This is not an event. It's just a way to pin an introduction to the ABQ Tarot Tribe Organizer for perpetual reference. I hope you'll join Cheryl at the various meetups the Tribe hosts for your tarot learning.
Cheryl Ryder is a tarot educator, writer, researcher, curriculum developer, and community builder whose relationship with tarot spans more than sixty years. Her work explores tarot as a flexible instrument for observing human experience, recognizing patterns, constructing meaning, changing perspective, and discovering better questions.
At the foundation of her work is a lifelong conviction:
"Nothing can be understood from a single viewpoint. Drop the blinders and change perspective in order to get a better overall picture of the whole thing."
That conviction has led Ryder through decades of exploration across tarot, psychology, personality typology, mythology, comparative symbolic and esoteric systems, human development, and the many ways people organize and interpret their experiences.
Rather than searching for a single system capable of explaining everything, she is interested in what becomes visible when we deliberately change lenses. History, culture, cognitive preferences, needs, values, developmental experience, social context, age, gender, circumstance, and individual experience may each reveal something different about the same situation.
For Ryder, models are perspectives, not definitions. They are useful because they help us see. They become blinders when we mistake one perspective for the whole.
## A Lifetime of Tarot Study
Ryder's tarot education combines decades of independent exploration with extensive formal and experiential study.
From 2008 through 2019, she attended The Readers Studio, the international advanced tarot conference created by Wald and Ruth Ann Amberstone of The Tarot School, earning a Certificate of Completion of Advanced Tarot Studies for every annual conference during that period.
Ryder also holds the Fourth Degree of Accomplishment from The Tarot School, (and is well on her way to the Fifth Degree) representing four years of uninterrupted weekly intense participation in the school's live, interactive Tarot Salon. Each Degree represents 100 hours of study, making the Fourth Degree the culmination of 400 hours of sustained Tarot Salon study. Tarot is a never-ending learning process to Ryder.
Over the years, Ryder has studied with a diverse group of influential tarot teachers, authors, artists, and researchers, including (but not limited to) Wald and Ruth Ann Amberstone, Mary K. Greer, Rachel Pollack, Caitlín Matthews, Theresa Reed, Benebell Wen, Barbara Moore, Eleanor Greenberg, Mark Horn, Katrina Wynne, Art Rosengarten, Robert M. Place, Sasha Graham, Carrie Paris, Heatherleigh Navarre, Liz Dean, Tori Hartman, Kooch and Victor Daniels, Nancy Antenucci, Ferol Humphrey, James Wanless, and Ellen Goldberg.
The diversity of those teachers has been as important to Ryder as their individual expertise. Encountering substantially different philosophies of tarot reinforced her conviction that understanding grows by examining something from more than one viewpoint rather than reducing differing perspectives to a contest over which one is right.
## The Readers Studio: Learning, Teaching, and Community
The Readers Studio became far more than an annual educational event for Ryder. Over the years she participated as student, presenter, organizer, facilitator, volunteer, Tarot Ambassador, ceremony creator, and community host.
She first served as a Tarot Ambassador in 2010, helping a group of conference newcomers navigate their first Readers Studio experience.
From 2011 through 2019, Ryder served as Tarot Ambassador Team Leader while continuing to serve personally as an Ambassador to her own assigned group of newcomers. She also functioned as a secondary Ambassador to newcomers assigned throughout the larger Ambassador team—a population that could reach as many as 150 first-time attendees annually.
The program was intentionally relational. Ambassadors contacted newcomers before the conference, answered questions, helped ease uncertainties about entering an unfamiliar gathering, and facilitated their connections with the established Readers Studio community. The public record similarly describes the Ambassador program's emphasis on proactive outreach and intentional inclusion.
The work reflected a principle that would continue throughout Ryder's later community building: people learn more readily when they know there is a place for them in the conversation.
## Juried Evening Study Group Presenter
Ryder was selected four times as an Evening Study Group Presenter during her years of study at The Readers Studio.
Selection was juried. Prospective presenters submitted a proposed subject and curriculum for review, and only six presenters were selected for each of the two evenings on which Study Groups were offered. Repeated selection therefore represented both a significant teaching opportunity and an honor within the Readers Studio community.
Her selected presentations were:
- 2013 — Deeper Tarot Readings Using Shamanic Perception-Shifting Techniques
- 2015 — Your Heroic Journey in Consciousness Revealed in the Tarot
- 2018 — Designing a Rockin' Tarot Presentation
- 2024 — Sure-Fire Tarot Spread Design: How to Design Signature Spreads
Her Heroic Journey presentation also remains documented in the public Readers Studio record.
