starting with tarot spreads

Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-what tarot spreads are
-how and why spreads work
-tips for getting started with tarot spreads

Want more on tarot spreads? I have a ton of resources including:
-Free spread archive: browse a digital directory of my most popular free tarot spreads
-Free email course: get four days of quick tips and suggestions for working with one, two, three, and four card tarot spreads
-Spread collections & worksheets: explore digital collections of printable spread worksheets and spread collections
-Next Level Tarot: a three-lecture series on multi-card tarot readings, spreads, and telling stories with your cards
-Spread Architect: love longer spreads? i can write you one that's fully customized to your needs and preferences!

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.

Love what you’re hearing? Support the pod with a one-time donation or recurring subscription, and get the chance to submit topics for future episodes! 

Chapters

• 0:12 Understanding Tarot Spreads in Readings
• 6:32 Mastering Tarot Spreads for Readings

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 the basics of tarot spreads. Now, if you've been following me for a minute or if you're familiar with my work, you might know that tarot spreads are one of my favorite things to talk about. I have so many resources already focused on spreads and I'm writing a book about them right now. Tarot spreads just feel like a really powerful, useful practice for me personally, and so I love talking about them and helping to support other people in using them in their own practice, cause I also think the tarot spreads can be kind of intimidating. So in this episode, we are going to break down what they are, talk about how they work and also consider how you can start to use them in your own readings. Now, I talked about this a little bit in the last episode on multi-card readings, but I want to just address what even is a tarot spread? Right? We got to start here Now. You may have heard me say this before, but it's really one of my favorite metaphors for describing tarot spreads. I really like to think about tarot spreads as an outline or a blueprint, because tarot spreads at their base are a structured layout that we use to give shape to our tarot readings. Essentially, spreads are a way of giving every card that we pull in our reading a specific function so that we understand what that card is doing there and what it's offering to us. Tarot spreads can come in any size, so we usually talk about spreads as having more than two cards. Right, I think you technically could consider single card readings as tarot spreads in some way, but that's not generally how we use that language. If we're talking about a tarot spread, it's usually a multi-card reading. Tarot spreads can be presented in a number of ways. Most of the spreads that I share are graphics or visuals and you'll see a little card outline and then text within the outline that describes what a card might be doing there. So you can really think about it as pulling a single card for each prompt and then thinking about each of those prompts as connecting back to each other to provide different angles on the broader scope of the question. So with a tarot spread, it's really helping us to stay focused on the task at hand and essentially guiding the conversation that we're having with our cards. When we use a tarot spread in our reading, we're essentially deciding ahead of time what we want to talk about with the cards, and so my favorite way to think about it is as a conversation. I use this framing a lot because I find it really helpful, not just in thinking about how we relate to our cards, but also because we can think about our own preferences when we're talking to people that we care about.

Speaker 1: 2:54

Sometimes you meet up with a friend or call them just to chat and you want to just let the conversation go wherever it wants to go. You might not have a particular agenda or goal, you might not have something specific that you really wanted to make sure you talked about. You just want to see how your friend is, tell them what's going on with you, hear how they are and just like let the chat lead to wherever it wants to lead, and those can be great. But at other times you might have something really specific that you want to talk to that friend about, that you specifically want to share with them, or that you want to get their advice or their feedback on something that you want to talk through with that person, and in that case, you might just know the general topic, you might just be like I want to fill you in on this, this story, this event, this thing that happened to me, and then just talk through it. But other times you might know that you have something really specific you want to ask for, or something that you want to share with them and get their feedback on. I have friends that are really talented in certain areas or really experienced in certain areas, and so, while sometimes I might reach out to them and just want to be like, hey, this is what's going on with me, let's talk about it, other times I might be like I need your specific expertise on this specific problem and I have very specific questions that I want to ask so that I can get your feedback and advice, so that I can go on to use that information and act in a specific way.

