I’d prefer a bit less Joseph Campbell and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,1 but overall, the best book on tarot I’ve encountered so far. Or, rather than a definitive superlative, it’s the book that most resonates with me so far. It’s how I engage with tarot, not for divination, but therapeutically, creatively, narratively, for introspection and storytelling. I took gobs of notes, and I have a feeling that I’ll thumb through it often in the future.
Pull quotes ⚭
Synchronicity is, in the words of ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, “a reminder of elegant connections.” Exploring relationships between things that cannot be explained by simple cause and effect is a doorway to understanding the relationship between psyche, a more collective consciousness, and matter.
This is by no means a book that claims to tell definitively “what the cards mean.” To do so would be counter to the overarching message of the Fool’s journey, in my view, which resists any fixed meaning and builds the capacity for reality, which is change.
The job of rules is to manage; they serve a function of control. In a community, rules control the social climate. In an individual, rules control the internal environment, which includes thoughts, feelings, and sensations. So when you break a rule, expect to be met by a wild chorus of thoughts, feelings, and sensations that the ice house walls were doing a great job of keeping out.
…but the truth is that secrets tell themselves in all kinds of ways. They’re spoken in the choices we make, how we hold our bodies, what we do with our hands and feet, and the ways we behave toward others and ourselves.
Behavior is also a language, and when we start to view it this way, we can see how things swallowed and tamped down have the tenacity of water in their drive to find throughways.
Khalsa said that the best motivator for behavior change is from the bottom up, meaning that coming into the body and actually feeling the impacts of a particular behavior will give us everything we need to know about whether to keep doing it or not.
True authority is marked by a degree of behavioral sovereignty—the ability to choose actions with intention and care, even when we feel scared and powerless.
Even if your spiritual practice is just recognizing in some way, each day, that there are things unfolding that you have no say in, that’s a way of honoring something greater.
I wish we’d tell more than only the stories where we struggle and then get what we want, as if always getting what we want were the point of life. How silly, how childish, how one-note and unmagical. Yes, willpower can carry you to many places. But make no mistake, stuckness is one of them.
Just as the World in tarot isn’t a fixed place, but rather a flux state that one comes in and out of through time, the peaceful middle way isn’t a static space or destination. It’s not the type of place where you arrive, stay, and hold residence. There, too, is yet another temptation to impose oppositional thinking: I am either there, or I am not there. Healed or still broken. This is why in many decks the Hermit is pictured walking; a metaphor for the way of a person who is at peace with the flux state of reality. That is, changing and being stuck, expanding and contracting, evolving and devolving, living and dying.
Tarotist Rachel Pollack has written that at the root of our dualistic thinking is a fear that we don’t know ourselves. We see things as either this or that because we don’t trust ourselves to flexibly navigate the contingencies and the in-betweens and the constant flux that is life and to still be okay.
In many ways, healing from trauma is learning to hold polarities, to be in life’s gray areas again. It is also the path of the mystic, who wishes to experience the truth and totality of things: the good, the bad, and the ugly at once.
To be in a state of not knowing creates openings, illuminates new pathways, and is thus ripe with potential, even as what we can’t grasp yet may scare us. When defenses drop, new edges and footholds appear, and when we’re flailing, we’re a lot less picky about what we grab hold of to stay alive.
Our parents or caregivers had preferences before we were born and those preferences didn’t go away when we arrived in this world. They had visions and fantasies about what it meant to be a parent or to have a child. Those ideas were placed firmly upon us and, not because they were bad people but because they were human, our caregivers chose our names before we were even born. Before we had a chance to show the world what our eyes look like when we’re happy, what it feels like to be in a room with us when we’re scared, or how we can sometimes hear colors. Far more than we were ever invited to be who we truly are, we were told who we should be.
Each and every one of us experienced this rejection of who we truly are and came here to be in some form. Because someone was counting on us to be something else, something they needed us to be, a supporting role in their own story. This old rejection wound is like a beast we lug around.
