Terry Yoder started his work as a psychic medium and tarot counselor almost four decades ago. Besides his readings, combining tarot and mediumship, Terry also offers a tarot course for beginners that can be done remotely.
In this special interview for MysticMag, Terry presented us his journey, how to surpass difficult challenges and also what the cards are telling us for this year of 2023.
When did you discover the power of the cards and that you wanted to help people with your knowledge?
I discovered the power of tarot immediately after coming across an old deck of tarot cards in a drawer in my grandmother’s house during a summer vacation. I knew what the cards were, although I’d never had any experience with them at all except seeing them used in films and tv shows.
Being very curious, I used the small booklet that came with the cards. It listed the meanings of the cards and how to lay them out in a couple of spreads, and gave a few tips on how to do a reading. With the cards and booklet was another larger book that went into vast detail about tarot reading and I used this book more readily to get me started.
Shortly after I started doing readings, I noticed that as I looked at the meanings of the cards, some would appear almost as if they were highlighted on the page, and I began focusing only on those that appeared that way. I quickly opened and developed a skill in tarot reading and the feedback I was getting was amazingly positive. It appeared that I was very much on target with the few trusted friends and family members I gave readings to for practice. Very quickly, as I became more grounded in my knowledge of the cards, I began to feel, sense, intuit, empath, hear, and see in my minds eye. At the onset of these experiences, I just went for it and found the more I trusted what I was receiving, the stronger and more accurate I became. I was only 14 years old.
Later that summer, I was led into a fundamentalist sect of Christianity (Pentecostal). Needless to say, my newly found gifts were not viewed as holy or from God. Being forbidden to practice tarot, I embraced the Christian teachings before me. There were many aspects of my life that
I battled to bring into alignment within the church. After four years of Christian practice and exposure to all the amazing gifts of the spirit, I was moved to leave the church and go back to my spiritual work with the cards, and healing. Coming back, my gifts were enhanced many times over. Information flowed quite liberally to and through me and I began to see just how powerful of a healing gift my work could be. At 19 years of age, I began doing readings at a local metaphysical store for the general public. Over and over, I was given absolute proof of the depth and assistance my readings presented. At 20, I began teaching tarot reading, growing in popularity and demand, I balanced my work life and career with a budding spiritual reading practice reading for the public in my small apartment, at the metaphysical store, and at local psychic fairs. I had found my calling and decided to devote more and more time to my readings.
I relocated to a larger mid-western city a few years later and things just began to line up for me. I took my work to a very large psychic fair, which opened the floodgates for the further expansion of my practice. Years later, I moved to the San Francisco area and my life has blossomed since then, in so many different ways, especially in my ability to be of service with my work as a reader and healer.
How do you combine tarot and psychic mediumship?
For me the combination of Psychic Mediumship and the interpretation of tarot happens naturally. More than being a psychic medium, I feel myself to be an empathic medium, which means much of what I hear, feel, and see I receive through emotional empathy. I literally have emotional thoughts that well up through the center of me from both the cards and just connecting with a client and those on the other side.
It caught my attention in your website a sentence about how you “can help you determine how to avoid and navigate life’s difficult passages”. What are the difficult passages that people bring to you and want help with?
It could be anything at all. The death of a loved one, the difficulty of finding one’s purpose, feeling stuck and stagnate, fears and repressed emotions of all sorts. I have a very strong ability working with those who are in religious recovery. Relationship issues. Spiritual and psychic development.
In your services you mention psychic parties and spirit circles. How does that work and do you have any story for us of a party that is stuck in your mind?
I did parties and spirit circles in person prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. I am diabetic and because of that, I have not yet started doing any work in public or in person at this time. Parties and Spirit Circles are pretty much the same with the exception that at a reading party, generally the participants are in a room with me one by one receiving private information. At a spirit-circle the readings are done in a group setting and usually limited to about 20 minutes or so. Spirit circles also can become somewhat interactive among the participants.
