How To Get To The Root Of A Lenormand Reading

Following on from my previous post about asking empowering Lenormand questions, I wanted to talk a little bit more the point in Tip 5, which was “Think About What’s At the Root Of Your Question and Why You Want To Know.”

If  you are someone who prefers to use Lenormand in a more personal development way than a fortune-telling way—and I know a lot of my readers are— getting to the root of questions and readings can be one of the most rewarding ways you use the cards.

What do I mean by “Getting to the Root of a Lenormand Reading?”

When you’ve been reading Lenormand for yourself for a while, or even when you’re reading for friends and family, you’ll start to find that the cards will oftentimes tell you what you or the person you’re reading for needs to know in relation to the question asked rather than what you or they want , at least on the surface,  to know.

Rather than lose confidence in your abilities or doing more and more readings to try to answer the question in the way that is hoped for, it might be worth considering whether or not the question asked is of the type that I have started to think of as a Sticking-Plaster question.

What’s a Sticking-Plaster Question?

A Sticking-Plaster question is one that you ask that yes, can probably be answered on a basic level, but is covering up for a much bigger and far more important root issue underneath.  It’s most often where you want, sometimes desperately, a particular answer to a particular question from the cards, where actually, what you need to hear is probably something else entirely. Sticking-plaster questions can often be quite closed—a lot of fortune-telling type questions tend to be of the sticking-plaster variety— and often seem to be sitting rather superficially on top of what becomes clear, if you look at the cards in depth, is a much more important or fundamental issue.

Examples of Common Sticking-Plaster Type Questions

Here are some examples of the sticking-plaster kinds of questions that tend to come up most often.

Question: Will X person ever love me?

(Root: I’m worried about my relationships. What are the issues around that? Why am I not in one yet? Why can’t I make this person like me in the way I like them?)

Question: Will I Get This Job And When?

(Root: Am I doing the things that make me happy in my work life? What do I like doing in my career? Am I on the right path for me? What really matters to me in life?)

Question: Will I ever get Married And When?

(Root: I’m single and worrying that it’s for ever. Is it? Is there anything I can do to change that? What do I really want?)

Question: Will I be rich in future?

(Root: I’m having money troubles and I don’t know how best to solve them OR I’m struggling about what really matters to me in life, and am unsure of my core values)

Why Does This  Matter In A Reading?

The depth of your questioning and whether or not you are really prepared for the truth affects the real value in what you’re getting out of that reading and importantly, most especially for those who prefer to use the cards more for personal development, how empowered you are and how much it spurs you to action. For the most deep and rewarding work, you want to to be dealing with the real issues, not just surface wants and desires: that’s all pretty much ego stuff.

Lenormand, like other card systems, is one way to help you do that IF you are willing to be open to what the cards have to say. Lenormand is, as I’ve mentioned previously, more direct and down to earth than Tarot, but that doesn’t mean Lenormand cards are incapable of using to explore unconscious or psychological themes in our lives. I prefer them, in fact, partly because I find them rather more practical and direct in nature.

5 Ways  Of Getting To The Root of a Reading

1. Ask your question. Try it with keycard AND no keycard

 Using a keycard – a card in the centre of a 5 or 9-card spread that representes the theme of your question, say the Heart or the Fox or a Man or Woman card – can help focus your reading so you know it’s definitely about that theme. However, you can often get a much deeper although less direct response to your question if you read and shuffle ‘blind’ – ie do the layout without choosing a focus keycard and let the centre card be whatever it is. I often find that this method gives me better information than using a keycard. In most of my five and 9-card readings where I have a specific question, especially when I do them for others, I now tend to use both to get the roundest picture.

Check out my Keycard or No Keycard: That Is The Question post for more details.

2. Consider how the cards do or don’t seem to relate to the specific question you asked

This can be a difficult one. What if you do a reading in response to a question and it just seems, on the face of it, not to be related to that issue at all?

It does happen that a reading can be ‘off’, maybe if you’re not concentrating or other things are influencing your reading and I know of some professional card-readers who would re-draw in that situation, although usually it’s because they feel that influences from a previous reading for someone else might be bleeding into the current one.

Generally, though, especially if you’re doing your own readings, I think if you’ve asked a question ‘cleanly’ and in your usual way, you should take note of what cards came up in response to a question, even if they don’t seem initially to answer it directly: they may do so in a roundabout way, or  be urging you to look at the question itself in a different way.

3. How do you feel? Annoyed? Was there something you didn’t want to see? Tempted to do another reading immediately?

Hold your horses! This might be one of the biggest signs to step back or that you’re onto something. I tend to take the view, especially when it comes to personal development of all kinds, that having a big emotional reaction to something, especially something not going our way, tend to be a giant clue that there is something that is really, really begging to be explored. It might even be the real key to the issue.

It’s human nature to try to avoid difficult issues in life. You will find that often with cartomancy systems – and this is true of both Tarot and Lenormand- people use them to try to ‘force’ the answers and things that they want in life because they feel out of their control. Nearly all sticking-plaster questions have this feel to them, I find.

My advice here is that if you do or get a reading and your immediate, visceral response is to ignore it, feel mad, or want to do another right away (which is really just a case of putting yet another sticking-plaster on top) STOP. Take a step back. Don’t do another reading yet. Do not pass Go.

Instead, take a bit of time to process what came up in the reading, and why it was you think you had such a reaction to it. Look at all of it and consider what it’s saying in detail.  It may be telling you something. Leave it a few days or a week at least before you go back. Sometimes these things just need a little bit of time to work through.

4. Investigate further

Another way of getting to the underlying root of issues, especially if a reading generates more questions than answers, is to explore further when unexplained things come up. This is a situation , in contrast to the “I just don’t want to hear this!” vibe in my previous point, where doing further readings can actually be helpful.

Check out my Following The Trail: How To Use Lenormand To Solve A Mystery for tips on this approach.

5. Listen To Your Intuition

Finally, as an intuitive reader myself, I cannot overemphasise the value of listening to your own intuition when doing readings. Especially after you’ve been practising Lenormand for a while, you’ll find – or I do, anyway – that your mind builds up a very strong sense of what each card means to you, and how they tend to show up in your life and even that of others. This is extremely valuable information from a personal development perspective. It means that your unconscious is starting to build up pictures of what is and isn’t meaningful to you in your life and how it all fits together with other things around you. I have learnt now to always go with my instincts on a reading if something jumps out at me—say a strong inner sense that a card is referring to a particular situation. I find that my instinct is invariably correct.

 

Want More Guidance?

Go to my Lenormand Tips page for tips about common issues and problems.

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