Lee
What's the best way to learn card meanings? With tarot, many people like to memorize keywords at least as a way to get started, and many people don't bother with keywords at all.
With Lenormand, unless you're a completely free-form reader, the reading process is much more dependent on having set meanings (whatever ones you choose to use). Thus, it would seem that more readers would set about memorizing keywords for Lenormand than for tarot.
I've made up many cheat sheets over the years for both tarot and Lenormand. Often I'll then attempt to memorize those keywords. Usually as soon as I successfully memorize them, I'll lose interest and go on to something else. I think I've memorized Joan Bunning's tarot keywords about three different times!
When I first got Rana George's "Essential Lenormand," I immediately set about creating a cheat sheet. She already has one in the back of the book, but I like to go through a book myself and compile my own, as I can focus on the keywords that resonate more for me and ignore those involving subjects that don't interest me as much (for example, describing people's physical characteristics, or medical questions). Also when authors include a list of short meanings at the back of their books, they tend to be less complete than I would be.
But several months ago, when I decided to commit myself to using Rana's book as my Lenormand bible, I found my single-page cheat sheet inadequate. So I went through the entire book's card chapters with an orange highlighter, and highlighted any keywords that seemed significant.
Rana's card chapters have meanings organized by type of question. So there are work meanings, relationship meanings, health meanings, etc. This approach can certainly be helpful in some situations, but I found that I really missed having keywords organized by concept. So when I finished all my highlighting, I sat down at my computer with the book and started typing up a document, listing the major concepts for each card, then listing Rana's keywords within each topic.
Here's an example for one card:
My cheat "sheet" took me six weeks to complete, and ended up being five and a half pages! If I had used a smaller font I probably could have shaved a page off of that, but it's still pretty big compared to the single-page cheat sheet I was using before.
The advantage of having this is that I can keep the sheets handy as I'm reading, without having to go through the cumbersome process of looking up card meanings in the book. And because I was pretty thorough in my keyword-gathering process, I don't have to feel as if I'm missing some important detail.
Another advantage to going through this process is that it forced me to really pay attention to the text while I was doing my highlighting in a way that I probably wouldn't have when just reading the book in a more normal way. I undoubtedly helped the internalization process along by going through the exercise of gathering, choosing, compiling, and typing.
So for anyone who wants to undergo an in-depth learning process for their Lenormand meanings, I definitely recommend going through this kind of exercise. Having more detailed and varied meanings for the cards will help prevent what I went through for a while with my Lenormand reading, which was a dreary, cliched litany of accidents with sharp objects and jealous female rivals.
With Lenormand, unless you're a completely free-form reader, the reading process is much more dependent on having set meanings (whatever ones you choose to use). Thus, it would seem that more readers would set about memorizing keywords for Lenormand than for tarot.
I've made up many cheat sheets over the years for both tarot and Lenormand. Often I'll then attempt to memorize those keywords. Usually as soon as I successfully memorize them, I'll lose interest and go on to something else. I think I've memorized Joan Bunning's tarot keywords about three different times!
When I first got Rana George's "Essential Lenormand," I immediately set about creating a cheat sheet. She already has one in the back of the book, but I like to go through a book myself and compile my own, as I can focus on the keywords that resonate more for me and ignore those involving subjects that don't interest me as much (for example, describing people's physical characteristics, or medical questions). Also when authors include a list of short meanings at the back of their books, they tend to be less complete than I would be.
But several months ago, when I decided to commit myself to using Rana's book as my Lenormand bible, I found my single-page cheat sheet inadequate. So I went through the entire book's card chapters with an orange highlighter, and highlighted any keywords that seemed significant.
Rana's card chapters have meanings organized by type of question. So there are work meanings, relationship meanings, health meanings, etc. This approach can certainly be helpful in some situations, but I found that I really missed having keywords organized by concept. So when I finished all my highlighting, I sat down at my computer with the book and started typing up a document, listing the major concepts for each card, then listing Rana's keywords within each topic.
Here's an example for one card:
As you can see, I also added an "In practice" section at the end for any specific notes that Rana gave for how the cards operate in a reading. Not all the cards have such notes, but I wanted to include them for the ones that did.
My cheat "sheet" took me six weeks to complete, and ended up being five and a half pages! If I had used a smaller font I probably could have shaved a page off of that, but it's still pretty big compared to the single-page cheat sheet I was using before.
The advantage of having this is that I can keep the sheets handy as I'm reading, without having to go through the cumbersome process of looking up card meanings in the book. And because I was pretty thorough in my keyword-gathering process, I don't have to feel as if I'm missing some important detail.
Another advantage to going through this process is that it forced me to really pay attention to the text while I was doing my highlighting in a way that I probably wouldn't have when just reading the book in a more normal way. I undoubtedly helped the internalization process along by going through the exercise of gathering, choosing, compiling, and typing.
So for anyone who wants to undergo an in-depth learning process for their Lenormand meanings, I definitely recommend going through this kind of exercise. Having more detailed and varied meanings for the cards will help prevent what I went through for a while with my Lenormand reading, which was a dreary, cliched litany of accidents with sharp objects and jealous female rivals.
