easy tarot lessons

When you are at the beginning of your tarot journey tarot cards can seem daunting. Too many tarot beginners rely on the LWB ("little white book" that comes with the deck—throw it away; it's worse than useless) or memorizing tarot card meanings in an attempt to learn to read tarot properly. But that is not how the tarot works, and as a beginner you need to know that.

Tarot cards are visual tools designed to help you interpret messages from your subconscious mind. The whole idea of card divination is that cards can act as a mediator between your conscious awareness and the source of information (“God,” or “the gods,” your spirit guides, faeries, angels, ancestors, or whatever you choose) .

Tarot cards work because they are well-designed tools, not because they are magic. “You” are magic. You are the psychic being whose awareness extends beyond what you can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell every day. The problems is that you have so much awareness that your mind cannot process it all and most of it shuts down. Think about when you are stressed and too many people are talking at once, or the boss is shouting and the radio is playing while the TV is on (extra loud to make up for all of the yelling). Your brain tries to shut out a lot of the “excess noise” so that it can focus on what you decide is most important. If it is all too much your mind tries to shut everything out so that you can regain your center.

Your total awareness is exactly like that, but on a much larger scale. Life requires survival (eat, sleep, sanity through time that is not spent acquiring the necessities of life). All of these things add up and make up so much psychic noise that your awareness has to create a “tunnel vision” effect where you are in a trance-like state. Now this trance-like state is no different from the trance that everyone else is in. This is why enlightened people seem so “above it all.” The purpose of wealth and luxury is to remove the psychic psychobabble of daily existence and allow you to increase your awareness. Unfortunately most of the time it just leads to people (who are untrained in the art of awareness) demanding MORE psychobabble but this time a more self-gratifying level.

You already ARE psychic. It is not some special gift that some people get and others do not. It does take training but you can become more aware and more in control of your own destiny. Tarot cards are a shortcut to reaching the awareness you find when you can eliminate all of the chatter and distraction, and they also point you in the right direction, helping you solve problems and answering questions. Again, this is all “you.” You could do this with a pack of matches, but it would be a lot harder. The tarot is simply the first pictorial tool to help you simultaneously increase your awareness and find answers to your “daily needs” problems. This is why it is so popular even centuries after we have discarded the notion that “rich people are closer to God” than poor people (the notion of divine birth, “nobility” and aristocracy are all basically rich people abusing poor people and poor people accepting it as somehow “right and true”).

Tarot card images may seem outdated or ridiculously old-fashioned but they are symbolic of basic human events, motivations, and actions. Look at the pictures and see with your mind’s eye what is there. The trick is not memorizing a bunch of (completely useless) keywords and phrases, or trying to force numerology or astrology on to cards that don’t match up. This is like trying to force dogs and cats to mate. It just doesn’t work!

What does work though is to throw away all of the superstition and myth associated with reading cards and sit down, RELAX, and just look at the cards. Get to know them. Say hello to them individually and see what the images are trying to tell you. Then cast a spread in answer to a question (it is always best to ask a question so that you know what the cards are responding to) and look at the cards. The spread will tell you what the card positions mean. Compare that to what the card looks like. What is happening in the card? Okay, so now, how does that apply to the card position? Only when you have answered these two questions should you ask: “So, how does THAT apply to my question?”

This is what the pros do. Trust me, I teach professionals. I have read for tens of thousands of people. I have written books on the subject. It is not complicated but it does take practice and it takes a good teacher to guide you along without distracting you with useless dogma and superstition. I hope you will pick up a copy of my book for beginners: The Easiest Way to Learn the Tarot—EVER!! You can find it on Amazon, BarnesandNoble.com or anywhere you buy books (you may have to ask your local store to order it for you).

For more detailed lessons on how to learn the tarot please listen to the free audio podcast lesson series Easy Tarot Lessons or pick up a copy of The Easiest Way to Learn the Tarot—EVER!! Also feel free to join our tarot discussion at AdvancedTarotSecrets.com where we share in-depth lessons and play fun tarot games. If you have ANY questions regarding the tarot you can always reach me at dusty@advancedtarotsecrets.com. Don’t hesitate to ask for help if you need it.

—Dusty