The Clairs: Psychic Senses Every Tarot Reader Uses
This guide covers what the clairs are, how each one shows up during a tarot reading, how to identify which are strongest in you, and how to develop them deliberately.
Here is the thing almost nobody tells beginning readers: intuition is not one sense. It’s eight.
When people say they want to be more intuitive, they usually picture a single vague faculty, something you either have or you don’t. That framing keeps readers stuck, because it gives you nothing to practice. The clairs give you something to practice.
What the clairs actually are
The clairs are the channels through which information arrives when it doesn’t arrive through ordinary reasoning. Clair means clear. Each one names a different sense doing the receiving.
Two things worth saying plainly before we go through them.
First, this is not a gift reserved for special people. You have used several of these already. The moment you walked into a room and knew something was wrong before anyone spoke, that was a clair. The song that arrived in your head for no reason, right when its lyrics mattered. The decision you couldn't justify but were certain about. These are not rare events. They are unremarkable events that most people have been taught to discard.
Second, developing the clairs is not about acquiring something new. It's about noticing what is already arriving and learning to trust it before your mind edits it out.
That last part matters more than anything else in this article.
The four clairs most readers use first
Clairsentience: clear feeling
Clairsentience is information that arrives in the body. A tightness in the chest. A drop in the stomach. A sudden heaviness or lightness that has no obvious cause.
This is the most common clair, and the most commonly dismissed. Most people call it a gut feeling and move on.
In a reading: you lay down a spread and feel your shoulders tense before you have consciously registered which cards are in front of you. Or a card that reads neutrally on paper lands in your body as dread, or as relief. That physical response is information. Say it out loud.
Claircognizance: clear knowing
Claircognizance is knowing something without any sense of how you know it. No image, no voice, no feeling. Just certainty arriving whole.
It’s the hardest clair to trust, because it's indistinguishable from an ordinary thought at first. The tell is that it arrives complete and unbidden, and it doesn't argue.
In a reading: you look at the Three of Swords and simply know this is about the querent’s family member, not their partner. Nothing in the card says so. You know anyway.
Clairvoyance: clear seeing
Clairvoyance is visual information: images, colors, symbols, brief scenes. Usually internal rather than external, more like memory or imagination than sight.
Most people expect clairvoyance to look like a film playing in front of them. It rarely does. It’s quieter and easier to miss than that.
In a reading: while looking at the card, you see a doorway, or a color that isn’t in the artwork, or a face. Tarot readers often have this clair without recognizing it, because the cards are already images and it’s easy to assume you're just looking at the picture.
Clairaudience: clear hearing
Clairaudience is auditory: a word, a phrase, a name, a song. Almost always heard internally, in something like your own mental voice.
In a reading: I once had a client sit down, and about thirty seconds in, “American Pie” started repeating in my head. Not a song I listen to. No reason for it to be there. I said it out loud, because that’s the practice, and the client told me it was one of his late father’s favorite songs. The Emperor in the center of that spread landed completely differently from that moment on.
Learning to say it out loud before your mind edits it
The four subtler clairs
These arrive less often for most readers, but when they do they tend to be unusually specific.
Clairempathy: clear emotion
Clairempathy is feeling someone else's emotional state as though it were your own. It’s often confused with clairsentience, and the distinction is useful: clairsentience is physical sensation, clairempathy is emotional content.
In a reading: grief arrives in you that isn’t yours. Sitting across from someone who is composed and cheerful, you feel their exhaustion.
This is the clair that makes boundaries essential rather than optional. A reader who feels everything and protects nothing burns out fast.
Clairalience: clear smelling
Sometimes called clairscent. A scent arrives with no physical source: cigarette smoke, a particular perfume, bread baking, hospital antiseptic.
In a reading: scent is the sense most tightly bound to memory, which is why this clair so often connects to people who have died. A specific scent arriving mid-reading is rarely random to the person sitting across from you.
Clairgustance: clear tasting
A taste arrives without anything in your mouth. Metal, sweetness, salt, something specific like a food.
The rarest of the eight for most readers, and the easiest to dismiss entirely. Worth naming so you recognize it if it happens.
Clairtangency: clear touching
Also called psychometry. Information arriving through physical contact with an object: a ring, a photograph, a piece of clothing, a deck.
In a reading: this is part of why deck bonding matters. Readers who carry their deck, sleep with it, and handle it daily are building exactly this channel, whether or not they'd use the word.
How to find out which clairs are yours
You don’t choose them. You notice them.
Most readers have one or two that run strong, a couple that appear occasionally, and several that stay quiet. That distribution is normal, and it doesn't rank you as a reader.
The way to find yours is embarrassingly simple: pull a card, and before interpreting anything, note what arrives first. Not what the card means. What arrives. A feeling, a phrase, an image, a knowing, a temperature. Write it down.
Do that daily for a month and the pattern becomes obvious. Your journal will tell you which channels are already open.
Why this changes a reading
Here’s the practical payoff, and it’s the reason a whole chapter of Tarot Academy is devoted to this.
A reader working only from card meanings is doing retrieval. The reading is accurate but flat, and it stops at what the cards mean in general.
A reader who has learned to notice their clairs is doing something else. The cards provide the structure, and the clairs provide what's specific to this person, in this moment, about this question. That's the difference between a reading that is correct and a reading that lands.
And the skill is not receiving. Nearly everyone receives. The skill is saying it out loud before the critical mind decides it's irrelevant, embarrassing, or wrong. That "American Pie" moment only mattered because I said something ridiculous out loud.
How to develop them
Notice first, interpret second. Every reading, every daily pull. What arrives before you think?
Say it without filtering. If a color, a word, a song, or a sensation shows up, name it, even when it makes no sense to you. Especially then.
Ground before you read. The clairs get louder when your own noise gets quieter. Grounding is not decoration, it's signal-to-noise.
Journal what arrives and what turned out to matter. Over time this builds evidence, and evidence is what eventually replaces doubt.
Protect your energy, particularly if clairempathy is strong. Clear limits are what allow this work to be sustainable rather than depleting.
Maintaining Your Boundaries and Spiritual Hygiene As A Tarot Card Reader
The next step
Tarot Academy devotes an entire chapter to intuitive development: all eight clairs across dedicated lessons, plus grounding, sacred space, tarot journaling, and the practices that turn what you receive into something you can actually use in a reading.
It sits inside a complete course covering all 78 cards across 20 chapters, with 142+ video lessons and 37+ hours of instruction.
Self-paced, lifetime access, all future updates included.
Tarot Academy
The Only Tarot Course You’ll Ever Need
Most tarot courses end at the cards: Tarot Academy takes you all the way. From learning all 78 cards in full depth, to developing your intuition, to launching a professional tarot practice.
