deepening your tarot practice

Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-the many things that "deepening your practice" can mean
-three habits that can help to expand and deepen your relationship with the tarot
-suggestions for resources that can support your work

For resources on deepening your practice:
CARD TALK episodes on collaborative readings and correspondences
3am.tarot Conservatory for a variety of resources including Card Connections
Magician’s Lens archetype intensive
Next Level Tarot lecture series for multi-card readings and spreads
Intermediate tarot Bookshop recommendations
deepening your tarot practice essay from devils & fools

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.

Love what you’re hearing? Support the pod with a one-time donation or recurring subscription, and please subscribe, review, and share with a friend or two!

Chapters

• 0:11 Deepening Your Tarot Practice
• 7:42 Exploring Methods to Deepen Tarot Practice

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 talk about deepening your tarot practice. Deepening your practice is something I get asked about all the time and I think there's a lot of different ways that we can take this. But I want to just say off the top that once you've got the basics down and can read the tarot with fluency and confidence, there's really no limit to what you can do. But depending on your reading style, your relationship with the cards and your ambitions or your dreams for your practice, there are a lot of different options for how you can grow and what this might look like. The idea of deepening your tarot practice can look really different for different people, and different people mean different things by this expression. So I want to just rattle off a couple of different things that people might mean when they say I want to deepen my practice. Someone might mean that they want to expand their practice to include longer or larger readings. Someone might mean that they want to utilize complicated tarot spreads or even learn to write tarot spreads for themselves. Someone might mean that they want to build personal meanings for the cards that go beyond what they've been using so far, like standardized meanings or more traditional meanings. Someone might mean that they want to work with their tarot cards outside of just readings and develop relationships with specific archetypes, elements, number groupings, astrological groupings with specific archetypes, elements, number groupings, astrological groupings, individual cards or the deck as a whole. Someone might mean that they want to interrogate correspondences or even create their own correspondences to broaden perspectives on the cards and build new layers of meaning in the cards. Someone might mean that they want to start reading for other people, either personally or professionally. Someone might mean that they want to create a detailed record of individual relationships with the cards, perhaps turn it into a reference or even try to publish it as a book and more. There's so many other things people might mean when they say that they want to deepen their tarot practice.

Speaker 1: 2:18

Now, if you're a regular card talk listener or you follow me on social media, you might've noticed that I've done episodes on a lot of the things that I just mentioned, and that's not my accident. I wanted to get a lot of those episodes created and out into the world, as well as some new resources that I've made and gotten out into the world before I released this particular episode. But I want to talk today about a couple of my favorite techniques for deepening my own practice that I haven't really covered in other places, and I also want to point you specifically to the resources that I have already created that are available to help support this work for you in your own practice. So let's get into it. This first one is actually going to sound super basic, but I haven't included it anywhere else, and that's literally doing tarot readings. Now I don't just mean doing readings for your own, I mean reading for or with other people.

Speaker 1: 3:09

Collaborative readings, which I have done an episode on, or just reading for people as a collective, pulling cards with your friends, et cetera can really change the ways that you see your cards and are also great for breaking you out of stagnant patterns or challenging your approach to the tarot as a whole. I highly encourage you to try collaborative readings with people that you trust, or to set up groups, either in real life or digitally, to read together on a regular basis. Listen to the ways that others interpret their cards, watch how they shuffle and move with the cards, look at the decks that they're using and see what they have to teach you. Rather than being a beginner exercise, although collaborative readings are fantastic for beginners this can also be an incredible way to deepen your process and deepen your relationship with the cards, because you're always going to hear from someone a meeting that they have for a tarot card that has never occurred to you. Every single time I do a collaborative reading, I hear something I've never thought of before, and it's always so cool and just immediately expands my perspective on a particular card or on reading a set of cards together. I also encourage you to get readings from other practitioners, especially if they use different decks or different styles than you do. Having a professional or someone with more experience read the cards for you can provide so many new insights, challenge your assumptions and give you new avenues of exploration. Depending on where you are in your practice and who you're in relationship with, you might be able to do a reading exchange with someone, but especially if you regularly read for other people or you're already a professional, a trade or reading exchange can be a great way to get more readings from other practitioners.

Speaker 1: 4:49

And the last thing I'll say about readings is that you can also expand. The thing I'll say about readings is that you can also expand the size or depth of your readings by using spreads or by adding an additional card to do longer readings. I have a lecture series that kind of touches on that and can support you through that process. But simply making your readings bigger can really immediately force you to start deepening your practice, because you have to find new connections within the cards, you have to strengthen your ability to tell stories with the cards and you also might deal with some surprising combinations of cards that force you to look deeper into individual meanings or correspondences or other layers of interpretation. I think sometimes folks feel like they have to do something really big in order to deepen their relationship with the cards. But reading with intention and changing up your reading style or including other people in your readings really can make a difference in how your practice deepens.

Speaker 1: 5:43

But, of course, the next thing I'm going to offer that's helped me personally in my own practice is tarot studies. Diving deeper into your tarot education through brilliant books, classes and resources can really help you expand your practice in different directions. So I highly recommend finding teachers and authors who do work that you love and dig into their offerings, and I also really suggest mixing it up. Don't just follow like me. Don't just follow one teacher. Check out different teachers and different approaches, because everyone's going to have a different style and be able to help you develop and grow in different ways and in different directions.

