journaling with tarot

Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-what "counts" as tarot journaling
-what your tarot journaling practice can include
-tips for customizing your practice
-four of my favorite ways to use tarot journaling

And if you're looking for specific assistance developing or expanding your tarot journaling practice, check out:
-Queens of Spirit, which focuses on building relationships with your own emotions and begins September 2nd 2024 (but is also going to be added to the 3am.tarot Conservatory membership in October 2024)
-Drink Some Water, which is a free mini series for working with four cards from the suit of cups to find replenishment and insight
-Priestess’ Prompts, which includes 21 days of tarot questions that you can use to draw cards for readings and also explore through a daily journaling routine
-Tarot printables, worksheet pages, and journal pages

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 please subscribe, review, and tell your friends! 

Chapters

• 0:12 Tarot Journaling Basics and Insights
• 6:55 Exploring Tarot Journaling Methods

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 our episode today, we are going to be talking about tarot journaling. Now, tarot journaling as an expression, as an idea, as a practice, can refer to a few different things. Right, there are a couple of different ways that we can go about tarot journaling. So today I'm going to talk to you about four different ways that this can look, or four different ideas that you can use to start to shape a tarot journaling practice, if you're interested in doing this as part of your readings or just your general relationship building with the cards. Now, just to give us a baseline when I say tarot journaling, I'm really meaning any way of recording your thoughts, impressions, feelings and interpretations around your interaction with the tarot. I know that, depending on who you are, how your brain works, what your body is like, journaling might feel really good or it might feel like something that has always eluded you. I know some folks who journal every day and have journaled every day for most of their life. I know other people that have journaled intensively at various periods of their life, but then at other times, it might find themselves never really reaching for their journal. But the thing is, tarot journaling can look a lot of different ways and it also doesn't have to be intimidating. So even if you're someone that doesn't consider yourself a journaler, this still could be a practice that you might find really supportive and helpful in building your own tarot relationship and learning to work with the cards in more depth. This doesn't have to be complicated and there are a lot of different ways that this can look. Before we start talking about methods for journaling, I do want to clarify that I think sometimes when people think about journaling, the first thing they might think about is handwriting on paper with a pen or a pencil, and that's totally fine, right? If your journaling looks like you sitting with a blank book and writing in it by hand, that's beautiful. Love that for you.

Speaker 1: 2:08

But there are lots of other ways to record your thoughts and to get things down in a recorded kind of way. You can handwrite, but you can also type, or you can make a voice memo, or you can do transcriptions or dictations, or you can doodle or draw or even make a collage or use stickers. You could do software like notion, or make an Excel spreadsheet. You could write in a calendar or a daily planner, or you could just use a Google doc. You can use social media. My tarot journal was Instagram for years, but you could also use Pinterest or a different kind of community platform. Share your polls with people. You could have a dedicated notebooks with specific sections for everything that you want to record and track. You can print out worksheets I sell some like that on my website or you can just use loose leaf paper, literally whatever works for you. All of this and so much more can live underneath the umbrella of tarot journaling, and I say all of this not to stress you out or give you too many choices, but just to say that journaling gets to be whatever you need it to be. You can tailor and create and adapt and change a journaling practice as you go, but you also get to play around and figure out what actually makes sense for you and what feels good for you.

Speaker 1: 3:18

For me personally, my tarot journaling practice started as just me, my deck and a lined notebook that I had gotten from a local drug store For me. Having that blank page in front of me and knowing that no one else was ever going to see it made me feel really safe to just explore whatever I wanted to explore on the page. It meant that I could write down questions that I had, that I could write how confused I was by certain cards, and it just gave me an opportunity to let my feelings out on the page without worrying about things being in complete sentences or super beautifully written or anything like that. After about six months or so, I shifted and started using Instagram as my tarot journal. It was initially private, but then I made it public because I never thought anyone would find it and and look where it got me, which is just to say that social media, as flawed as it is, can be a great way to have a visual representation for your tarot journal. Depending on how you are right, I was a photographer and so for me, having that visual component felt really useful as part of my journaling practice. I really want to remind you and stress here that your journaling practice can look any way you want and can be specifically tailored to what feels good for you. As I talk about these four methods, I really want to encourage you to trust in your own knowledge of how your brain works, how your body works, of what feels good for you in your practice at this time and also for what you actually care about in terms of records and information.

