Weekend Journaling Prompt
On tarot as a tool for self-knowledge
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Hello,
I’m taking a break this week while I’m finising my book (honestly!) but I invited
, who has just started a brilliant new Substack called Odd Good Life where she is explaining the art of tarot. She’s wonderful, so do take a look (and you can read a previous post by her on The Clearing here).
If you’re feeling a bit wobbly about tarot cards, would it help you to know that the future is the least interesting bit of a reading? In fact, you don’t have to think about, ask or learn anything about the future at all if you don’t want.
Might it also help to know that you are not required to converse with, see or understand dead people?
I mean, you can if you want. I’m not stopping you. I’m just saying that you might not want to start there.
The thing I find most interesting and rewarding with regard to tarot cards is how useful they are as a tool for understanding myself right now. The standard 78-card deck is split into two sections, the Major and Minor Arcana. This just means big and little knowledge and understanding that they can be a way into knowing myself is both liberating and powerful.
Tarot is a tool for self-knowledge. That’s it in a nutshell.
It’s a brilliant tool for taking things we already know on the inside and laying them out in a space without the extraneous mental noise that accompanies most of our thoughts. It asks us to focus on what is important and it shows us what that important thing is. The process of pulling and laying out the cards invites us into a meditative, safe space in which we can shed extraneous baggage and move freely around an issue, problem or idea and see what is possible for us.
When I read the cards I think of it as a cross between a story I’m telling myself to learn and make sense of something and a game in which I may feel stuck, but which through the cards, might show me a move I can make to free myself going forward.
By working with where I am rather than being stuck in my past or being fixated on my future, I can free myself of the burdens of the past and see a different way to move into my future if I want. The past is done. The future is mutable because we change all the time, doors open and close, thoughts and feelings shift our perspective. What we thought yesterday may be entirely undone by what happens today. What we control is ourselves in this moment and that is all. Tarot invites us to resource ourselves now.
The cards will answer the questions you ask them. This is always the bit where people ask the winner of the Grand National. Resist this urge. Think about what would genuinely help you to understand yourself and feel better now. The cards work best, in my opinion, when we use them to help create safe, loving foundations for ourselves and figure out how to empower ourselves in ways that are internally rather than externally referenced.
This week’s journaling prompt is about getting curious around a problem or situation you find yourself in.
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