Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover: -what listening to your cards really means -how to transition from learning to reading tarot -tarot readings as conversations -an in-depth example of what listening to your cards can look like -how to thoughtfully practice this process
Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover: -what listening to your cards really means -how to transition from learning to reading tarot -tarot readings as conversations -an in-depth example of what listening to your cards can look like -how to thoughtfully practice this process
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. In today's episode we are going to be talking about learning to listen to your tarot cards. Now what do I mean by that? Basically, when you start to move from studying what the tarot is to interpreting what the cards are communicating, there is a necessary shift. Studying what the tarot is includes looking at the structure of the cards, thinking about the potential meanings of the cards, looking at the cards as stories and cycles, recognizing that each card plays an important role in the broader structure and experience of the tarot. This can also include like looking at the tarot's history, reading different stories or interpretations of the cards, looking at all the different ways to understand what the cards are offering us. All of that fits into kind of the study part of building a tarot practice. But when we start shifting to reading, it really requires us to go beyond repeating just basic keywords or correspondences or things that we have learned and instead really starting to recognize what the cards are sharing with us when they offer a specific card as a response to our question. In other words, when we learn how to listen to the tarot, we're really going beyond basic comprehension and moving into interpretation or deeper understanding. Reading tarot involves bringing our own intuition and knowledge and experience and discernment into the process, rather than just being someone who is kind of passively absorbing information. So when we say listening to your cards, that's really my personal language for just what it means to recognize what the deck is offering or extending to you and processing that card or those cards as a response to your question instead of just as a list of words. Listening to the tarot is what really helps us deepen our relationship to the cards and I really like to talk about a tarot practice as a relationship and tarot readings as conversations, because it really puts the emphasis on the relational aspect of tarot readings. You're checking in with your cards, you're asking them a question or bringing up a specific topic, something that's important to you right, something that matters, something that you want feedback or insight on, something that you want support around or encouragement for something that you could use some advice or another perspective on, and the cards are responding to your question, to your emotion, to your request with an answer. But think about it this way If you remember that it's a relationship, think about what it feels like to talk to a friend. If you reached out to someone that you trust for advice on a messy situation, like at work or something, they wouldn't just say hi, priestess, as a response to your question. They would talk to you, right. They wouldn't even just say something like inner wisdom. It might be good advice, but it would feel kind of weird as a response.
Speaker 1:
The tarot is not that dry, it's not that bland, right? So instead, I want you to remember that the cards that we receive in our readings are responses relational responses to our questions, and that they are pointing us in a specific direction. But when we're doing a reading, it's up to us, as the tarot reader, to expand on the cards that are offered to us and to learn to listen to everything that's being communicated through that card's specific meanings. In other words, it requires us to do some work, right. We're not just pulling cards and passively receiving. We're instead really engaging with the cards that come forward and critically thinking about what those cards contain. Listening to our cards, listening to the tarot, is often really about recognizing the relationship between the question that we have asked or the topic that we have brought up, and the answer that we have received. So all of this is why I talk so much about the difference between learning tarot and reading tarot, because there's only so much studying you can do before you have to start building up those other skill sets that allow you to do readings and feel confident about your interpretations, to feel like you can really believe what you're seeing in the cards.
Speaker 1:
I want you to remember that every single one of the 78 tarot cards has a lot of different potential meanings that you can glean from the correspondences, the imagery, the symbolism, the resources created by other tarot teachers or scholars, the specific deck that you're working with, which sometimes have their own sets of correspondences or their own keywords, plus your own intuition and your own experience and your own observations about the card. And all of this is why starting out with a tarot practice or working to deepen your tarot practice can be really overwhelming. Right? That's a lot of information to be trying to parse and distinguish. Building up that skill set of understanding what the cards are offering in the context of a specific reading, and learning to recognize which keyword is the most relevant for a reader, which meaning is the most relevant for your reading, is really how you get to be a more experienced, more proficient tarot reader, but it takes time.
Speaker 1:
I want to just really affirm here that this shift from learning about the cards to reading the cards and interpreting the cards and building a relationship with your deck is hard. It is a hard thing to do. These might not be skills that you necessarily use on a regular basis, and digging into symbology and correspondences and having practical knowledge is not the same as trusting yourself or recognizing which knowledge is going to be the most applicable in a situation. Plus, when you're coming to the cards with a question, even if you're trying to do so in a really chill way, if you're asking a question that feels relatively neutral or doesn't feel super emotionally charged, that doesn't mean that you're not still feeling some feelings and might have some tenderness. When you're reading right, tarot reading always involves some kind of vulnerability, and so when you're in that state, when you're reading right, tarot reading always involves some kind of vulnerability, and so when you're in that state, when you're looking to receive knowledge or support or insights or a new perception or a new perspective, it can be a tender experience to pull a card and not feel like you know what the card is saying to you. That can just feel bad and it can make you feel like you're not doing something right. So please let me just affirm that you're doing great. And this is a hard thing. It takes practice, it just does. It takes time, it takes energy. It takes consistent devotion and discipline to build up those muscles and those skills so that you can start to understand what your cards are saying to you. Now, just telling you that this is hard and requires practice might not feel great.
