One card a day: keeping a tarot journal

If you want to start practising without looking up lots of meanings at once, try a daily card.

One card a day.

Draw it in the morning and don't open the book yet. Look at the picture and write down the first thing you notice. A colour is fine; a gesture is fine.

Then look up the meaning. Compare what you saw with what the book says: what's the same, what's different?

In the evening, think about whether anything today matched the card. If nothing did, write that down too. Don't force it.

The journal only needs three boxes

• Today's card: the card name, upright or reversed.
• What I saw: the first detail I noticed in the picture.
• Evening review: did anything today match?

The Eight of Pentacles is often used to talk about repeated practice. But your notes don't need to be long every day. A single line, "couldn't see a connection today", is worth keeping too.

Mary K. Greer's Tarot for Your Self is full of exercises like this and puts a lot of weight on writing things down. When the same card comes up again, you can turn back to the last entry and compare why you read it differently.

If you don't feel like getting your cards out, use the daily card, which remembers what you drew over the last 14 days.

Common questions