#squaredogs

Honestly? I just did it. I had a tarot reading, thought it was neat, went and bought my first deck with a guidebook. I still use the guidebooks that come with decks, because I think the author’s intent influences the deck and the meaning of the cards, and also because I rely very heavily on my intuition, and sometimes words will jump out at me when I’m reading the meaning. If a deck doesn’t have a specific guidebook, I’ll usually reference BiddyTarot online to make sure I’m not misremembering the meaning of a card.

I also paid attention when other people did tarot readings, what they paid attention to, what they ignored, whether they interpreted reverse cards and HOW, etc. The two best pieces of advice that I picked up this way were to incorporate the deck art into your reading, and to make sure to look at the reading as a whole instead of just individual cards. Are there any suits that are overrepresented? Is it mostly major or minor arcana? Is there a certain theme that keeps coming up across multiple cards? Etc.

So my best advice is to go find a deck you like and start practicing! I started on a project once that was to go through the whole deck/guidebook and take notes on each card, etc., but honestly that was boring. So I just look up cards as they come up in readings, and some of them I know very well by now because they tend to come up for me (...Five of Pentacles, could you STOP), and some of them I don’t know because they rarely come up for me at all so I have to rely really heavily on the guides.