Five Tips: How To Do A Tarot Reading

Tarot reading is NOT about individual cards’ meanings. Do it right by following these five simple tips…

Tarot reading can be an incredibly fun activity that can also help you with everyday life.  It allows you to connect to your subconscious and find the answers lying there to the questions that are troubling you.  Despite what you may have heard about tarot reading, you don’t have to be psychic to do one.  With the following tips, you’ll be able to start doing readings for yourself and your friends IN NO TIME.

#1 – Form a Good Question

This may actually be the most important part of the entire reading, as this is why you are coming to the tarot in the first place.  Your question should be one that when answered, is going to provide you with multiple insights into your situation.  Most of the time, you are going to have something going on in your life that is troubling you, and to which you want to understand why it is happening or what you can do about it.  Your question has to be open ended and not simply one with a yes or no answer.  By doing this, you are giving the cards a chance to give you multiple points of view, or possibly things you haven’t thought of yet, instead of simply passing on the responsibility of an answer.  If you’re going to ask a yes or no question, you might as well flip a coin and save the time.

When you are forming the question in your mind, you need to keep your options open as opposed to simply asking to strengthen or refute the action that you are already strongly inclined to take.  For example, instead of asking “Will I fail again with this new business?” you should be concentrating on “What do I need to understand in order to succeed this time?”

#2 – Choose an Appropriate Spread

There are many existing spreads when it comes to laying out your tarot cards, but not every spread is equally beneficial for every kind of question.  (You can check out some of the most popular spreads HERE on this website).  You need to pick one that has good positions, ones that are going to offer additional sub-questions that are highly relevant to your main question.  Each card (position) in the spread that you do end up choosing should inspire you to think more deeply about some aspect of your problem, and to therefore understand it better.

You can also create your own spread.  If you choose to do your reading this way, make sure to think about what aspects are important for your situation and include one position in the spread for each one.  For a custom spread, it would also be a good idea for the reading if the positions are already somehow related.  For example, positive and negative or past and future.  This is important because reading is the story, not just a dry interpretation of individual cards’ meanings.

#3 – Pay Attention to How You React to Each Card

Your reaction to a card is your intuition trying to tell you something.  Your subconscious knows and understands the situation even better than your rational mind; and unlike your rational mind, your subconscious is not limited by your beliefs or your own self-image.  This is why it is so vital to listen to it throughout your reading; you will often get a completely different point of view to consider.

#4 – Understand How the Card’s Meanings Relates to It’s Position In the Spread

Tarot reading is about bringing it all together.  You can’t just think about the meaning of a card by itself, you have to relate that meaning to its position in the spread.  Combine these two important aspects with the reaction you felt when you first picked up and saw the card.  It is with the combination of the three essential elements that you will get what you feel is important for this part of the question.  Once you have that understanding, then you proceed to the next card.

#5 – Notice How the Cards In the Reading Relate to Each Other

The reading is not about the individual cards.  The individual cards are like individual words in a story.  In order to communicate that story, you can’t focus on the individual words.  Translate that concept to the cards; find how they relate to the question, find how they relate to one another, and weave the story.  Your reading will be much more natural, and a much greater meaning by doing this, than if you focus on each card by itself.