Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover: -why it's helpful to start by learning the tarot instead of diving straight into readings -ways to begin learning the tarot's structure and history -how reading is different than learning tarot -tips for starting both of these processes with your own deck
If you'd like to know more on the distinctions between learning and reading tarot, check out my Tarot Foundations lecture series available through my website.
Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover: -why it's helpful to start by learning the tarot instead of diving straight into readings -ways to begin learning the tarot's structure and history -how reading is different than learning tarot -tips for starting both of these processes with your own deck
If you'd like to know more on the distinctions between learning and reading tarot, check out my Tarot Foundations lecture series available through my website.
CARD TALK is written, edited, and produced by Meg Jones Wall of 3am.tarot. Theme music created by PaulYudin.
Speaker 1:
My name is Meg Jones-Wall and you're listening to Card Talk, a mini-podcast for Tarot Basics, and Evergreen Insights I'm glad you're here and Evergreen Insights I'm glad you're here. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about the difference between learning tarot and reading tarot. Now, in my experience, it's pretty common for people who get started with tarot to immediately want to start reading the cards, and that's exactly what I did. I bought my first deck having never really worked with the cards at, and that's exactly what I did. I bought my first deck having never really worked with the cards at all and certainly never having had received a reading, and I thought that I could just buy my cards, pull them out of the box and read with them before really spending any time with them. So I'm here to try to help you not repeat my mistakes. If you want to unwrap your first tarot deck and dive first into a reading, you do you. I'm not going to stop you. I'm not going to show up at your house and pry the cards out of your hands, but I think that when you're starting a tarot practice of any kind, it's really useful and powerful and important to have an ability to distinguish between practices and habits that are going to help you learn the cards versus routines and habits that are going to help you learn the cards versus routines and rituals that are going to help when you start reading the cards. Again, it's very easy to conflate the two, but I think that part of building a relationship with the tarot is by intentionally doing activities and practices that support both learning and reading, rather than just one or the other. I'm going to talk in this episode about how I define and distinguish learning from reading, and then I'm going to give you a couple of tips and ways that you can get started in developing practices for both kind of habits or directions. I'm also going to give you some additional resources that you can check out to support your work in the show notes, so make sure you check those out for the show notes on this episode. All right, learning versus reading.
Speaker 1:
Now, when we're thinking about learning the tarot, what I really mean by this is getting to know the cards themselves with intention, with purpose, with clarity, understanding the structure of the deck the history of the deck, if you're interested different correspondences and structures and different aspects of the cards themselves, to really get to know the fundamentals of what the tarot is and how it can be used. Now I know that for some folks that might feel either boring or not aligned with your own practices. If you're someone that's really committed to reading the tarot intuitively, you might feel like you can kind of skip this step. You know, if you're someone that's not particularly interested in learning about traditions with tarot, if you don't want to get bogged down or confused by the keywords that other people might use for the cards, that's completely fine and I totally get it. But even if you want to read in a fully intuitive throw the guidebook out, just trust your own impulses and instincts sort of way, there is still a massive benefit to spending time with your deck studying the images and paying attention to how each card makes you feel. Studying the images and paying attention to how each card makes you feel when it comes to learning the tarot. I think it's a really powerful way to begin to develop the habit of paying attention to the ways that your intuition, instincts, observations, experiences and emotions come into play in your readings. And bonus, if you're someone that's not super interested in reading intuitively, if you're interested in understanding the history of the cards, if you want to have more awareness of correspondences that are often used with the cards. If you want to understand different traditions that are associated with the cards and the different types of decks that exist. This is a really important step of the process. Again, learn from my mistakes. I just kind of dove in headfirst and I ended up being really confused and frustrated and also like really hard on myself for not immediately being able to read fluently with the cards, and part of that is because I didn't spend nearly as much time as I thought I had understanding the structure of the cards.
Speaker 1:
So when you think about practices that you can start to develop and explore in learning your cards, really it's about spending time with them. This can look like finding books and teachers that you love, listening to podcasts like Card Talk, but also it can look like spending literal time with your cards, going through the deck, pulling out cards that you feel particularly drawn to or curious about identifying cards that might make you feel really uncomfortable. This can look like journaling with your cards or talking to your cards or even talking to other people about specific cards, but anytime you are engaging with trying to understand the tarot itself or individual cards or suits or cycles or stories or correspondences or structural elements or histories or anything else around the tarot. You are practicing learning the cards, and I really think that having a strong foundation of spending time with the cards and learning about them, whatever that might look like for you, can really help to develop a foundation that your readings can then return to. If you take the time to journal through every card, for example, or even just to journal through each suit or the major arcana, or to break the major arcana into lines, as Rachel Pollack so beautifully does in 78 Degrees of Wisdom, there are just so many different ways to analyze and understand the cards and that can just be so critical to developing a lot of confidence and clarity through your readings.
Speaker 1:
Now, readings, on the other hand, are when we are practicing. I say divination. It doesn't always have to be divination specifically, it doesn't have to be about asking the cards for predictions about what's going to happen. Not just be there but to communicate with us around a specific question or situation or decision or obstacle. That can be considered reading tarot, and that is a different practice really altogether than spending time with the cards. Reading really involves learning how to listen to the tarot and understanding the different ways that the cards can communicate with you on an individual or communal basis. You know if you're reading with other people, the ways that different people might read the cards is different, but they're all still kind of participating in that same reading practice.
