The year is 2017. I’m celebrating my birthday in my small hometown, back for the weekend after recently having moved to the “big city” in pursuit of my dreams. The event receives the regular birthday fanfare – friends, family, cake, gifts. I open a parcel from my two closest friends, gifted uncharacteristically by them both, to find – a deck of tarot cards?
I manage an enthusiastic “thanks!” as I flip through the cards, my inner skeptic furrowing her brow at some of the fantastical names and outrageous scenes. Though my friends have recently gotten into the practice, I consider myself logical, a student of academia, fresh off a university-based research stint and newly training at a psychological assessment house. My limited exposure to tarot consists purely of predatory Sylvia Brown types, selling snake oil to desperate people who forfeit realistic options that could help them change their circumstances in exchange for hollow fortune-esque platitudes. I’d heard my friends speak about it, filtering my understanding of their experience through this lens, not quite understanding the appeal to them.
Fast-forward to present day, where I consider tarot to be an indispensable tool for self-reflection, something I regularly integrate into my introspective practice. I still hold hard fact and logic in high regard, still spend a lot of time researching and asking “why,” still take action to change my life where I can.
So, how did I go from here to the assertion that tarot has changed my relationship with my thoughts?
To start, we’ll outline the hard facts about tarot: Tarot is a 78-card deck of cards separated into two main categories – the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. The Major Arcana is a 22-card arc, numbered 0 through 21, that details the “Hero’s Journey,” the quest from childlike innocence to experience and balance with the world. The remaining 56 Minor Arcana cards are divided into the 4 suits of the Minor Arcana – Wands, Swords, Pentacles, and Cups – each suit running from ace to 10, followed by the court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King). Each of the Minor Arcana cards represents a miniature journey itself, its topic determined by the suit. Each of the 78 cards of the tarot contains different artwork, each with a different commonly-accepted topical understanding.
At its core, tarot is an artistic experience rife with symbolism. Much like any visual art, these pieces can be appreciated without any type of personal meaning, simply taken for the face value of what the cards depict. But for the adventurous introspective, it has potential beyond this.
Before we go any further, let’s explore an important philosophy: In life, you have the choice to learn from your experiences. This is a choice, an either/or – either you can choose to learn from an event, or you can choose to not, to ignore, to pass on the opportunity for reflection. Both options are useful and adaptive at certain points.
This is where I see the most critical difference between 2017-me and present-day me: 2017-me actively resisted the idea of learning from tarot, dismissing it as flippant and one-dimensional. In stark contrast, 2022-me holds a more nuanced view that you get as much out of a situation as you give, and that lessons are everywhere you choose to find them. In other words, if you think tarot is stupid, it will be – you will only see the art, dismiss it as silly, and be on with your life. But if you choose to open your mind, maybe you’ll notice similarities between the story unfolding in the art and challenges you’re working through in your personal life. This isn’t too different from finding common threads between a protagonist’s struggle in a movie and that of your own.
This is the real power of tarot, in my opinion: As a tool for processing things in one’s life, a way of setting aside dedicated time to reflect on your past behaviors, your present reality, your future dreams. It has the potential to add extra texture to situations that you may be stuck on, lending new perspective in a way that expands the possibilities available to you. In my practice, tarot is used directly alongside commonly accepted therapeutic practices like journaling, meditation and therapy, just another aspect of the self-care continuum that affords me time alone with my thoughts. All of these assertions are based on my lived experience.
2017-me held off on looking at the cards until I had a reference in hand, a tarot guidebook that provided me with those commonly-accepted interpretations of each card’s meaning. The familiarity of intellectual structure superimposed, it felt more approachable, less woo-woo for me to play around with the deck. I started simple, beginning some mornings with a quick one-card flip known commonly as a “card of the day,” meant to provide a topic to come back to and reflect upon over the course of the day.
A concrete example: I draw the Death card, number 13 (XIII) in the Major Arcana. In spite of its doomsday name, Death represents transitions, letting things go when they’re no longer serving you. Throughout the day, I notice myself in situations where I’m not happy and could stand to release (that third coffee that skyrockets my blood pressure through the roof and kicks my anxiety into high drive? Probably not necessary), I notice the ways that transition shows up in my life (I’m moving to a new apartment in 2 weeks – maybe I should make time to prepare for this?).
This practice added value to my life, if for no other reason than the mindfulness it developed. On the days I did my pulls, I found myself more likely to slow down and be aware of what’s going on around me, a nice change of pace from the frequent autopilot encouraged by modern society. I noticed I was more likely to see my feelings and less likely to be my feelings. Don’t get me wrong, more often than not I was still moving lightning-fast through activities, not taking time to pause and be still. But that card-a-day practice presented a possibility, a small crack through which I could catch glimpses of what it felt like to slow down and be with my thoughts.
Over time, I grew accustomed to my cards, began keeping a tarot journal where I would record the date, card, and meanings. I began to spend more time thinking about how the tarot cards’ symbolism and meaning could be overlaid on my own life, noticing trends in which cards came up for me more regularly, which ones evoked stronger emotional responses. I began to learn that for me, resisting a card usually meant there was something unresolved that needed work (spoiler: if a piece of art holds that aversive a feeling, chances are it’s not the painting holding that aversion, but yourself. Try to find out why.)
My daily card-a-day practice slowly melded into more complex multi-card arrangements, each card intended to symbolize a different “bucket” for interpretation, interpreted both for its individual card meaning and in the context of its position-meaning. For example, while completing a three-card “Past/Present/Future” spread I first flip “The Tower,” then “3 of Pentacles,” then “The Stars” – here, card 1 (The Tower) represents my past, card 2 (3 of Pentacles) represents my present, and card 3 (The Stars) represents my future.
As time progressed, I realized the appeal of tarot for me laid in the depths of its introspective possibility. Tarot provided a consistent practice I could easily schedule into my day, allowing me to go as deep or shallow as I needed on a given day. If I wanted to keep it light, I’d stick with a single-card flip; for deeper dives I’d conjure up situationally appropriate multi-card spreads, often asking whole questions of each card (e.g. “What can I learn from this scenario?”). I recognized the potential of the cards to help narrow focus on a specific issue, enabling me to cut down on outside noise by imposing card meanings and positions over my personal challenges to shrink the scope of focus from that vast “oh my god I have no idea how I’m going to deal with this mess” to “okay, let’s just look specifically at how this 6 of Wands energy might be related to my struggles at work currently”.
As my mindset towards tarot shifted, so too did my relationship with my brain. Instead of seeing dark thoughts or hardships as untouchable pains that should be kicked to the back of the closet, I had the choice to approach those things through a structured practice. With the help of the cards, I was able to systematize my approach to my feelings, something that had been scary and off-limits for so long because of how negative and self-deprecating I could be with myself. Having layers of meaning to focus on allowed me to shift my focus away from those harmful thought loops and towards the various interpretations, helping to abstract elements of pain from the scenario to make it more approachable. I felt this empowerment in my day-to-day life as I learned to be more observant, less reactive, grounded.
In a way, the journey of my relationship to tarot mirrors the journey of my relationship to my thoughts: Rejected at first for its prickly undesirable aspects, then later gently picked up and examined with an open mind.
While my personal story with tarot is unique to me, I firmly believe that it has the capacity to open everyone’s mind. I encourage everyone to try it at least once, especially if the idea is off-putting – chances are there’s something in that aversion that you could learn from, and what is tarot if not a tool for unearthing a richer relationship with yourself?
Pingback: Tarot Practice and Mental Health: Tarot Tuesday - Jodie Baer