How to Read Tarot Cards
A paragraph about why we read Tarot Cards
In order to read Tarot Cards, each image must take on deeply personal significance from your own lived experience. The Tarot is a pictorial expression of shared human experience, and it is only when you know how your own life experience is essentially similar to the masses will you be able to tell a complete stranger anything that is deeply relevant to them. When the meaning of each card becomes deeply personal, when you’ve done work to recognize the universal in your own personal experience, words you speak will have a bigger magnetism and a stronger vibration than intellectual knowledge.
The information along with the pictures then becomes a transmission rather than mere exchange of information. Pictures are a bridge between conscious and unconscious mind; the unconscious mind is buried in the body. Once that bridge between mind and body is established as the cards are laid, non-verbal vibration of emotional and energetic content can be transmitted from the reader's body to the querent's body more easily. Many times the information given will feel foreign, but recognizable, to the querent since the shadow aspect of the cards laid reflect their unconscious experience.
Interpreting a Tarot Card Meaning
Here’s an example: The Four of Disks or Earth Element reflects our bodily experience of power that comes from honoring boundaries and containment. Four is a stable number, there are likely four walls to the room in which you sit, but when combined with the Earth element, which is already stable, it can reflect stagnation. The Osho Zen Tarot’s version of The Four of Disks is called The Miser and describes a kind of trauma response in the physical world where our bodily boundaries have been violated by extractivist practices. Extractivism is when we take something from the physical world of our bodies or the Earth without regard for reciprocity in the exchange. When reciprocity is present as a practice, we are aware of what the entity or environment from which we source our energy is also needing. When reciprocity does not happen we are left feeling “walled-off” with little capacity to be generous with either our own bodies, homes, or physical-financial resources.
Image by Ma Deva Padma
When The Four of Disks or The Miser is present in a reading I rely on the work I’ve done to heal generational trauma around the physical experience of poverty, hunger, war, cultural genocide, violence, rape, or any context in which my ancestors basic bodily sanctity was not honored in some way. I also know that the person sitting in front of me has some level of issue related to the same, which empowers me to ask good questions relevant to that topic. Do you like your job? How are you feeling in your body? What is it like for you sharing your body intimately with someone?
