How to use Rooted
Nobody was keeping score. Now something does.
Rooted walks you through a practice and shapes every step of it to meet you where you are: your question, your way of drawing, your read in your own words. Then it does the part nobody was doing. It keeps score.
Start where you are
Name the question you are actually sitting with, or let Rooted help you find it. Shuffle in the app, lay your own deck on the table, or speak the reading aloud. However you practice, it fits.
Say what you see
Rooted can read first, walk you through card by card, or stay quiet while you write. You choose how much company you want. What gets kept is your read, in your own words.
Check back and keep score
Once enough time has passed to know, Rooted comes back and asks how it turned out. Every check-in feeds the tracker below: a running record of what is moving through you, and how often you read it right.
After a few months you stop wondering whether your instincts are any good. You go look.
A season of check-ins, gathered.
Intuition trackerIllustrative. Your own numbers live in the Insights tab.
The rest of this page walks the practice one act at a time.
Intuition is easier to see with the right lens.
Ours is built from the story arcs of tarot, set against the patterns of your own life, with room for however you draw and somewhere safe to be honest.
A vague question gets a vague answer.
Name what you are here to look at and the cards have something real to answer. Most nights you already know what you are asking, so type it and read on it. Some nights you sit down certain that something is there but cannot name it. That is what the question bank is for.
Custom question generator
Describe your situation in a sentence and Rooted writes a set of questions for it, so the reading opens on the thing you are sitting with.
Save the ones that land
Bookmark a question and it waits in your own bank, ready for next month or next year.
Your intention has its question. Now the cards answer it.
Rooted meets you where you are, and moves when you do.
Some nights you need an example of what a reading looks like. Some nights you need help putting words to what you already sense. Some nights you need a blank page. Rooted does all three, and which one you reach for is allowed to change.
Oracle
Start by reading along.
Rooted gives you its interpretation: each card in its position, read against the question you asked. Then it hands the reading to you and asks what you make of it. You are not being read to. You are reflecting in your own words, from the first day. This is how the cards stop being a book you look things up in.
Guided
For the moment you catch yourself already knowing.
It happens without warning. You turn a card and something answers before you have read a word of the interpretation. Guided Tarot is built for that moment. Rooted asks what you notice, one card at a time, and shapes your answers into the reading. The scaffolding is Rooted's. The reading is yours.
Manual
When you trust it.
No prompts, no interpretation. Rooted lays out the board, holds the structure, and stays quiet while you write. The words are entirely yours.
However you read, Insights reads across it.
The mode changes how a reading gets made. It does not change what Rooted can help you see in a year of them. Whether you were shown the meaning, walked through it, or wrote it cold, the connections surface the same way, and every mode ends with the check-in that feeds the tracker you saw up top.
None of that works without knowing the cards, so that part is never locked away.
All 78, always one tap away.
Every card in the deck, read through love, career, money, health, spirit, and reversal. Six angles on the same image, because the Five of Pentacles means something different when you asked about your job than when you asked about your love life.
This part is not behind a subscription and never will be. Tarot is a shared language and the dictionary should be open. Look up a card mid-reading, or sit with one for a week. Free or on a plan, it is the same library.
And that is where all three modes were going the whole time.
Everything you have ever drawn, kept.
These cards have been read this way for two hundred years, and most of what people learned went into notebooks. A notebook keeps a reading. It cannot show you the other four times you drew that card.
However you got here, the readings pile up: the spreads, what Rooted saw, what you saw, the nuance you would never have remembered a year later. Rooted keeps all of it, filed and searchable, so the thread running through it becomes visible.
Reflection is built in.
A reading is only half the practice. For every one you finish, Rooted weaves your thoughts into a journal entry, so you can sit with all the directions your journey is taking you.
Auto entries
Every finished reading leaves an entry in your own voice, with the rough notes you jotted shaped into something readable. The moment you edit one, it becomes yours.
Guided entries
Rooted takes the topics of the reading and walks you through tailored questions one at a time, until the entry says what you meant.
Manual entries
Freestanding reflections where every word is yours, linked to one reading, several, or none at all.
The patterns in your perception.
Entries add up. Rooted surfaces what threads through them across the week, the month, the season, and the year. Read alongside the intuition tracker, the trends show you what has been moving under all of it.
Insights reads across everything you have drawn and written: the cards that keep returning, the themes running under them, the rhythm of your practice, and how closely your own read of a reading matched how it landed.
One entry is a moment. A hundred of them is a picture of your life.
One reading shapes all the rest.
Twelve houses, one sitting.
A one-time reading that maps the major arcs of your life: work, love, home, money, the cycles you repeat, and what you carry quietly. What you share is woven into About You, so every reading after it speaks to the real shape of your life. Redo it whenever life moves.
Every reading lands on a spread, and the spreads go as far as you do.
Every spread, including the ones you invent.
The classics are here, each with its traditional walkthrough. Design your own and name every position, or describe the idea and let Rooted build the spread for it. File the ones you return to.
Most of these were meant for a real table, with other people leaning in.
Built for the table as much as the screen.
Tarot has always been physical: shuffled paper, a spread on the table, a room that goes quiet when a card turns. Rooted is built to meet that world, not compete with it. Bring the deck you already trust and the people already around you, and every card that lands there lands in your record too.
Bring your real deck.
Rooted has no interest in replacing the deck on your shelf. It wants to catch what happens when you use it.
Digital shuffle
Manually select
Photograph the spread
Speak it out loud
A reading the whole room can sit in.
Tarot got quiet because people made it quiet. Put the spread on the television, keep the iPad on the coffee table as the hub, and let everyone draw from the phone already in their hand.
Hand the room to Oracle mode
If you are early in your own practice, Rooted reads each position and weaves the spread, and you walk the room through it as it lands.
Keep the reading in your voice
Give your interpretation out loud, card by card, and Rooted formats your words into a shareable reading the room can follow and everyone keeps.
iPhone and iPad both work either way: run the session as the central hub, or join someone else's as a satellite device to draw your cards.
Your subscription travels with the session. Friends on the free app get the full depth of a subscriber reading for the one you share with them, then keep it afterward. When they are ready to work with it, their own practice starts from that first entry.
Cast to the television
The spread fills the screen above the fireplace and turns a reading into something the room shares, one card at a time.
iPad as the central hub
The iPad is where the reading is built and where you walk everyone through the cards they drew, position by position.
Everyone keeps a copy
The finished reading is delivered to each person who drew, marked as shared, waiting whenever they open the app again.
By now Rooted is holding years of your thinking. Here is what happens to it.
Something has to listen.
Reflection needs a reader. Rooted shares your reading with our curated language model so it can take in what you wrote and respond to it. Under commercial terms it is never trained on your words, and no one at Rooted has access to read them.
How much it does is your call. Ask it to read the cards for you and it will. Ask it to draw the reading out of you instead and it will do that. Or tell it to stay quiet and hold the structure while you write. What it never does is decide whether you were right. It comes back later and asks you.
Encrypted and yours
Your questions, readings, and journal stay tied to your account. Nothing is sold and nothing is advertised against.
Shape, not substance
What Rooted stores about your practice is tags, card counts, and how often you return. The same material you see in your own Insights tab.
Across your devices
Your library, About You, and your chosen background follow your account on iPhone and iPad. Start a reading on one and finish it on the other. Large spreads like the Celtic Cross, the Zodiac, and the Tree of Life lay out whole on iPad, positions and all.
