By Brigit Esselmont.
I have some breaking news for you! You don’t have to be a Tarot Master with years and years of experience and secret mystical knowledge to start using the Tarot.
All you need are a few simple techniques to connect yourself intuitively to the Tarot cards.
In fact, I’m going to bet that by the end of this post, you will be able to pick up a Tarot card and gain intuitive insight from that Tarot card… even if you have never used the Tarot before in your life!
How do I know this? Because I have seen my very own husband (who has an aversion to all things ‘woo woo’) complete a 3-card Tarot reading with no knowledge of what the cards traditionally mean, simply by using these techniques I’m about to share with you.
Ready? Grab your Tarot deck (or shuffle online), a pen and notepad, and let’s go…
Getting Started
Before we start intuitively connecting with the Tarot cards, we first need to ask a question and then select a card which we’ll work with.
Let’s start with a very simple (yet powerful) question for the Tarot cards:
What energy do I most need for the day ahead?
Now, concentrating on this question, shuffle the Tarot cards and when you’re ready, draw one card. Place it in front of you, face up.
Technique #1: Initial Impressions
The first thing I want you to do is simply gaze at the Tarot card in front of you. Take in all the imagery, the symbols, the colours and the details of the card. You don’t have to analyse anything just yet – simply take it all in without judgement, without interpretation.
Now, start to connect with the ‘energy’ of the card. Notice what you’re feeling in your body or what emotions start to emerge within. You might even start hearing words or seeing images of your own. Just take note.
To further connect with the energy, you may like to hold your hand over the card – what do you notice? Again, pay attention to any physical sensations, emotions, words or phrases, or visions you may receive as you tap into the Tarot card’s energy.
Now take a moment to write down your initial impressions of the card in front of you. They may not all make sense straight away, but take note of them anyway because as time passes, new connections may begin to emerge. What do these initial impressions tell you about what energy you most need for the day ahead?
Technique #2: Eye-Catching Details
Look at the Tarot card in front of you again. This time, I want you to pay attention to what catches your eye. It might be a colour, an object, a person, or something else. What is trying to grab your attention? Choose the one thing that is jumping out to you the most.
Now pick up your pen and start free writing for the next 5 minutes about the thing that you’ve chosen. Make sure that you keep writing, even if it is something like, “I don’t know what to write”. Soon, your intuition will open up and new insights will begin to flow. You may find yourself writing about personal experiences with the thing you have noticed in the card, or you may tap into the collective consciousness about what this thing symbolically means. Just allow yourself to write freely for those 5 minutes.
After your time is up, review what you have written and highlight the most profound insights that you encountered. Connect those insights with the original question, “What energy do I most need for the day ahead?”
Technique #3: Story Time
This last technique is one of my favourites! This time, I want you to pay attention to what is happening in the card.
Are there people in the card? What are they doing? What objects do you see? Why do you think they are there? What’s in the background? What’s in the foreground? How do all of these different elements come together into a coherent story?
Start writing your story in your notepad. Begin with a description of what’s happening in the card. For example, there is a happy couple standing arm-in-arm while their children play. A beautiful rainbow filled with colours and cups shines above them.
Then, ask yourself, why is this happening? And what is the lesson or deeper meaning in this story?
Well, when there is love and harmony between people, everything else flows perfectly and life is beautiful.
Aha! We have our message for today – the energy I most need for the day ahead is one of love and harmony for all beings. Beautiful!
What you’ll probably find is that as you write more about what’s actually happening in the card, the underlying lesson will become more apparent to you. What’s more, you’ll begin to open up to your intuition as you connect with the deeper meaning of the card.
Over to You
I invite you to try these three simple techniques to connect intuitively with the Tarot cards. Share your experience in the comments below.
Brigit is a Tarot reader and teacher, a spiritual entrepreneur and an intuitive business coach. She is the founder of Biddy Tarot and inspires over a million people each year to transform their lives with the Tarot.
She’s passionate about business and thrives on helping aspiring Tarot professionals to build their own business empires that are aligned with their soul purpose.
Brigit believes anyone can read Tarot. She doesn’t own a crystal ball nor a crushed velvet dress. She’s simply a down-to-earth, practical Taurus who likes to use the Tarot cards in every day life. When she’s not reading Tarot, Brigit loves spending time with her two daughters and husband in Melbourne, Australia.
I’m thrilled to bits to see Brigit’s guest post here! Your Intuitive Awakening course and her Tarot Foundations Course complement each other SO well. Now that I have finished her course and am working my way through your’s I realize the tremendous value addition that your course brings to tarot reading. I completely recommend your course to all tarot and le normand card readers as well as Oracle card readers. It just ‘opens up’ a whole new dimension and adds such depth to readings. Thankyou for featuring Brigit’s guest post!
Hi Anna,
Thank you for this article which helped me interpret my tarot cards. I tried this earlier and was surprised/delighted on the closeness of my interpretation vs the actual meaning of the cards.
More power Anna…
Anna, great post. Thanks. The Tarot are awesome. When I was younger I would read people’s cards at parties and the like. I was so uninhibited and open. Then I was told they were evil and made to destroy them. It was so sad and I was so young and foolishly allowed myself to be easily manipulated. When I left the monastery, I returned to many of those beautiful practices I’d left behind. I eventually bought new Tarot cards, but they’ve seemed like a long lost lover I’d jilted so long ago. I hope to reconcile.
Blessings,
Dawn Marie
The Thematic Apperception method is my favorite, too!
There’s a blogger out there by the call sign of Duskenpath who I think expanded a lot on the first method mentioned, though, in an interesting way that was basically connecting with the personification of an entire deck. So, for example, she meditated upon Doreen Virtue’s unicorn oracle deck, and as we know oracle decks don’t have a system like tarot cards do, and got claircognizant instructions to draw four guardian cards and so on, so forth. That’s pretty neat.