Card Talk
CARD TALK is a mini podcast featuring tarot basics and evergreen insights, supporting you from your very first reading to card-slinging with confidence. Whether you're a curious beginner or an experienced practitioner, CARD TALK is your new go-to tarot podcast for quick tips and practical tricks.
Hosted by 3am.tarot creator and Finding the Fool author Meg Jones Wall, a queer and non-binary tarot reader dedicated to creating accessible, inclusive tarot resources.
Card Talk
why tarot right now?
Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-announcements for june 2025
-what tarot can literally do for us
-how tarot helps us grow as individuals
-how tarot helps us grow in community
-practical suggestions that you can use right now
Resources mentioned:
-ocean’s 16 workbook for identifying your skills and navigating community
-the power of a good question essay
-flash sale for devils & fools newsletter
-spread architect for personalized tarot spreads & monthly mentorship
-queens of spirit for emotional exploration, available through the 3am.tarot conservatory
-free crossroads quiz for finding your tarot path
-CALL YOUR COVEN recent episodes
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!
CARD TALK is written, edited, and produced by Meg Jones Wall of 3am.tarot. Theme music created by PaulYudin.
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, hi, hello. Before I get into this, just a couple of quick announcements. First, my second book, tarot Spreads, is out on July 7th. It really snuck up on me. I can't believe it's mid-June, but this book is packed with hundreds of tarot spreads. But it does also include instructions, advice, exercises and guidance for reading tarot spreads with confidence.
Speaker 1:Learning to write your own tarot spreads that really address what you want to know, and even some help editing or revising existing tarot spreads so that they really suit your specific needs and preferences. Talking about the nitty gritty of reading and utilizing tarot spreads. This book also talks a lot about the art of a good tarot question and gives a lot of advice on how you can formulate questions that really get to the heart of what you want to know and help you just develop rituals and routines that are going to allow you to have tarot readings that really address your actual questions and give you the kind of information that you're craving from your readings. I definitely encourage you to order this book from your favorite local bookshop or request it at your local library. But if you want a direct link, I'm also going to include a link to the book on bookshoporg in the show notes. And if you'd like a signed copy, find Astoria Bookshop in Queens, new York, and order from them, because you can put a little note in the comments and I will send your book for you.
Speaker 1:Secondly, this is a pretty timely one, but I wanted to let you know that I am currently running a limited time flash sale for the entire month of June 2025 over on my newsletter. If you're new to my work, if you love card talk and you'd like to get tarot essays and spreads and different resources delivered straight to your inbox, or if you've been a free subscriber of Devils and Fools for a while and are ready to upgrade for even more content plus access to my private Discord community, this is a really great time to lock in a forever discount on annual gold subscriptions, which gets you everything that I write. I'm also putting a link directly to that flash sale right in the show notes, but if you head to my newsletter website, which is 3amtarotghostio, you'll also find links to it in my most recent pieces. And finally, I made you a free quiz. I love quizzes and I have a lot of resources that I'm kind of constantly rolling out on my website, and so I wanted to make this crossroads quiz as a free, fun, old school pen and paper style quiz that will help identify what kind of tarot path you're on right now and what might be a good fit for you from my big library of resources. So, whether you're new to tarot, you're craving a new resource to play with, you're feeling a little bit disconnected from your cards, or you're interested in working with me personally in kind of a one-on-one situation, this is a fantastic way to learn more about everything I've got to offer, as well as simultaneously helping give you a better understanding of what might be a good place for you to start. So, just like with the other things I mentioned, the link is in the show notes or you can just find it by heading to 3amterocom.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's get into the episode. In today's episode, we're going to talk about why tarot right now. Why tarot when it's June 2025 and the world is on fire and they're fascists rising everywhere and it feels like everything is bad. Empires are falling, institutions are collapsing, violence is everywhere, ice is kidnapping people off the street Like shit is really, really scary. So why are we talking about tarot? Why is tarot something worth investing energy and resources into in your personal life or in your community routines? In this particular moment, with so many things demanding our energy and our attention, what's the point of spending time reading cards or deepening our relationship with the deck? Why tarot?