Speaker 1: 4:10

And so this this latter way of thinking, this approaching the conversation with an agenda, with something that we know we want to receive that is what we can use a tarot spread for. We can look at each of the positions, every card that's showing up in the spread, as a different angle that we want to use in the conversation or a different aspect of the situation that we want to be sure gets addressed. This is basically our way of mapping out what we want the conversation to be, so that we can be sure that every concern we have or every layer we want to address is going to be included in the overall conversation. In other words, tarot spreads really make sure that the conversation that we're going to have, the reading that we're going to have, covers everything that we want it to cover and can also help us ensure that we get what we want from the reading, whether that's advice or support or encouragement, a pat on the back, a pep talk or like a shaking us up, right. Sometimes we know we're missing something or we know that we need courage to do a thing that we don't want to do, and we need the cards to help us get there. Now I want to be clear that just because we're using a tarot spread doesn't mean we're always going to receive the cards or the answers that we're exactly hoping for, right? That's not how this works, but it is going to ensure that we address the facets of the situation or the aspects of our question that we want to make sure get addressed.

Speaker 1: 5:29

Now let's talk about how tarot spreads work. Spreads work, as I've said before, by giving us a clear function for every card in the reading. So every card is going to show up for a different position or prompt and typically you're just going to pull one card for each one of the prompts. If you're someone that reads cards that fly out or jump or you know whatever language you use, for if you're shuffling and a card falls out of the deck, sometimes you might want to set those to the side. Other times you might want to say that this card falls into this position and still other times you might still end up pulling a card for that position and just including the second card as part of that prompt. You really get to decide for yourself how you want to navigate that, but generally we think about spreads as using one card per position and by creating an established structure for our reading, spreads really do help us remember what the reading is about and not get too lost in the cards. So spreads really work by helping us stay focused on what we want and helping us define the parameters for the conversation. Here's another example to kind of show you how spreads work.

Speaker 1: 6:32

Say you want to do a reading about a relationship. I'm using that example because there are a lot of relationship spreads out there. Perhaps you've got a crush on somebody, you've got big feelings for someone. You're trying to figure out what to do. Do I tell them? Do I make a move, or do I just hang back and hope it'll go away? Right, let's say you want to do a tarot reading about your relationship, about this, this new thing that might be starting Now.

Speaker 1: 6:53

If you just Googled tarot relationship spread, you're probably going to get thousands and thousands of options, and each of those spreads is probably going to take a different angle. They're not always going to be appropriate for a crush and trying to decide what to do of the crush, right? Some of them are going to be like establishing a relationship. Some of them are going to be a deepening relationship. Some of them are going to be about deciding whether or not you should end a relationship. Right? There's going to be a million different options for the kinds of relationship readings that you want to do, and so a spread works by really helping you clarify what it is you're looking for from the reading and then ensuring that that gets addressed in the reading itself, right?

Speaker 1: 7:32

You can't just use any spread on a relationship and think that you're necessarily going to have the kind of conversation that you want. But spreads work when you're able to find one or write one or create one or tweak one. That's going to direct the conversation where you want it to go. That is really the purpose of the spread. So maybe I've sold you on this or maybe you've been waiting patiently for me to tell you how to get started with spreads. But let's talk about how to get started.

Speaker 1: 7:56

If you want to start integrating tarot spreads into your practice, my best advice and I know I keep saying this in these episodes and I just said it in the last episode as well but start small. Truly, two and three card tarot spreads can be incredibly effective. A spread does not need a million cards to get the job done. Also, make sure you pick a spread, as I said, that you're excited to use, that you understand and that actually addresses your question right. You don't just want to use any random spread just because it seems sort of related to the topic you want to talk about, because you might end up asking questions or pulling cards for prompts that have nothing to do with what you're looking for If you're going to get started with tarot spreads. If you're going to start utilizing spreads, make sure it's a spread you actually want to use and that's going to be asking questions or exploring topics that feel relevant to you and feel useful for you.

