In the monthly column Artist’s Advice divination authors and deck designers give their reading tips, divination techniques or unique essays to share their expertise and showcase a new release. This issue:
Tarot Journaling | Tarot Tracker: A Year-Long Journey | Angelo Nasios
“After the success of Tarot: Unlocking the Arcana I sat down to decide what my next project was going to be. It came to me, a tarot journal! If I could go back in time to the beginning of my tarot journey to do something different, I would journal more. I did attempt journaling, but that failed. Blank notebooks were uninspiring. They left me wanting. Printing out online PDF’s and creating a journal from a three-ringed binder was too much work for me. I wanted my journal to be elegant, beautiful and focused on the essentials of tarot journaling.
Tarot Tracker: A Year-Long Journey is the tarot journal I wished I had from the beginning. The Tracker captures the macro and micro experiences in your tarot interactions throughout the year. The first essential task of the tracker is to figure out your Card of the Year, in 2018 I will be in an Emperor year. Using the included year card reference, this may suggest that 2018 will be a year of building solid structures in my life, and getting organised!
The second essential task of the Tarot Tracker is recording your progress with the cards. The Meaning Tracker provides you the space to record keywords for each card at the beginning of the year. Write down what you currently know about the card. At the end of the book in the Meaning Tracker Revisited – you will record new meanings and understandings as your progress throughout the year. Compare and contrast these two areas to reflect on your growth!
The third and most significant essential task of the Tarot Tracker is recording your daily experiences. The Daily Tracker provides space for day and night readings. Do one or the other, or both! Day and night readings included default questions to ask such as “What should I focus on today” or “What lessons did I learn today?” You can also write your own questions, get creative!
The fourth and last essential task of the Tarot Tracker is keeping tabs on cyclical or season events. I love tracking change based on the annual cycles of birthdays and the New Year. The Tarot Tracker provides you with a New Year Spread, New Year Resolution Spread, and Birthday Spread. Each of these readings has a “revisited section” to return to at later times to reflect on the initial reading.
The Tarot Tracker is primarily designed to be your tarot companion. For beginners or people who fell off the wagon an opportunity to jump-start your tarot studies.
For the experienced reader, the tracker provides you the recording structure needed for long-term growth. If you have a new deck you want to learn better, the tracker can help you bond, establishing a closer relationship with the cards.
5 Unique Tracker Tips (by Angelo himself!)
Here are some helpful tips for using your Tarot Tracker, only for readers of The Queen’s Sword.
1. Tracking significant days. To track the days where you have an exceptional reading, simply highlight the day’s number on top of the page. As you flip through the book over time, you will be able to return to the important days in your tracker for progress. Color code how you color in the day’s number any way you like. You could color code base on the sort of day it was. Blue for happy, red for angry and so on.
2. Tracking Elements. To get a bird’s eye view of the elemental pattern in your tracker, write in color pens that correspond to the element of the card. For example, Wands = Red | Cups = Blue | Pentacles = Green/Gold | Swords = Silver/Grey. Majors = Purple. Pick any color you like of course.
3. UnTarot Tracking. The Tarot Tracker is not just for tarot decks! Use your Lenormand or other oracles decks as well with the tracker.
4. Nothing to Track? Some days there will be nothing to write down on your daily or nightly draws. Life can be dull and uneventful, you may think nothing in your cards applied to your day. Here are some tips to approach the cards, ask yourself:
a. Did I do something, say something that reflects the card?
b. Did someone do something, say something that reflects the card?
c. Did the card manifest on a emotion, mental, vocal, physical level?
5. Tracking out of the lines. Staying within the lines are for kids, we’re adults – break the rules, use every nook and cranny in the tracker to write notes and any sort of special specifics to make the tracker personal.”
– Angelo Nasios
 Angelo received his B.A in Religious Studies and is currently pursuing his Masters in History. An active voice in the tarot and pagan communities, Angelo is the author of two books: Tarot: Unlocking the Arcana and Tarot Tracker: A Year-Long Journey. Writing on Patheos Pagan, his blog The Hearth of Hellenism is dedicated to the history of Greek religion, philosophy, and mythology. |
WHERE TO BUY Tarot Tracker:
Bookdepository
Amazon
Amazon UK
