This was my answer to a question someone posted at ATF. Keep in my mind that it’s just an opinion - my opinion - and thus, you should feel free to agree, disagree or ignore. It comes from my personal experience, but i must say that i’m no more than just a young student.
So…can anyone read tarot? Or do you need extra intuitive abilities? Is it a gift or something you learn?
I never really knew what intuition is. It has never worked for me until i actually learnt the cards….until i sat down with a notebook and studied, and did readings, and thought a lot…
Some people actually have this spiritual ability or hearing of seeing things that enhances their readings. I don’t. For a long time, it made me think i had no talent whatsoever for reading…i don’t hear voices, see ghosts, talk to spirits. To compensate this lack of apparent natural ‘gift’, i studied. Then inspiration slowly came…and is still coming, ever coming.
You may think art is something inspired…but it’s actually, like many said, 10% inspiration and 90% transpiration. You can have a gift for painting, but i”m sorry, if you don’t learn what do you do with the oil/water, how do you mix the paints and pigments, what materials do you use, you won’t develop that gift. It’ll be a wonderful, but latent thing. You won’t be a Van Gogh unless you paint and practice almost as obsessively.
To be a great tarot reader, you gotta live tarot just like artists live their arts. Inspiration will come once you have worked enough. Picasso was always painting, even when he was uninspired…when asked about it, he said that when inspiration came, he wanted it to find him working.
A gift? Maybe. But lots of work is needed to make it become natural. When you see a dancer dancing, so easily, so beautifully, you don’t see the hard hours of practice behind it. To make the effort seem effortless - that’s an art. Making the complicated seem/become simple - an art.
I think intuition and work/study are connected, you need both to make an ability become an art. Intuition is not something you are just born with…is something you learn to listen, and learn to trust. Learn. ‘Success’ only comes before ‘working’ in the dictionary, you know.
A fellow ATF member called Forensic answered: “I’d think anyone with an open mind could. That excludes a bunch of people though.” I agree. Anyone could learn tarot…but to read well, you gotta open your mind and work, and study, and think, instead of expecting a sudden ‘divination gift’ to manifest.
Again, my opinion. Just that.
Marina - your piece echoes my thoughts completely. I don’t consider myself psychic. I don’t think I was born with a gift. I do think that I am very curious about people and how they tick. But I don’t think that was always the case - it’s something that has developed over time.
I do believe anyone who is interested can learn to use the tarot - especially with a good system. I do believe that I failed to learn to read tarot for years, despite my best attempts, because I did not respond well to the system that was commonly taught in books; learning lists of pre-defined meanings. I guess if I had devoted enough time to it I might have succeeded, but I was always turned off way before that point!
Then I found a system that worked well for me - one that didn’t mean I had to study books for hours, but one I could quickly pick up the basics of, then learn as I was actually doing it. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t take a lot of study - it does - but I’m studying the cards, not a book! And I expect to be studying the rest of my life.
So, yes anyone can learn to read tarot with enough work; however there are some people who will be curious about it and some who won’t - there are way too many things in this world to be interested in for everyone to even have a slightest curiosity about tarot!
We are all psychic and we all use intuition every moment. Do we realize how much we use these methods of perception? Our culture is patriarchal, so these modes of perception are repressed, and few are willing to admit their abilities in these areas of perception. We all have our set of symbols that we use to convey our environment, inner and outer, and the study of those symbols expands our environment. We call our collection of symbols knowledge.
When I decided to write down explanations for the symbols in Tarot, I found that the concentration on a single card in the effort to find as many explanations as possible (I love my thesaurus!) created a more conscious realization of my psychic perceptions. I could find lost items, I had premonitions, I felt more comfortable with how things unfolded - it was like opening my eyes for the first time.
So I agree, that concentrated study will open up perception, and the cards of Tarot are a masterful set of symbols that are tools designed to allow any and all to feel their psychic and intuitional perceptions unfold and blossom.