I've been a solo practitioner of divination since I started in my early teens when someone gifted me a set of runes. Besides the little booklet that accompanied the stones, I didn't really have much to go on and made up different ways of casting them. Tossing and spilling on different surfaces, meditations while choosing a rune from the bag that housed them, and really anything that added more color to the experience. In a lot of ways it felt limiting, frustrating even. I still feel this way sometimes with my now preferred tool the tarot.
In the beginning I struggled to understand the intuitive aspect of divining with the use of tools. I understood it in a clinical sense, formulaic. As a procedure and an action of the mind. At first there were inklings and quick flashes but nothing sticking with me long enough to make sense. This is why I experimented so much. To find a path (a shortcut, maybe) to get to what I thought I wanted, a sort of superpower that would let me see the future. Know thine fate! I think forging my own path minus any affect from outside influence has given me unique methods and perspectives on the use of runes, tarot, pendulums, scrying, and other tools and forms of "knowing."
What have I learned?
There's a big difference between "reading" and "intuitive reading"
I see a lot of practitioners taking meaning at face value. That the "Tower" card means disaster, the pendulum can only answer yes/no questions, etc. I personally believe these things don't come preprogrammed in such a way. They're just cards and rocks and not only you can assign any meaning you like, but that meaning changes depending on the subject and your intuitive/psychic hits. It's a controversial opinion that I'll elaborate on in another blog post.
Only you know what works for you
Everyone's experience of divination is unique and everyone has different ideas, rules, theories around what works best. And that's fine as long we do what's best for us and it's what keeps it interesting. The practice dies without innovation.