How to Trust Your Intuition in Tarot Readings (and Stop Second-Guessing Yourself)
- Suzanne Butler
- Sep 3
- 11 min read
You lay the cards out on the table, and for a moment, everything holds still. The images look back at you, layered with symbols you’ve studied, stories you’ve absorbed, meanings you’ve memorised. And yet—beneath all of that—something else flickers. A sense. A tug. A quiet knowing that doesn’t quite fit into words.
It’s subtle, and it passes quickly. Because almost as soon as it rises, the second-guessing begins. You start scanning the cards for what they’re “supposed” to mean. You remind yourself of the book definitions. You notice the reversals and brace yourself. Before long, you’re no longer in the reading—you’re in your head, trying to figure out whether you’re doing it right.
This is the place so many readers stumble. Not because they lack knowledge, but because they don’t trust the part of themselves that’s trying to speak. The part that knows the spread is not a checklist of upright and reversed definitions, but a conversation. A living picture. Something that unfolds in relationship with you, not outside of you.
The challenge is that doubt feels safer. Doubt tells you there must be an official meaning somewhere, and if you can just get it right, you’ll be secure. But tarot doesn’t ask for security. It asks for presence. It asks you to look at the whole story in front of you and let yourself feel what’s stirring.
I learned this again recently in a personal reading. The cards on the table looked, on the surface, like a warning. Multiple Pentacles, most of them reversed. Enough to send anyone into a spiral about financial collapse. But the rest of the spread—The Empress in the present, The Star reversed in the near future—pulled me in a different direction. When I slowed down and listened to what my body was telling me, I realised the reading wasn’t about money at all. It was about health. Energy. The quiet ways I’d been draining myself and ignoring the signals.
If I’d clung to the obvious interpretation, I would have left that reading anxious, convinced something terrible was looming. Instead, I walked away with clarity about what needed care in my life right now. And that clarity didn’t come from the guidebook—it came from listening to myself.
That’s what this practice is about. Not memorising every possible meaning, but learning to trust the moment of recognition when it arrives. The place where the spread stops being theory and starts being truth.
Where the Doubt Comes From
Most people don’t start out trusting themselves. We’re taught from an early age to look outward for authority—for the right answer, the approved method, the expert’s stamp of approval. That conditioning runs deep. So when you sit with a tarot spread and feel something rise in you that doesn’t match the book meaning, the instinct is often to dismiss it.
Second-guessing doesn’t arrive as a thunderclap. It shows up in small, familiar ways:
A subtle tightening in the chest when you notice a reversal.
The urge to Google the spread before you’ve even given yourself space to breathe into it.
The voice that tells you you’re projecting, that you’re making it up, that someone else could read this better.
None of that means you’re failing as a reader. It means you’ve been trained to value outer authority over inner recognition.
Tarot complicates this because the cards do have shared meanings. They’re archetypal, they carry centuries of symbolism, they live in a collective language that’s bigger than any one of us. It’s natural to want to “get it right.” But the paradox is that a spread only becomes alive when you let those archetypes speak through your own lens, in your own timing, in the context of your own life.
That’s where people hesitate. Because listening to yourself feels uncertain. You can’t prove it. You can’t fact-check it. You can only sit in that hum of recognition and trust that the resonance you feel is enough.
And doubt loves to rush in there. It loves to fill that space with “what if I’m wrong?” Because being wrong feels risky. It feels like exposure. It feels like not being in control.
But here’s the thing—tarot isn’t an exam. There’s no grader at the end of the table marking you down for misinterpreting a reversal. The only question is whether the reading brought you closer to yourself, or further away. Whether it clarified something real, or muddied it. Whether it left you with resonance, or with a story that sent you spiraling.
That’s the difference. And that’s why learning to trust your own interpretation isn’t about dismissing doubt completely—it’s about recognising it for what it is. A reflex. A leftover survival strategy. A habit you can thank, and then set aside.
When you do, what’s left is much quieter. But also much truer.
An Example From the Table
Not long ago, I sat with my deck for a check-in reading. Nothing dramatic, just that quiet tug that said it was time to see what was moving beneath the surface.
The cards that landed were heavy with Pentacles. Three in total, two of them reversed. And in the long-term position, yet another reversed Pentacle.
If I’d stuck with the traditional meanings, I would have told myself a story of financial strain. Reversed Pentacles often point to instability with resources, scarcity thinking, poor investments. Combine them in a spread, and the obvious conclusion writes itself: trouble with money ahead.
