Intuition is a powerful tool when reading Tarot.
I get asked a lot about how to read tarot intuitively. Sometimes it feels like you’d like to turn on the intuition switch. I think of this like asking Meryl how she seems to act so effortlessly or how Van Gogh could know where to put each dot. They started with a skill and a talent. Then they studied, and they practiced, and then failed.
What these masters never did was assume that they had perfected their craft. There’s always a tweak. A new lesson learned. A way to do it better next time. Through this practice what once was challenging became effortless.
Learning to read intuitivly is the same practice. You have the desire to help people. You have skills that you can put to use. So you start using them and helping people. If you’d like to include tarot, then you start studying. That includes studying how to read intuitively. Move on to practicing. Rinse and repeat.
What’s It Like to Not Read Intuitively?
Every tarot reading has an element of intuition in it. So I don’t think that you could say that you’re not reading intuitively even when you’re getting started.
For example, let’s say you know nothing about Tarot and how it works. You buy yourself a deck, shuffle it up, draw 10 cards and lay them out like the book says to do. Then you read about the meanings of the cards and try and figure out how that relates to the spread position that you laid it in. When your interpretation of those two things feels right or if it feels wrong, you have just experienced using your intuition!
The difference between reading with your intuition and in spite of your intuition is experience.
How Does a Professional Use Their Intuition Differently?
At the start of a reading for a client I discovered that I wasn’t connected to them at all. My intuition was throwing up red flags all over the place. It felt like nervousness, a numbness in my ears, and an instinct to want to make the spread I had work. I never have to make a spread work. They just do.
I had tried a new technique and it immediately wasn’t working. So I thanked my client for their indulgence and scrapped that part of the reading. Then I started over. The work was effortless.
Reading Tarot takes time. Anyone can pick up a deck and start to read answers from the book. Anyone can pick up a deck and string together a sentence based on the pictures they see. The art is in interpreting the traditional meanings, the interplay between the cards, layers of occult learnings, and utilizing a honed intuition to answer a specific question.
So the professional reader is actually amalgamating a ton of data in seconds and using their intuition to determine of what’s about to come out of their mouth next is right! This is vastly different from using a psychic ability, a claire ability (voiance, audience, sentience), or other mode of ESP.
Tarot professionals also practice their intuition more than the average person. Our intuition is being tested constantly. We’ll fail over and again until we know what it feels like when our intuition is right. Then we look for that feeling again. Just like I did in the example above.
Techniques to Practice Your Intuition
- When you start a new activity ask yourself, how does this make my body feel?
- Meditate and focus on learning more about how your intuition “speaks” to you
- If you’re walking into a situation that makes you uncomfortable – reflect on it later. What did your body feel like? Where did you feel different?
- Read Tarot for others – let them know you’re practicing your intuition and you need some feedback.
- Ask them to describe how your body changed during the reading (face, limbs, posture, everything).
- Put some strong interpretations on the table and then talk about how you feel. Have them validate or invalidate your interpretation. How do you feel now?
Here’s a vid I pulled together a while ago about how to recognize that your intuition is working: