Overwhelmed with Tarot

It's been a good few months since I've gotten really into Tarot reading. As it is with my nature, when I develop a new serious interest I have to know everything about it. So I've gotten myself a binder and filled it will all sorts of Tarot info, studied it, performed readings with friends, etc...

There is so much info out there, I was wondering at what point after starting to learn about Tarot that you all felt that you knew enough to perform a good reading?

Even when I think I'm doing a good job I'm always wondering in the back of my head if I need to look deeper, or did I miss something?

woah woman! Your not a Virgo are you?! lol

I was the same, lots of writing down, learning meanings from books etc.
I became more confident when I realised I was looking at it from the wrong angle. The meanings are on the cards! Tarot is often linked to an unbound book of 78 pages. Each symbol has many words and personal thoughts and insights that are personal to you! Books and their meanings show you the way, but tarot isn't really your own, you dont gain any real confidence and intuitive flow untill you stop writing and just gaze at the card.
Scan the card, let your eyes start in the top corner and move across, row by row, get to a symbol or a colour find out what it means to you. Look at the clouds, the waves, the hills etc in the back ground, the colour of the sky and then move forward. All the clues are there, you have to just do some detective work.
Course, writing down your thoughts on those symbols and how it could mean in a reading is a great plan! You could even compare it to the meanings in the book and see if they are the same. If they aren't no biggy. Every reader has a subtle difference to each card.

With tarot you will think you know a fair bit, and then it will astonish you and give you a whole new realm of thinking! Its a life time of study, and one we all relish in

Sezo
x

Oh, you've caught that TOS disease (Tarot Obsession Syndrome). It's incurable, you know.

Welcome!

Nevada

Keep all the stuff you find that you like and want to have,
but if it's information you're going to use, copy it by hand.

You'll soon realize that very little needs to be written down,
and the essentials of understanding are really quite simple.

Wow. Sounds like you and I are similar. We are incurable philomaths. Lovers of scholarship for scholarship's sake. That is how I got into tarot, but not what has kept me here. I think ti was a good two years before I performed a reading which I called completley satisfactory. And I still find myslef seeing new meanings in cards which I have laid a hundred times before. Laders of meanings stretching down beyond sight. If there is one person on this forum who thinks they know the lot then I should be surprised.

Sometimes my instructress and I will see two diferent things in the same card, in the same reading. Sometimes she will even tell me that she preffers my interpretation to hers, I like that, but she has been reading for ten years, so one would have to read for longer than that to know it all, that's all I can say.

I have been into tarot for 5 years now and I am only starting to feel I would like to try reading for others . I find it difficult to memorize card meanings from books etc. so I have to know the card on a personal level in order to feel comfortable. But that's just me. In regards to you wondering "in the back of your mind if you are missing something", I was the same way. Now when I have the feeling I may be missing a deeper message, I calm myself even more and simply ask the card what I may be missing. I use the Sacred Circle and it works wonderfully for me.

First of all, Welcome to the boards, Dovanna, and welcome to AT (Associate Tarotaholics )

Practice is the ticket: the more you read, the more you will learn to trust your intuition and knowledge! And the more you read, the more you will discover meanings to cards within spreads and in relation to questions that were not in your books

Have fun!

Love
Simone

Dovanna wrote:There is so much info out there, I was wondering at what point after starting to learn about Tarot that you all felt that you knew enough to perform a good reading?
I'll let you know when I get there, I've only been doing it for 10 years. I guess I'm a little slow. LOL I'm still surprised when it happens.

I thought that having the right deck helped me get there, because when I started using a certain deck, I noticed that I was finally able to read the cards and didn't need the book anymore. It may have been that, or it may have just been timing because then I noticed I didn't need the book for other decks anymore either, and I'm not quite sure how that happened. (I am not into memorizing.)

I think you can perform good readings from the beginning as long as you are open to what is being presented. As far as knowing enough, I probably never will.

I too have gotten into the mode of reading everything about tarot that I could get my hands on and one of the things I have learned is how much cut and pasting goes on in the texts. I guess its not really cut and paste if several high end authors say virtually the exact same thing about the meanings of the cards, but it is disconcerting that there isn't more insight and variation. I am now to the point that when I read a new book (some of the Llewellyn books for example) I am resigned to finding chunks of different books by the same author(s) having nearly identical text. When I see that I scan through until the text returns to something non repetitive. In all seriousness I think I will write my own book of the meanings of the cards not because I think I'm so brilliant but because writing to learn is a sound strategy for deepening what a person knows about a subject. I'm becoming more and more annoyed with pat descriptions of cards so I need to challenge myself to go deeper inside of myself. Then I think I will be ready to read others. I already read for others but I would like to do this as a professional second job ie to have a side line that really invigorates me as an adjunct to my straight ahead Monday through Friday job.