Speaker 1: 8:46

I also think that when you're practicing using tarot spreads or getting started with tarot spreads, it can be really helpful to practice with spreads that don't feel quite as loaded or tender. Right, try some general support spreads or just some more general overview types of spreads and see how they feel. You don't necessarily want to dive headfirst into, like, the most sensitive emotional topic that's on your heart while you're learning spreads because chances are those first couple spreads that you use you might feel a little bit confused and so if you start diving headfirst into a reading that's exploring something that feels really vulnerable, really tender, really emotional, um, really difficult, really potentially triggering, and you don't understand how it works, or you're really struggling to connect the cards that you drew with the positions that they're in, it can be rough and I don't want that to happen to you. So make sure that you're starting out with some spreads that feel more general, feel more supportive, have a typically positive bent or just like focusing more on encouragement or support or building you up rather than getting really serious or really intense. It's also helpful when you're getting started with spreads to move slowly, which is why it's also nice to do a shorter one, right If you're? If you're trying to move slowly through, you know eight or 10 positions. You might be there forever. So you can move really slowly if you only have a couple of cards, because you can really spend a lot more time with those cards.

Speaker 1: 10:12

Lastly, pay careful attention to the relationship between the card you pulled and the position that it's in, not just how that card answers the broader question, but specifically the relationship between that card and its prompt. How is that card a response to the prompt? If it was just a single card reading and you were pulling one card for that prompt, how would you connect those two things together? And then, once you've done that, you can consider how that card connects back to the broader overall purpose of the spread itself.

Speaker 1: 10:43

Now, for some people, tarot spreads feel incredibly intuitive. Falling right into that structure, understanding what purpose each card is serving in the reading feels really natural, it feels really good, it feels really easeful. So if you are someone that really fucks with spreads, like I am, you might find this really intuitive, and you might not need a lot of practice before you can start either using more cards or using spreads that get a lot more intense and like dig into much more personal topics. But spreads are not intuitive for everyone, and so if using a tarot spread feels really hard for you or feels really complicated, please don't beat yourself up. All right, spreads can be really tricky for folks, and if you start Googling around and searching on the internet about how to use tarot spreads, you will find all kinds of advice to help you work through them in different ways. But I do want to say, as I mentioned in the other episode, I just did a big lecture series called next level tarot that's specifically talking through how to work with multi-card readings and spreads in particular. So if you are someone that struggles with spreads, I have that lecture series, as well as some other free and paid resources that you can find on my website that are specifically devoted to help you build up your confidence with tarot spreads, and I'll put links to all of those things in the show notes. As always, I like to wrap up these episodes with a tip or a trick, and so some of my best advice for you in using a tarot spread is to take your time with the spread before you read with it.

Speaker 1: 12:07

Now, as I said, you don't want to just grab any old spread that's just generally about the topic you're eager to read in. You want to make sure that the different positions are going to address your actual problem and are really relevant for the situation that you find yourself in. But once you have that spread, once you've committed to the spread that you know you want to use, you know what's relevant for you, you know it suits your situation, you know what's addressing the questions and topics that you want to talk about. Take a few minutes to really consider how the spread works, look at how it's directing the conversation, look at the different things that it's circling around, look at what it's making space for in the conversation and also consider what might be getting left out of the conversation or what's not getting addressed. You not only want to make sure that the spread addresses your question, you also want to make sure that it's going to get into the kind of specificity that you want and then it's not leaving something out that you really wanted to address.

Speaker 1: 12:58

So I really like to go through each position in the spread and understand for myself what it's doing there. I want to define for myself why each position is included in the spread and just like what it means and how it works, so that when it's time for me to pull the card that's going to respond to that position, I know what the card is responding to and I know what role that card is going to play in the overall reading. Now, this doesn't have to be a really lengthy process, but even just taking a couple of minutes before you use the spread to make sure you understand it and define for yourself what each of those prompts is going to accomplish can go a really long way in making sure that when you do use the spread, when it's actually time to do the reading, you have a much more confidence about what you're doing with that spread. The spread is there to help you. It's there to help provide additional structure and guardrails and boundaries and focus for you. So make sure you know how to use it and make sure that it's actually going to be working for you so that you can use it to its best advantage to help support your reading.

Speaker 1: 13:55

That's all I have for you today, but, as always, thank you so much for spending this time with me and I'll 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.