15 Tarot Reading Tips from 20 Years of Experience

I’ve been reading tarot for over 20 years, and I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way. Here are 15 of the most important tarot reading tips to help you become a better tarot reader yourself.

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Tarot is a brilliant tool for helping you gain clarity and take control of your life… but if you’re using it wrong, it may actually add to the confusion and end up holding you back. That’s why I’ve put together these 16 tarot reading tips I wish I had known back when I started reading tarot. Master these, and you’ll be well on your way to reading tarot like a pro!

15 Tarot Reading Tips

In the rest of this article, I’ll explains these 15 tarot reading tips in detail so that you can apply them to your tarot practice and start performing more powerful and insightful readings right away (or as soon as you’re done enacting the advice you never took from the last reading lol)!

1. Understand That Tarot Cards Can’t Change Your Life For You

This first tip is actually kind of an anti-tarot reading tip, but it’s the truth: Tarot cards can help clarify what’s going on and they can help you decide what to do, but they cannot and they never will be able to make you do it. You know the saying, “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink?” You’re the horse in that saying. The cards can offer guidance, but they can’t make you follow it.

Part of what this means is that if you already know what you’re supposed to be doing, maybe just skip the reading and go do it.

2. Ask the Right Questions

Asking the right question is so, so important – this cannot be overstated, and this might be the most important of all the tarot reading tips in this article. Formulating the right question is at least as important as interpreting the answer, and the value of the answer you receive is directly proportionate to the quality and the specificity of the question you ask.

This is why when I do professional readings, a good chunk of the time is spent on me helping you figure out exactly what questions we should be asking. Sometimes, once you figure out what question you should be asking, the answer becomes almost immediately apparent.

Back in the days when I was hosting the Welcome to Magic School Podcast, I did a whole episode just on crafting empowering questions for use in tarot reading and divination. I’ve embedded it below if you want to give it a listen, and you can subscribe to my newsletter here to get a free worksheet to walk you through the process.

3. Don’t Skip the Talking Phase

Sometimes, the most helpful part of a reading isn’t even the part where you pull cards—it’s the part where you talk to the cards before you pull them to get your thoughts together to even be able to ask the right question. Occasionally, if you talk to the cards long enough, you’ll talk your way right out of a problem. On the other hand, if you skip the talking phase and go straight to pulling cards, much like going home with someone you just met at a bar, you may “get into bed” with the cards and find that you and the deck are on totally different pages and neither of you know what the other is talking about… because you skipped the talking phase.

4. Be Open to Receiving Answers to Questions You Didn’t Ask

Although many questions do not call for a full Celtic Cross spread, this spread does make it pretty easy to tell when the cards are answering a different question from the one that you asked, since it paints a full picture of the situation at hand. Pictured here is the Aquarian Tarot.

5. Recognize That You Are Not a Neutral Party

You are biased in your own life… and you can’t help it—it’s your life! As obvious as this sounds, it can be one of the hardest tarot reading tips to accept and integrate when you need it. Sometimes, when we really want a particular answer to a question, or when we’re unwilling to see certain truths about ourselves or about a situation in general, we can misinterpret the cards because what they’re telling us is not something that we are ready or willing to see. If you’re not truly open to hearing the truth and challenging your own existing beliefs, perspectives, and opinions, a tarot reading may not be helpful for you—you may just not be in the right place for it, and it may leave you even more confused than you were before you started pulling cards.

From another angle, this means that sometimes, if a reading is really confusing you and you just can’t make heads or tails of what the cards are trying to tell you… ask yourself if maybe it’s because they’re trying to tell you something you disagree with or are refusing to see, and whether you might be wrong. (Of course, there are other possibilities for why a reading might not be making sense, but this is one to consider!)

6. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for a Second Opinion

When you’re doing a tarot reading for yourself, and you get the sense that you might be a little too biased and another perspective might do you some good… you’re allowed to ask for a second opinion. You can either ask a trusted friend or consult a professional reader.

I wish this could go without saying, but we’re not all lucky enough to have friends who always want the best for us and always want to be totally honest with us—sometimes we have friends who (consciously or unconsciously) are trying to sabotage us, or who project their own fears or desires onto us… so pick a friend that you actually trust to be frank and supportive.

If you’re not lucky enough to have a friend like that, consider working with a professional reader. I don’t really have any tips on how to find a professional reader that you trust and vibe with, although I am a professional reader myself… so if you vibe with me, and if you trust me, I’d be happy to help you! I’m totally happy to step in and help you find a fresh perspective on a reading you’ve already done, and/or if you want to start fresh, I’d love to craft a bespoke reading for you.

