When I found a guide to using playing cards for fortune-telling at a library book sale, I thought I might learn a fun party trick. The things I could figure out using a dollar-store poker deck, wildly exceeded my expectations, though! Over time, certain combinations of cards began to remind me of other readings where I’d seen the same cards before. As these patterns and connections began to fall into place, readings started to feel downright magical.

Then I grew up.

I had just started my career as an English teacher when I became a mom. There wasn’t much time for card readings, but the Tarot deck collecting dust on my bookshelf still called to me. Every so often I would pull out the cards and flip through them one at a time, carefully studying their explanations in the little white booklet. I tried memorizing keywords like it was a huge vocabulary test, which was an uphill battle.

After a while the card meanings began to feel familiar, but I still struggled to put them together into readings. I realized that there had to be something more to this than just memorizing what each card “means,” because that little white book couldn’t tell me how it all was supposed to come together. Being able to talk about every card’s symbols is not the same thing as giving a meaningful reading.

This was the breakthrough that changed everything. I realized that the strategies I taught 8th graders could make me a more confident reader, too! As soon as I started to think of Tarot cards as “texts” to be read, I was finally able to connect with their symbols. A spread of Tarot cards became a story waiting to be told instead of a secret code that needed to be cracked.

I doubled down on my own learning.

I wanted to do research and improve public education, so I went back to school. This journey got me thinking about how people take ideas from a classroom and apply them in real life. I was surprised to discover that intuition plays an important role in learning. Humans create mental models that help us understand the world we live in, and these are what make “gut feelings” possible. Intuition is a fast-thinking system that uses this network of meaning to find patterns in and arrive at a solution faster than the speed of conscious thought. Symbols that activate this process can include oracle cards, tiles, objects, and yes… even Pokemon cards.

As it turned out, the process I used to learn to read Tarot cards was not just a “Zoe thing” after all. In fact, my experiences learning Tarot were consistent with decades of research findings about how humans learn. While we all have different learning styles and preferences, there is a single framework that anyone can use to learn how to read Tarot cards.

We constantly improve these models by learning and experiencing new things. Exploring these connections to explain why an image surprises or moves us is how we make meaning. It does not matter whether someone is educated or “spiritual,” because we already do this every day.