Learning Lenormand requires sifting through a lot of information, and most of it is very flawed, to say the least. So to (hopefully) save a few people from making these common mistakes, I’m going to list a few things people are prone to falling into.
Everything the cat dragged in
In the very early days, I walked right into this one. I collected meanings from various websites and countries. My early readings were mud, and I had to unlearn a lot of stuff. So…don’t.
Start with ONE set of meanings, any set that makes sense to you – French, Dutch, German – and stick with it. Get a SOLID foundation. After a few years when you’re familiar with the symmetry of the system, you can expand it a bit, add more secondary meanings, more nuance.
Borrowing a meaning from a region other than the one you’re using can throw the whole thing off. For instance, I use German, where the Bear tends to be male. Other variants see it as female. But if I go so far as to call the Bear “mom” and I already use the Snake for that, where is mom in the GT? It would be like jamming extra, incompatible parts into a car. The only way to make it work would be to totally switch over to those meanings and scrap mine.
Lenormand is perfectly balanced. It’s genius – don’t screw it up. :D
You have all the meanings inside you
That one makes me throw up in my mouth a little. Images of dogs and houses and fish may evoke ideas, but that’s not the Lenormand method. PAMs (personally assigned meanings) will ruin your accuracy. I see this every day in groups, a lot of people INSIST on PAMs. They get their interpretations from “intuition” or “guides” and they “don’t rely on canned meanings”, but their readings SUCK.
The thing is, Lenormand will work if you stand back and let it, and don’t get in the way. Accuracy comes in inverse proportion to PAMs!
Lenormand “schools”
There are no Lenormand “schools”. There’s a Lenormand METHOD, with regional variations, like dialects. Where I live, a Coke is a “soda water”, but in Massachusetts it’s a “tonic”, and I think it’s “pop” in the midwest, but that’s all considered “english”. Not “schools”. Same with Lenormand. The work cards might vary a bit from place to place, or there might be more or less use of Distance, but there’s not enough difference to say there’s different “schools”. This has been explained 1000 times, at least.
Not learning the Method of Distance
I fell into this one. When I started with Lenormand, I had a Blue Owl with a LWB and those horrible english poems, lol. And I went online and found a yahoo group in english, with a german lady who had taken some courses. So I started asking things like “How far is ‘far’?” and she said “Oh, nobody pays attention to that” and introduced me to combo reading. It made sense at the time – aren’t Tarot LWB’s a joke? Nobody uses LWB’s. And she wasn’t trying to mislead me. Distance reading isn’t that common in Germany. She answered the question to the best of her knowledge.
The years went by and I found more sources, all combo readers. I eventually started doing paid readings. I ‘knew’ Lenormand. And it worked, I predicted stuff, it was right, I got paid.
Then Andy got me interested in Distance, and I’m liking it more and more, it’s decisive. Often, with combo readings, I have to sit and consider various meanings and how best to combine them, and sometimes, even after all these years, there’s a bit of “uhhhhh…”, lol. Distance reading is sharp and precise, like a scalpel. Sometimes it actually makes combo reading feel clunky. I wish I’d learned a long time ago. :D
