How my reading practice changed when I went online

For seven years I read tarot in a small room in Colonia Roma in Mexico City. Tile floor. One window onto a courtyard with a lemon tree. A table I'd inherited from a friend who left for Madrid. Two chairs. A pitcher of agua de jamaica and two glasses if a client wanted one. Most of them did.

I never thought I'd read online. I had a kind of contempt for it, if I'm being honest. The whole appeal of tarot, to me, was that you sat with another person in a room and the room itself was part of the reading. The light. The smell of the deck after years of being shuffled by hands. The way a long silence in a small room weighs more than a long silence anywhere else.

Then March 2020 happened. I closed the room. I told my clients I'd come back when it was safe. Three of them asked if I'd try a video session in the meantime. I said yes, mostly because I wasn't sure how I was going to pay my rent.

That was almost six years ago. The room in Roma is still mine, and I still see clients there when I can. But most of my reading life now happens through a camera. Here's what I lost. Here's what I gained. I'm done apologising for it.

What I lost, and I want to name it honestly

I lost the room.

I don't mean the building. I mean the third thing in the reading. When a client and I sat across from each other at that wooden table, there was a third presence between us that was the room itself. It held the silence we left between the cards. It absorbed the things that didn't need to be spoken. The lemon tree did half the work some days.

In a video session there is no third thing. There's me, in my apartment, with the deck on a tray on my lap. There's the client, in their kitchen or their car or, once, their bathroom, because their housemates were noisy. The cards exist between us as small images on a screen. The silence, when it happens, has to be carried entirely by the two humans, because there's no room to lean on.

I lost the smell of the deck. This sounds small. It isn't. A deck that has been handled for years smells faintly of the hands that handled it. My main deck smells of the lavender oil I rub into my hands before a reading. Clients used to come in and pick the deck up and bring it to their face. That gesture is gone over video. I miss it more than I expected to.

I lost the slow arrival. A client who'd taken the metro and the bus and a walk to get to the room in Roma had spent forty minutes getting ready to be there. They were already half-arrived by the time they sat down. A client clicking a link from their bedroom is in the session within four seconds of closing a work tab. I have to do the arrival work for them now, which takes longer and is harder.

I want to name those losses because most writing about online reading skips over them in a rush to defend the format. The losses are real. They are not nothing. I think about the lemon tree often.

What I gained, which I did not expect

I gained clients in Portuguese, in English, and in Catalan. The room in Roma served the people who could get to that room. The internet served the people who couldn't. I have a regular client in São Paulo who would never have flown to Mexico City to see me. We've worked together for four years.

I gained a reading life that fits inside my actual life. I have a small daughter now, four years old, and the version of me that drove to Roma at 7am to open the room before a 9am client doesn't exist anymore. The version of me who reads from my desk after she's asleep, who takes a midday session while she's at preschool, who can be a mother and a reader on the same Tuesday, that version exists. The internet built her.

I gained the recording. This is the gain I most underestimated. With the client's permission I record every video session and send them the audio file afterward. In the room I used to watch clients write frantically in a notebook, trying to capture sentences while still being present in the reading. They couldn't do both. Now they don't have to. They listen later, in the car, on a walk, in the bath, and they tell me they catch things the second time that they missed the first time.

This last gain has changed my reading style. I speak more slowly. I name the cards out loud as I lay them, even when the client can see them, because I know they'll be listening again later and I want the audio to make sense without the video. I leave longer pauses, deliberately, because I want them to be able to pause the recording and think. The work has become better since I started recording, not worse. I didn't see that coming.

The format question, answered the way I'd answer it for a client

People ask me, mostly via DM, whether an online reading is "as good" as in-person. The honest answer is that it's a different reading, and the right one depends on what you're bringing.

If your question is large and slow, the kind of question you've been carrying for months, the kind you'd want to sit with for a full hour and let unfold, in-person is still the gold standard if you can get to it. The room holds you. The reader can see your whole body. The cards on a real table have a presence that the cards on a screen don't quite have. I won't pretend otherwise.

If your question is more focused, or if your nervous system finds it easier to be honest in your own space, online is often better. I've had clients tell me things over video that I'm fairly sure they would not have told me across a table. The screen is a small distance, and the small distance lets them lower a defence they couldn't lower in person. I didn't expect that either.

If you live somewhere without a reader you trust, online is not a compromise. It's the format. The internet is the only reason a client in Belém or in Tromsø or in a small town in Querétaro has access to the same caliber of reader as a client in Mexico City. That's not nothing. That's the entire reason the platform we use exists.

If you're a working parent, or a shift worker, or a carer, or anyone whose life doesn't have a free Tuesday at 3pm three weeks from now, online is the reading you can actually have. The reading you can have is better than the reading you can't.

How I prepare differently now

A few things I do for video sessions that I didn't do in the room.

I keep the camera at eye level. Not down on the table looking up my nose, not up on a shelf looking down. Eye to eye, the way it would be across the table. This sounds technical. It is. It also changes everything. A client who is being looked at the way they'd be looked at in a room behaves differently from a client who is being filmed from a strange angle.

I light the cards. The light in the room in Roma did this for me. In an apartment with one overhead light, I had to learn to do it on purpose. I have a small lamp now, angled at the table, so the cards are the brightest thing on the screen. The client's eye goes where the light is, and I want it on the cards, not on my face.

I write to the client first. The morning of the session, I send a short message. Just a check-in. The room used to do this for me too. The client would walk in, take their shoes off, sit down, and the room would do the work of saying, you have arrived, you are here. Online, I have to write a few sentences that do the same job.

I start the session with my hand on the deck and a long breath out, in view of the camera. Clients almost always breathe with me. This is the closest I've come to importing the room. A long breath out, on camera, with a deck in your hand. It works. I don't know why exactly. I'll keep doing it.

The thing I'd say to a client who's hesitating

If you've been holding off on a reading because you can't picture how it works on a screen, here's what I'd say.

The cards still know what they know. The reader still does the work they'd do in person. The session takes the time it takes. You'll cry if you need to. You'll laugh if you need to. The reader can see you. You can see them. You can pause to drink water or get a tissue or look out the window the same way you would in a room.

The one thing I'd ask is that you pick a place in your home where you can close the door. Not the corner of a shared room. Not your office between meetings. A small private hour. Light a candle if you have one. Make the place hold you the way the room would. You'll be surprised what the cards can do across a screen when the small space on your end is taken seriously.

The room in Roma is still mine. I'll be there next Tuesday for a client who flew in from Monterrey. The lemon tree is doing well. And tonight, after my daughter's asleep, I'll read for a writer in Lisbon I haven't met in person and probably never will. The work is the work, in either room. I love them both now.