the archaic images of feudal lords and peasants with barbaric technology.

I cannot strongly enough recommend Robert Place's book on the subject. It is that good--and it is a quick read. It reveals the scoundrels and some of the thieves in the tarot, the historians who tried, and failed, to find the true history of the cards, and how the cards evolved from dice rolls. I don't run around recommending tarot books, so I do hope you will try this one out. At least read the free parts on Amazon and decide for yourself:

The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination

A simple perusal of the tarot's evolution will show you WHY we have the meanings we do today, and how the order of the cards has changed several times, meanings have been purposely altered on the whim of one man's ego and another man's zealotry. Knowing these things deepens your relationship with the cards. It makes you see them for what they are, and not as some "mysterious oracle" the aliens gave us.

Trust me--I do this for a living. And my only concern is to scrub the crap out your head that people keep piling on.

Okay, thanks for reading. More later

Fun new tarot game! (helps you LEARN)

I have been working on several new tarot games that make learning the tarot fun. I want to post an easy one here. I hope you will incorporate this into your practice with the tarot, as it will build your skills very fast on several levels. It is not enough to know the meanings of the cards. It is essential to know how cards interact with each other in spreads and how the circumstance and question involved shape the meanings of each card.


These easy games will help you do exactly that. Let's start out with one that you can practice alone, or play with friends. If I get enough comments I will make it a priority to post the rest of the games here as well. As always, these are based on the information in my book The Easiest Way to Learn the Tarot--EVER!! if you have any questions on that.


This game is called "Friends and Enemies."


This game is super-easy, but it takes a little thinking. The purpose of this game is to remember the images of the cards and to compare and contrast cards. All you have to do is pick a random card from your deck. If you are a new student, or at the beginning of your tarot journey, you may find this game easier if you just work with the "minor" Arcana for now.


The first variation of this game is called "Friends" (or Who likes me?)


Look at the image on the card. Get a feel of what is happening in the picture. Are people fighting? Are they being friendly to each other? Maybe they are alone and lost in thought . . . Just enjoy getting inside the picture as if it is happening right outside your window. 


Now try to match it up with any other card in your deck. Find the card that (you think) best matches it in meaning or general similarity (example, the 3 of Swords and the 9 of Swords both indicate despair, or great disappointment/sadness; whereas the 3 of Cups and the 4 of Wands show people having fun, celebrating; also the 7 of Coins and the 9 of Coins show people on a farm or vineyard). That's it! Work through the deck until you run out of matches and start again.


If you this variation gets too easy try "Enemies," where you try to find cards that have either the exact opposite meaning or are completely incompatible (like the 3 of Swords and the 3 of Cups).


It helps to lay out all of the cards in rows on a table, or even the floor, so you can quickly look over all of the cards, rather than thumbing through your deck, one card at a time. Full rules for the game will appear in the forthcoming book Advanced Tarot Secrets, but for now that is enough to get your practicing and having fun.


Here are a few examples:

Card one: The Star (Who likes me?)

Card two: The World (reasoning: Both have naked women--OR--they are both happy fun cards whose meaning is ridiculously positive)

Card one: The Magician (Who likes me?)

Card two: The Chariot (reasoning: Both cards are autonomous. They both hate to be told what to do and like to be in charge of their domain--OR--They are both alpha males)

Card one: 9 of Swords (Who likes me?)

Card two: The 4 of Swords (reasoning: They both have people in bed--kinda)--OR--The 5 of Coins (reasoning: Misery loves company) 

See? Easy! 


Please let me know what YOU think.