In the words of the mythic Hermes Trismegistus, absolute reality is “all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together.” (hey! A Sorceress Comes to Call also just name-dropped Trismegistus)
Bad boundaries often emerge from a wish that we had fewer limits, were more flexible, durable, unfazed. But when a line’s been crossed, when you can’t bend anymore, when it just doesn’t work for you, when it disturbs your work in this world, none of that matters.
I like to think about boundaries as limits, since a limit is something every person has while a boundary can feel like something reserved for only whole people, healthy people, people who really have their lives together. Whether you choose to enforce them or not, you absolutely have limits, lines that should not be crossed. Conditions that are too much or not enough, those that will support your growth or betray it.
I’ve come to see that difficulty setting boundaries is sometimes a symptom of a sense of oneself that is insubstantial, or that needs fortifying. Not knowing personal limits can stem from a lack of genuine curiosity about one’s personal wants, needs, likes, dislikes, values, and morals. In other words, what makes you, you.
It’s tough to say which comes first, the boundaries or the self, but it’s safe to say that without a solid sense of self, we will find setting boundaries difficult.
In the West we tend to see emotions as insular experiences that exist within individuals, an isolated phenomenon that is mine, yours, or someone else’s. But I often wonder, especially when working with the cups suit—the suit of water—whether we’ve fundamentally misunderstood this domain of our experience.
Once, humans understood psyche or the soul not as something that existed within the individual but rather as something the individual existed inside. Old ways took for granted that internal life and external life were linked, but today we seem to have forgotten about that. Our narratives usually sound like this: What have I done, what can I do, what should I do to influence the world around me. We rarely ask and get quiet enough to hear what our environments might be expressing through us.
We tend to think of contemplation as having to do with thinking, but it is really more a creative process of coming into dialogue with other forces, such as emotions. The prefix con-, meaning “with,” tells us that it’s a collaborative process, and templum, the Latin word for temple, connotes a sacred space where a deity was believed to reside. And so to contemplate is to engage in spiritual dialogue, which, like all dialogues, is going to involve both speaking and listening.
What if, for example, rather than seeing ourselves as taking a walk through the woods, we see ourselves as being a wave of energy rippling through the consciousness of a family of redwoods? How would this change the way we move through the environments we dwell in? How would it change the way we relate to our experiences? (cf. You’re a wiggle, and the world is wiggling you.)
Water is an apt symbol for emotion in part because, like the archetypal trickster, it is slippery in the way that it can penetrate walls and boundaries invisibly, going from over here to over there without ever being seen.
And though projection gets a bad rap, psychotherapist David Richo writes that these products of the relational imagination “show us that other people are not out there as totally other. They are reflections/projections of our own story. They are part of us. They are not only ‘they’ . . . but also ‘I.’ ” And perhaps that’s why the intensity we feel for and toward people seems to magically shift and fade as we ask about and attend to our own wounds.
Our rusty listening skills are sometimes evident in the experience of working with the raw imagery of a card itself and not knowing how to understand its language. We engage with tarot cards the way we engage with a lot of other things in this world—as objects to support our agendas and bolster our polemics. Not as entities unto themselves that would offer something if we only knew how to listen.
Maybe we clip a sprig of rosemary from a bush and offer a quick prayer or blessing to show our gratitude to the plant. Did the bush ask for that? If it had asked for something, would you have heard it? Did it even occur to you to listen? Or do you move through life taking, with your arms across your chest?
In Jamaica there is a saying: “Who feels it, knows it.” That wisdom is perfect here.
Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast has written that “the intellect sifts out what is true; the will reaches out for what is good. But there is a third dimension to reality: beauty. Our whole being resonates with what is beautiful.” When we experience beauty, he wrote, we start to speak about emotions, and the more we are touched on an emotional level, the more we seek to celebrate the experience, and it’s there that we begin to create ritual. He wrote that all rituals have to do with, and celebrate, belonging.
The reframing of repetitive behaviors as ritual, and of ritual as the behavioral practice of preserving and commemorating experiences of beauty, belonging, or any other desired emotional state, is powerful for many reasons. So many rituals are stigmatized, seen primarily as moral failings, called by words like dysfunctional, maladaptive, unhealthy, not serving you, and so on. But as far as I know, the way behavior works is we don’t do things that don’t serve us in some way.
