tarot rituals & routines

Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-personal rituals for entering and exiting a tarot reading
-the habits and frequency of readings
-blending tarot practice with your personal style and needs
-general reminders for beginning a tarot routine

Tarot printables for tracking readings and card studies from 3am.tarot
Daily tarot prompt email series from 3am.tarot

For more on Meg, check out 3amtarot.com, and order your copy of Finding the Fool through Bookshop.org or your favorite local bookstore.

Find episode transcripts and more over on the CARD TALK website.

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Chapters

• 0:12 Exploring Tarot Rituals and Routines
• 10:51 Creating a Flexible Tarot Routine

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

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 tarot rituals and tarot routines. Now, this is a topic that I get asked about all the time, and so I really wanted to devote an entire early episode specifically to kind of getting into the nuts and bolts of a practice. These are really ways of thinking about how we ground into a practice, how we focus on our practice and also how we create a rhythm for consistency in our readings, if consistency is something that you are concerned about. Now, I try to not put a disclaimer on every single episode, but I just want to emphasize that, as always, this is just my way of talking about this and my way of understanding this and breaking it down. None of this is standardized right, and so different readers and teachers and authors and other just folks that you follow in the tarot world they might have different language for this than what I'm going to use, so I'm going to define my terms and the ways that I'm using these words really briefly for you here, just so you know what I'm talking about when I use these words. Now I define a tarot ritual as the literal steps that you take during a reading, so the ways that you might prep a space for beginning your tarot reading, the things that you might do, the practical, tangible steps that you take during a reading, and also anything that you might do to close out or end the reading. In other words, this is the bones or the framework of the reading itself, the ways that you yourself read the cards in any given reading. I define a tarot routine as your habit of reading, which is to say the consistency of your readings, the kinds of readings that you do and the times that you do your readings right. Some folks do daily readings, some do weekly readings, some do monthly readings, some folks are going to do mostly single card readings, other folks prefer spreads, and also thinking about the types of questions that you ask. Your routine is your regular consistency with of questions that you ask. Your routine is your regular consistency with the readings that you do, and I define a tarot practice as your routine plus your rituals, and then also kind of folding in your general tarot philosophy, style, experience, purpose, as well as your tarot beliefs.

Speaker 1: 2:31

Tarot practice is kind of the broad language that I use to describe your full relationship with the cards. I think it's really important, whether you're starting a practice or you're trying to get back into a practice or you're feeling like your practice is changing, to show yourself a lot of compassion right as we grow and change. As the world around us grows and changes, as we learn more about who we are and what we need, and as our relationship with the tarot itself deepens, things are going to change and also it's healthy to mix things up. You don't have to hold yourself to certain standards and then judge yourself when your needs change. Building a tarot ritual, building tarot routines and understanding what you need and want from your tarot practice are all things that can help you build confidence in your workings with the tarot. So please give yourself permission to let those things evolve and change over time. Your tarot rituals, your tarot routines and your tarot practice get to be whatever you want and need them to be. Imposter syndrome is really really fucking real with this stuff right.

Speaker 1: 3:34

Comparing your tarot practice is such an easy habit to fall into, especially with so many readers sharing their rituals and their readings and their habits and their practices and their beliefs on social media in a way that is completely unfiltered and sometimes can just come out of left field. Right, you might just be scrolling on threads or Twitter or TikTok or wherever you spend your time, and see someone talking about tarot in a way that feels completely different than how you think about tarot. But if they look really magical or they seem really plugged in or whatever it is, it's really easy to immediately get caught up in that comparison struggle. Right? Comparing your tarot practice to someone else's is one of the fastest ways to kind of destroy it. Give yourself the gift of allowing your tarot practice to grow in its own way and to become its own weird, beautiful little thing. Right, let your practice be what you need it to be. You don't have to share it with anyone. You don't have to publish it. You don't have to publicize it. It just gets to be yours, and there's something really precious and special about that. It just gets to be yours, and there's something really precious and special about that.

