Describe before you interpret

Description: what is on the card, as if you had to tell someone who cannot see it. A red heart. Three steel swords through it from above. Rain in straight lines. Grey clouds. No figure. No ground.

Interpretation: what you think that means. Heartbreak. Three painful truths. A grief with no one there. He is going to leave. That last one is already a story, and it may be your fear, not the card.

You need both. Description without interpretation is a catalogue. Interpretation without description is a guess wearing a shawl. The Method is: say what you see, then say what you make of it, and keep them in different sentences so you can tell when you jumped.

If your first sentence contains will, should, always, or a person's name, you have probably interpreted. If your first sentence contains a colour, a hand, a building, weather, an object, you are still describing.

Jumping is not a crime. It is a habit. The training is to catch it, go back to the picture, and then interpret on purpose.

Card: Eight of Swords. Description: a standing figure, bound, blindfolded, eight blades in the ground, a castle on a far rise, puddles, a grey sky. The bindings look loose if you look twice.

Interpretation jumped too soon: I am trapped, this is anxiety, I cannot leave. Maybe. The picture has not been given a chance to mention the castle, the space between swords, or the loose bind.

Interpretation after description: thought has surrounded this person, sight is restricted, and the picture still includes a way the body might step. In a question about a job, that might be a contract in the mind, not a locked door. You could not have got there without describing first.