by Melissa Nierman of Now.Age
Sometimes you don’t know you can do something until you actually do it.
For the past five years, Tarot Salon has been a place, a community, a safe space to actually do Tarot. Whether you’ve never picked up a Tarot deck in your life or you’ve been practicing for the past 20 years, you will read Tarot. What that looks like may differ depending on the individual. No two people read Tarot in the exact same way, because there is no exact same way. The only way that is truly “right” is the one where you, as the reader, are able to use the cards as a tool for tapping into your own spiritual knowing. Because the cards, no matter how mystical or mysterious they may seem, are just that: tools.
Yes, there is an art form to it, reading Tarot, just like any modality that invites mastery. There’s layers to understanding the cards that can only be understood with practice, study, and patient openness. But that doesn’t mean that someone looking at a Tarot card for the very first time is any less tapped into the energetic meaning than someone that has looked at the same card thousands of times. Any sense of spiritual hierarchy - whether you see yourself less than or better than - just gets in the way. And sometimes even our own experience and familiarity with what we think we know about the cards can get in the way. Because when we’re certain of our certainty, we stop really looking.
This is what Tarot Salon is all about. It’s designed not just to level the playing field, so to speak, but to negate that there’s really a playing field at all. It’s about bringing people together with all backgrounds of experience, to just try and see what happens in a space of non-judgment. Because if you don’t try, you’ll never actually know if you can or what it feels like when you do. And life after all is really just about the process of experiencing, isn’t it? But it’s so easy to forget that when so many of us have been taught that shame and punishment follow “failure.” In Tarot Salon there is no failure, because just showing up is what truly matters. And the same could be said of life.
I love recounting the story of how Tarot Salon came to be, because like so many guided endeavors, it started with a whisper. I was sitting in a Tarot class in the HausWitch store with my friend Zhana Levistky, who I didn’t know was my friend yet. Up until that point, I’d only been reading Tarot quietly on my own and was still very much tied to the guidebook. This was my first “official” class I’d ever taken on Tarot and I furiously transcribed every single word the teacher said, every beautiful poetic interpretation of every single card - all 78 of them. By the end of the class, my notebook was full and my mind was buzzing. But I still didn’t know or believe that I could ever interpret the cards so beautifully myself. The teacher was obviously gifted and I was just a person with a lot of notes...
That was the story I was stuck in when Zhana mentioned maybe getting a group together after class to actually read with each other and wouldn’t that be fun? “Like a Tarot Salon,” she said. And as if in a trance state, I mouthed the words back for everyone to see, eyes wild with excitement, one syllable at a time: “Ta-rot Sa-lon.” It seemed important. But I didn’t live in Salem at the time or even Massachusetts, so I quickly forgot about it. That is, until many months later, when those two words mysteriously popped back in my head - literally the moment I drove over the border into Massachusetts on my way to my new unexpected life in Salem. Life, The Universe, my guides, whoever or whatever, were there to remind me.
This coming Tuesday, May 25th 7-9pm EST will mark 5 whole years of meeting every single last Tuesday of the month in community to practice reading the Tarot together. Now, with the adaptations of 2020, our community has gone online, available to curious folks from around the world. Every month, we explore the themes of one Tarot card together through questions that Zhana and I create. We’ve already celebrated completion of the entire Major Arcana and now we’re onto the Minor Arcana. And every month, we bring together people who may not have believed that they could read Tarot for others, if they hadn't had the opportunity to try.
Today, Tarot Salon has become a monthly refuge, a space to see so many of the same faces again and again and share in their expansion and welcome all the new brave faces too. To talk about what lies beneath the surface of our beings, to let so-called strangers know parts of us that even our closest friends have never touched. It’s not about healing anybody else or giving a “good” reading. It’s about exploring something mysterious together, something that most of society is too afraid to even interact with. It’s about showing up and allowing ourselves to be seen and to practice seeing another person without any judgement.
It’s about actually doing it, even if we’re not sure we can. And that in itself is the real MAGIC.
Join us virtually for Tarot Salon every last Tuesday of the month! Sign-up on the HausWitch Events page. All you need is a deck.