Speaker 1:I wanted to talk about this because being a person right now is really draining. Okay, adding in the work of fighting fascism and navigating all of the additional challenges and stresses that you might be facing, that are growing and increasing every single day, is so much. Just being a person might be challenging. You know, navigating bills and work and daily stresses, trying to take care of ourselves and our families and our homes. There is a lot going on. There is a lot to navigate, there's a lot of heaviness, there's literal genocide, there is so much violence, there's so much hatred, there's so much pain. People are really struggling just to get their basic needs met, and I find that frequently every time I read the news, I have to also then take a few beats to breathe and try to try to be present in my body to feel my feelings. It is so much.
Speaker 1:So first, just here at the top, I want to say that I see you If you were also really feeling the heaviness, if you were also feeling overwhelmed or exhausted or scared or uncertain. I see you. You're doing great. It's very reasonable human reaction to be overwhelmed and upset and uncertain about what to do when there's so many things coming at us from all sides at all times. Now I have talked at length about roles in the resistance before right, roles in building a new social ecosystem, and I've also written tarot spreads and workbooks and other tools that you can use to identify your skills, to find a role that you might be able to fit in well, to gather your courage, to sit with your emotions, to get started with this kind of work and so many other things that can really show up for you and help you right now. So I'm going to put those into the show notes. The show notes are going to be big for this episode. Just brace yourself.
Speaker 1:But I like talking about roles and skills because it can be really helpful to have permission to lean into specificity, and I think that specificity can be really essential when we're feeling overwhelmed. Right, whatever role you're in, whatever skills you're bringing to the table, you still got to take care of yourself. Nobody can attend every single action or be on every single call or engage with the news 24 seven. You can care about a lot of things, can attend every single action or be on every single call or engage with the news 24-7. You can care about a lot of things. I care about so many things, but I can't show up for every action on everything. I've still got to eat and sleep and also try to make time for rest and play and moments of connection and joy. Right, those things are also essential and I think it's easy to kind of shove those things into a special little box that says luxury or that these are things that we have to earn.
Speaker 1:But I really want to remind you that it is literally an essential piece of your activism to also take care of yourself, because it helps you stay in touch with your humanity and remember what you're fighting for. Okay, it is important to still take care of your body, or you're gonna burn out. It's important to take care of your heart, or you're gonna burn out. It's important to take care of your brain or you're gonna burn out. Okay, I really wanna encourage you to find some tools that you can use in your life to help you stay engaged with the fight against fascism, but also to take care of yourself. And there are a ton of different options. You don't need to use all of them. You really just need a couple solid tools that are going to be available for you on an ongoing basis. Sometimes it can be hard to figure out which tool is going to help, and sometimes we take on too much and then we don't feel like we have time to even use the tools that we know will help us, and sometimes that means that we have to let things slip or we have to set some things down in order to find the time to take care of ourselves. Right.
Speaker 1:To be totally, totally honest with you, I took an entirely accidental, inadvertent break from recording this podcast simply because I've been stretched really thin in a lot of directions. I've got a book coming out in a few weeks. It is a wild time to be talking about a book. I've got a book coming out in a few weeks. It is a wild time to be talking about a book, especially when it's like, not a really politically minded book, even though I'm a politically minded person, but I'm also, you know, writing my newsletter. I'm working on my third book, which is due at the end of the year.
Speaker 1:I am taking care of the digital communities that I manage and the clients that I work with and the students that I have and the containers that I run. Those are everyday tasks, and I'm also trying to offer as much hope and as many resources I can through social media. On top of that, I'm setting up events and participating in interviews and recording other podcasts with other people and being a guest on podcasts. And then I'm also, you know, like trying to live my life right Eating and sleeping, trying to start lifting weights and trying to take breaks sometimes from work to read a book or watch Love Island right Now. I'm saying this because I personally haven't been very good about balancing my work and my own ways of showing up with rest and play and connection. I've been leaning much more heavily onto the work side and kind of neglecting those kind of self-care rituals that make it easier to keep doing what I'm doing, and I'm pretty tired because of that lack of balance.
