How do you relate to your wildness? The Chariot tarot card can teach us how to honor the wild parts of ourselves and release grasping onto maladaptive ways of being.

The Chariot tarot card usually shows someone at the reins of a chariot, driving forward. In the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the chariot is depicted as being drawn by a black and a white sphinx, facing in opposite directions. In some more modern cards, they are horses that are pulling the chariot, one dark and one light, in opposite directions. The charioteer often looks calm despite the opposing directions of the beings in front of him.

The Four of Swords tarot card usually shows someone lying on a bed (or something that looks like a coffin) with three swords hanging above their head and another lying beneath them. In the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the person’s hands are pressed together in prayer, and a stained-glass window is depicted on the wall, representing a sort of spiritual sanctuary. The person looks as peaceful as can be, considering they are lying on a coffin with three swords hanging over their head.

Swords cards tend to be the most difficult cards the tarot to sit with. They often depict scenes of heartbreak, struggle, and loss. This is because Swords represent intellectual energy, which is truly like a double-edged sword: Clear thinking can help us discern between reality and illusion, while muddled thought can make us believe terrible untruths about ourselves and the world.

When the Queen of Wands presents herself in a tarot reading, she brings lessons about personal power, sovereignty, and the power of being a lion in cat’s clothing.

The Queen of Wands is generally depicted in the tarot as a beautiful woman, comfortable on her throne, holding a staff (or wand) and a sunflower. Lions adorn her throne and a black cat sits at her feet. This queen seems confident, independent, and intuitive, but what is the spiritual meaning of the Queen of Wands?

The Tower tarot card is one of the least-loved cards in the deck, but it offers powerful wisdom about big life changes. What’s the spiritual meaning of the Tower tarot card?

The Tower tarot card can be a little scary—maybe even scarier than the notorious Death card. It usually shows some version of a burning tower, with people jumping out of it to get away from the flames. It symbolizes something like the Tower of Babel, a story from the Bible about a time when humans were building a tower high enough to reach into the sky. God didn’t like this, so he scrambled the human’s languages and dispersed them across the earth, making it impossible for them to communicate well enough to continue building the tower.

How are you breaking your own heart? The Three of Swords tarot card asks us to look into what is causing us pain.

The Three of Swords tarot card is somewhat dreaded—perhaps even more so than the heavy-hitting major arcana cards of Death or the Tower. It’s often called the Heartbreak Card, and it shows three swords piercing a bleeding heart—ouch.

Look at its placement in your reading, however: If it sits in your past or present position, it may represent shifting out of a phase of heartbreak. It may also be asking you to look at how a previous heartbreak is informing your current situation.

What is holding you in chains? The Devil card may appear scary at first, but it has deep lessons for those who will listen.

The Devil tarot card often shows a classic Devil figure with horns, wings, and the legs of a goat, with two naked figures standing at his feet, held loosely in chains. The image in the traditional Rider Waite Smith deck is a clear inversion of the Lovers card, which depicts two naked figures standing at the feet of an angel who, on that card, is offering a blessing.

The naked figures standing with the Devil are often shown as demons with tails and horns themselves, seemingly unbothered by their tethered reality. It appears that they could remove the chains at any moment, but they do not: One of the classic illusions of the Devil card is that that is the only reality that exists.

The Five of Cups instructs us to explore our relationship to trauma and how we process. Learn more about the spiritual meaning of this tarot card.

The Five of Cups tarot card usually shows a cloaked figure looking down at three cups that have been spilled. Two cups remain upright just behind this person where they can’t be seen. In the distance is a bridge across water, some faraway land that must be crossed.

Who sits between you and God? Learn more about the meaning of this masculine major arcana card.

The Hierophant tarot card generally depicts an imposing masculine figure sitting between two pillars, clad in three robes of different colors with a triple-pointed crown on his head. One hand is held up in a gesture of teaching or speaking, two fingers pointed to the sky, and the other hand holds a scepter. Two people sit below him listening, rapt, to his sermon.

I’ve been in a complex dance with hope over the last couple of years, and I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to expect and plan for the worst. I keep hope very, very close to my heart and certainly don’t engage with it joyfully. This helps me feel safer from a negative outcome. It helps me feel like I’ll avoid the embarrassment of finding out I shouldn’t have hoped. 

