MOST people struggle with reading more than one card at a time, but you don’t have to.
When you are just starting out reading tarot cards, it can be difficult to weave multiple cards together into a story. The Three Card Spread tarot reading is a simple way to read multiple cards together.
When you start with a simple three card spread tarot reading, you can easily learn and practice how to find the story that ties all of the cards together. You can watch this short video to learn more, or keep reading below…
In this post, I’m going to show you just HOW to read a three card tarot spread, in a few simple steps.
The 3-Card Tarot Spread is used by tarot beginners and professionals alike. Sure, the 10-card Celtic Cross spread is sexy and seems more “real,” but a simple three card spread tarot reading, can give you all the information you need, no matter what problem you are having.
This blog post is geared toward beginners or anyone who has difficulty reading multiple cards at a time in one spread.
Before we get started, download the updated (and totally free) PDF printable tarot journal page for this spread. It includes eight different interpretations or ways to read the three-card spread and is an incredibly useful tool for your tarot reading. Just enter your email below to download your copy before we go any further:
Awesome! Now, let’s go through a simple 3- card spread, step by step. First shuffle the deck and lay out three cards, face up.
Step One: Pay attention.
Notice what types of cards you see, and how they make you feel. Are there more than one of a suit or multiple court cards? Are they all Major Arcana? Do you get an instant understanding of the story or how the cards flow together?
Step Two: Tell a story, with a beginning, middle, and end.
You can interpret the cards in multiple ways, but it helps to think like a storyteller. When THIS happened, this was the RESULT, and now I need to DO this other thing.
The simple Past-Present-Future reading is an easy example of this and works well in all situations.
Step Three: Find the thread of the story that ties all of the cards together.
Sometimes this is obvious, and sometimes it’s more of an intuitive feeling. When you look at the three cards together, the thread might be an event that happened, a relationship you have, or an emotion that ties everything together. Find what the three cards have in common – and use your intuition, not just your logic brain.
Step Four: Trust yourself.
Tarot is a gateway into your subconscious. Even though you don’t fully understand the story or the tarot reading from an intellectual or logical space, if it “feels” right, then trust yourself that you’ve read the cards right. You may just need more time and perspective to see how everything plays out.
It’s very useful to record your tarot readings in a tarot journal or notebook. When you review them weeks or months later, you can often find the thread that you missed earlier, just with a little perspective and hindsight.
Wrapping it all up
That wasn’t so hard, was it? Just follow these four simple steps every time you read your three card spread, and remember to stay positive, treat practice as play, and enjoy the process of learning to read your cards with confidence.
The Three-Card tarot spread, along with many many other tarot spreads and topics are covered in my Tarot 101 course, which is a perfect way for tarot beginners to learn how to read the cards.