Speaker 1:Now, I'm not saying any of this to elicit pity. I'm saying this because I bet you're tired too. I bet you also have a lot going on. I bet you're also feeling a little bit stretched thin. I bet you're also trying to figure out how to juggle everything and I bet you're also wondering what might help you feel a little bit more resilient or a little bit more courageous or find some stability or, you know, find some tools that are going to help you get more involved or whatever it is you're craving right now. I bet you're craving something.
Speaker 1:So again, I ask, why tarot? Out of all of the tools available that can help support us right now, what is tarot specifically do for us? Why am I talking about tarot Now? I want to be clear that I don't think reading tarot is magically going to solve fascism. Okay, we are navigating a lot of things and tarot can't just immediately fix Christian nationalism or transphobia or white supremacy or ableism or police brutality or COVID denialism or any of the other really violent forms of hatred that we are navigating right now. But I do think that integrating tarot into your life in a holistic, reasonable way and that the practice of engaging with the cards in ways that work for you can have real therapeutic benefits and can also help you directly strengthen skills that are literally going to help you in the fight against fascism and help you build up the kind of resilience that is required to keep going in the face of the many horrors around us. Now, for some people, this might literally look like actually getting back into a consistent tarot reading practice, like pulling cards and doing readings for yourself, but for others, this might look like journaling with the cards, or using the cards to help you find more specific, precise language for your emotions or fears, or collaboratively reading with people you care about to facilitate conversations or articulate goals, or maybe doing some deeper studies on particular cards or chosen archetypes that might feel supportive right now, or so many other things.
Speaker 1:There are a lot of ways to work with the tarot. I've covered a lot of them here on this podcast, so I definitely encourage you to explore previous episodes as well. But I want to make sure you hear me when I say that working with tarot can mean any number of things and isn't just about readings. For a lot of people, readings don't feel very accessible right now, but working with the tarot can look a lot of different ways, so don't limit your imagination just to asking the cards a question and then receiving an answer. I would like to just take a minute to concretely name for you a bunch of different ways that tarot can help you and support you.
Speaker 1:Right now I want to tell you about some things that tarot can do for you for working with the cards as an individual, like as a personal practice or in the privacy of your own practice. First, working with the tarot can directly help you develop and strengthen your personal intuition and learn to trust yourself. Tarot can help you slow down, learn to listen to yourself and also practice relying on your own thoughts and feelings. Every time you read the tarot or listen to the tarot and honor what comes through when a card emerges or, when you like, work intentionally with a specific card, every time you allow yourself to breathe and observe and check in, you are actively giving your intuition an opportunity to share something with you and listen. It's okay if not. Every tarot reading or practice or study feels like the most magical moment of your life, right? Sometimes you look at the tarot cards and you just feel sort of blank, and that's also fine. But practicing, giving yourself an opportunity to check in with your mind and your heart and your body, can be really helpful, especially if, historically, you have trouble trusting yourself.
Speaker 1:Having a regular tarot practice, of any kind, can help you build rituals into your days and your weeks, which creates some stability and also some consistent moments for grounding, being present and giving yourself space for whatever you need. When our world is as chaotic as it is, when we're trying to stay on top of these news cycles and stay involved and take care of ourselves and take care of our people, it can be really destabilizing to recognize just how many new crises are happening on a daily basis, and so having simple rituals of any kind but especially with tarot, I find is helpful can really help us to ground our bodies and literally calm our nervous systems. The physical act of shuffling can be very soothing. You know the art of listening to the cards can be really grounding and really helpful. Tarot is a really easy ritual to introduce into your day or week or your month, and I think it's important to note that things don't have to be really consistent in order to still give you this benefit.
Speaker 1:Whatever regularity or consistency looks like for you is completely fine, but giving yourself the gift of regularly showing up whenever you can, as you are, really can have an impact. Tarot can teach you how to show yourself more compassion and grace by making regular space for your feelings and your needs and your desires. Tarot can really teach you how to be honest and authentic with yourselves, especially if you're reading by yourself or working with the cards as an individual right, there's no one to perform for, there's no one to, like you know, try to hide from. You can really just be yourself and be with the cards, whatever that might mean for you or however that might help you right now, especially if you have trouble with negative self-talk or you struggle to feel like your emotions or your needs deserve to take up space. Tarot can help you really intentionally engage with those things and give them the respect that they deserve.