The Empress tarot card holds rich symbolism and is connected to two important goddesses. Learn what lessons we can glean from this powerfully feminine tarot card.

The Empress tarot card shows a beautiful woman, usually dressed in a flowing garment, covered with pomegranates (a fruit related to sexuality and fertility) with the symbol of Venus on a heart near her feet. She’s often shown in a lush environment, with wheat growing beneath her. Sometimes she is shown as a pregnant woman.

The major themes of the Empress tarot card include fertility, abundance, and feminine power. The Empress is an appropriate symbol for the springtime, when the world begins to come back to life after the dying time of winter. Mythologically, she relates to two other goddesses of the cycle of life and springtime.

The goddess Brigid—widely celebrated on February 1st—and the Star tarot card have much in common. Explore how these two figures represent resilience after collapse.

The Star tarot card is a beautiful, calm, and hopeful image. In the classic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, the card shows a naked woman kneeling by a body of water, surrounded by lush green rolling hills, with one large star and several smaller stars shining above her. She is typically holding two jugs of water, pouring one onto the ground and the other back into the water.

When the Death Tarot card appears, the Death Light is upon us. This is the knowing that comes when we face the inevitable aspect of life that is death and endings. A lot of people fear this card, but it need not be taken literally. Its messages, however, are very important to pay attention to.

In traditional images of this tarot card, a skeletal figure in knight’s armor rides his white horse at sunrise. People kneel and drop at his feet, asking to be spared. The mythological figure of Death appears in many ancient traditions, here most recognizable as the Grim Reaper, who carries both a scythe to sever the soul from life and an hourglass to indicate that one’s time has come. As feared as he is, however, the Grim Reaper is not evil. His work is to safely carry the soul from its body to the afterlife. Sometimes Death is interpreted as an angel.

The Hanged Man tarot card depicts a figure hanging upside down from one foot, usually by a tree or some sort of wooden cross. Despite the explicitly uncomfortable position, the figure often looks peaceful and at rest, sometimes even with a halo around their head. The general interpretation of this card is to rest within chaos, confusion, or uncertainty. To allow yourself to learn from being stuck somewhere you never wanted to be.

The last card is the Star, which is an energy of hope, especially after a difficult period. It’s the energy of early spring, which is when the first flowers start to break through the melting snow and frozen earth. In this image, this woman is surrounded by chaos but calm, at one with it. One of the students in the class pointed out the bird holding a flower resting on her hand, which calls to mind the myth of Noah’s Ark. After God flooded the earth, everything was gone but Noah’s family and his menagerie of animals, floating in an ark on an ocean of nothing for over a year. Noah sent out a raven who didn’t come back, then a dove, then another, until one finally came back with an olive branch, indicating that their long wandering was finally coming to an end.

I’m having one of those weeks that I know many of you have had (or are having right now), where, due to no choice of my own, I’m hanging out in the Upside Down. It’s not my first time here, and I know by now that struggling and fighting it isn’t going to get me out of the tree any faster. I know I have to surrender to it. To breathe through my feelings. To trust that I won’t be stuck here forever. Even if I really don’t want to do any of that.

When the Moon tarot card comes up (especially in the Dreamkeeper’s deck, above), I am also called to ask about grief. For me, this image is about waiting, about being in that twilight place in a long embrace with the past. What losses have I not fully processed? If I allow myself to change in the ways that I really want to, in the ways that I am really excited about, what will I have to let go of?

Of course, it can be helpful to have some familiarity with the cards, especially the major arcana and the underlying meaning of the suits and the numbers, and there is plenty of information out there on these meanings. But no particular card explanation will be as important as how you feel when you select a card from the deck and take some time to contemplate it.

I first learned about the term process-focused or process-oriented Tarot reading from Jessica Dore, a Tarot reader and teacher whose first book, Tarot for Change, just hit the shelves. Her approach is so much more intuitive than I had often seen when I was trying to leaf through guidebooks and memorize the meaning of each card. She offers Tarot the way I had already been reading it: by observing the images of each card and noticing what comes up.