7. Don’t Crowdsource Your Readings

While it can be super helpful to get a second opinion, the law of diminishing returns applies here. You don’t need twenty-seven opinions (especially not from strangers) on anything, least of all a tarot reading. I’m in a bunch of witchcraft and tarot Facebook groups, and all the time I see people posting things like, “I drew these cards for myself and I think I know what they mean but I’m not sure, what do you think it means?” and they’ll post this great big reading with tons of cards and zero context—nothing about what they were asking or even what area of their life they were asking about, nothing about what the spread was or what each card position is supposed to refer to… it’s just the picture of the cards and “help, tell me what this means!”

Making this sort of post is not useful for two reasons.

1. You’re not giving enough information. Even if the people you’re consulting happen to all be absolute tarot and divination experts and have your best interests at heart, they have little to nothing to go on. So much of interpreting a tarot reading is dependent on context: what did you ask, what were your intentions with the reading, what spread are you using, what’s going on in your life that led you to do this reading?
2. Even if you do give enough information, you’re still not going to be safe from the second reason why crowdsourcing your readings is a bad idea, and that is that if you do get responses, you’re probably going to get so many different responses that it’s just going to be a too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen situation. With so many voices in your head, you’re not going to know which responses are right and which aren’t, which ones apply to you and which don’t, which people are projecting their own fears or desires onto you and your reading, and which people are actually able to see the situation without personal bias. The danger here is that you’ll walk away even more confused, or possibly worse, just going with whichever comments agree with what you want to hear or what you already thought. In any case, it’s not necessarily going to be the truth, so don’t crowdsource your readings.

8. Mind Your Energetic Boundaries

Speaking of too many voices in your head, strong energetic boundaries are important in all types of magic, but especially in divination. In divination of any kind, you’re intentionally opening yourself up to the spirit world for advice, information, guidance, direction, and so on. If your boundaries are really strong and really solid when you open yourself up to this sort of spiritual influence, you’re likely to receive divine guidance from spiritual entities who truly want the best for you, and it’ll probably go pretty well.

However, if you’re just eager to communicate with spirits because it’s new, fun, and exciting, and you readily open yourself up to whatever spirits want to communicate with you, you’re very likely to receive guidance from entities who do not want the best for you, who have very selfish motivations. When counsel from demons, evil spirits, or selfish gods is your guiding star, you can really find yourself lost down some very wrong, very dark paths. At best, you may find that your energy is being sapped through the connections you’ve opened and initiated. This sort of misguidance and/or energy vampirism can happen either from opening yourself up indiscriminately, or it can also happen as a result of reaching out to a specific entities who may not be as wholesome as you thought. Even when the spirit who picks up is the same exact spirit you called, spiritual entities are not necessarily required to be honest and forthcoming with you. I don’t love to admit it, but I’ve definitely found myself in a working relationship with a deity who turned out to be playing me to a certain extent… so that’s just something to keep in mind. Do not neglect your boundaries, they are very important, especially in magic like divination where you are kind of giving over the opportunity to influence what you believe, how you think, and what you decide to do to the spiritual entities that are directing your reading.

9. More Cards Is Not Always Better

You do not need a 10 card Celtic Cross for every single reading or every single question. Readings with more cards may look fancy, and to the uninitiated they may convey a false sense of infinite wisdom and sophistication, but a lot of questions can just be answered with one, two, or three cards, and sometimes three cards is too many. Often, more cards just leads to more confusion, especially if you’re not using a spread or asking really clear questions for each card as you go.

Your life is probably not the Da Vinci Code, you probably don’t need 25 cards to answer the question about whatever’s fucked up with your life. You probably need to hear one thing that you don’t want to hear, and then go do at least one thing that you don’t want to do. And going back to point number two: ask a more specific question, and you’ll get a more specific answer. If you’re pulling more cards, because the answer you’re getting is not making sense, because you asked a really vague question… ask a better question.

10. More Readings Is Not Always Better

So instead of doing your 25th reading on the same question in the same week, put the cards down and go do something useful with your life. Then, when you’ve done something and the situation has changed, then you can come back and do another reading, if you need to.

11. More Decks is Not Always Better (But Two Might Be Better Than One)

More decks is not always better. You do not need a million tarot decks (I need to hear this as much as anyone). When I first got into tarot and witchcraft, it was so hard to find any decks at all unless you could get to an actual occult bookstore, and even then, there just wasn’t anything close to the selection we have today. As witchcraft has blossomed in the public eye, tarot has become a sales opportunity for every artist, publisher, and brand, and there is a nearly infinite selection of decks available. Just over the past week, I’ve scrolled past advertisements for a Popeye and Olive Oyl-themed tarot deck, a tarot deck inspired by the lore, flora, and fauna of the southern United States, and a tarot deck inspired by Ukrainian mythology! As someone who loves both tarot for tarot’s sake and art for art’s sake, it can be incredibly tempting to purchase every beautiful deck that catches my eye… and trust me, I fully grasp the hypocrisy of this statement coming from me, I really do—but you don’t need them all.

