making personal meanings

Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-what personal tarot card meanings are
-when in your practice to start expanding your understanding of individual cards
-three of my favorite methods for developing personal meanings
-how long it'll take you to develop a full library of meanings

For journal prompts to help you make your own meanings, check out Card Connections, a new resource available exclusively in the 3am.tarot conservatory. And to deepen your relationship with the Magician archetype, check out Magician's Lens, beginning October 26th or available anytime through the conservatory.

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. And as a special thank you for CARD TALK listeners, click here to download a completely free, exclusive workbook for building your best personal tarot practice.

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Chapters

• 0:11 Developing Personal Meanings for Tarot Cards
• 9:00 Building Personal Relationships With Tarot
• 15:57 Nurturing Personal Tarot Card Relationships

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

I'm Meg Jones-Wall and this is Card Talk, a mini podcast for tarot basics and evergreen insights. I'm here to help you build a tarot practice that works for you. Glad you're here. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about how to make tarot cards your own, and what I mean by this is having a set of definitions, meanings and or interpretations that you develop on your own and use in your tarot readings or your personal work with the cards on a regular basis. Now, sometimes these might be expansions of standardized meanings, which I went into a little bit more in the last episode, but other times your personal experiences with a card might take you over time in a very different direction than classic keywords you might see others using or have been relying on yourself.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Now, if you missed the last episode of card talk, I talked about so-called traditional versus intuitive meanings for the cards. But if you skip that episode and you're not going to listen to it, I want to be really clear here that I don't think this has to be a binary. I think there is great value in standardized meanings and I also think there's a lot of wonder and magic in personal meanings for the cards. Personally, I use both. I think it's great. I think it's really fun to have a lot of different potential meanings for the cards, and I think it adds a lot of depth to your readings, especially if you're doing longer readings or starting to use spreads or expanding your knowledge of the cards, or reading collaboratively with other people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right, knowing how to build personal or intuitive meanings on top of these kind of foundational standardized meanings can make for more nuanced readings and more layered interpretations. Regardless of whether you prefer to use more standardized meanings or consider yourself a more intuitive reader, building personal meanings for your cards can be an incredibly satisfying, empowering and trust-building process that makes your relationship with the cards a lot more personal.

Speaker 1: 2:04

Now, if you're just getting started in your tarot practice, if you just got your first deck and you're still starting to figure out what you want to do with these cards, you can start to do this, this process of building personal meanings, right at the beginning of your practice. This doesn't have to be something that you necessarily wait on, but if you are trying to learn standardized meanings at the same time as you're building out your personal meanings, it could be a little bit overwhelming. This really just depends on your personality, your learning style, your brain, the amount of time and energy you have to put into this practice, et cetera. Please remember that learning tarot takes time. You're learning to speak a new language, you are learning a new process and you're building a relationship. Besides, building your own personal meanings for the cards can be a lifelong pursuit, so please don't rush any of this process. Enjoy it, savor it. Being a beginner is beautiful. It's not bad. It's actually great. Enjoy the process of getting to know your cards and beginning to build out a practice.

Speaker 1: 3:02

Now, there are a lot of different ways to build out personal meanings for your cards, so in this episode, I'm going to talk you through three of my favorite recommendations for getting started with this process. Now, some of these methods might work really well for bonding with the entire deck, while others you might find are particularly effective for just a handful of cards. I really encourage you to play around with these methods and see what works for you, and also don't be afraid to try other things If none of these really resonate. There are lots of different ways to deepen your connection with your cards and start to make meanings with your cards, but these are three of my favorites that I think are particularly accessible and fun to get started with. No matter where you are in your practice, my first suggestion is to find your story in the cards. Consider what it is about yourself, your personality, your history, your relationships, your experience, your fears, your ambitions and so much more. Figure out what parts of those things you can find within the cards of the deck and start to connect different cards to different parts of your own personal story, which can really help you start to find new meanings within those cards.

Speaker 1: 4:08

For example, the Three of Cups is a card that a lot of people associate with celebration, with chosen family, with being supported by the people who really see us as a standardized meaning. This card can feel really warm and joyful and supportive. But for the first few years of my tarot practice I was really struggling to find community. I felt really lonely and really isolated, and so when I pulled this card, especially when I was feeling particularly disconnected, this card became really painful for me. Pulling it felt really difficult. I almost felt like my deck was mocking me for something that I really wanted but was really struggling to build, and while at first I admit I was just kind of pissed at this card, I just didn't really want to see it.