Speaker 1: 4:38

Now, first, we're going to talk about ritual, your tarot ritual. And again, this is really just what it looks like when you sit down to do a reading the steps that you take, anything you might do to prep the space, as well as anything that you might do to exit or conclude the reading. Now I want to be real with you. Some folks like a really elaborate setup for their tarot practice and those are often like the Instagram witches. Right, they're going to have really special, elaborate storage for their deck, a special cloth that they might use for their altar or for their reading space. They might have a consistent place that they always read. There might be special teas or special prayers or mantras or crystals that are always out, incense that's always burning, candles that are going room sprays there's so many like props that sometimes get brought into a tarot practice and I want to be clear I'm not trying to disparage that at all For a lot of folks, having physical objects that are attached to your practice or a routine of laying out a cloth or opening up a window or ringing a bell or spraying something or arranging crystals in a grid or like whatever it is, these can be really helpful physical acts that help you get centered and focused and ground into the practice, just like a morning routine or sleep hygiene to help prepare your body and your mind for sleep.

Speaker 1: 5:52

These kinds of rituals can really help you shut out the noise and moving through those steps for a lot of people is essential for entering the mental and spiritual space of a tarot reading. It can help you give physical representation to what you're doing internally and enter the space in a really intentional way. But the flip side is that your tarot ritual does not have to be elaborate if you don't want it to be, if you don't want the props, if you don't want stuff, that's completely fine. Now, I don't usually like to say a lot about my own practices because I think again we get into that comparison mindset. But for the minimalists, for my fellow minimalists, I'm going to be real with you.

Speaker 1: 6:29

My tarot ritual involves choosing a deck from my office bookshelf which is where they all live taking a few deep breaths and pulling up the cards and diving right in. Like I read at my desk, but sometimes I also read at my coffee table, I read at the dining table, sometimes I even just sit on the floor or on my bed. Sometimes I make a cup of tea beforehand, sometimes I crack open a window to just air out the space, but that's really about it. And on the other end, when it's time to close out the reading, all I usually do is say thank you to the cards, because I don't generally have a candle burning or crystals to put away or anything else. I focus on the relationship itself and I honor the cards and what they have offered to me. I might take another deep breath or two, do a little stretch, but that's honestly all I do to close out my reading.

Speaker 1: 7:13

For me, a really specific, consistent ritual is more distracting than grounding. But that's just my mercurial ass. You can do whatever you want. This is just to say and I only share this to affirm that you don't need an elaborate tarot ritual if it doesn't feel good for you. If you want to have props, if having crystals or candles or anything else as part of your ritual feels good for you, I would encourage you just to make sure that you have a specific purpose for each of those objects, rather than just feeling that kind of magpie urge to collect a bunch of stuff or do a bunch of rituals simply because it feels witchy and I hope you can hear the air quotes that I'm using. There is a kind of aesthetic that I think gets brought into tarot and witchcraft and occult studies and spirituality in general. That is not necessary, it just isn't. But if those things have meaning for you, if there is a purpose behind them, that's a really beautiful part of a practice and I really encourage you to lean into that and enjoy it. There is no such thing as a perfect tarot practice, a perfect tarot reading or a perfect tarot ritual. There is no ideal. It's really just about you and what feels good for you. Next, let's get into your tarot routine and I don't have a whole lot to say about this, because your tarot routine can really be anything you want it to be, and it will probably change over time.

Speaker 1: 8:33

When I started reading tarot, reading a card almost every day felt really good. It felt good for my learning practice, it felt good for my reading practice and it also just felt really spiritually nourishing and supportive at a time in my life where I desperately needed to feel grounded and tethered to something. For me, that car today was something that I could return to again and again. But even at my most consistent daily readings, I still never really did like a classic morning routine where I always went through the same steps and had that ritual. For me, ritual is not super helpful. So even when I was reading my card a day consistently, it might be at whatever time of the day I remembered to do it or felt like it or it felt good, but that is what I used to do.

Speaker 1: 9:18

Right Is reading every day. Now I'm more likely to do a couple of readings per week and they're always based purely on need. They always bubble up from a question that I have or a desire for support from the cards, rather than the need to feel like I'm doing really consistent readings. I absolutely know folks who do a big spread at the top of the week and then might not pull cards for the rest of the week. They have their big like Sunday reading or Saturday reading or Monday reading, and that's really what grounds them and sustains them through the week. Other people just read like a few times a week or a few times a month, even just grab the cards when they have a big question and they want some help digging into it.

Speaker 1: 9:54

So if you want to start building a tarot routine, regardless of what your ritual is for the readings themselves, if you want to build a routine, how do you start? The first and probably the most important thing is to be realistic about your life and be realistic about like who you are as a person. There is space for dreaming. There's space for ambition. If this is something that feels really important to you, do live your life. You know, reach for your dreams, do what you got to do. But I want to be really clear here that your consistency with reading has nothing to do with how much you love the tarot. Building a tarot routine instead is about what you can reasonably do and it's about what's going to feel good for you and be supportive for you and make sense for you. I don't want you to start resenting the tarot because you set some kind of arbitrary reading goal that doesn't actually make sense for you and then get frustrated with yourself when you don't read every single day.

