Having first been exposed to psychic knowledge as a child, Lisa Frideborg Eddy uses Skype to guide people using the tarot. She talks to Sarah Millington

IT is with curiosity – and a little trepidation – that I volunteer for a reading by Lisa Frideborg Eddy, a student and teacher of the tarot, who guides clients in all aspects of life.

Her medium of choice is Skype so, after a technical glitch, we finally connect; Lisa smiling at me on the screen from her Cotherstone home. I’ve been asked to prepare a question and, after reading up on this, I’ve gone for something broad and proactive: what steps can I take to achieve success? Lisa approves, but asks me to be a little more specific – success in what, exactly?

“Well, I’d like to write a novel,” I begin, describing my (admittedly, not that extensive) efforts to this end. Satisfied, Lisa draws the first card – the Page of Cups. “This addresses the underlying emotions,” she says. “There’s an emotional block. You need to start feeding your imagination more. What really inspired you as a child? That’s still what’s uniquely you.”

The Northern Echo: It's in the cards
Destiny: Tarot card reader Lisa Frideborg Eddy

Next, she draws the King of Swords, followed by the Devil. While the latter hardly seems positive, Lisa is upbeat. “Talk to your kids about the baddies they really like,” she says. “Start from the shadow side of the story.”

So it seems I need to lighten up a bit in order to write a story with a villain. I’m thinking perhaps young adult fiction. All good so far. The next bit I struggle with.

“I get that you want to know if success is achievable,” says Lisa. “If you look at it in astrology, there are fated aspects. Almost everything you need to know is in the cards.”

Counterintuitive as it seems, the offer of having the future served up on a platter makes me uneasy. I worry that if it’s bad news this will haunt me, no matter how much I try to dismiss it, and if it’s good – well, won’t I still have to work hard and do all the things I’d be doing anyway? We agree to leave it at that, with some thoughts to reflect on, but without the definitive “answer”.

Born and brought up in Stockholm, Sweden, Lisa, 46, was first exposed to psychic beliefs at an early age. She describes her grandmother as a “natural psychic”. She lived near the Polar circle, where practices like reading coffee grounds were common. Such was her grandmother’s ability, says Lisa, that she would put the kettle on ahead of a visitor appearing, knowing their arrival was imminent. It was at her grandparents’ house that Lisa discovered a book on playing card divination.

“I was about eight and I was just so fascinated by it,” she says. “Then when I was about 15, I came across a magazine which had a cardboard cut-out of the major arcana cards in it. There are 78 cards in the tarot deck. I just tore it out, cut them out and I had a friend over and said, ‘Let’s play. I’ll do you a reading.’ I was 15 and my friend was 14. I laid five cards out in a row and I remember seeing the Devil and the Emperor. I just looked at the image and I remember feeling really uncomfortable. The energy that was coming off the cards was horrible.

“I said, ‘There’s an older man around you and he’s nasty. He’s abusing you’. She started crying and said, ‘Yes. It’s my stepdad and he’s abusing me.’ It turned out this was going on and she hadn’t told a soul.”

The experience left Lisa badly shaken – to the extent that she didn’t pick up a tarot card again until her late 20s. She moved to the UK and studied with the Tarot Association of the British Isles, which gave her an ethical grounding. This is key to Lisa’s practice and she has firm rules to which she adheres.

“I won’t read for minors and I won’t place or remove curses,” she says. “What charlatans do is tell you everything in your life is going south because you’ve got this curse on you. I guess you have to just keep educating people about what tarot is and what it can be.”

When clients come to Lisa, she initially works with them to identify a key question, which she considers essential to the reading. She caters for more women than men and the most common theme is love.

“That’s where I’ve had to learn the hard way about ethical boundaries,” she says. “A lot of people typically turn to a tarot reader when they want to cheat on their spouse. I do ask beforehand and I decline to read because I don’t want to use my time or guidance that way.

“I get requests about the potential of a new relationship – if it’s fated, it will show up on the cards. If people are struggling to meet someone, I can read on what’s blocking them. I do read on health and well-being from the point of view of emotional underlying causes but because I’ve studied counselling I’m very wary of people coming with heavy emotional issues.”

Lisa is always careful to set clients’ expectations at a reasonable level. While she has “psychic flashes”, she dislikes the term “psychic”, believing it can be misleading. Her view of the tarot is that the cards represent both synchronicity, revealing aspects of yourself that need to be addressed, as a “mirror of the soul”; and predestined fate as revealed through astrology.

She feels the client is as important as the reader in interpreting meaning and that even Death can be positive. “This year’s UK Tarot Conference is the 13th and it’s themed after the 13th card, which is Death,” says Lisa. “It’s not physical death – I don’t read on that. I’ll be talking about transformation.”

While she freely admits that knowledge of the tarot doesn’t lead to a problem-free life, she does rely on the cards to help her through it. She can’t explain how they tap into our inner psyche – she just believes they do. “I don’t know how it works – I just know that it works,” says Lisa. “The more I study astrology, it’s just true.”