Recently I had a conversation with a client who draws cards for herself, and wanted my thoughts on why the card messages sometimes don’t make sense. I totally got where she was coming from. When I first started reading cards, I once got so frustrated trying to understand what the angels were telling me that I threw the deck across the room in fury! Over time, though, I’ve become more familiar with the different meanings of the cards and better at understanding the different ways the divine can use these tools to speak to us. I’m also better at sitting in the ambiguity and waiting for the messages to become clearer. (I should point out: this has taken a long time.) Here are some of the reasons which, in my experience, can make oracle card meanings not super clear – if you draw cards for yourself, you might find it helpful.
1. Consider other meanings
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An obvious one to start with. Generally oracle cards have more than one meaning, so if the main one just isn’t resonating, consider some of the other possibilities. Sometimes the angels will give you the closest card to what they’re trying to say. For example, there’s a card called ‘Workshops and seminars’ in the Angel Therapy Oracle Card deck. For many people, that card will be a clear call to attend that workshop they’ve already been considering, or to pay attention to when someone recommends a workshop to them in the near future. But for others, it might be an invitation to teach their own workshop. Or it could be a more general message about life lessons, suggesting that the situation that person is facing might be trying to teach them an important lesson that they’ll need to understand before the situation can resolve. As always, trusting your judgment is key.
2. You’re reading too often
This is just my opinion, but I have found drawing multiple cards for myself every single day can result in information overload, and I’m unable to take all the messages on board. This can muddy the waters a little. I also don’t recommend continuing to draw cards on the same situation, time after time. You’ll either keep getting the same cards, which will annoy you, or you’ll get different ones that confuse you (I suspect that sometimes the angels do this as a way of telling us to stop drawing cards).
3. Your focus is too narrow
(Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash)
Have you ever asked a friend for advice, and when they haven’t told you what you want to hear, asked a bunch more people until you got the guidance you were looking for all along? It’s easy to do this with the cards, too, completely forgetting that the angels will always tell us what we need to hear, not what we want to hear. Sometimes those two things are the same, but sometimes they’re not. So it’s important to go in with an open mind, and be accepting of what comes up, even if it’s not what you were hoping for.
Also, sometimes our questions are too specific. For example, you might ask the angels whether a stressful work project is going to work out favourably. Maybe you get cards that don’t give you that very specific ‘yes’ or ‘no’ you were looking for, but instead deliver messages on what you need to know about your work environment generally – such as ‘throat chakra’, indicating a block in your ability to communicate and express ourselves.
4. There’s a bigger picture at play
We often forget that we can only see a small sliver of a situation, whereas the angels can see the full picture. So while we’re consumed by one event in front of us, the angels already know something else is going to happen in the near future that will change the game completely, and they might want to give advice on that. For example, once when my business was slow, I asked them for advice on how to bring in more money. Instead, they gave me messages saying I needed to rest. This was not overly helpful. However, about a month later, business picked up substantially and I was rushed off my feet. I then realised they’d been trying to tell me that I needed that earlier time to rest and restore my energy for the future influx of work that they could see coming. (If only I’d listened.)
(Photo by Pietro Tebaldi on Unsplash)
As another variation on this theme, an angel card reader friend of mine told me years ago – and I’m pretty sure I’ve told this story on the blog before, so I apologise for the repetition – about when she was in an on/off relationship with someone who’d moved to another country. She asked her angels whether she should move over to be with him, and she got messages indicating that committing to a move would be a good idea. Unfortunately, after she bought her plane ticket, he broke up with her. Not surprisingly, she was pretty furious – with the angels (and probably with him too, I imagine). Eventually she came to understand that the angels hadn’t been deliberately setting her up for heartbreak. In fact they’d been setting her up to get closure, because the on/off nature of that relationship – a partnership that they knew didn’t have a future – was keeping her stuck. It was only when she committed to the move that the guy finally called it off, setting her free. (She met her soulmate later on, and married him, so she’s absolutely at peace with this situation now, in case you were wondering.)
For more advice on reading angel cards, click here. If you’d like to book a session with me, go here. More information about what I do is available here.