Intuitive Reading
Our first encounter with tarot cards begins with the feelings their images stir in us, even before we learn their traditional meanings. This article explores how observing colors, figures, and movement gives rise to an intuitive reading, and how bringing feeling and knowledge together makes tarot a deep and meaningful tool.
Tarot Begins with Feeling
I was about fourteen when I first encountered tarot cards. A friend of my mother’s had decided to study tarot and came over with a new deck she had bought for her lessons.
She and my mother were deep in animated conversation. Words filled the room in quick succession, leaving almost no space for thought. I couldn’t really follow their conversation, and I didn’t try for long. My attention settled on the deck of cards lying on the table.
The images fascinated me.
I knew nothing then about the Major Arcana or the Minor Arcana. I didn’t know the meanings of the numbers, the four suits, or the symbols that recur throughout the cards. Even so, I felt there was something in those images. They looked like fragments of an ancient story I had never heard, yet somehow it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar.
The cards stirred my curiosity before I knew how I was supposed to interpret them.
A few years later, our neighbor Miriam came over with a similar deck. Miriam was a painter, so she looked at the cards differently. She didn’t rush to find a fixed interpretation or try to remember what each card was “supposed” to say. She lingered over the image and asked what it evoked in her.
She laid out a few cards, studying the colors, the figures’ postures, the directions they faced, and the spaces between them. From these details, she wove a whole story. One figure seemed to her to be dancing, another to be reaching out, while another card suggested a gesture of invitation or a move toward connection.
In some of the images, I saw something different.
What looked like dancing to her sometimes looked to me like a movement of avoidance. A gesture she saw as optimistic stirred a sense of tension or hesitation in me. I didn’t think she was wrong, but I didn’t feel that my experience was wrong either. The same card lay before us both, yet it touched something different in each of us.
That moment has stayed with me.
I believe that, first and foremost, we need to feel the tarot. Before we turn to books and interpretations, before we learn the traditional meaning of each card, it is worth pausing to notice what the image evokes in us.
Which figure immediately draws our attention?
How do the colors make us feel?
Is there movement in the image, or stillness?
Are the figures moving toward one another or turning their gaze away?
And where do we recognize that feeling in our bodies and our lives?
Our first response to a card is not necessarily its full interpretation, but it isn’t random either. It can reveal something about how we see the world, the experiences we carry with us, and the issue calling for our attention right now.
Intuitive reading is neither guesswork nor invention without limits. It begins with careful observation. With color, movement, a glance, distance, and the small detail that catches the eye. From observation, a feeling arises, and from that feeling, meaning begins to take shape.
The traditional meanings of the cards matter a great deal. They offer depth, context, and a shared language. They connect us to the history of tarot, the structure of the deck, and the knowledge accumulated over the years. But that knowledge is not meant to silence our initial encounter with a card. It is meant to become part of it.
To me, the richest readings emerge where knowledge and feeling meet: when we know a card’s meaning but still allow its image to speak to us anew in every spread. The same card may take on a different shade of meaning depending on the question, its position in the spread, the cards around it, and the person sitting across from us.
Perhaps that is why my first encounter with tarot at fourteen was so meaningful to me. Before I knew what the cards were saying, I felt that they were saying something. And before I learned to interpret them, they invited me to look closely.
Our initial experience of tarot cards can teach us a great deal about ourselves. It opens the door to intuitive reading, but also to a deeper understanding of how we take in images, create stories, and give meaning to what is before us.
Perhaps this is the starting point for understanding this remarkable tool: rather than rushing to ask what a card is supposed to say, pause for a moment and ask—what does it evoke in me?