How to do a tarot reading on yourself

Can you read tarot for yourself?

Yes. No book on reading tarot forbids it, and many readers draw a card for themselves every day. Reading for yourself is also the fastest way to learn, because you know the situation behind the question better than anyone.

You may have heard that reading for yourself brings bad luck or that a deck has to be a gift. These are superstitions passed between readers, not rules of tarot.

The real difficulty is closeness. When you read for someone else, you have no stake in the outcome. When you read for yourself, you often do.

The catch: you already know what you hope to see

A card has several layers of meaning, and a hopeful mind picks the one it likes. A Tower drawn about a job you want to leave reads as “finally, a change”; the same Tower about a relationship you want to keep reads as “just a passing storm”.

You will not get rid of this bias, but you can catch it. The trick is to put your expectation on paper before you see the card, so that afterwards you can compare what you hoped for with what the card actually says.

Before you draw: write down the question and your expectation

Write the question in one sentence, as an open question about your part in the situation. Then write one more line: what you expect, or hope, the cards will say. It takes a minute and changes how you read.

After the draw, read the card’s traditional meaning first, then its position, and only then your own associations. If your interpretation lands exactly on what you wrote in advance, look again at the parts of the card you skipped.

One reading per question

Drawing again because you did not like the answer turns the reading into a lottery: sooner or later a card will agree with you, and it will mean nothing. Keep the first reading and work with it.

A new reading is fair when something has really changed: you have new information, you made a decision, or a set time has passed, such as a week after a reading about the week ahead. It is also fair when you ask a different question, not the same one in other words.

Two worked examples

First example. The question: “What would help me decide about the evening course?” The written expectation: “I hope it tells me to sign up.” The card: Eight of Pentacles, upright, a craftsman working carefully at his bench. It is tempting to read it as “yes, study”. But the card is about patient, repeated work, so the honest reading is a question back: are you ready to put in the regular hours this course takes? That is something to check against your calendar, not your hopes.

Second example. The question: “Why do I keep putting off the conversation with my sister?” The written expectation: “Because she always gets defensive.” The card: Two of Swords, a blindfolded woman holding two crossed swords. The card points not at the sister but at the person asking: a stalemate kept up by not looking. The note written in advance makes this easy to see, because the expectation was about her and the card is about you.

Keep a record

Self-readings become useful when you can look back at them. Write down the date, the question, your expectation, the cards and what you made of them, and add a line a few weeks later about what actually happened.

On Taromi, the reading journal does this for you, but it needs an account: create a free account and every reading stays in your journal. Without an account, a paper notebook works just as well.