How To Read Tarot (If You Can't Read Tarot) [Workbook]

The Tarot is a language. It offers us a rich vocabulary of symbols, connotations, and complex connections that can deepen self-understanding by giving us the tools to understand our innate wisdom. In this intuition-based style of reading Tarot, throwing cards is akin to having a conversation with ourselves. When we lay cards with the intention of reflecting the truth, our intuition is able to break through our usual defenses and make itself known. That is the most powerful experience Tarot offers us: a realization that we already knew the truth, but needed to see it differently in order to trust and understand it.

This language is likely very different from other languages you speak. It is highly flexible, dependent entirely on connotation, implication, interpretation, and individual recognition. This is why I gently discourage clients and students from relying on dictionary definitions of the Tarot cards and their meanings. Even the booklets included with most Tarot decks are, by their very nature, reductive and limiting in their interpretive possibilities.

Rather than teaching you the language by offering you a dictionary to memorize, this guide is a simple introduction to the grammar, syntax, and linguistic devices of the Tarot. The strategies laid out here will allow you to immediately start pulling and interpreting cards for yourself, even if it’s your very first time pulling your deck out of the box. And if you don’t have a deck, don’t worry; these techniques can also be used with a common deck of playing cards.