Your experience during your first tarot year?

I wonder what people felt like during their first year of learning tarot. How did those feeling progress or change during the year? Had there been any other learning that was akin to this learning? How consistent or varied was the time you put into learning? And, what were the most important things you learned - about tarot, about yourself, about the learning process - during that time? Enquiring minds want to know

I learnt that I was completely useless at it and would never ever be able to do it, ever. Oh, and that everyone else found it easy and would just look at the cards with no effort involved (having thrown away all books) and see Everything Immediately.

But fortunately I loved cards with pretty pictures on and also books so I just kept going anyway, and attempted to focus on making sense of the system despite it all.

ETA The Fey was born in 2002 and I'd started feeling more confident about reading a few months beforehand, but this was the first deck I had that could actually READ with straight from the box. I bought my first deck in about 1999. So yes, probably took me about two years to feel I was getting the hang of it (btw still learning)

ps thinking about it, I've felt like that about a lot of learning and so it is probably just my usual process

My first year I almost gave up. I had bought so many decks and never found "the one" that I could magically read with. I thought it was hopeless for me and that other people could do it but I'd never get it. And yet, I just kept my fascination with it through the years.

In that first year, I think I was making it harder than it needed to be. And I went by book meanings a lot instead of weaving the cards together into the message that was there to be found.

My first year was last year!
I read the book and went with it! At first I really sucked, understandably.... but I just dove in to the serious amount of learning material online. I don't know, but the end of my first year, just about now... people were paying me to read for them (for cheap) and I was coming up with very accurate reading. A friend told me that she was surprised how good I was considering I had been reading for less than a year.

I dunno, it just came naturally; and I'm a bookworm too so I think that helped a lot.

when I first picked up tarot I was fourteen or thirteen I thonk...I used the lwb and plodded along with my universal waite and it was really a side interest to my stronger then-interest in wicca. then I lost interest for a while, got interested again and repeat ad naseum for a few years. Im still like that really. there are months when I do readings daily and months when I don't pick up a deck at all. wandering attention span and all that. but fact is, unlike so many things I always did return to tarot. after a couple years I decided to grt a deck I really connected with and found a gilded. after thar, slowly lol, the collecting bug began. also, I started using real tarot books and left the lwbs where they belong, namely shoved in box cartons and drawers and ignored.

Baffling. Could not understand how to read the cards together.

I spent hours on readings because I looked up each meaning but couldn't work out how they fitted into the reading as a whole. They were just a bunch of cards and a jumble of descriptions that meant little to me.

It took me a long time - we're talking well over five years before I actually let go and allowed my intuition to butt in. I think it's when I started doing a lot of readings, including live readings for other people that the cards began to come alive. Using other tarot decks for alternate interpretations also helped.

Let me see, what I felt during my first year of Tarot...?

-First I felt determined as I knew it was something I had to do. I felt impelled to learn as it was a period in my life where I was having some problems that were causing me a lot of pain and I somehow knew that if I mastered Tarot it would help me tremendously (and it did)

-Then terror, LOL. My very first reading the Death card came up. And I did not yet understand the cards. I really thought they were telling me I was going to die. LOL Scared the living heck out of me. It tool me over a week till I had the courage to even touch the cards again or to look in the book to see what the card acutally meant. But eventually I got my courage together and it of course had nothing to do wtih that and the message was actually true.

-Then some confusion. As all the books did not agree on meanings. Also I started wtih the Haindl Tarot, which was Thoth based. I had no idea of that at the time of even what a Thoth was. But the cards did not tend to mesh well with what i was told they were supposed to mean. General confusion.

-Then came determination to find my own way. Having the confusion mentioned above, helped me greatly on my path. I was still determined to learn, but I got to a point where I decided that if the books could not agree then I was going to find my own way, even if I had to invent it myself.

--Then a period of deep experimentation. I read eveyrthing I could get my hands on, took the best of what I read and tried it all. Experimented wtih anything and everything that called to me. Kept what worked, dropped what didn't, invented some new ways to get the cards to do and be what I wanted. And then more experimentation on different ways to combine all the elements I had kept to find the best way to do so.

-In between all this more confusion as I refined the process. I was not too good yet and understandning the card. They did seem to be tryign to tell me something but a lot of times I could not decipher what it was. It was like they were speaking to me in a language that was learning but did not quite understand fully yet. I did keep a journal and save all my readings. The ones that made no sense, I read them over again months later and suddenly then (uwually after the event asked about had already happened) I was able to look back and understand what the cards had been trying to tell me. And that helped me understnad hosw they talk to me and get us speaking the same language.