Speaker 1: 6:20

Now, if you happen to love card talk, if you like my approach, if you love my book, if you've taken classes with me before, et cetera, I have a lot of different resources out there, both for building a practice and also deepening your practice. But if you want to work with me, I would highly encourage you to check out my signature program, which is the 3am tarot conservatory membership. This is a monthly subscription that gives you streaming access to my most popular and robust tarot courses. They're all original, they're all self-paced and you can do them in whatever order you like. If you're looking to deepen your studies, transform your practice, learn to see the deck in new ways, build out personal meanings for your cards or so many other things, the conservatory is for you, and so I will throw a link in the show notes to give you more information and talk you through joining, but I also really regularly recommend my favorite teachers and practitioners on social media and through my newsletter, because I just think that it's so important to listen to multiple people, take courses with different people, get readings with different people, et cetera, and so you can also find recommended lists of my favorite books about tarot and other spiritual topics through my bookshop link, which I'll also put into the show notes. I'm trying to put together a master list of my favorite teachers and practitioners, but some of the people I love to work with aren't open for readings right now or aren't available for classes right now, so it kind of keeps evolving, but I'm going to try to put that together and send it out as soon as I can.

Speaker 1: 7:42

In addition to working with teachers and practitioners and resources and studies that have been created by other people, you can also do your own personal studies Choose a specific card or an archetype or a suit or a rank or a card grouping or a correspondence set or an aspect of tarot history or a deck type or style or literally whatever else to study on your own and take some time to unpack that and dig into it and research it and work with it on your own. If you're someone, that's really curious, if you're really self-motivated, you literally might not need anything else besides a decision to do a study in order to go deeper with your practice and learn more. And the third and final method I want to offer for deepening your tarot practice is to branch out. There are a lot of different ways to look at tarot cards, and so if you're interested in deepening your practice, I highly recommend looking into other systems that might intersect with or layer into the tarot in ways beyond things you've already studied or that you already know.

Speaker 1: 8:43

If you love astrological correspondences, if you love connecting cards to planets and zodiacal signs, check out Deccans, which are astrological connections for a lot of the minor arcana cards and court cards. You can do a Deccan walk. You can read all of these different books and resources out there about Deccans. It's not something I work with closely, but I do hope to do a Deccan walk on my newsletter at some point in the future. But if you already love astrology and you want to connect astrology and tarot together more, decans are fascinating and a great way to dig more into the astrology of the tarot.

Speaker 1: 9:16

If you love tracing patterns between the numbered groupings of the cards, study some different systems of numerology and see what greater depth you can find within the numbers and the tarot. I work with Pythagorean numerology, but there are a number of other systems of numerology that you can study and there is so much to find when it comes to numerology, so this can be a really fantastic way to deepen your understanding of the cards and to expand the layers of meaning that you find within the tarot itself. If you're fascinated by the major arcana in particular, do some deeper studies on archetypes, both with Jung and psychology, but also with character archetypes that come up in storytelling or mythology or folklore. If you love looking at different kinds of card images, study some symbolism or color theory, look to the patterns to discover new connections within the cards and also study the history of tarot art. It is fascinating. And if you really love using the tarot for general predictions about the future, dive into the world of timing techniques using the cards and start to practice. See how precise you can get by using the cards to get more specific about when something might happen or what something might look like. Those are just a few suggestions of places to get started, but branching out with your studies and learning to incorporate other aspects of the tarot into your work can be a really cool way to deepen your practice in some unexpected ways.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Of course, there are plenty of other methods for deepening your practice beyond this, but I do hope that, in addition to past episodes of Card Talk, the resources I'm sharing in the study notes and these suggestions here, you have a bunch of new, fun, interesting things to try out in your own practice. I think the most important thing to consider when you're thinking about how you want to deepen your practice is really to consider what it is you're going for, what you want to accomplish and what deepening your practice means to you, because the steps that you take or the things that you pursue or try out, the things that you study, the ways that you experiment, really can be chosen based on what your goals are. What kind of reader do you want to be? What does deepening your practice mean to you? What does it feel like might be missing from your practice, or where do you want to be stronger in your practice? Right, take some time to really think about that journal, about it, pull cards around it, and I think it's going to also just help you clarify what steps to take in order to deepen that practice in a way that's going to be really personal and supportive for you.

Speaker 1: 11:40

If you want help in thinking about how to deepen your practice or build out your personal practice, I have a free downloadable workbook that's available just for Card Talk listeners. I'm not talking about this literally anywhere else, but it's completely free to download. It's 12 pages. You can print it or use it on your computer or your phone as a PDF, or you can just copy the questions into your own journal. But it'll talk you through telling your story through the cards and finding your own story of the tarot, and it's also going to ask you a bunch of different questions that you can journal with and think about around where you want your practice to go, what's already working, where you might be looking for some change and what your goals are around your practice. So you can find a direct link to that in the show notes and I highly encourage you to check that out again. It's completely free. You just have to go to my website to download it Now.

Speaker 1: 12:26

I always like to give a tip or a trick, and this one I know I've already said a couple of times in previous episodes, but I just want to emphasize here that deepening your practice is not necessarily a process that can be rushed, because once you know the basics of tarot, deepening your practice is really just having a tarot practice for the rest of your life that you continue to utilize. But I do want to say that with exercises like the ones I've talked about and different resources that I'm sharing in the show notes, it's more than okay to be intentional about that work, to want to deepen your practice. There are so many resources out there that can support an expanding or deepening practice. It's just important to know what that means to you and what you want, so that you can set your goals accordingly and find resources or systems or studies or whatever that are really going to support that work for you. That's all I have for you today, but, as always, thank you so much for taking this time with me today and hanging out to talk about tarot, and I'll be back again soon with more card talk.

Speaker 1: 13:26

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.