Speaker 1:
So this is a lot of developing rituals and routines for reading. Ideally, you'll get to a place where you can practice those rituals like shuffling, choosing the card you're going to use and sinking into the listening experience or the reading practice without even really thinking about it. It doesn't mean that you're never going to get confused by your cards and I will do a whole episode on getting confused about your cards but that habit of understanding how to turn to the cards, how to formulate a question or select a spread, all of these different aspects and routines that go into the reading process, are all important things to not just clarify but also experiment with. This is really about finding ways to hear what the cards have to say and understanding what rituals are going to help support you so that you can hear them as clearly as possible. I think that when it comes to reading the tarot, it is really tempting to feel like we should be able to immediately understand what the cards have to say to us, even if we don't know the cards backwards and forwards, inside and out. But what I'm going to say over and over, what I've been saying over and over and I know I'm not alone in this either tarot is a language. It takes time to develop fluency and, while different decks might reflect different dialects or different regional accents, you still have to learn the language of tarot to be able to understand how the cards are communicating with you. And so when we're kind of using these practices together, both learning and reading, it's really about developing those skills and also just practicing speaking the language of tarot so that you can not only communicate clearly with your cards, but also so that you can understand how the cards are communicating with you.
Speaker 1:
To practice reading, to kind of start reading tarot. I will certainly do more episodes on this in the future, but it's really about practice and experimentation. I really like to start with one, two or even three card spreads when you're getting started, but also, I've been reading since 2016, and I still mostly use two and three card spreads. I generally find them to be really clear and concise and I don't like to mess with extra cards if I don't have to. But taking your time to not just play with spreads and different kinds of reading, but also to test out different techniques. Testing out different shuffling patterns, different ways of formulating your questions using spreads or not using spreads, testing out single card readings, playing with different techniques like reversals it's all going to help you strengthen your reading practice. I also really recommend going slow Do not rush this process but also writing down your experiences with each one of your readings, even just a quick journal, a quick snap for Instagram, whatever practice suits you and your learning style the best.
Speaker 1:
It's really helpful to categorize and catalog those early readings. It's such an incredible way to sink into the reading. Even if you're just doing audio. It doesn't have to be written, but whatever format works. For you to record that reading in a way that you can return to it later is going to be incredibly fortifying for your process, because not only does it force you to slow down and really name what you're feeling, but it also gives you a record that you can return to. If you start to see the same card over and over, you can use those records to start charting when the card showed up for you and how you responded to it. And the same card is going to feel different to you in different readings and at different times, so that's also worth charting and paying attention to. You might find that if you're asking your cards questions that feel really hard and getting really difficult cards in response, you can start to adapt the questions that you ask your cards so that it can kind of protect your own heart and your own spirit from receiving really harsh answers to questions on days when you feel especially tender or vulnerable. I also just want to say that if you like this audio format, if you like listening to me talk and you want more detailed information on the origins of tarot, as well as deeper breakdowns with different methods and tips and exercises that you can use to learn tarot as well as to start reading with tarot, I have a Foundations Lecture series available on my website that covers all of these three topics. It's a really fantastic place to start. They come with really detailed outlines and tons of resources, and it's just a great thing to check out if these topics are of particular interest to you.
Speaker 1:
As always, we're going to end with a little tip, trick or technique, so for this particular episode, I want to encourage you to go through your deck manually and find a card that you have questions about. That could mean anything. Maybe it's a card that always confuses you when it shows up in readings, or that you find yourself always trying to find more information about. Maybe the imagery in your particular deck is really captivating or strange or enticing to you. Maybe you're just curious about this card and you want to understand it better. You want to figure out its positionality in the deck. You want to understand how it contributes to the broader story of whatever cycle it's in. It could be anything, but I want you to take that card and spend some time with it, journal about it, study it and also research it.
Speaker 1:
But in addition to all of those kinds of learning techniques, I also want you to chat with it. It's going to feel weird, but talk to the card, consider how it might mean, not just as an individual card, like what that card might represent, but I also want you to think about what wisdom, insights, actions and emotions it holds. What do you think that card has to say to you? If you listen to it, what do you hear? I want you to take some notes on how that card feels for you, what it brings up for you and also pay attention to some potential ways that it could function in a reading. If you've been reading for a while, write down different ways.
Speaker 1:
That card has shown up for you different pieces of advice. It has offered different directions. It has pointed you different, you know, perhaps like encouragements or advice or even warnings it has offered in the past. Essentially, what I'm asking you to do here is to practice both learning and reading this card and see how it feels, see if one thing feels more comfortable than the other, See if this is a kinds of techniques that you want to apply to other cards in the deck, or if this is a practice that you could dig into more fully in different ways to really strengthen and support your practice. That's all I've got for you today, but I want to thank you for being here and I'll be back soon with more Card Talk. Card Talk is committed to staying ad-free for everyone, which is only possible thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. To pledge your monthly support or to make a one-time donation, click the link in the show notes. You can also find episode transcripts, more about me and additional Tarot resources through my website, 3amtarotcom. See you next time.