Meditating on Tarot in With New Year Energy

Meditating on Tarot With New Year Energy

On the one hand, a new year is just another day. On the other, it allows for a clean demarcation of new and exciting habits. I have many things I’d like to introduce into my daily rituals this year, and am eager to see how they shape my life. This includes making more room for tarot.

Perhaps you’ve been gifted a tarot deck for Christmas, and aren’t sure what to do with it. Maybe you’ve had a tarot deck for years and just haven’t spent time with it. Or, perhaps you have a daily practice and aren’t sure how to change it up. All of these situations bring that New Year Energy!

Here are some things that came up when I meditated on bringing that New Year Energy to the tarot.

Keeping a Tarot Journal

Hands down the biggest thing anyone can do for a tarot journey is to keep a tarot journal.

Mine includes everything from card meanings to layouts, to just general thoughts and meditations on the cards. The more that I work with a card and see into its meanings more, I can add it to my own personal little book. As you can see from these pages, my journal is getting a bit on the full side, so part of my journey this year will be to expand its space.

There are other journaling exercises you can do for tarot, it doesn’t just have to be about individual cards and their meanings! If a card is troublesome, free-writing from a person’s perspective in the card could give more insight. If a card delights, maybe it’s a good time to write a poem or haiku that captures it. I’ve read about tarot readers using their tarot journals for everything from free verse to long-form fiction about the cards.

A tarot journal is a wonderful way to give tarot literal space in your life, and can help you track your progress on your journey with the cards.

Daily Practice

One of the most fulfilling things I’ve done in my relationship with tarot was to introduce a daily practice and deepen that practice over time. Such things start simple — a daily card pull and a quick look up in the little white book (LWB) that came with the deck will suffice.

When I wanted more knowledge of tarot than a single LWB would offer, I started to spend more and more time with each card. I’d contemplate each symbol held within it and how it would relate to the rest of the deck. I thought about what those symbols meant for me. I considered what the card might mean for the Fool’s Journey, as well as for my own. I thought about what energies that card symbolized, what the people in the card might have been through, and what moments portrayed in the card ‘felt like’ in the stories I loved to hear as well as in my own life.

A New Year Tarot Spread (or a few!)

There are so many amazing tarot spreads out there for the New Year. When I was a tarot baby, I used a card a month, spreading out 12 cards to look at what the new year would bring. The Little Red Tarot page gives a wonderful New Year spread , though I enjoy using standard spreads like their Bridge Spread to contemplate the year as a whole. Labyrinthos recommends this eight card spread. There are so many out there to choose and learn from!

Regardless of which spread you pick, doing this spread is a great way to figure out what you’re looking for in your tarot journal as well! Use it to guide you to determine what elements you want to capture about the reading, so that you can refer to it throughout the year!

Interview Your Deck

Deck interviews are often performed when a deck is first acquired, and I talked about the deck interview that I did with my new Five Cent Tarot . The New Year is also a great time to interview your decks!

Because the interview spread is aimed at giving clarity on what the deck can teach and what you can learn — the same sort of spread is a great way to contemplate how to integrate your tarot reading into your daily life as well. What are the strengths with that deck? What are you looking to learn from it? What’s the potential?

A new year is a great time to re-asses and re-evaluate all of these ideas!