I bought a deck, now what?

Congratulations!

Welcome to the great world of Tarot.

I promise it is a lot less spooky than the movies and some readers make it out to be. The first order of business depends on how you acquired this deck. If it is brand new from the store it shouldn’t have too much energy attached to it and you can proceed to the 2nd step. If you picked it up from a friend, a used book store, another reader, or lying on the street you probably want to cleanse it the first few nights. Take a clear quartz and place it on top and let your deck hang out for a few days like this. You can also light some sage or a candle and pass the cards through the smoke (just don’t set them on fire). Envision the smoke picking up all the energy residue and taking it away. Do this till you feel the cards become neutralized, as if you could use them to play a good game of gin.

The next thing you want to do is sleep with your deck. You can place it under your pillow or next to your bed. The important thing here is they pick up your energy and you can start to begin to connect to them. You can also start playing with them, shuffling and looking at each card if they pop out. Feel free to ask simple questions like “what will today bring?” and see what pops out. I’ve also read people talk about interviewing their deck, asking questions like what questions can you help me with and what energy do you have?

Every deck has it’s own personality. I’ve owned 4 and they are all very different when it comes to readings. It’s good to know your deck’s personality, especially when it is tired of your questions and starts giving bogus answers. Trust me, they do this. Even the universe gets tired of answering questions.

The thing is to explore with your deck along side reading the booklet. The books can give you the author’s meaning and this can be helpful, especially with more artistic decks. But the way to connect to your deck and your own intuition is by first interpreting what you see and then check with the book.

I would recommend starting a tarot journal of and begin with daily pulls. You can write down in the morning of what you believe the card means and then check back at the end of the day with how the day went down, meanings from the book and how they relate to each other and your own interpretation.

I promise this is going to be nonsense in the beginning but the further you go along the more you will see patterns and start connecting the meanings to the cards. For every card there’s 10,000 and 1 meanings. If you begin diving deep into the meanings you will get lost and suddenly every pull is telling you that you must be pregnant and your partner is cheating on you and you may just lose your job today. All in one card. It is both the joy and pain of Tarot, 78 cards – an infinite amount of meanings. So start small, ask about your day, your lunch, your business meeting, then forget about it.

When you come back at the end of the day you’ll have the power of hindsight to evaluate how the card did or didn’t fit. Intuition is a practice just like playing the piano. If you never done it before you’re going to make a lot of mistakes but if you keep at it you’ll get stronger and more savvy with the keys you have to work with.