How to Learn The Meaning of Tarot Cards

Learning the meaning of Tarot cards isn’t as difficult as you may at first think. I remember thinking when I first started my own Tarot journey that I would never be able to read the Tarot without my handy reference guide at my side.

However, the best piece of advice I was given was to begin by considering my own thoughts on each card before I looked up the meaning in the book. Of course, this is much easier when you have a deck such as Rider Waite, because the images and symbolism are very simple. But once you have a general feeling for each card it doesn’t take long to gain a much more in depth understanding of each Tarot card meaning.

I have recently been helping a friend develop her own Tarot talents and she was surprised at just how easily this helped her to quickly learn the meaning of each Tarot card and also how the interpretations were influenced by the position of the cards in relation to each other.

It’s also helpful when you get your first Tarot deck and go through it to make a record of the feelings you associate with each card. You will find over time that these notes will become of more use to you than any Tarot reference book you may have bought.

Each morning, pick one Tarot card and consider what you think it’s message is for the day ahead. Write this down in your notebook and then simply go about your daily business without giving it any more thought. At the end of the day, look at the card again, reflect on what you had written and see if the events of the day bear any correlation to the card meaning as you understood it.

Again, make a note of anything that happened that day so that in future if you pick that same card, you will be able to see patterns associated with particular Tarot cards. Not only does this help you learn and interpret the meaning of Tarot cards, but it helps to build up your confidence and trust in the messages the cards are relaying to you.

It’s worth noting that while Tarot cards share basic meanings and symbolisms across all different Tarot decks, they are not necessarily the same for each card. Some of the images in the Rider Waite Tarot deck for example, suggest a very different meaning to the images in the Native American Tarot deck, which I currently use. This is why it’s more important to rely upon your own intuition and listen to your own inner voice than relying upon the information given in a reference book.

The Tarot card meanings given in reference books are a guide. You can learn the meaning of Tarot cards by reading any number of books on the subject, but when you come to read the Tarot cards you will find it very difficult to associate any real understanding with those meanings. And understanding what the cards are saying is the real reason for learning Tarot in the first place.