Tarot often carries a reputation for prediction or fortune-telling, but at its heart, it’s much more than that. For those who practice it, tarot is a tool for reflection, insight, and connection to your own intuition. It helps you slow down, process emotions, and gain clarity on the patterns and desires already present within you.
What’s fascinating is that modern science is beginning to uncover why tarot works – not just spiritually or symbolically, but neurologically. The cards engage your brain, your nervous system, and your subconscious in ways that support emotional processing, insight, and self-awareness.
In this post, we’ll explore what tarot is, how it functions in the brain, and the ways its rituals support clarity and emotional balance.
What is Tarot?
Tarot is a symbolic language. Each card holds archetypal images and meanings that can resonate with what’s happening internally. When you pull a card, it doesn’t predict a fixed future. Instead, it reflects aspects of your thoughts, emotions, or circumstances that may be ready to be acknowledged.
Tarot acts as a mirror for your inner world. By projecting onto the cards, you give shape to feelings and patterns that might otherwise stay unconscious. This is why tarot can feel so accurate – your mind is revealing what’s already there.
The Neuroscience Behind of Tarot
Recent research is beginning to explain why tarot works, in ways that validate what practitioners have long experienced. Let’s break it down.
1. Intuition Has a Neurological Signature
When you feel drawn to a particular card, it’s for a good reason! Your orbitofrontal cortex processes intuitive information in milliseconds – faster than conscious thought. That instant pull toward a card has a measurable neurological footprint, reflecting your brain’s ability to access knowledge and feelings that exist below conscious awareness.
2. Tarot Functions Through Projection
Psychologists recognize projection as a key way to understand the mind. Tarot works similarly to tools like Rorschach tests, allowing your unconscious material to surface. By engaging with symbols, you reveal your inner truths and emotions in a safe and structured way.
3. Pattern Recognition Activates Creative Brain Networks
The process of drawing and interpreting cards relies on pattern recognition, which activates your right hemisphere’s diffuse semantic networks. These networks are behind creativity, prophecy, and insight. When a card’s meaning “clicks,” your brain makes connections between emotions, memories, and symbolic imagery, often resulting in moments of clarity or new perspective.
4. Dopamine Enhances Memory and Insight
When a card resonates deeply, your nucleus accumbens floods with dopamine, while your hippocampus reorganizes memories. Research from Duke University shows that insights processed this way are remembered twice as well as insights gained through logical analysis alone.
5. Ritual Reduces Anxiety and Supports Emotional Regulation
The act of performing a tarot ritual – shuffling, spreading, and reflecting on cards – signals to your nervous system that it’s safe to slow down. Studies on ritual and meditation show that focused, repeated actions can reduce anxiety and even physically thicken the cortex and enlarge the hippocampus.
The Ritual of Tarot
Tarot also engages the autonomic nervous system, helping regulate emotions and support clarity.
1. Slowing Down Creates Safety
When we slow down to reflect, the body receives cues that it’s safe enough to process emotions. This helps the nervous system shift into a ventral vagal state which is associated with calm, connection, and receptivity.
2. Naming Emotions Helps Process Them
Tarot allows you to put feelings into words and symbols. By engaging with these images and reflecting on them, emotions that might feel chaotic or overwhelming can become structured, understandable, and manageable.
3. Gaining Clarity During Transitions
Whether you’re making a major life decision or navigating uncertainty, tarot provides a reflective space. By externalizing your thoughts and emotions onto the cards, you can see situations from new perspectives, making it easier to choose intentional action rather than react out of habit or fear.
Supporting Healing and Insight with Clients
When used in a coaching or therapeutic context, tarot can be a powerful tool for personal growth and empowerment. Benefits I’ve seen in my own practice include:
Short-Term Benefits
- Clients feel uplifted, hopeful, and seen
- Emotions become clearer and easier to process
- Perspectives on situations shift, creating clarity and choice
Long-Term Benefits
- Stronger intuition
- Better boundaries and self-trust
- Comfort with uncertainty
- Deeper connection to personal desires and values
Why Tarot Helps Us Trust Ourselves
At its core, tarot is a tool for self-reflection and insight. It encourages us to slow down, listen, and engage with our internal guidance. Over time, this practice can strengthen intuition, clarify values, and make uncertainty feel more navigable.
It works because it blends symbolic imagery, neuroscience, and ritual to engage the mind, nervous system, and subconscious all at once. This helps you understand the present more deeply and choose your path forward with confidence.
Bringing Tarot Into Your Own Practice
You don’t need to be an expert to start using tarot. A simple, grounding ritual can help you receive insight. Here’s a beginner-friendly approach you can try:
1. Take a Moment to Ground
Before you touch your deck, pause and take three deep breaths. This signals to your body and nervous system that it’s safe to slow down and reflect.
2. Clear the Energy
Blow gently on your cards to clear the energy and invite focus into your practice.
3. Shuffle with Intention
Start shuffling the cards while thinking about the situation or question you’d like to explore. Allow your mind to stay focused on the topic without forcing any answers.
4. Lay Out Your Cards
Spread the cards out in front of you. Rub your hands together until they’re warm, then hover your non-dominant hand over the cards. Move it back and forth until you feel a tingling sensation in your ring finger.
5. Pull the Cards
Place your ring finger on the card beneath it and gently pull it out. Repeat this process for each card in your spread.
6. Try a Simple 3-Card Spread
A simple spread for beginners can help you explore any situation:
- Card 1: What to Know – Insight into the current state or hidden influences
- Card 2: What to Grow – Guidance on what needs attention or nurturing
- Card 3: What to Let Go – Patterns, beliefs, or energies that no longer serve you
Take your time reflecting on each card. Notice which thoughts, emotions, or memories arise as you interact with them. This is where insight comes through – from connection to your own intuition and subconscious wisdom.
Tarot is a beautiful practice that has been validated by modern neuroscience. Whether you use it personally or with clients, tarot creates a space for insight, emotional processing, and self-trust.
If you’d like to explore tarot more regularly, follow me on Instagram for weekly card pulls and prompts to connect with the energy of the week.
Want a full year of insight? My Yearly Spread ($200) includes 13 cards: one for your year’s overarching theme and one for each month. It’s a lovely way to set intentions, track shifts, and gain insight for the year ahead! Click here to order a reading.
Comments +