Instead of calling ourselves stuck or hopeless or lost, we could call ourselves lovers of beauty and of belonging, lovers of deep emotional resonance just trying to recall some sacred feeling. And then maybe, if necessary, we could begin to explore new ways to recall those same feelings, new rituals for feeling safe and soothed.
A heart’s desire sprouts from a sense of self that’s sturdy enough to have preferences independent of external factors. In other words, when we know who we are, we can appropriately weigh our internal wants and needs against the wants and needs of the whole.
The primary task in all healing relationships—such as that between a therapist and client—is to listen deeply. Conversely, traumatic relationships are ones in which people consistently deny, overlook, and avoid each other’s truths.
Which is to say, to clear a space for them to emerge, unfold, and find full expression. Water has for so long been a symbol of birth and life, and I would argue that emotions, which are also associated with water, simply want what all other life wants: to be born, to have a safe space to express fully, and to die, eventually, as all living things do.
Here’s a charm that’s helped me internalize that understanding: Trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has written that humans can endure more pain when they know it is time limited, which means that intellectually knowing the transient nature of emotions is a tool that helps us with the necessary task of experiencing it. This is how an emotion makes its way out of an individual, out of a family, and ultimately out of a bloodline. And so if you are feeling something big and deep, consider your kingship. Consider that maybe you are the one with the tools and the temperament to contain the thing and see it through, once and for all.
There is a strong and automatic tendency to respond to stuckness with hostility and aggression. So many times, teachers have asked me, “Why are you forcing?” and it’s taken a lot of practice to remind myself that no one’s keeping time. No one is grading me on my ability to make a particular shape with my body, or to respond differently to a trigger, or to do a new thing that I’m scared of, for that matter.
I fold in a lot of ideas from the tradition of narrative therapy, a natural fit since tarot card reading is in many ways a storytelling practice. Approaching our challenges through narrative is one way to sort of hack the intellectual mind in order to change the way we relate to our problems, or “blocks,” through reframing and perspective shifting. When we relate differently to something, we tend to behave differently around it. As social worker Mary Van Hook has written, “Stories don’t mirror life, they shape it.”
When all the care or attention is being funneled toward one person, the caregiver is blocked from being seen or known. And I think that’s often rooted in an unconscious aversion to being seen, a deep-seated fear that intimacy is dangerous, and a sense that the things we need and want will betray us or reveal the ways in which we are too much, not enough, or downright broken.
After all, it was in deep connection that our oldest injuries were sustained, and so perhaps it is in deep connection that the roots of such wounds might be properly treated.
But let’s remember that at the heart of the spiritual philosophy of tarot is the idea that nothing is all good or all bad. This, paradoxically, is also true for “black-and-white” thinking. Sometimes, seeing things in a straightforward, yes-or-no, this-or-that way can be beneficial. There are times when our evolution depends on the ability to step back from our energetic, emotional, and behavioral experience and simply observe so that we can discern the next step forward.
When we give in to the tendency to categorize things as all good or all bad and draw our swords at inappropriate times, splitting complex, nuanced experiences into rigid evaluative dimensions, the mind goes from being a helpful aid to a liability, like carrying a knife for self-defense that gets turned back on you because you didn’t take the proper time to learn to use it. Conversely, when we know how and when to draw the blade—like when we’re getting distracted and need sharp focus or have become entangled in a trap of some kind—that’s what it’s there for, why it stays on our hip, ready. As is the case with all of what tarot teaches us, the ideal is moving flexibly between these modes, as the present moment calls for. The sword isn’t going to be the right tool for every challenge in life, but it will be for some.
Cunning is described by the poet Robert Bly as—and I’m paraphrasing—the rearranging that is necessary in order to stay in contact with what one knows to be true. Sometimes that’s rearranging a material reality, sometimes an internal one, like a narrative.
