Using Your Intuition in Tarot

A Beginners Guide

One of the most helpful things I’ve found with tarot is learning to read intuitively. Tarot cards are very visual, with images that give clues about their meanings, but reading intuitively means tuning into your feelings and emotions beyond what you see physically. The sensations you get during a reading help you to put the whole picture together in a way that’s personal and alive. The images on the cards act as a way to stimulate your intuition, while also carrying important messages to help guide you through interpreting the reading more accurately.

Intuition helps you to move beyond a surface-level interpretation so you can connect on a deeper level of meaning, allowing the reading to feel more relevant to the person’s unique situation. This approach invites you to trust your inner voice and the subtle impressions you receive, making each reading a unique conversation between you, the cards, and the situation at hand.

Intuition is the key to unlocking the cards true potential.

Intuition and Energy in a Reading

Knowing how you personally feel about the cards in your readings is a personal connection that takes time to develop, as you continue to notice patterns in what certain cards mean in different situations. So, over time, you will start to build your own understanding of the cards, shaped by your own experiences and mixed with the unique energy of each reading.

If you’re an empath, this intuitive style might come naturally because you’re already sensitive to other people’s energy.

Tarot, as a divination tool, is a way of helping your intuition. When you’re doing a reading for someone, feeling into their energy adds another layer of understanding that complements what the cards say. If the person shares their story with you, they’re also transferring their energy to you, which you can use to read deeper into their situation with your intuition to help give further meaning to what the cards say.

I believe you need to apply your intuition to really read tarot well. If you only stick to the card meanings, the readings feel flat and too mechanical. But if you combine the person’s story, their energy, and your intuition with the cards, the readings becomes alive and meaningful. This blend allows you to see nuances and possibilities that a purely literal reading might miss, making the experience richer for both you and the querent.

Every tarot reading is a collaboration between different energies.

How to Practice Intuitive Reading

Tarot is a tool to help your intuition express itself and the back-and-forth between your inner feelings and the card images creates a dynamic conversation that reveals insights you might not have considered otherwise with intuition by itself. The more you practice, the easier it becomes to trust your intuitive hits and to weave them into your readings more naturally.

My advice? Try giving someone a tarot reading if they’re open to it. First, practice with yourself until you feel you have a rough idea of the cards meanings, and what it means when certain cards show up for you, so you can give someone a reading more confidently without using a booklet of definitions for the cards. But once you feel you have a good idea of the cards meanings, take off the training wheels and use your intuition to guide and navigate yourself. Then get into the flow of the reading, the person’s energy, what the cards are saying, and how this applies to their situation.

Card definitions offer a support to help build confidence when using your own intuition.

Try to feel what the person is telling you even before you draw the cards, as this initial tuning-in can give you a sense of the energy or emotions involved, so when the cards come up, it either confirms what you’re feeling or it may guide you to finding a creative solution to the person’s situation.

Focus, Comprehension, and Clarity

One of the main goals of a reading is clarity — to help you or someone else understand a situation better and to find direction. The cards complement your intuition, and though sometimes they may confirm your own first impressions, other times they may offer new insights or strategies, which is another reason why people use tarot — to see things from different perspectives and to find better solutions.

Practical experience is the best way to get better at combining intuition with tarot. Over time, you will learn the language that the cards speak to you and how to put their messages together like a story. And this is what makes tarot so powerful, as it’s not just about isolated definitions of the cards, but about what the cards reveal to you when you can see deeper.

— Tarot for Beginners