-LOTS of wonder at the magic of it all. Of the cards and all that surrounds them. I had so many magical experiences that challenged my views on life. How the future works, that we live in a world that wants to tell us the cnaswers to our questions and is capable of doing so if we ask....Pure wonder, some fear when my life views were challenged, but it turned back into wonder and fasicaintion pretty quickly. Even though I had to let some of my old life views go, the new ones were more wonderful and beautiful. The world was more that I had imagined and that was good.

-Only read for myself for the first 6-8 months. I had no plans to do anythign else. But AT friends started asking me to read for them. Some rather insistently, LOL, until I gave in. They were happy with the results and asked for more and I started reading for others more and more.

-Did a reading for a friend and the cards just told me that her angels were protecting her and she could relax and let her worries go. I got that answer to clearly that I was sure. Except that I myeslf did not beleive in angels! But there was the answer I was asked to give her. That floored me. I asked her what she knew on the topic, read lots abotu angels and now they are a big part of my life too and I very much believe in them.

-My fascination with Tarot lead me to read more and more about other spiritual topics. And of course my fascination and skills grew...until I am where I am now.

For me I never did those daily draws or anyting of the sort. I did not try to schedule a set amount of time to learn. I just picked up the cards and worked with them whenever I felt like it. I wanted joy and fun in the learning process, not regimentation. Of course I was so fascinated by them I got a lot of time in with them, I don;t think a day went by when I was not workign about them.

The most important things I learnt? That we live in an intelligent universe that wants to and can answer any questions we ask of it. That we are not alone and we do not HAVE to figure it all out on our own, there is a source that knows the future and can help us decide what to do. That we are connected to this source and to all the universe. That we CAN choose the future we want and create it any way we want and there is not some kind of fate that cannot be avoided (for the most part). That I DO have an intuition and it works (it never did before Tarot and now it does). That the magic is in me and not in the cards. That I MYSELF am a magical being. And that we all are in fact, we just have to learn how to see it and draw it out and use it effectively. We are all totally magical and connected beings.

Babs

what a great thread!

my first year...well i think i scared myself! and i know i scared some others.

my first deck i got at the small bookstore i worked at when i was 16. it was the tarot of the witches, yes, the james bond deck! lol totally non pictoral minors and i spent a good amount of time having to look things up in the little booklet, but the readings were creepy accurate and a few people started looking at me weird. i did acquire the nickname gypsy after that!

i read for friends during that year but it wasn't until i did a reading for a person i'd never met that we both got a bit of a jolt...VERY accurate about things i shouldn't have known about and it creeped her out so much that 12 years later at our friends wedding she STILL wouldn't sit at the same table as me! LOL

littleiris said:

what a great thread!

my first year...well i think i scared myself! and i know i scared some others.

my first deck i got at the small bookstore i worked at when i was 16. it was the tarot of the witches, yes, the james bond deck! lol totally non pictoral minors and i spent a good amount of time having to look things up in the little booklet, but the readings were creepy accurate and a few people started looking at me weird. i did acquire the nickname gypsy after that!

i read for friends during that year but it wasn't until i did a reading for a person i'd never met that we both got a bit of a jolt...VERY accurate about things i shouldn't have known about and it creeped her out so much that 12 years later at our friends wedding she STILL wouldn't sit at the same table as me! LOL

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People do react with fear and it's so sad. It scares so many people that Tarot and divination can work and be accurate. the more accurate the more scary. I've heard the expression "scary accurate" a lot. It's a shame that we are so brought up to beleive that these things are impossible that it scares us when someone prooves our life view wrong. How much better things could be if we were all brought up to expect these things to be a normal part of life and we could all profit from them to forge our best lives.

So sad to me, as to me life with Tarot is so much better. I always thought it is such a great life tool that it ought to literally be taught in school.

Babs

caridwen said:

I spent hours on readings because I looked up each meaning but couldn't work out how they fitted into the reading as a whole. They were just a bunch of cards and a jumble of descriptions that meant little to me.

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It was pretty much like that for me too, I think I posted each and every reading I did, just to see if I was even close to being on the right track. I spent more time searching for tarot sites and meanings and printing those out... ended up with a ton of links that I still use. I would look at every little thing in each card, writing up the possible meanings for each color, each symbol, checking out the astrological and numerological connections and so sure that no matter what I thought it might mean, I was probably missing the real message. It could take hours and hours just to write out all this stuff and by then I'd be so confused and overwhelmed I was sure I'd never "get it"... ever! I was doing a free online tarot course, each week it would send out something to study, so I was trying very hard to memorize and almost fell into the "rote" trap, disregarding my intuition, until I discovered AT and found out it is all about intuition in context. Seems like after about 6 months I started thinking in tarot and didn't have to look up each card, but could read them by what I saw and felt.
Mostly I was impatient to know everything and miss nothing and pretty much over compensated my ignorance with too much and felt like I should have started studying tarot in an earlier lifetime.