Speaker 1: 4:40

Let's start talking about some methods for tarot journaling. The first method that we're going to talk about is kind of what we've already been talking about, which is using tarot journaling as a method for tracking your readings. Something that often comes up when people think about tarot journaling is really the idea of writing about whatever card or cards you draw that day. I think that this can be one of the simplest and most accessible ways to get started with tarot journaling, because it's a really easy way to just start keeping a record of what you pull, what you asked and the context of the reading itself. When you're journaling as a way of tracking your readings, it doesn't have to be any more complicated than this. You can really just note what the question you asked is, what spread you used, if you used a tarot spread, what cards you pulled, maybe what deck you used, and then just the context of the reading itself. You don't even have to write what you think the cards mean or the reading meant. If you don't want to, you really can just use your journaling practice as a tracking method For some people, having a tracking practice is really helpful, and so I am going to do an entire episode just talking about methods for tracking and organizing your tarot readings, but to take it one step further.

Speaker 1: 5:50

The second method I want to talk about is really journaling, as understanding and exploring your readings, and I think that this can be one of the most helpful methods, especially if you're just getting started in your tarot practice. This is really just taking it one step further and including not just what card you pulled and what was going on when you pulled that cards, but also writing down anything you like about your interpretation, your understanding of that reading, in as much depth as you find helpful, and you can write anything for this. This could be your reflections, it could be your observations, it could be any meanings you derive from the cards you pulled. It could be questions you have or places where you're confused. These could be reminders to self, things that pop up in your head as you're writing. They could be quotes or song lyrics or stories or anything that comes forward when you're looking at a certain card. They could also just be keywords or correspondences, things that you know, either that come from within you, or things that you look up while you're doing your reading, and I think it's especially helpful to write down things that are uncertain, things that are frustrating, ways that you get a little mixed up or uncertain about your reading.

Speaker 1: 6:55

So really, beyond just tracking, like we were talking about in the first method, this secondary method offers the additional benefit of not just seeing what you've pulled and being able to look back at that over time, but also being able to track your understanding of specific cards, not just to see how often a card comes up, but also to watch and monitor how your relationship with the tarot itself changes and grows over time, and also to see how, when you pull a certain card at various points and that card starts to repeat when you've been reading long enough that you might've worked with a certain card more than once already, you have the chance to see what that card meant to you when you've pulled it in the past and compare that with how it might strike you in this particular moment as you pull it. In this current reading. These first two methods are really connected to tarot journaling as part of your reading practice, but the other two methods I want to methods are really connected to tarot journaling as part of your reading practice. But the other two methods I want to share are really about tarot journaling as part of a personal connection practice or really deepening your relationship with the cards themselves, and so I'm going to talk you through that a little bit more.

Speaker 1: 7:58

The first is journaling as building personal connections with the cards, and this is really about actually choosing specific cards that we want to build connections with or work with. In certain ways, this might mean that you calculate your birth card or you're looking at a card that has a correspondence with part of your natal chart. Right, you might realize that, like I'm, for example, I'm a Scorpio sun, which is connected to the death archetype in the major arcana. Maybe I want to work with that a little bit more, especially if you're not sure how to find yourself in that archetype or you just want to understand it more deeply. You could choose that card really specifically and decide to journal about it. In the same way, you could do this If the same card kind of keeps recurring and you want to spend some time studying it and trying to figure out why this card keeps emerging for you and I'm going to do an episode on recurring cards too soon, I promise you can also do this not just with one specific card, but actually with a set of cards.

Speaker 1: 8:50

So, for example, if you're really struggling with the suit of swords, maybe you pull all of the cards from that suit out and start to journal through them. Or you could pick a specific type of card, like all four of the minor arcana pages or all of the fives that show up in the tarot. Or you could do a line from the major arcana like the magician to strength and look at that story together. But journaling through a set of cards or an individual card, but especially a set of cards, can help you start to make connections between the cards as well as with individual cards. Digging deeper into what these cards mean to us outside of the context of readings can be really helpful, because it means that things are a little bit less charged and we can be more objective in how we're synthesizing a card. You see different things in it, or that you're more open to layers of meaning that are harder for you to notice when you're in a more emotional space and you're trying to have a conversation with your cards. So this is a particularly great method If you want to dig into specific cards that are confusing, overwhelming, feel really complicated, or just that you want to get to know better or feel more confident about.