That could have been enough to send me spiraling. I’d have walked away tense, scanning my accounts, replaying every choice, waiting for the other shoe to drop. And if I had done that, the reading would have become a source of fear rather than clarity.
But the other cards on the table wouldn’t let me stop there. In the present position sat The Empress—lush, embodied, deeply connected to nourishment. The short-term future showed The Star reversed—not hopelessness, but fatigue. A dimming of light, a body in need of restoration.
Taken together, the message shifted. Those Pentacles weren’t pointing at my bank account. They were pointing at my energy. My health. The quiet depletion I’d been ignoring while pushing forward. The Empress was asking me to tend to my body. The Star reversed was showing how stretched I’d become. And the Pentacles, instead of warning of financial collapse, were describing the slow leak of vitality that happens when you forget to ground and care for yourself.
The spread only came alive when I let myself read it that way—through my own experience, my own body, my own intuition. The guidebook would have left me anxious. My listening left me supported.
That reading didn’t predict an outside event. It reflected my inner state. And in doing so, it gave me a path forward: rest, recalibration, nourishment.
That’s what trusting yourself in a reading feels like. The difference between panic and presence. Between spiraling and clarity. Between a generic answer and a message that is undeniably yours.
Knowing When You’ve Landed
Every reader wants to know if they’ve “got it right.” But tarot isn’t a test with an answer key. It’s a conversation. And conversations aren’t measured by accuracy—they’re measured by connection.
So how do you know when your interpretation is in alignment? You feel it.
It shows up in the body first. A loosening of the chest. A breath you didn’t realise you were holding. Sometimes it’s a tingling, or a wave of warmth, or simply the sense that the noise has quieted. You stop scanning the cards for what you might have missed, because nothing feels missing.
It shows up in the mind too, but differently than doubt. Doubt scrambles and loops. Alignment settles. The story doesn’t need to be rehearsed or over-explained—it makes sense the moment it’s named. Even if it’s a hard truth, it carries clarity instead of confusion.
It also shows up in the way the reading stays with you. The interpretations pulled from fear tend to fade quickly, or gnaw at you in ways that feel hollow. But the interpretations born of intuition carry resonance. They echo through your day. They nudge you gently toward action. They feel less like warnings and more like invitations.
And sometimes, the simplest sign you’ve landed is this: the reading feels like it’s speaking with you, not at you.
When the spread mirrors something alive in you—something that clicks into place even if it isn’t comfortable—you don’t need to double-check. You already know.
A Simple Way to Test Your Intuition
One of the challenges in trusting yourself is that intuition doesn’t shout. It whispers. Which makes it easy to confuse with wishful thinking, fear, or the leftover noise of a dozen tarot books swirling around in your head.
Here’s a simple way to begin recognising what your intuition actually feels like in your body. I use this all the time—it’s become a touchstone for me when I start to doubt.
Start with something you already know is true. For me, I go to “I love…” and then name something that I love deeply, with no hesitation in my heart. It could be a person, a place, a memory, even a food. As soon as I say it, I notice how it feels in my body. There’s a kind of rightness there—steady, warm, clear.
Then I try the opposite. I say “I love…” and follow it with something I don’t actually love. Maybe even something I actively dislike, or something I feel completely neutral about. And I notice again. This time the feeling is different—flat, unconvincing, sometimes even tight or uncomfortable.
The contrast is the point. One feels aligned. The other doesn’t.
When I’m reading for myself and I’m unsure if what I’m hearing is intuition or overthinking, I bring that same awareness to the spread. I sit with the interpretation and ask: does this carry the feeling of truth, the same way my “I love” statement does? Or does it feel off—like I’m trying to talk myself into something I don’t quite believe?
It’s not foolproof, and it doesn’t replace discernment. But it gives you a baseline. A way to tune in to what your body already knows.
Over time, this practice builds trust. You learn to recognise that subtle hum of rightness, even when the message of the cards isn’t easy. And you learn to spot the slippery, not-quite-honest feeling that often comes from fear or projection.
That’s the difference between second-guessing and intuition. One ties you in knots. The other grounds you in clarity, however quiet it may be.
Reading the Cards as a Whole (and Making Peace With Reversals)
One of the easiest ways to get tangled in doubt is by reading each card in isolation. You flip the first card, your mind latches onto a key word, and before you’ve even laid out the rest of the spread, you’ve built a story that might not belong to the reading at all.