That said, there’s really no such thing as having a hundred close friends, and I think it’s kind of the same way with decks. There is some truth to the idea that more than one deck is better than one deck (although one deck can absolutely be enough if you’re a minimalist or on a budget), and I am not someone who is allowed to tell you that you can’t have a little collection. All I’m saying is that at a certain point, it becomes a collection because you want to have a collection, not because having more decks will improve your ability to have great readings.

12. The Prettiest Decks Don’t Always Give the Best Readings

This one really hurts, and might be my personal least favorite of all of these tarot reading tips… but it’s nonetheless true: pretty does not always equal good. The most beautiful decks are not always actually good decks to read with. Now, you and I may have different opinions about what’s pretty, and you and I may have different experiences about what’s a good deck to read with, but the principle holds true across preferences. I have decks in my collection that I think are just absolutely gorgeous that I would love to be able to read with all the time… but I’ve never gotten a good reading with them. No matter how much I want to, I’ve never felt connected to them, and it pains me greatly to not be able to read well with them, because they’re just so gorgeous I could look at them all day.

On the other end of the spectrum, I have decks that I never would have purchased based on the art alone. I don’t even really like the art style at all, but somehow they ended up in my collection anyway, and the readings that I’ve done with those decks are some of the best readings that I’ve ever done for myself. Some of the most straightforward, clear, direct, honest, and true readings that I’ve ever had have come from decks whose art I would never hang on my wall, but the readings are so good that the decks undeniably deserve a permanent spot in my collection. All that to say, pretty doesn’t always equal good, and ugly (or just not your preference) doesn’t always equal bad.

Pictured above are The Lover’s Path Tarot by Kris Waldherr and the Magical Mermaids and Dolphins Oracle Cards by Doreen Virtue.

13. You Don’t Have to Keep Every Guidebook (or Box, etc.)

Almost every deck comes with some sort of guidebook. If it just comes with a shitty Little White Book (fondly or not-so-fondly abbreviated as LWB) with one keyword per card, and you’re either past that or you have access to Google, you’re allowed to throw that away. You don’t have to keep that with your cards. You don’t have to keep the title cards with your cards—they make great bookmarks! You don’t even have to keep the boxes. Tuck boxes are notorious for disintegrating, so if you have a deck in a tuck box that you use a lot, be prepared to either reinforce it with packing tape or replace it altogether (it’s not your fault, I promise!). Then some decks come in these big beautiful presentation boxes that, while gorgeous for display, just aren’t necessarily practical for long term storage… you don’t have to keep those, either. So anyhow, throwing the guide book away is not a sin, with one exception: if you’re not 100% sure you’re in love with the deck, and it has a chance of being collectible at some point, and you’d like to be able to resell it for a good price someday… keep everything together.

14. Don’t Be Too Proud to Check the Guidebook

15. Clarity Improves With Perceptual Distance

Every now and then, you’ll have a reading that just doesn’t make sense, no matter what you do… until weeks, months, or even years later, when you look back and realize—“Oh, that’s what that card meant!” In some cases, the thing that you need to help your reading make sense might just be time. Perceptual distance can also be a second opinion from someone who’s not so close to the situation (see #6 above), but sometimes you really just need time to be able to stop seeing the trees and start seeing the forest as a whole. As I shared in a recent video, it took me seven years to understand why I kept drawing the Six of Pentacles over and over and over. When it was happening, I kept thinking “I’m pretty sure I get it, I’m pretty sure I’m already doing what this card is telling me to do, but obviously if I was doing what it was telling me to do, it wouldn’t still be telling me to do it, so there must be something that I’m not getting…” and now nearly seven years later looking back I’m like “Ohhhh… I get it.” (P.S. – This is why journaling your tarot readings is such a good idea!!)

So sometimes it’s not your fault you don’t get it right away. You’re not infinitely wise, and no one reasonable expects you to be infinitely wise. You’re only human, it’s okay, you don’t have to have it all figured out, and you’re not a bad tarot reader just because pulling a few cards didn’t suddenly make everything make sense and your life all fall perfectly into order. Sometimes it just takes time.

That’s it for my top 15 tarot reading tips! I wish I’d known these things back when I first started reading tarot… but I know them now, and now you know them too, so we’re all better off!

If you still want help with your readings or for someone to do a tarot reading for you, I happen to be a professional tarot reader who knows all of the 15 tarot reading tips that I just laid out for you, and I’d be delighted to be of service to you! I offer a couple different types of readings, which I’ll just leave right here for you to peruse at your leisure:

If you’re not looking for a one-on-one reading just now, but you’d like to receive mini pick-a-card readings in your email inbox every now and then, you can subscribe to my newsletter, Notes from the Rose Garden.

Until we meet again – be well, seek beauty, and leave a little magic wherever you go.
Blessings,