Speaker 1: 10:04

And the fourth and final method, one that I am particularly fond of, is journaling as intentionally working with cards towards a purpose. If you want to get really deep, we can choose specific cards to work with that are going to help us accomplish a goal learn more about an aspect of self, explore a complicated theme or a topic that's near to our heart, or just think critically about something that matters to us. But this is a really potent way of working with the cards in a way that can lead to, like transformation or healing or empowerment. It can really help us get to know ourselves on a new level, and it can also give us space and a container to challenge a notion that we might have about ourselves or dig into something that might feel really complicated. Now, this could be thematic, right, we could choose cards that are specifically about relationships or work, or health or money, or feeling safe in the body. Look at those cards together and think about what bubbles up for us and journal through that. But it could also be about an emotion, like choosing the cards that represent to us a specific feeling or a sensation. This is quite literally what we're doing in my upcoming journaling series, queens of Spirit, where we're using them as a container to explore certain emotions, but it can also be about goal setting.

Speaker 1: 11:20

We can choose cards that embody who we want to be, or that represent something we want to accomplish, or that paint a picture of the kind of world that we want to build, or that represents something we want to become or learn to do or strive for or not be afraid of anymore. Really, the sky's the limit here, but this is a fantastic way to name something that we want, or name something that we want to learn about whether it's a desire, a fear, a hope, a dream or something else and start to give ourselves the space to unpack it and explore it and be curious about it. Using tarot journaling in this way, it can be fantastic for manifestation, for reflection, for personal interrogation, for transformation work, for therapeutic work. There's so many ways that we can use really any of these methods, but especially this final method, to get to know ourselves better and to help ourselves carve out space to learn something about ourselves or to start setting intentions towards something that we want to accomplish. I think that having the tarot as our companion for this kind of work and also being able to have those representations, visually or otherwise, of what we're thinking about or feeling or wanting or afraid of, or wanting to move away from, or trying to decide between, or whatever else, can be really helpful. It can just anchor us to something and, because the cards are tangible and physical, and because whatever method of recording is going to require our attention, it can really help us to slow down and really be present with our feelings, with our thoughts, with our impulses or instincts and really honor what's happening within us. And we don't have to be alone, because the tarot cards are with us, which can just be really affirming, especially if you're doing tough personal work. Now it's absolutely possible to do all of these things at once, but I really hope that in thinking about tarot journaling as part of a reading practice and tarot journaling as sort of a study practice or personal practice, you are starting to get a sense of just how powerful tarot journaling can really be and just how wide it is.

Speaker 1: 13:21

I'm only naming four options, but there I'm sure are dozens of ways that you can utilize journaling as part of your tarot practice, to understand the cards better, to build connections with the cards in new ways, or even to challenge yourself and really dive deep into a topic that has deep meaning for you. I always like to wrap up these episodes with a little tip or a trick that you can take with you, and for this episode, we're going to keep the tip really simple. I want you to play. I want you to play around with different options for journaling, both in terms of medium and in terms of method. If you're typically someone that only handwrites, try typing, or try voice memos or try doodling. If you're typically someone that doesn't journal at all, give one of these methods a chance and see how it feels. If you're typically someone that doesn't journal at all, give one of these methods a chance and see how it feels.

Speaker 1: 14:06

If you usually just tarot journal as a method for tracking, start to expand beyond that and incorporate some other ideas into your journaling. And if you usually just write off the cuff, look up some journaling prompts or creativity prompts that you can use to dive a little bit deeper, either into cards that you've pulled as part of a reading or cards that you're choosing intentionally to work with in a more specific way or towards a specific end. There are tons of prompts out there on the internet. I have a few series myself that can also provide some if that's what you're looking for, but I think that using questions that someone else has written sometimes can be really helpful in just kind of getting out of our heads challenging our way of or looking at something through a new lens. So I just want to encourage you to have fun with this.

Speaker 1: 14:49

Don't put pressure on yourself to immediately develop a perfect quote unquote tarot journaling practice as quickly as possible. Instead, give yourself space to try things out, see what feels good for you and see what really feeds your spirit, what really satisfies you when it comes to your tarot journaling practice. That's all I have for you, but, as always, thank you so much for spending this time with me, and I'll be back again 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.