Reflections on learning to read tarot cards

Well, it's been three whole weeks since I started this journey. it's so short and yet I feel as though I've learned a lot. Yet I know there is still an entire lifetime of things to learn with tarot. Part of me wishes I had started on this sooner. But then again we come to things when we do. I now know that I wasn't ready to learn this when I was 18. I bought a Rider-Waite-Smith deck from the local bookstore back in the '90s. I read that little booklet that came with it. And my brain immediately said "Huh?" after reading just a few pages. I tried to understand but I couldn't see it.

Skip ahead 30 years and here we are today. Learning the tarot. Although today I have the benefit of the internet. The vastness of YouTube's "how-to" videos that include how to read tarot. Plus the myriad of books I can just buy with a single click and have them delivered to me wirelessly to my kindle. There is so much knowledge to be found that it's almost overwhelming. I say almost because my BS filter is pretty good and I can pretty much tell when someone isn't what they say or has information that isn't quite right.

With that being said so far what I've learned is to trust your own intuition. That the cards have meanings that were written by someone more than a century ago. But you can also use your own 6th sense and find meanings in them as well. And this is probably what would have made it difficult for me when I was younger. A sense that while there is a kind of standard, there also isn't. My younger self would have been driven nuts by this idea. Back then I needed definite answers to questions. There can only be one! (Cheesy highlander reference). My younger self would have balked at the idea that one card could have several different meanings. Today I see that as the beauty of the tarot cards. That they are a mirror that we hold up and we ultimately see what we see. Someone else will see something totally different.

The fact that we don't see the same cards the same way is exciting to me. I will say that I am working through Arthur Waite's Book "Key to the Tarot". And I'm using his meanings as the basis for my study. But I'm also seeing other things in the cards now than what I saw before. Not every card though. The other day I did a reading and the King of Wands came up and my brain blanked on it for a while. I literally couldn't tell if the king looked happy or sad. I had to sit with it for a while. I did my reading and it wasn't until 3 hours later that I realized that because you could see both of his hands, it might mean he's honest. Tiny tiny little detail like that haunted me three hours after I finished the reading. It should have been the clue that told me that But I didn't see it right away. And that's what I'm learning about the tarot. I'm learning that it's not all as it seems.

This isn't a new concept for me though. I'm from Hawaii where the culture was taught to me at a very early age. I embraced it as my own despite the fact that I am not genetically Hawaiian. In Hawaii, there is this idea of veiled meanings. Every word has a surface meaning and then several hidden meanings. A word like "Piko," (Pronounced peee-coe) it's surface meaning is that it's your belly button. But it's more than that. It's the center of our bodies. It's a thing that leads to where we process our food. It's how we were nourished by our mothers when we were in the womb. It's how we got our first food, first water, and first nutrients. Our mothers shared their blood and oxygen with us through this thing. Allowing us to grow and become strong enough to handle life outside the womb. It was our first connection to the world. But it's just a belly button, right? And even then a place can have a "piko." It is said that the Earth has one. A center, a place where life begins. It can even represent a spiritual place. This one word goes so deep.

This word has tons of different meanings all of which can all be conveyed in different ways based on context. And tarot works in much the same way. This is probably what keeps people away from Tarot. But at the same time, the meanings aren't so hard to figure out. There's a guide built into them and if you take some time to see it, you'll find it.

It took me years to understand all those meanings of the word "piko." And just like that word, It will take me years to understand the tarot. Luckily I only have 78 cards to work on instead of thousands of words. But that's the fun of it, isn't it? The journey has just begun and while I am reading the cards at a basic level, I'm starting to understand the veiled meanings and beginning to see them too. Again, not for all the cards, but for some, those other meanings are beginning to make themselves known to me. It's a process I enjoy and look forward to developing. That's it for now, if you enjoyed this please leave me a comment and let me know. Thanks for reading.