Speaker 1:
So let's talk through an example of what this could actually look like together. Let's talk about a single card reading and think about some different ways that you could potentially move through it. Let's say that I want to ask my cards something pretty general. I'm just looking for like a daily check-in sort of reading, and so I shuffle up my deck and I ask them what do I need to know today? It's one of my favorite general questions to ask for a single card reading. I shuffle the cards and say what do I need to know today? And I pull out the four of cups, say that my version of this card right, the deck that I'm using, which, in this case, is going to be the next world tarot features a femme looking person in an open bathrobe sitting on a pier, surrounded by letters and bottles, with the water extending behind them.
Speaker 1:
They're doing their nails. There's some bottles of nail polish by their feet and they're kind of blowing on their fingers. It looks like and it just looks like kind of a vibe, right. This person is sort of just doing their own thing. They're in their own world. They don't seem distraught, but they also don't seem particularly like involved in anything. They're kind of just doing this little care ritual for themselves. They're on their own and they're in a beautiful place. It's a vibe, it really is a vibe.
Speaker 1:
Now, I know from my own experience that when we think about Rider-Waite-Smith keywords or some of the most common keywords that you might see if you were to do a Google on the four of cups, this card tends to be associated with ideas like apathy. To do a Google on the four of cups, this card tends to be associated with ideas like apathy, selfishness, boredom, retreat, contemplation or maybe just a lack of motivation or a lack of energy. If I wanted to expand from those keywords, those Rider-Waite-Smith associated keywords, in a more and more size style, reading where I'm going to be looking at the full scope of the numbers and the elements that are in that card. I might remember that the number four is a digit that's really associated with foundations, order, stability, protection and structure. Or the element of water, which is the one associated with the suit of cups, is really tied to emotions, relationships, intuition, love, vulnerability, matters of the heart. And so, looking at those things together, I might come up with some additional keywords like feeling secure, or having protections around a relationship, or creating emotional stability, or putting up walls around the heart. There's also a keyword in this particular deck that's re-evaluate, that's written right on the card, which might make me think further about slowing down or reconsidering relationships, or dreams even asking me to step back and be really thoughtful and trust my intuition when it comes to relationships or love.
Speaker 1:
Now, all of those meanings together, those intellectual meanings, paired with my understanding of kind of the vibe of the imagery on the card, might point me towards feelings of emotional stagnation, emotional boundaries or emotional retreat as a general theme for this card, just broadly. And so, with all of that information, now it's on me to think about where or why that idea is relevant to my life and where it might be useful in terms of answering my question. Remember, I asked what do I need to know today? And so it's my job now to do my thing, and in my case that might mean taking a few deep breaths and clearing my mind, meditating on the car, journaling about it a little bit, maybe praying or talking to my spirits or just talking to myself and thinking about where this might apply or where this might come up.
Speaker 1:
I might think about where my own emotions might feel really stable, or I might think about where emotional boundaries have been put up or where they might be needed. I might think about places in my life where I feel a little bit apathetic or not super emotionally engaged. I might think about any selfish actions I've taken recently or selfishness that's come up in my life, perhaps from people around me. I might also think about retreat and contemplation about what emotional rest might look like or what emotional protection might look like, and, with a little bit of reflection, I might start to think about how I feel kind of distant from my coworkers at work, how my work doesn't feel super emotionally fulfilling, and I've been kind of putting up some walls or boundaries to protect myself from getting too emotionally invested in this work that I don't particularly like. Maybe I think about the people that I work with and how I feel pretty disconnected from them and how that's been a little bit disappointing to me and has caused me to pull back even further. And so, as something to know, today, this card could be asking me to just pay attention to those feelings, to just acknowledge that that's been kind of a low level emotional thing that's been happening in my life. It could also be asking me to really acknowledge feelings of separation or ways that I have created distance myself between me and my coworkers. Even though I'm craving that emotional intimacy or that sense of belonging, I might be putting up walls that are actually preventing that from happening. In that way, this card could also be encouraging me to do something about that, to acknowledge that sense of disconnection in a way that spurs me onto action or maybe encourages me to make. But say that, instead of just asking that general question, what do I need to know today? Say that we're repeating this process. But I pulled the same card in response to a more specific question, something that's a little bit more tender, like what do I need to know about my relationship with my partner right now? That kind of question might feel a lot more vulnerable.