Speaker 1:In a similar vein, tarot can help you name your emotions and really learn to articulate what's going on within you or find language to express to yourself what is happening to you or for you or within you. Sometimes we really just need to sit with our emotions and give them space to breathe, right, but other times it might take us a minute to actually understand what's happening with us. Again, when there's so much going on, it can be difficult to really name what we're feeling, and tarot can actively help with this. We can literally ask the cards to give us language for what we're feeling, or we can go through the deck and choose cards that resonate with us and then use that language of the tarot to find deeper clarity, as well as ask for or research or look into methods for soothing and care and safety Once we have that language.
Speaker 1:Something else that I think is really important to name is that tarot can help you stay connected to your values, especially with tarot readings or journaling questions or digging into specific spreads or utilizing studies that empower you to see yourself more clearly, to name what matters to you and to find your place and your role within broader initiatives or actions. I write so many tarot spreads about this and I also put together a lot of resources that can help with this, but I think it's such an important benefit to name when working with the tarot. It can help us see ourselves more clearly and can help remind us what we care about and what we stand for. There are so many other things I could name here, but the last one that I want to say is that readings can also help us practice sitting in discomfort or in uncertainty or in mystery, and this is a really vital skill for community and resistance work, because when we join in with other people or we're reading books and ideas that are new to us, it might challenge what we know or believe.
Speaker 1:It might push us to stretch. It might force us to kind of sit within tension in ourselves. That might feel really uncomfortable or frustrating. It might even activate some big emotions. Right, there are always going to be things that we don't know. There's so much stuff I don't know. It's appalling, but that's also part of being human right. Especially if we are someone that moves through the world with a lot of privilege or we grew up in a high control environment, we might not even know the things that we don't know, and so in this way, tarot can also really encourage the very important concept of curiosity, as you probably are going to need to ask some questions or acknowledge not knowing something or track down answers that broaden your perspective.
Speaker 1:Working with the tarot can push us outside of our comfort zone, and that's a really important thing to practice. Now, obviously, I could probably name 10 more things at least, and you might have your own things that you feel that tarot really activates or supports within you, but I also want to talk about the benefits of working with tarot as a group. Now, this could just be another person, or it could be within a group of people coming together once, coming together on a regular basis, whatever that looks like. But reading or studying alongside other people can also have a lot of really specific benefits that can be directly applicable to your work and your concerns right now, in this moment. Firstly, working with tarot as a group can literally help you deepen connections with other people and build trust within those relationships.
Speaker 1:When we read collaboratively or we read for a group or we receive a reading from someone who is reading for a group or we're studying together, we're sharing ideas. It can really encourage us to deepen those connections through the act of listening and sharing our ideas, offering our insights, navigating those things together and just moving through the ritual of studying or reading the cards. Collaborative tarot reading specifically can also really help to create space for deeper conversations. Tarot can really open the door for any number of topics or emotions or questions or challenges or realities, and having tarot as part of the conversation can help anchor us in an important discussion and can also just help people feel a little bit safer in expressing themselves or articulating their ideas or their emotions, or even acknowledging that they might struggle with a certain card or archetype or image. There is so much that can happen in a collaborative reading.
Speaker 1:When someone says here's what I think about this card, or here's my experience of this card. Or wow, this card scares the shit out of me. Or wow, this is my favorite card in the deck right. Immediately, you're going to learn to see and sit with alternative perspectives, which is the next thing on my list. This is really essential for organizing and activism, as we are inevitably going to be in community or in solidarity with people who don't perfectly fit our vision of what an activist looks like or what important work is. But talking about tarot with others, especially when those people don't agree with you or might have a preference for a different deck or a different style of reading or whatever, navigating those kinds of tensions or differences of opinion, can literally help you build those kinds of community skills, because inevitably, you're probably going to share something about the tarot that somebody else disagrees with.
