People sometimes ask me how they can learn to be "psychic". I think that we all have the ability to be intuitive, or psychic, or whatever you want to call it - but we're so engrossed in the everyday, that we lose the thread that joins us to that part of ourselves; the part that is an animal, a spirit.
Most teaching of a spiritual or magical nature strongly advises that you meditate as a means to re-engage with the part of yourself that you've lost somewhere along the way. The part of yourself that is able to quieten the many thoughts, stresses and pressures of daily life. This seems hard for many people because it involves discipline, practice and continuity - but it's worth the effort.
I practise transcendental meditation and it's something I first started when I was a student back in the 1970s. My flatmate suggested that we do a course in TM so we went along to this lovely teacher, a man called Paul if I remember correctly. We had to go along for a number of weeks and eventually, we had to go separately for an "initiation" when we were given our personal mantra (which, to this day I have never shared with anyone). TM works on the basis of repeating the mantra in your head (TM mantras are in Sanskrit which is helpful because you don't know what the word means, so you have nothing to associate it with). The whole point about meditation is that you don't try to block out the thoughts of daily life, instead you just keep bringing yourself back to the mantra and gradually, slowly, your mind quietens down.
As a trained hypnotherapist (although I don't practise any more), there is a big difference between an hypnotic state and meditation. The former usually involves listening to somebody else as they guide you through into an altered state of consciousness and it doesn't involve any discipline (guided meditations are actually just hypnotic states). Meditation, on the other hand is a different kind of altered state, requiring you to be conscious of the mantra and of pulling yourself back to it.
What, you may ask, has this got to do with learning how to be psychic, or with the tarot? Well, everything really. Meditation leads you into yourself as I've said above and by quieting your mind, you are able to listen to it more easily, you are gradually able to learn how not to be governed by emotion and anxiety and to feel more in balance. It's no surprise, if you think about it, that balancing your mind and heart is good fory our body too and like anything worth having, it takes time - it's certainly not a quick fix, but it will help you to train your intuition, just as I need to do when reading the tarot.
For me, meditation is a part of my daily routine and I look forward to it (finding a time that works for you is half the battle). Once you've done that, then it is the opening door to the deeper parts of yourself which are linked to universal wisdom (or whatever you want to call it).