Many people, once bitten by the Tarot bug, decide to invest in their own deck and start to do readings for themselves, friends and family. This is always exciting at first, but once you have figured out the basics it can be hard to know how to take it to the next level, and what you can do to make your readings more meaningful.

Let’s have a look at some things that you can do to improve your Tarot reading.

Develop your intuition

As you will know from your initial forays into Tarot, the practice of reading the Tarot cards depends very much on accessing your intuition, to reveal knowledge that is buried there and pick up on energies and signs that are manifest in the world around you. As such, your intuition is one of the most important ingredients of a Tarot reading, and developing your intuition can improve your readings.

There are many things that you can do to develop your intuition, such as practicing mindfulness, automatic writing or psychometry. But the most basic thing that you can do, before trying these other practices, is to develop a meditation practice.

There are many different ways to practice meditation, but in essence, it is a matter of sitting still and observing the thoughts of your conscious mind, of that part of your mind that is continuously active and fills your day with endless chatter. It is a matter of recognizing these thoughts of the conscious mind for what they are, ideas sent to you in reaction to certain stimuli largely filtered by social norms and past experience, and putting them to one side. This practice quiets your mind during the practice, and in time, in general.

This quietening of the conscious mind gives you the capacity to access the other parts of your mind, such as the subconscious. The nature of the conscious mind means that it is unable to process all the stimuli that our senses, including our psychic senses, collect, so it filters that stimuli to something manageable. However, the subconscious mind can also process much more data, and therefore has a clearer and more accurate view of your life and the world, so accessing your subconscious mind can provide you with profound insights, and these insights are often characterized as intuition.

A regular meditation practice will strengthen your access to your subconscious and your intuition, allowing you to connect what you see in the cards with what you know about the world more profoundly.

Know your cards

When you started out with Tarot you probably spent quite a bit of time learning the meaning of the different cards that came in your guide, and this is a great place to start. There are plenty of websites where you can learn all of the Tarot card meanings such as www.numerologysign.com. Once you have come to grips with these meanings, it is time to go deeper.

While the meanings given in your guide have been developed by experts who have spent a lot of time with Tarot, what the cards mean for you, depends on you, so spend time discovering what the cards mean for you.

Spend time with each card, reviewing the meaning given in your guide, but then really examining the card, and seeing which of the meanings described in the guide resonate with you most strongly. Also look at the imagery and think about how the card makes you feel and see if the card has any other meaning for you that isn’t in your guide. These meanings are the ones that are most significant for you and will stick in your mind and easily come up when you see the card again.

Also keep a reading journal, writing down what you asked, which cards came up and in what arrangement, and how you interpreted them. Regularly return to your readings and make comments on your reading with the benefit of hindsight. This will help you see where your readings have been strong, and where they have been unclear. It will help you see which cards you are struggling to interpret and need to spend more time with, and will help you notice patterns in your readings and if the same cards keep showing up in particular circumstances.

Pay attention to relationships

Again, learning the meaning of the individual cards is one of the first things we do when we start out with Tarot, but a reading is not just about the meaning of the individual cards, but how the cards dealt relate to each other and the story that they tell as a whole.

To improve your readings, move your study beyond the individual cards and start to look at card relationships and combinations. There is lots of discussion about this online to get you started.

Also try different Tarot spreads, which combine the cards in different ways to form different meanings. Trying many different spreads, rather than always using the same one, will help you see new and different relationships between the cards which will help with all your readings, even if you go back to your favorite spread as your go to.

Make sure you are asking the right questions

Again, one of the first things that we learn when we start Tarot is to always ask open questions, rather than yes or no questions, in order to give the cards more scope to pull the information that we need. However, it can be easy to fall out of this habit, so it is a good idea to check back in with yourself and make sure you are asking not only open questions, but questions that give you an opportunity to actively take control.

Perhaps you have recently started a business, and you are worried if it is going to work out. Make sure you are not asking questions such as ‘will my new business venture work?’, and convert it to an open question. While your new question could be something along the lines of ‘what can we do to ensure that our new business venture is successful?’, this too is not the most useful question that you can ask. We all know that often when we start something we think we know what we want, but with time and experience we realize that what we need is something quite different, and what we get in the end can be something very different to where we started, to the point of not even really being the same thing. As such, you should rather by asking ‘what can I be doing to bring success into my life?’ This opens up your question to a greater range of possibilities and focusses on what you can actively be doing to improve your life.

This proactive, open, growth mindset is one of the cornerstones of Tarot, and it is a good idea to check in with yourself regularly to make sure that you are bringing this mindset to your readings.

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