In this course, you will

• Develop your own, unique, intuitive approach to the cards
• Learn to match the cards to actual events taking place in your own life
• Create your own tarot spreads to help you answer (almost) any question
• Learn to identify the four elements in tarot and how they interact
• Grow your confidence in reading for friends
• Have loads of fun with your cards
• Become a more confident, more intuitive, more you tarot reader

You won’t

• Be going through the cards one-by-one (there are plenty of books out there you can use for that!)
• Be learning the meanings from a book.
• Memorise lists of ‘keywords’

This is all about finding your own approach to tarot, through working with your cards and exploring your own ideas with exercises that make each card relevant to what’s happening in your own life.

How it works

Each chapter should take around one week each to complete.

That said, you can set your own pace. There is no set timetable for this course, and you can use it for as long as you like.

Each chapter has a theme which is explored through a series of different exercises, plus a weekly tarot spread which helps to build your confidence in reading for yourself and for others.

There is also the daily practice of drawing a single tarot card, with journalling prompts to encourage you to relate the card to events or experiences in your own life.

This course is journal-based

You’ll be doing a lot of typing or scribbling over the eight weeks of the course, as every exercise asks you to write up your findings, experiences or feelings in a journal. (This is how I started… never expecting it to become my life’s work!)

The reason for this is threefold:

1. Writing is motivational

As you work through this course, you are building a unique body of work. I hope it will make you feel proud of your work and this process you’re going through. I hope that this will encourage you to keep writing, keep learning, keep developing.

2. Writing produces a record which you can look back on

At the end of the course you will be able to look back on a detailed journal through all kinds of tarot explorations. You’ll have experimented with some new ideas, developed your thinking about others. You’ll have learned a lot about yourself and how you want to work with your tarot cards, and you’ll always have this record of how you felt when you first started out. That is a beautiful thing.

3. Writing requires a creative commitment

As you write your way through these exercises (rather than simply doing them or thinking through them) you are commiting your thoughts to screen or paper. You are agreeing to yourself that you will take your learning to a deeper level by externalising it, expressing it through words.

This is not about being an amazing writer. You do not need to worry about spelling, grammar, writing beautifully or being super-articulate. No-one will judge or mark your work, and if you choose not to share it, no-one else will ever see it!

Think of this as your own private (or public) journal. What’s important are the ideas expressed, not the language used. Maybe you’ll write in bulletpoints. Maybe you’ll draw spider-diagrams or sketch your cards. Maybe you’ll write reams and reams of stream-of-consciousness prose… whatever works for you is the right way to do it.

Downloads

Many of the exercises in this course involve putting words into grids, brainstorming or filling in ‘boxes’. To facilitate this, I’ve included downloads where I feel it would be helpful. There are PDFs you can print, and format-free Word docs if you want to edit your own.

You don’t need to use the handouts if you don’t want to. If you’re writing on a blog or in a beautiful notebook, you may not want my PDFs interrupting your style. And if you’re accessing this entire course on your phone then downloads won’t be much use to you. No problem! The downloads are there for those who want them but are not an essential element of this course.