Speaker 1:Do you know how to respectfully have conversations with people who read in a different style than you do, who maybe hate your favorite tarot deck or who like love tarot but don't fuck with astrology the way that you do, right, this is a pretty low stakes way to build those kinds of skills, but it's also a really important skill to practice, and tarot can be a great place to do that. I lastly just want to quickly offer that literally pulling cards for your pals that can help you take care of your loved ones Okay, pulling tarot for your friends, for your loved ones, is an act of service. You can use your cards to give someone a pep talk or help them celebrate what they're doing well, or even just acknowledge their skills in a lovely and supportive way. But this is also a way of building community. Again, I could probably say like 10 more things here that tarot can help do when you're reading with a group or studying the cards in a group, but the takeaway here is that working with the tarot really can strengthen not only your individual capacity for self-trust and courage and resilience and curiosity, but can also build your skills for expression and community building and collaboration and navigating conflict and appreciating differences and building trust and just so much more.
Speaker 1:Now, if you are interested in starting a tarot practice but you feel totally overwhelmed, or if you felt really disconnected from the cards and you don't know how to get into it again. I'm putting so much stuff in the show notes right now, so I really encourage you to explore those, but I'm also not going to leave you hanging here. In this episode we're going to go a little long, but that's just the way that it is. I always like to end these episodes with a tip or a trick, and today I want to offer you just a couple of quick, simple practices that you can start with if you're not sure what to do first, especially if you are someone that is queer or trans or disabled or part of the global majority and your personal resources are really stretched thin. I know that giving you a bunch of resources, some of which cost money, might not be super helpful, but I really do want to remind you if you only take one thing away from this, the tarot can help you show up for yourself right now in a therapeutic way. All you need is a deck of tarot cards, and if you don't have a deck of tarot cards, check out moonlightworld, because it's a free digital tarot deck that you can work with, and I'll also put a link to that in the show notes.
Speaker 1:Now for our quick suggestions. The first one is to ask the cards what you did. Well, literally do a single card reading and ask the cards something like what did I absolutely crush today? Or where am I kicking ass in my life right now? Or what's something I accomplished that is worthy of pride and celebration today, or whatever else you like. Those are some places to get you started. Now you can do this practice as often as you need to, whenever you need to, but I would encourage you to try doing it every day for just like a week and see how it feels. Do it at the end of the day as part of your winding down practice, or do it with a partner or a roommate or a friend. For each other. Record what comes up, even if it's just a really fast five minute reading, and see what patterns start to emerge.
Speaker 1:Secondly, give yourself a weekly check-in right. Choose a day of the week, whatever makes sense for you, pick a tarot spread or a general question like what do I need to know about the week that's ahead of me, and then give yourself a little chunk of time to move slowly and gently through the information that you receive. I also want to suggest that you take some time to name your emotions with the cards, by choosing a one or two that really represent what you feel. You can also do this with something you want or something you're afraid of or something you feel like you really need right now. Now I mean, I mean what I say. Don't just like pull a card at random, literally go through the deck and manually pick a card that feels resonant or representative of what you're feeling or experiencing, take some time to journal with it and then, if you want, you can shuffle the cards up and ask the deck how you can attend to that feeling or that desire or that fear or that need, and then draw a single card as a response, as advice from the deck about a way to take care of yourself.
Speaker 1:Now, if you're listening to this, if you've gotten all the way at the end here, please know that I would love to work with you. I would love to have you in the conservatory, which is really the most affordable way to get access to a bunch of my resources. I would love to work with you directly, one-on-one, through my spread architect program. But, honestly, even if you never buy a single thing from me, if you never give me a single dollar for anything. I still want you to know and take with you that the cards can offer you a way to take care of yourself in this current fucking fascist nightmare that we live in. Okay, and I really, really sincerely hope that some of these tips and ideas have been supportive for you and are going to give you some kind of handholds you can use to take care of yourself in this particular moment.
Speaker 1:Thank you so so much for being here. Please stay safe out there. Please take care of yourselves and your neighbors. Please find a way to get involved and to utilize the skills that you have at your disposal, and I will be back again soon with 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.
