Is it “critical” that grounding and centering be performed before you do a reading? That depends on who you speak to! Whereas I do think it is important to try and be as grounded and centered as possible before reading, I am not sure that that I would agree and that it is an absolute must every time.
Grounding and Centering Can Depend on Your Experience Level
Grounding and centering and the need to do it rather depends on how experienced or inexperienced you are. Professional Tarot readers build up a natural resistance to negative energies over the course of their professional lives and can ground very quickly when the need arises
They must because if you are doing tarot as a full-time occupation (and many of us do) you do not have time to go through what might be a lengthy grounding and centering ritual prior to each reading. It’s no different to working (for example) as a checkout operator. You will not have the time to meditate for fifteen minutes before dealing with the next customer!
For those of you starting out reading for others it is perhaps advisable to get into a routine of grounding and centering prior to doing a reading. I would still hesitate to call it critical, but I do think it’s important. And it is important for a few reasons. Firstly, it provides you with a level of “psychic” security. It prevents you from taking in negative energies that don’t really belong to you and knocking yourself out of balance.
In addition, it will help you to prevent losing your own positive energy when the reading is unduly negative. But the most important reason for grounding and centering when you first start reading for others is simply that it will help stop negativity from influencing the reading itself. It will help you maintain the neutrality needed for an accurate reading.
I will be covering some techniques you can use in future articles. The first of which can be found here.