Speaker 1: 4:50

I started spending more time with it and eventually, after kind of bonding with the three of cups, talking to it, meditating with it, making an altar for it, journaling to it, et cetera, I started to see other sides to it besides that standard happy friends, celebrate and feel good with people who love you kind of vibe. I started to think about the ways that emotional outpourings look in my own life and how I let my heart be seen in its raw messiness, for better or for worse. I started to associate it with feelings, overflowing feelings of all kinds, not just positive ones. I also thought about relationships that might not be perfect but that do feel true and authentic. And I thought too about those initial fumblings to create intimacy with other people, to seek intimacy with other people, to want to be seen by other people, and how sometimes we have to try out friendships with a lot of different kinds of people in order to find the ones that really resonate and match our energy. So what that means is that, yes, while I absolutely do still associate the three of cups in general with celebration, chosen family and being seen by people who love us, I also personally have a relationship with this card that speaks to working to build community and how that can be a messy process of practicing vulnerability and sharing our hearts and witnessing how our heart is received by other people. The three of cups, to me also can sometimes represent sitting with complicated feelings. That might be authentic and not necessarily very pretty, and I have meanings for the three of cups around letting our feelings take up space, even when we don't totally understand them or necessarily have a remedy for them. Now, these aren't classic interpretations of the three of cups, but they work for me and they really have shown up consistently in that way in my readings, for myself as well as for clients. But I would not necessarily have gotten to that meaning for that card if I wasn't willing to see my own story in that card for better or for worse.

Speaker 1: 6:49

The second method I want to share with you is journaling through the cards. Now I talk a lot about tarot journaling because it, for me, it's been one of the most effective practices, both to do on my own and to teach and do with other people. I also recently did a whole episode on tarot journaling, so if you're particularly interested in this practice, definitely listen to that episode. But in general, I think journaling, whatever form it takes whether you're recording yourself speaking, writing by hand, typing or making collages or doodling or anything else, tarot journaling can be a really great way of digging deep into specific cards and seeing what you find and what you feel when you peel back the layers. Journaling prompts in particular can give us space to look at the cards through a lot of different angles, interrogate our own assumptions around the cards and also think critically about what else we associate with the card, even if we haven't named it that way. Now, I love to write journal prompts. Pretty much every resource I think I've ever made includes journaling prompts, including my book. So if this is something that really appeals to you, check out Card Connections, which is available as part of the 3am tarot conservatory membership program, and I will drop a link to that in the show notes. But even if that's not your bag, that's totally fine. You don't necessarily need journaling prompts in order to journal with the cards.

Speaker 1: 8:04

Now to give you another example from my own life on how I've used journaling, let's talk about temperance in. In my own practice, I struggled with the temperance card a lot, but what that means is that I've actually written about it at least as much as any other card. I think I've written about temperance more than most other archetypes. I find a lot of truth on the page and trying to articulate my feelings and my impressions and my understandings of archetypes that trip me up, the process of choosing which words describe a card or reflect my understanding of the card often reveals a lot to me as I go. Sometimes I'll look down at what I've written and then really have to think is that what I think? Is that how I feel, or does that just feel like what I'm supposed to say? Journaling really gives me a chance to reflect on what comes out on the page and how that's reflected within me. But specifically journaling about through and to the temperance card as an archetype revealed all kinds of layers to me.

Speaker 1: 9:00

Now, in a standardized way, the card of temperance usually gets described as being about like moderation, balance, self-control, etc. But through journaling I really started to explore temperance as being the aftermath of death and the process of trying to figure out how these different, fractured, changing pieces of self might be trying to reorganize and restructure themselves in the wake of a really big loss or shift, even if that loss or shift is a good one. Temperance as internal contradictions that reveal more truths. Temperance as internal contradictions that reveal more truths. Temperance as internal friction. And temperance as a messy rebirthing or reconnecting process. Now I love when this card comes up in readings, because I have so many writings on it from my own work and it feels like a really richly layered, complex, gorgeously messy card to me that I love getting to talk about. Every time I work with temperance, it seems like something new comes up, which is a real delight for me as a mercury ruled person, and every time I challenged myself to journal about this card again or to write a new essay about it or to create a course about temperance, which someday I'll finish I find something new within this card. It's an ongoing process. There is no end point, and I think that's really cool.

Speaker 1: 10:13

The last thing that I want to really recommend, if you're looking to make personal meetings for the cards is something I've definitely talked about before, but I want to reiterate here. It's this idea of building a grimoire or a tarot reference for yourself. Now, journaling or tracking your card pulls isn't for everyone. For some people, that feels really restrictive or boring or just like too much work or stressful or whatever, and that's honestly fine, but I love the practice of creating a reference that you can keep building on and adding to over the entire duration of your practice. Now, as I said, I know I've mentioned this before. I also talk about the process of building a tarot grimoire in my book, finding the Fool, but since I've given you examples from the other two exercises, I want to tell you a little bit about how this process started for me and how having a tarot grimoire has impacted me.