Speaker 1: 10:51

I'm talking about myself and my practice more here than I usually do, but it's because I want to emphasize I hate daily structured routines. I can't do them. They seem really great in theory, but in practice I personally really struggle with them. Blame my Gemini Ascendant and my Mercury in Sag. But I like to have complete flexibility over my days. I like a to-do list, but I like to be able to decide for myself what order I complete those tasks in and which things get done on which day I still end up doing the things that I care about basically every day. I write and read every single day, but if I try to make myself do something at the same time of day or something like that, it pretty much always falls apart. But again, that's just me. I just say that so that if there are other mercurial weirdos out there, you don't feel alone. But if you're really struggling to figure out what you want your tarot routine to be, or if you're having trouble separating what you think your tarot routine should be from what you actually want it to be, take a step back from the tarot and think instead about your relationships.

Speaker 1: 11:52

Think about how often and in what manner you talk to the people in your life that you care about. Not the people you have to talk to like bosses or coworkers or your tax preparer or whatever, but the people that you choose to have in your life friends, chosen family partners, people that you really genuinely care about and want to be in reciprocal relationship with. How do you talk to them and how often do you talk to them? What is your relationship like with those folks and what feels the best for you in terms of consistency? How often do you like talking to the people you care about. Are you a texting this person every couple of days to check in kind of person? Do you have a standing daily or weekly phone date? Do you have a monthly coffee date? Do you get deep every time or do you like to check in and kind of laugh and joke and tease in between more large, substantial conversations? Pay attention to that, spend some time thinking about it and really thinking about how you like to best connect with and be in relationship with the people in your life. That can translate to your relationship with the tarot.

Speaker 1: 12:56

If you're someone that likes to talk to your favorite people every single day throughout the day, you might really love daily check-ins with your cards. You might even like doing those multiple times a day. But if you're someone that prefers to have like a big juicy coffee date with your friend like once a week, then a weekly reading might be a better fit for you. I definitely encourage you to play around and experiment with different things and recognize that this might change over time. But I think there's something really powerful in letting your relationship with the cards be similar to your relationships with other things in your life that you care about. Your practice will change over time. I'm going to keep saying that again and again. So please give yourself grace in the process and let it evolve naturally and in a way that feels right for you.

Speaker 1: 13:40

Pay attention in particular to the readings you do that feel particularly supportive and simple, not just because of the cards that you drew, but because of the way the reading went, what felt natural, what felt like you didn't really have to think about it or work at it, what felt like you were falling into a rhythm that felt really good, where everything that you did had a purpose and a meaning and you didn't have to scramble for a prop or look for something that wasn't already within reach. I always like to end these episodes with a little tip or trick, and today's, I think, is more of a pep talk. I want to be real with you. You are going to have tarot readings that feel weird, okay. You're going to have tarot readings where you can't really focus, where your phone is buzzing or your cards fly everywhere, where you're shuffling or you're halfway through a reading and the dog starts wanting to go out. You might have readings where you pull a card and you just don't understand what it means, even if you know what the card means, you don't understand what it's saying. There might be times when you pull the cards away and feel more confused than before you pulled them out. All of this is normal. I want to say it again All of this is normal, and being discouraged or feeling a way about a reading that you've done is normal too. Okay, it happens to everybody. It happens to all of us at every level.

Speaker 1: 14:56

Journaling about your practice and keeping track of your readings includes those weird readings, includes the readings that feel a little off or a little a little strange. You're not a bad reader just because a reader doesn't totally make sense or doesn't totally connect or feels awkward. Tarot is a relationship and some days are just going to feel weird because the world is weird. Okay, the world is weird and hard. We are weird, things are weird. That's okay. Keep going, it's going to be all right.

Speaker 1: 15:22

The weird readings are part of the practice too, and you can learn from them, just the same as you can learn from the readings that feel awesome when you really feel like you're in your bag and the cards are speaking really openly. All of them are part of the practice. Embrace all of it. Let it be weird. Embrace the awkward. You can laugh with your cards, you can tell them that it feels strange. That's all. That's all fine, it's all part of the process. That is all I have for you today, but, as always, thank you so much for spending this time with me and for listening to Card Talk, and I will be back again soon. 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.