Please start small. Newbie readers confuse themselves starting out with spreads like the Celtic Cross (see right) which contain ten or twelve cards and that will just mess with your head. The Celtic Cross is very pretty, but it isn't always practical--not for a beginner anyway. In my experience, the fewer cards you draw per question the better. Now, not all tarot readers agree with this and many of them can use very complicated spreads to great effect. Yea for them and for you if you turn out to be one of those readers! I am not one of these readers.
My favorite spread is the Post-It Spread which uses the fewest cards per question or per aspect of a question. I will explain this further in a bit.
To start reading, you will need a tarot question. Let me use a question I hear too often. "When will I meet my soul mate?"
I am not one of those tarot readers who can predict time with the tarot. It's not my gift. It can be done, you can experiment with it for yourself to see if the tarot will help you in that department. When I was working with timing in a tarot reading, I preferred to ascribe Cups to days, Wands to weeks, Coins/Pentacles to months, Swords to a year and Majors to unknown/undecided block of time. For time, it's best to ask "when" and draw one card for the answer trusting that the ONE card will tell you "when." But since experimenting with predicting time frames has not gone well for me, I don't attempt to do them anymore and perhaps you should consult another resource on the matter.
Instead of allowing my Questioner to ask "when" she'll meet her soul mate, I ask the tarot what she can do to make herself more attractive to the kind of partner she is seeking.
Let's say I've drawn the Three of Cups in answer to the question. This card would lead me to tell the Questioner to stop worrying so much and to, instead, start celebrating the love that is
already in her life. The card suggests to me that the very fact that her happiness has become dependent on finding a partner is what is making her unhappy and this unhappiness, in turn, makes her less attractive to a potential mate. After all, what's more attractive? A happy person or a desperate one? At this point I will also ask the tarot what is blocking her from finding a soul mate. This can be a very revealing question.
So my Questioner is not going to be very happy with me at this point, she just wants to know her future. She doesn't want to WORK at it. But I much prefer to do a reading that empowers the questioner by taking their future out of the hands of fate and helping them to see that they are the ones who manifest their destiny.