Speaker 1: 11:00

My tarot grimoire happened by accident. I had been writing about individual tarot cards in this cheap notebook from the drugstore for a while, and I'd also been sharing insights on tarot on Instagram for a few years. But I realized that not only was it really hard to search and reference those different entries, but also that social media is not really to be trusted, and I didn't have any of that writing backed up anywhere but on Instagram, which made me nervous. So I downloaded all of my Instagram data, but it wasn't super easy to look through. So I decided to do the kind of arduous process of organizing all of that writing into a way that would be easy to reference. Now there are lots of ways that you could do this notion or Google docs or whatever but I use a software called Scrivener, which is something that I write my books in and I use for different writing and research projects. But what I did is made a separate digital file for all 78 cards in the deck and I went through all of my Instagram posts, journal entries and other writings and painstakingly copied and pasted them all into this big digital project. It took a while and it was kind of tedious, but the end result was that I could click on any of my card files and see, organized and dated, what I had written about that card in various readings and at various times.

Speaker 1: 12:14

And then, anytime I pull a card and feel stuck or uncertain or have some thought that feels really profound or come up with a new layer of meaning, I can scroll back through my own experiences and both read the truth and support and wisdom from my past self, but also make new entries and continue adding into it. This has become an invaluable resource and practice for me and I just kept adding to it, letting it grow with me over time. Now, eventually, this became the inspiration for the first draft of Finding the Fool. I ended up going back to a lot of those notes and letting them contribute to this book, but I still have it and it's really cool to be able to see how my own understanding of individual cards has shifted and changed over time. I also like to add in notes or keywords or insights or stories or links from other authors that I love. I put in song lyrics that remind me of different cards. I put in images that I find literally whatever strikes my fancy.

Speaker 1: 13:11

Now yours doesn't have to be digital. You could just get a loose leaf notebook or traveler's notebook or just a cheap notebook from the drugstore, like I had. You can do this in whatever format you like and you can build this anytime. You don't have to be like me and go back through time. You can just start fresh today and just start recording your thoughts on cards as they come up. But tracing your own history with individual cards can also be really helpful for identifying and exploring the meanings that you already associate with each card, as well as questions you have about different cards. And when you start to have that as a compendium, as a reference, you start to really see where your mind and heart goes with each card and you can really start to expand on that in a more intentional way.

Speaker 1: 13:55

Of course, there are plenty of other ways that you can make personal meanings for your tarot cards, and you might find that just doing readings or having a regular, consistent tarot practice or doing card studies in other ways also helps you, over time, develop those personal meanings. You can explore correspondences. You can connect meanings with the imagery and specific decks. You can research different decks to see what comes up Really. The sky is the limit and I highly encourage you to experiment with different ways of making meetings for the cards on your own to see what sticks, to see what feels good and to see what you might want to do intentionally and what you might just want to let emerge naturally over time. I always like to include a tip or trick in these episodes, and so for this one, I just want to remind you that this isn't really a process that you can rush. Sometimes, personal meetings for your cards really do just come up over time through your readings and through your studies.

Speaker 1: 14:48

This process of consistently engaging with the tarot, consistently exploring the tarot, consistently talking to the tarot, is all part of building a personal relationship with your cards. So, rather than being impatient to have this elaborate catalog of personal definitions for your cards, just take it bit by bit and try to enjoy the process. Prioritize curiosity and discovery over a sense of having all of the answers. Your practice and the meanings that you associate with the cards are going to continue to evolve the longer you work of the answers. Your practice and the meanings that you associate with the cards are going to continue to evolve. The longer you work with the cards, the more perspectives you allow in and the more curious you become.

Speaker 1: 15:26

Now, if you find that notion frustrating, allow me to just remind you that in my experience, this can actually be one of the most joyful parts of developing and strengthening a tarot practice, because this part never really has to end. You're not necessarily getting hit an end point where you're like now I know all the meanings of this card and I don't have to study anymore. So try to just settle in and enjoy the ride. Let the tarot reveal itself to you over time. Enjoy the process of continually deepening your relationship with the cards and see what happens.

Speaker 1: 15:57

You might be surprised, with consistent effort, how your relationship with these cards really blossoms and how your own personal meanings slowly become integrated with any other standardized meanings that you might have had from the beginning. Let your practice evolve naturally and enjoy it as it comes. That's all I have for you today, but, as always, thank you for spending this time with me and I will see you soon for more Card Talk. Card Talk episodes are always free for everyone to enjoy, so if you love what you hear, please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing, recommending Card Talk to a friend or two or donating to help with production costs. You can find episode transcripts, learn more about me and join my signature Tarot Conservatory membership program through my website, 3amtarotcom. Thanks for listening and see you next time you.