Across eleven years, the four subjects reveal a continuing interest in perception, consciousness, communication, teaching, and the architecture of tarot practice itself. Perhaps fittingly, the earliest explicitly concerned perception-shifting—an idea that would become increasingly central to Ryder's later work.
## Welcoming the Newcomer
In 2016 and 2017, Ryder was selected as Emcee for The Readers Studio's Tarot Newcomer Initiation Ceremony, the formal welcome for people attending the conference for the first time.
She created a different participatory ritual for each ceremony, preferring humor, play, and shared experience to artificial solemnity or hierarchy.
The 2017 ceremony became particularly memorable. With Stuart R. Kaplan, founder of U.S. Games Systems, Inc., in attendance, Ryder created an initiation ritual based upon the Hokey Pokey. Kaplan thereafter called her “the Hokey Pokey Lady,” a moniker by which members of his staff also came to recognize her.
Some professional distinctions come with certificates.
Others require putting your left foot in.
## The Tarot Incubators
From 2013 through 2018, Ryder hosted discussion tables during the annual Sunday morning Tarot Incubators at The Readers Studio. Her sessions concentrated particularly on practical subjects for tarot readers interested in creating businesses, Meetup groups, and tarot communities.
The Incubator format suited Ryder's emerging teaching style particularly well: introduce a subject, gather people around it, invite questions and experience, and discover what emerges from the interaction.
Following a hiatus from 2020 through 2023, The Readers Studio was convened for its final gathering in 2024 under the guidance of Michelle and Roger Welch, proprietors of Soultopia Boutique in Texas.
Ryder returned both as a juried Evening Study Group presenter and as Host/Emcee of the Sunday morning Tarot Incubators, conducting the overall session. Her published biography in Tarot Tips Newsletter also records her 2024 role facilitating those discussions.
## The Albuquerque Tarot Tribe
For more than a decade, Ryder has led the Albuquerque Tarot Tribe, developing a local Meetup group of approximately 150 local New Mexico members into a global community of more than 1,200 tarot enthusiasts.
Central to her leadership is a firm commitment to creating a welcoming, respectful, and inclusive learning environment in which human diversity is treated as a source of perspective rather than a hierarchy of worth. People bring different identities, abilities, cultures, spiritual orientations, experiences, cognitive preferences, learning styles, and approaches to tarot into the room. Those differences are respected, as are individual boundaries.
The Tribe reflects Ryder's belief that serious study need not require solemnity, hierarchy, or adherence to a single prescribed method. Its programming has included workshops, guest presenters, experiential exercises, collaborative learning, discussion groups, Tarot Cafés, Tarot Incubators, and virtual programs that allow people far beyond Albuquerque to participate.
The community invites participants with different backgrounds and levels of experience are encouraged to compare observations rather than compete for interpretive authority.
Difference is not something that must be eliminated before understanding can occur.
Difference can be one of the means by which greater understanding becomes possible.
## Drop the Stone and Observe the Ripples
Ryder describes her teaching style with a simple metaphor:
"Drop the stone into the pond and observe the ripples. See what rises out of the depths for observation and consideration."
An idea, question, card, exercise, or alternative perspective becomes the stone.
What happens afterward is part of the lesson.
Rather than introducing an idea in order to persuade students to accept it, Ryder invites them to investigate what it generates. Agreement, disagreement, resistance, recognition, unexpected associations, alternative interpretations, and entirely new questions all become ripples worth observing.
Her position as teacher is equally straightforward:
“I am no authority. I notice patterns and ask questions.”
Teaching therefore becomes collaborative inquiry rather than transmission of certainty. The teacher contributes another perspective while remaining part of the investigation.
## Writing for Tarot Tips
Ryder is a contributing author to The Tarot School's Tarot Tips. Her articles explore ways of moving tarot beyond fixed keywords and inherited interpretive assumptions toward observation, inquiry, perspective-shifting, and the construction of meaning.
Her contributions to date are:
| Date | Article |
| ---- | ------- |
| October 1, 2025 | Dynamics for Change — A 6-Card Spread |
| February 1, 2026 | Beyond What It Means - Tarot Gestalt |
| March 1, 2026 | The 8 Questions a Querent Is “Really Asking” |
| April 1, 2026 | The 4 Powers of Tarot - Suits as Agency |
| May 1, 2026 | Minor Arcana as Energy Demands |
| June 1, 2026 | 4 Life Domains of Tarot - Where the Cards Operate |
| July 1, 2026 | What Court Cards Really Show You |
| August 1, 2026 | For When Your Mind Goes Blank |
Her July 2026 article offers a particularly clear example of her evolving approach. Instead of treating Court Cards as fixed personality types, Ryder proposes viewing their ranks as developmental relationships with life skill:
Page — Capacity: discovering, exploring, experimenting
Knight — Capability: applying skills and experiencing consequences
Queen — Ability: integrating learning and regulation into responsive strategy
King — Agency: intentionally directing power while accepting responsibility for consequences and continuity.