Speaker 1:
The meanings are all the same, right? Those? Both the vision of what's on the card, the actual imagery and depiction itself, as well as those Rider-Waite-Smith keywords, the keywords that we kind of expanded on using Versailles style. Reading the keyword re-evaluate, that's right on the cards. You know, all of those base meanings that I came up with are still relevant. They're still part of the card itself. But I might then be thinking about emotional boundaries with my partner, places that I've put up walls with my partner, or thinking about ways that I might be selfish or standoffish with my romantic partner. But in that case I would still be stepping back to take a moment to listen to my intuition and think about my actual relationship with my partner.
Speaker 1:
And let's say that after doing that I really just can't come up with anything. Right? I'm thinking about that. Things have actually been really good with us, right? I'm thinking about how we've been really connected emotionally, and so this card as a recognition of feeling disconnected, doesn't feel super relevant. So what do I do with this card, right? So in that case I might go back to all of those meanings and start to dig a little bit deeper and think about what might actually suit my question and my situation, and I might, in this case, think about how four as a digit is a number of stability and protection, and so this card might actually be indicating in this case that we're on really solid emotional ground and that things with my partner, in an emotional sense, are really steady and reliable and protected.
Speaker 1:
Two completely different kinds of readings, but still using the same format and still using the same question. I say all of this, I share this example to say that it's really up to you to sit with the ideas, to think about what question you've brought and to really acknowledge the situation that you're actually in, think about the meanings that really resonate with your question. This process can be tricky, right. It's why tarot readings are always easy. It's why everybody doesn't do it.
Speaker 1:
Sometimes, tarot readings really do require us to sit with the card or the cards that have come forward and to think really critically about what they might be communicating. When we ask the cards a question, we have to remember that the cards are answering us and we also have to be prepared for any answer that the cards might give. That might mean that sometimes the response that we receive is uncomfortable or frustrating or scary or not immediately clear. Tarot reading really requires us to be brave enough to actually listen to what the cards are saying, to take the time to process that and to know enough about the potential meanings of the cards to be able to dive deeper if our initial interpretation or our first thought doesn't really totally make sense. Practice really does make perfect in this case, and so I know you might feel impatient to want to be reading really fluently, really quickly, but taking the time to really continue to practice your tarot readings is what's going to make you a very proficient, confident and clear reader.
Speaker 1:
So when you're practicing, don't be afraid to pull the cards consistently to do regular readings. Now, your regular might look different than someone else's, that doesn't matter. Don't let that fuck you up. Okay, you get to read at whatever pace feels right for you. So read with whatever consistency makes sense for you, whether that's daily, weekly, monthly, whatever but don't give up on the cards. Take breaks if you need to, but don't give up on the cards. Also, don't rush your readings. Don't be afraid to sit with a card for a little while and really analyze it, think about it, talk to it, meditate on it. Give the card space to breathe and space to sing, and let yourself really take the time to listen to everything that the card might have to offer. Also, continue to learn more about correspondences and meanings. There's so many brilliant resources out there and there are so many correspondences it's honestly wild. So really give yourself time to learn about the kinds of meanings that really resonate with you.
Speaker 1:
Journal, journal, journal, journal keep track of your readings. Reflect on your readings. These do not have to be elaborate, beautiful writings. They can just be bullet notes or doodles or whatever works for you. But anytime you can track your readings, it's going to give you something that you can look back on to reflect. And not only can you track your progress, but then you're also building up your own repository. You're basically creating your own tarot resource, and that's a really cool thing. And if you need help with this, I do have like printable tarot journal pages and tarot grimoire sheets that you can find on my website. I'll throw them in the show notes.
Speaker 1:
Lastly, don't be afraid to allow yourself to experiment with different styles of reading. I love a single card reading for readers at every level, but you might also like trying to start using multiple cards together, either in spreads or not in spreads. Play around with different formats and really start to pay attention to which readings feel the easiest for you to hear, which which formats facilitate your listening the best I know. I just offered some tips and tricks already, but I want to wrap with one last one, as always, which is to let your studying stay in balance with your own reflections. I think it's really easy to get caught up in reading different resources and prioritizing other people's perspectives on individual cards or the tarot in general over your own, but I really want to encourage you to value your perceptions in the same way. Just because you're new doesn't mean you don't know anything. So please try to keep the outside resources that you take in in good balance with your own internal reflection and discovery on the cards. I promise you that both have a lot of value and both are important for your tarot practice.
Speaker 1:
To develop your perspective on the cards, your experience with the cards, your observation of the cards, your knowledge of the cards, your relationship with the cards gets to take up as much space as your research does.
Speaker 1:
As you continue to work with the cards, as you learn to trust your ability to listen to the cards. You might find that your desire to lean on resources lessons, and that's completely fine. You can start to prioritize your own reflections, but you might also start looking at your own notes. It's why I'm always encouraging folks to journal and reflect, because it can be really valuable to be able to look back on your own observations of the cards and hold them in the same esteem that you do with resources that are written by other people. That's all I have for you today, but, as always, thank you for spending this time with me and I will be back soon with more Card Talk. Card Talk is committed to staying ad free for everyone, which is possible thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. To pledge your monthly support or 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.