Tarot cards came into my life when I realized during a major crisis that my mind is a very good helper in every area of my life, but it is not always enough. Sometimes it is important to take a step back to see your life as a whole, to see your life as a journey. It also helps to find inner peace and clarity in more difficult stages and the sense of direction needed to make decisions.
When we look at our life as a journey, we realize that it has its own key themes and challenges. Certain questions and situations come back to us again and again.
When we understand what challenge and lesson they represent for us, it becomes clearer what we need to do to move through them and reach the next (developmental) stage in our life’s great journey.
I love to use the most classic Rider-Waite Tarot deck in my work, which is like a complete human journey and archetypal system. Each card, each character in this whole represents a certain piece of the mosaic of being human. Tarot, as a complete archetypal system, can reflect back to us our own unique and individual journey, help us understand where we are at the moment and what we need to move forward in the right direction.
It seems to me that an indispensable component of working with cards is a mystical perception of the world, the recognition of the existence of some higher organizing force – in whatever way we perceive it (some god or goddess, primal energy, great spirit, guardian angels, ancestral spirits, etc.). Acknowledging and relying on this higher power creates a safe space for us to work with the cards as an archetypal system. It doesn’t matter who or what it is that we want to rely on in a spiritual sense, the important thing is that it has meaning for us and we trust it.
Another essential component in working with the cards is our body and energetic system. Our body talks to us all the time – if we start to consciously observe ourselves, we soon discover that many things we see or hear cause sensations and feelings in our body that are so fast that we cannot associate them with any analytical thought process. We see a visual or hear a single sentence and it creates inexplicably strong sensations in us – we feel a rush of energy, tingling in our hands and feet, feeling of hot or cold, etc. It is the way our body and energetic system constantly talks to us. Indicates that important information for us is hidden here – look more carefully and pay attention.
By using the cards in this way, we are in contact with a deep intuitive self-awareness as well as with the ‘higher’ spheres at the same time. We open ourselves to the possibility that new information and insights about our place and role in the bigger picture enter our consciousness. It helps to open your eyes and perceive your life much more comprehensively.
A great Tarot session most likely won’t tell you anything you didn’t know before, but it will help you see the whole of your life more clearly, more connectedly, and more expansively. To place both rational and intuitive information in the right place, to see more clearly the connections between things, big directions and choices. All of this gives us inner peace and clarity and helps us understand what are the most authentic choices for us to live in the deepest harmony with ourselves.
