Teaching Tarot

Yesterday was the second one of my Tarot one day workshops held at the Spiritualist Centre in Billericay Essex and again was really pleased with the interest and the turnout.

“How can you teach reading Tarot in one day” I hear you say!...... well in truth you can’t, but what you can do is give an introduction to what tarot is about and de-bunk the myths that have built up around tarot.

Traditionally when you decide to study tarot for the purposes of reading for others, most teachers / centres will teach you the meanings of all 78 cards, the spreads and how to associate the cards into a reading, (I know, I did it myself 26 years ago) this in itself can take up to 2 years before you can read professionally for others.

What I do is teach it intuitively, that is to use the images on the cards to invoke how the reader feels about that card or picture and what they may feel it means to the sitter (the one getting the reading).

I normally start off saying that there is no magical or mystical properties to the cards themselves, in fact they are just pieces of card with colourful pictures on them, that is only what the reader sees within them that gives any mystical or intuitive meaning at all.

Starting off with photos of something like trees or even abstract art and scribbles I prove to them you can ‘read’ almost any image and by the end of the day have them all doing a valid card reading.

Ok the above sounds like it simplifies the world of reading tarot cards, but who made it complicated in the first place? Many people give up when faced with 2 years of study and 78 cards to learn, but if they have a method of using their cards almost straight away then if they want to take the professional route then they can learn the traditional meanings after when it suits them, my method has worked with dozens of people at live workshops and in our website chat room classes, and if it brings a greater interest in working with tarot cards then I will continue using what now seems a tried and tested method of teaching a wonderful medium of divination.

16 people went away yesterday with a better understanding of how the cards work for them that to me makes it worth while.