She combines those developmental relationships with four broad human domains represented by the tarot suits:
Wands — Power to Act
Cups — Power to Care
Swords — Power to Understand
Pentacles — Power to Build
This seemingly simple shift changes the interpretive question. Instead of asking “What kind of person is this?”, the reader can ask “How is this person engaging life right now?”
## Tarot and the Study of Human Differences
Ryder's current research brings tarot into conversation with personality typology, cognitive processes, Jungian psychology, human development, systems thinking, and the construction of meaning.
Her continuing studies of personality differences have included the work of Linda V. Berens and related approaches to temperament, cognitive dynamics, interaction, motivation, and differences in how human beings organize experience.
Central to Ryder's approach is a holistic orientation toward systems rather than isolated parts, wholes rather than reductions, processes rather than static functions, patterns rather than rigid types, and preferences rather than diagnoses.
Applied to tarot, that orientation produces deceptively difficult questions.
Does a card describe a person—or a process in which that person is currently engaged?
Does an inherited interpretation describe a universal human pattern—or does it also reflect the historical period, culture, assumptions, values, and biases of the person who wrote it?
When readers describe someone through a card as “cold,” “weak,” “controlling,” “immature,” or “manipulative,” what have they actually observed, and how much interpretation has already been added?
What else might become visible if the same card were considered from another person's needs, values, cognitive orientation, culture, circumstances, or developmental experience?
**These questions move Ryder's work away from creating another dictionary of tarot meanings and toward investigating how human beings construct meaning in the first place.**
## Tarot and the Construction of Meaning
An important distinction has emerged from Ryder's work:
A tarot card doesn't carry meaning; it helps us create meaning.
The card contributes another piece of experience.
The human mind begins organizing the image together with the situation being considered, memory, knowledge, emotion, hopes, fears, expectations, relationships, cultural assumptions, and whatever else is active in the moment.
Meaning emerges from that interaction.
The card contributes to the construction. It does not determine it.
This perspective transforms tarot from an exercise in retrieving predetermined answers into an instrument for observation and inquiry.
The reader's task changes accordingly. Instead of announcing what a card means about another person, the reader can use the card to generate questions through which that person can examine their own experience from perspectives that might not otherwise have occurred to them.
Tarot need not merely answer the question brought to the table.
Sometimes it can help reveal the question nobody thought to ask.
## Different, Not Less
Ryder's commitment to multiple perspectives carries an ethical consequence.
If no single viewpoint reveals the whole, human differences are not merely things to categorize and judge. They provide perspectives and information unavailable from any one point of view.
This principle informs her teaching, writing, research, and community leadership. Differences in cognition, culture, identity, experience, ability, values, spiritual orientation, communication, and ways of learning are approached with curiosity and respect rather than automatically arranged into hierarchies of better and worse.
Ryder summarizes the principle simply:
Different, not Less.
The same ethic governs her approach to tarot and personality models. A card, archetype, psychological framework, personality model, or interpretive tradition may provide a useful lens through which to examine human experience.
None should be mistaken for a definition of the person.
Preserving multiple perspectives also preserves agency. Ryder does not regard the tarot reader's role as telling another person who they are, what a card has declared them to be, or what their future must become.
Tarot can instead contribute another piece of experience from which better questions, broader perspectives, greater understanding, and previously unseen possibilities for choice may emerge.
The purpose of changing perspective is not necessarily to find the answer.
It is to see more of the whole thing.
## The Work Continues
Across more than sixty years of tarot study, advanced education, conference teaching, community leadership, curriculum development, writing, and research, one thread has remained remarkably consistent in Ryder's work:
Change the viewpoint and see what else becomes visible.
She does not propose replacing traditional tarot with another authoritative system. Nor does she suggest that history, symbolism, psychology, typology, intuition, or any other single approach possesses the final explanation.
Each provides another lens.
Each may reveal something.
Each may obscure something.
And another perspective may change the picture again.
Her lifelong adage provides the foundation:
Nothing can be understood from a single viewpoint. Drop the blinders and change perspective in order to get a better overall picture of the whole thing.
Her teaching method provides the experiment:
Drop the stone into the pond and observe the ripples. See what rises up out of the depts for observation and consideration.
Her ethic provides the boundary: Different, not Less.
And the deceptively simple question with which she characteristically leaves her readers keeps the inquiry exactly where she wants it: “What do you think?”
Contact Cheryl via DM here in the ABQ Tarot Tribe Meetup network or email to ABQTarotTribe@gmail.com
