15 Tarot Reading Skills Every Professional Must Teach A Beginner

These are on-the-reading-table skills that you can master, before you can start to accept payment for your tarot reading services. It is all about proficiency with the tarot cards.

You got paid. But that doesn't make you a professional tarot reader in a true sense of the word. If you have decided that tarot is the path to follow, you have to be proficient in the art of reading tarot. Here is my personal curriculum to the path of tarot master-dom.

1. Learn the traditional; tarot meanings of the seventy-eight cards of the tarot deck,both the upright and reversed tarot meanings.

2.Tarot card spreads-focus on one or two general tarot layouts and master them until it becomes second-nature to you. Learn enough specific spreads for specific questions like timing information question, you can use the calender tarot spread. If you're inclined you can learn to design your own tarot spread and assign particular meaning for each card's position.

3. Significator- learn what,when,why and how to use it.

4.Court Cards- get a clue if the court card represents the querent, someone else or if it represents activities,institutions,professions and occupations. If the court cards represent people,discover their true nature, feelings and desires even the bits they hide. Study their psychological profiles and interactive styles.

5. The Four tarot card suits-wands,cups,swords and pentacles. Learn each general sketch of character traits of people represented by the four tarot card suits.

6. Learn basic and advanced tarot symbolism. What makes this topic an interesting part of tarot is that it is a bottomless well in which to draw tarot meanings and interpretations from. You will need a dictionary of symbols. If you see more green than blue when you look at your tarot spread as a whole it means growth and fertility.

Pay attention to the details that catch your eyes in the card's images like, what are the characters doing in the scene? Are they happy or sad? You can tell by the expressions on their faces. Observe the repeating symbols that keep reappearing on the majority of the cards. You can meld them together symbolically e.g. angels, river or pool,vegetation and tower and make your own interpretation.Just focus on one or two generic tarot decks though. It would be an enormous task to study tarot symbols of different decks.

7. Numerology-there is this one tarot reader who mainly draws his interpretations from the numbers of the tarot cards. It is one-dimensional i know, but he does it really well, his clients are amazed. Sometimes there is more important message in the reading, that has to do with numerological meaning and repetition of certain number than with the individual cards of the tarot spread.

8.Qaballah, Astrology,I ching, NLP, Aromatherapy- the tarot is flexible that it can accommodate other faith structures and other divinatory systems. It doesn't hurt if you have knowledge with these forms of disciplines and combine tarot together to create amazingly effective and accurate readings.

9.Card combinations/card pairs-to identify and interpret card pairs can be a complex and exhausting skill to learn. You can look for two cards in a reading that oppose each other. This pair can point the opposite ends of experience from which you choose the best balance area for yourself.

Like for example, four of cups shows one man sitting under a tree as oppose to ten of cups shows a group of happy people getting together.In a reading, these two cards could be showing you the importance of isolation/being with people issue in your life.

10. Primary/Secondary majority-you will likely observe in a tarot spread that one suit predominates, this is called primary majority. A noticeable number of cards from another suit, lesser number of them though, is called the secondary majority. By identifying the primary majority and secondary majority you will know instantly what the reading is all about. Whether the focus is subjective-inner thoughts(swords) pr feelings (cups) or objective-concentrating on tangible events (wands and pentacles).

11. Elemental Dignities-this is a process in which you learn how each card relates to each other based on their elements (fire,air,earth,water) like for example: swords strengthened wands,pentacles weakened swords,swords is neutral to cups. The elemental dignities help us to identify which cards to pay more attention to and which irrelevant cards to discard.

12.Rephrasing- this is a technique of tarot readers to maneuver themselves out of an uncomfortable,vague or complex questions of the clients. Especially if its outside the boundary of the reader's code of ethics.

13. Handling difficult readings/surviving tarot reader's block-neophytes and experienced readers alike have been stumped by this occasional obstacle. There are lots of alternative approaches to squeeze you out of this compromising situation.

14. Know how to link Court Cards to Major Arcana cards- the best way to do it is by interpreting the symbols,colors and images of the cards. The Empress and Queen of Pentacles for example both sit on a throne with a crown on her head and a river at the background. The purpose of this method is to mentally replace a court card (if you have trouble interpreting it) with its equivalent Arcanum to make for an easier interpretation.

15. Telling your tarot story/The Narrative- there is no right or wrong way to do this. It is an art. Let your inner guide make the disparate pieces of information gleaned from your readings to tell a coherent and unified tarot story.

If i left out some important aspects to reading tarot professionally please feel free to comment and add. You can go by the route of enrolling enrolling in formal tarot lessons and get certified. Attend seminars and workshops and participate in online discussions. After learning all this theoretical lessons, you will need to apply them pragmatically.

You will have to practice constantly. There is no substitute for doing actual readings to gain experience. Soon you will arrive at your own original nuances at tarot interpretation. Let it sink to your subconscious and eventually will develop your own style of reading tarot as unique as your thumb prints.