Tarot was never meant to be read like a dictionary. A spread is a living picture. Every card is speaking in relation to the others—echoing, contradicting, softening, amplifying. If you stop at one meaning, you miss the conversation.
Take reversals. For many readers, a reversed card triggers instant anxiety. Does it mean the opposite of upright? Does it mean blockage? Delay? Something bad? It can mean any of those things, but it always depends on where it lands and what surrounds it.
A reversed Star, on its own, might feel like hope dimming. But paired with The Empress and reversed Pentacles, it paints a different picture. Not lost hope, but exhaustion. A call to step back and tend the body, so that hope can be renewed.
The same card, in another spread, might carry an entirely different weight. That’s the beauty of reading together—you don’t force the card into a single meaning. You let it play its role in the larger story.
Reversals often point to subtlety rather than catastrophe. They show where energy is leaking, where something is inward rather than outward, where attention is needed. But you’ll only feel that nuance if you let the whole spread speak at once, instead of interrogating each card in isolation.
When you read this way, the edges soften. Doubt doesn’t get as loud. You’re not trapped trying to decide if one card is “good” or “bad.” You’re listening to the way they weave together—and that weaving always carries more truth than any one card on its own.
Between Fear and Expectation
Every tarot reader knows the feeling: pulling a card and instantly overlaying it with what you’re most afraid of, or what you most want to hear. It happens quickly, almost before you realise you’ve done it.
Fear has a way of bending our perception. A few reversed Pentacles can suddenly look like financial ruin. A Tower card can feel like your whole life is about to collapse. When fear steps in, the reading narrows. It stops being about the full story and collapses into a single anxious interpretation.
Expectation does something similar, only dressed up in lighter colours. You pull The Lovers and your mind races to romance. You see The Star and think of guaranteed success. You want the cards to tell you what you’re already longing for, and so you bend them into that shape.
Both fear and expectation blur intuition. They speak loudly, while your quieter knowing waits patiently underneath.
The way through isn’t to banish either one—fear and longing are part of being human. The way through is to notice when they’re colouring your reading. To pause and ask, Am I seeing the card, or am I seeing my hope or my fear reflected in it?
When you recognise the filter, you can set it aside, even briefly. You can ask the spread to speak again, this time without the noise. You can lean into that subtle hum of rightness you discovered in your intuition exercise—the one that tells you when something truly lands.
And here’s the gift: when you move past fear and expectation, the cards almost always offer something more useful. Maybe not what you wanted, but what you needed. Maybe not what you dreaded, but what you’re ready to see.
Closing Reflections: Reading With Trust
At some point in every reading, you’re faced with a choice. Do you stay in the head—flipping through remembered definitions, running scenarios, spiraling into “what ifs”? Or do you sink into the body, into that subtle hum that says, this feels true?
Tarot was never meant to be a rigid code to crack. It’s a mirror, a dialogue, a way of seeing yourself more fully. And like any good conversation, it comes alive when you stop trying to get it perfect and start showing up honestly.
The Empress, The Star reversed, those Pentacles—all of them shifted the moment I listened inward. They weren’t a financial forecast. They were a reminder to rest, to nourish, to restore what had been drained. The wisdom wasn’t in the definitions. It was in my willingness to trust the story that was already moving through me.
That same trust is available in every spread. You can feel for it with the simplest of exercises: name what you love, feel the resonance in your body, then notice the difference when you say something untrue. That contrast is the compass you carry into your readings.
From there, the work is practice. Reading the cards as a whole, letting reversals be part of the conversation, noticing when fear or expectation are clouding your view. The more you return to that presence, the more natural it becomes.
Doubt will still visit. That’s what doubt does. But it doesn’t get to steer the reading anymore. It becomes background noise, something you nod to and then set aside, while you lean toward the truth that resonates deeper than words.
That truth is yours. It won’t always be comfortable. It won’t always be obvious. But it will always bring you closer to yourself.
And at the end of the day, that’s what it means to read a reading right—not by memorising every possibility, not by outsmarting the cards, but by being willing to listen to the quiet voice that says: Here. This is what matters now.
Ready to go deeper into healing and intentional growth through tarot? Explore The Healing Journey, our step-by-step guided experience for transformation.
Liked this piece? Follow me for more soulful tarot reflections, healing frameworks, and tools for intuitive growth. Or visit www.the-healing-tarot.com to explore our courses and offerings.
Comments