I believe everyone has spiritual gifts and I readily allow people to express that in spirit circle as long as everything is working in Spirit’s order and is being done from a loving place. One of the more recent stories I have regarding a spirit circle is that during the session everyone kept smelling the smell of a sweet floral fragrance, despite the fact that the only candles lit in the house were unscented. Believe me we all checked and verified that the candles were not emitting any fragrances at all.
Finally, myself and another person recognized the scent as being the scent of Sweet Peas, the flower. Oddly, the fragrance arrived just as I was talking about this client’s grandmother who had already passed away. The messages were all very positive, but the most interesting thing was that that client emailed me a few days later to tell me she had checked with her mom about her grandmother and the smell of sweet peas only to find out her grandmother had grown sweet peas her entire life, everywhere she lived. They were her absolute favorite flower. It was a visitation.
Can you give us more detail about your Beginner’s Tarot Course? Can anyone participate in that course?
I began teaching tarot reading when I was 20 years old, in 1985. I completely developed my class curriculum. My classes are extremely interactive and hands on. My course covers a bit of information about the history of the cards and where they came from, and extend from there to learning all of the 78 cards in their upright and reversed positions, we learn basic spreads and put them into practice doing readings for one another.
My last class was conducted with students from the United States and Europe via the Zoom platform. I found it to be an amazing platform with which to teach and to learn. When it came to readings, my students would be assigned a number of readings to practice and would make appointments with one another on Zoom to do them. They would record their sessions and send them to me for critique, which really worked well. Also, the fact that all the classes were recorded with video and audio on Zoom was a major plus in the teaching process.
Students were given the option of receiving or not receiving the recordings and all of them chose to receive them. They are able to continue their study and their practice as long as they keep the recordings. It was truly the best class I ever taught.
My class is always open to anyone who wishes to learn. I am now planning my next class to start in April and will be opening registration soon. I have two classes, a class in the morning on Thursdays, at 11:00 AM Pacific time and an evening class on Tuesdays starting at 5:30 PM Pacific Time.
Each class is 2 and a half hours each and the course consists of 9 classes that fall in 3 sections of 3 classes. Between each class section there is a one week break so there is a bit of rest and so the class does not get too overwhelming. It is a lot of information. I give teaching my absolute all.
The comments in my last class were that they did not expect so much from me and that the value was immeasurable, because they all opened and developed their own psychic and intuitive senses and even clairvoyance. Teaching is a very favorite focus for me. Anyone who is interested in my classes can access the information about them and contact me via my website.
What are the cards showing to us for the beginning of 2023?
The cards state that financial issues will continue to improve with an emphasis on the time period from Spring to Fall. Many aspects of our lives seem to be coming back on track as we move through 2023.
Throughout the year there is a great focus on stability, strengthening, and health not only of our physical bodies, but as people and inhabitants of the planet as well. This year seems to bring things much more into focus on the question of What do we really want? It will offer many opportunities for clarity around that.
Many people have reported in the current time and recent past that they have felt stuck and unable to move forward. It has been revealed that there has been a bit of a holding pattern in moving into newness, so to speak. It looks to me from reviewing 2023 that there could be a more relaxed and flowing movement that comes by the end of this year opening new channels towards manifestation of what we’ve been waiting on in our individual purposes and plans for the future.
The most powerful theme of 2023 is to recognize and develop the strength required to unify us as a people, as a nation, and as a global community. There will be an even more powerful movement of globalization and equality this year that will take time to be fully enacted.
I would call this year a turning point in many ways. Numerologically this year is a 7 and for me that is the striving for perfection, the observation of everything that is needed to complete the cycle of evolution that precedes new beginnings to come. All in all, this will be a difficult, confusing, and chaotic year in US politics filled with revelations, shocks, and stagnations. This too shall lead people to a point of restlessness and demand for changes that will take time to achieve.
