3 Obstacles That Sabotage Your Efforts When Learning To Read Tarot

In this article I’m going to share 3 of the main problems and obstacles we face when trying to learn to read tarot cards.

These obstacles sabotage many a well intentioned effort by otherwise intelligent and disciplined people.

Obstacle #1 With Learning to Read Tarot?

Confidence In yourself and therefore your readings.

It stands to reason that when you’re in the process of learning something you’re still developing your confidence.

So how do you get it?

First of all, you need to be confident in yourself. You need to look inside and know that you have the ability to learn something. Remind yourself that you’ve learned things in the past so there’s no reason you can’t learn tarot!

Many people no more intelligent than you have learned and mastered reading tarot cards. 

So now that that’s no longer an excuse, you need to focus on things that actually have the biggest impact on your learning whatever it is you want to learn — in this case, reading tarot cards.

I’m going to write more about this obstacle in the next article in this series. For now, just think of when you’ve learned something with an organized system. Didn’t that system help you to feel more confident about learning?

You trusted that the system was organized in such a way in order to support the gradual increase in your skills and understanding.

An organized and systematic approach to learning tarot is what will support you in knowing you're on the right track with your learning.

Obstacle #2: “Scary” Cards

Everyone seems to have a few cards that they just don’t seem to connect with or understand. Whenever these cards pop up in a reading — whether for yourself or others — your mind goes blank.

Your heart rate speeds up and you start to sweat. You fumble around in your mind for a meaning that you can connect to the situation but you feel so uncertain!

It’s time for you to knuckle down and connect with those few cards! Find out why you don’t understand them. Look at them. Journal them. Contemplate them.

You probably thought I was going to bring up cards such as Death, The Devil, The Tower, 5 of Swords, etc. as examples of the scary cards...

Well, those certainly qualify as “scary” cards too! However, Mary and I bust that myth in our Tarot Energies course.

Obstacle #3:  Bad Habit of Depending On the Book

Many of you are stuck on the habit of looking up the meanings in a book. There’s nothing wrong with looking things up in books — sometimes a certain meaning can jump out at you and give you a deeper understanding of the card and life — but it becomes a problem when you’re dependent upon it.

If you don’t feel confident about your own interpretation without the book, you’re definitely stuck.

You need to break this habit and trust yourself! This brings us to another obstacle, however…

Just Winging It

Because of the seemingly enormous wealth of meaning and information in a tarot deck (it IS a book of Life, after all) many people decide to be “intuitive” and just wing it.

While this can work to an extent, it is a hit and miss affair. 

Yes, we should absolutely utilize our intuition when reading tarot cards!

However, without any sense of how a tarot deck is organized and what the principles of tarot are, you are missing so much!

And deep inside, if this is you, you know this to be true. There’s a sense that your readings are somehow incomplete.

Not only that, but if your intuition or psychic ability is in fact that accurate, why even bother with the cards in the first place?

The thing is, the cards always have the truth of the energies of the moment in them. You just have to know how to look. 

​

Part of looking involves being willing to peel back layers of "blindspots" and being willing to see what is. That's the spiritual growth or "yoga" of the tarot. (Some people have called tarot "the yoga of the west.")

This will then jumpstart your intuition and you’ll put everything together.

It’s like playing a musical instrument. If you don’t know any of the fundamentals of playing that instrument, how far can you take it?

Even if you experience some beginners luck with it and have a knack for it, you’re music will be extremely limited.

The best music is usually a combination of some technical skill which provides a foundation for the intuitive and creative faculty to soar.

The takeaway is to not get too caught up in unnecessary details — unless you really love that kind of stuff — but to at least master the fundamentals.

Then, allow your intuition to come forward and make new connections in every reading you do!

All this and more is covered in our course, but I hope this in and of itself was helpful.

Stay tuned for the next article in this series in a couple of days.