Poet David Whyte wrote that “in the wild, the best response to dangerous circumstances is often not to run but to assume a profoundly attentive identity, to pay attention to what seems to threaten and, in that attention, not to assume the identity of the victim.” Which comes back to what I love so much about Ḥāfez’s take on loneliness, and why I view his poem as medicine. Though it can feel threatening, even terrifying, we have a choice to relate to loneliness as an ingredient that might do wonderful things to us, that can “ferment and season” us like nothing else, if we can let it.
When we make problems into elevator speeches, we’re choosing a psychic location for ourselves—“I am broken, I am damaged, I have been victimized”—and setting up shop there. If that stance is not one of agency or power, we start to see our lives through that perspective, and the brain’s confirmation bias excludes anything to the contrary.
All stories, for the most part, are incomplete; anytime you are a storyteller, you are also a magician in that you are drawing attention to one thing in part by diverting it from another. Stories by nature don’t contain the whole narrative; they can’t. In order to smooth out the texture of a story—to make it easier for telling to ourselves or others—we conveniently omit perspectives that might complicate things. One of the jobs of the storytelling mind is to make life comprehensible, which means sorting, labeling, and categorizing. But don’t forget that the Fool’s journey is one of occupying the edges, where nothing is all this or that, all good or bad.
And while you are never—and I repeat, never—required to frame a traumatic experience as an opportunity, you always, always, always have the option to tell a story that highlights your agency and power.
Hearth spaces, whether private or public, were something to be protected. The fires in them were required to be maintained at all times, and failure to do so was considered immoral. And so Hestia, as guardian of this flame, was the Greeks’ connection to nourishment—since fire is how people cooked meals—warmth, and light, but also to the other gods, since every offering made went through her. Without the hearth, there was no food, no warmth, no light, and no way of communicating with the Divine.
We are automatically ascribing worth to something when we put our focus there. To a very real extent, we are worshipping—or giving worth to—anything we put our mind to. When you think of it this way, how does that sit?
Tuck this into your back pocket before you go: The ideal of the World is plurality. It is neither to adopt a perfect protocol nor to reject the rules altogether, to identify as solely individual or collective, but to activate your capacity for a kind of kaleidoscopic awareness where you’re able to hold many truths at once, to move fluidly and flexibly as each moment calls for.
A therapist I used to see would always tell me that a romantic partner should feel—for both parties—like a book neither of you wants to put down. That doesn’t mean you don’t live your own lives, just that you’re eager to get back, and definitely not dreading it. Choose a deck like that. One you’re eager to come home to. One that calls out and speaks to you in a voice you can really hear.
Some people interpret cards differently depending on whether the card is upright or reversed in a spread. I’ve never read reversals, and this is a personal choice. To me, any “reversed” meaning has always felt inherent in the upright; for instance if an artist is feeling blocked creatively and they draw the Empress upright, it’s obvious that the Empress is not saying, “Oh yes, your creative juices are flowing,” but rather she’s asking questions about what needs to happen in order to get a generative energy moving again. (Agreed! This is why I don’t like reading reversals! The meaning is already inherent in it. Very tao de ching.)
Keepers of old secrets—whether storytellers, tarot readers, cowboys, or elders—will tell you that the solutions in a crisis always emerge from the edges, not the center. It’s never the king who saves the day. Or the knight with all the privilege and grooming. It’s the absolute fool who comes riding in on a donkey with the ill-fitting armor, the poor man who fibbed his way into the royal party, the youngest daughter that no one would dare put their ducats on. Once I understood this, I started to see it everywhere. If you practice softening your gaze when you look at things, I think you’ll start seeing it, too.
At the center, much is certain, a lot is fixed. On the edges, though, you can see territories beyond your own. There’s potential for cross-pollination, the sharing of ideas and resources. It’s out there that you can start to see the center—the stuff you think you know for sure—in a new way. I can think of very few people who don’t come to tarot, at least in the beginning, for a new way to see things.
CBT is wonderful and helpful for many people. Others though, including myself, have had bad experiences with it. It’s too easily used to gaslight away from real somatic and sensory issues and reframe things unhelpfully as “all in your head.” The Autistic Survival Guide to Therapy by Steph Jones is a great resource if you struggle with CBT as a modality too. ↩︎