LESSON 10: PLATEAUING AND GROWING
Cards drawn: A cross of Hanged Man (1)
Three of Swords/Sorrow (2); Four of Swords (Truce) (3)
The Universe(*)(4)
Deck: Thoth Tarot

For various reasons, I haven’t had the occasion to pick up a deck in a couple weeks. When that happens, though it’s often quite good to take rests—intended or not—I often face the fear that I’ve lost the ability in the meantime. Somehow, between last touching tarot and now, the ability I’ve spent going on three decades cultivating has somehow dissolved. That’s not really related to the cards drawn above, but hopefully interesting nonetheless. The mind is a tricky thing. (Note from future me: that wound up being exactly what the reading was about!)

As always, I never ask a question for these blog posts. I simply shuffle with the intention What is Lesson #? In this case, lesson ten. Today I felt the urge to ask something different, like “what is tarot?” or “what makes a great divination?” I didn’t, though, because the whole point of this experiment is letting the cards tell us what they want to say about working with them, rather than restricting them to things I might be curious about at the moment. There’s nothing wrong with using the cards to address current curiosities; in fact, that’s what I spend most of my time doing with them—for myself and others. But that’s exactly why I decided not to impose any questions on this particular blog. It’s really letting the tarot talk about itself through my fingertips, as it were. 

Either way, I wasn’t particularly thrilled to see our pal the Hanged Man today. If for no other reason than that he’s made an appearance in this little journey several times. More than several. I think I’ve seen the card more writing these posts than I have reading for anyone the last three or four years. And ironically, I was just thinking, “you know what the cards will probably say, because they’ve been saying it over and over from week to week.” The lesson I keep getting is “combine the spiritual with the divine!” Great! I’m attempting to. I don’t think I need the message again! Granted, what we think as diviners or seekers typically isn’t the goal of the divinity that makes divination work. So. 

Let’s not think yet about Hanged Man, then. Let’s leave him (ahem) hanging. Let’s actually begin with the fourth card, The Universe, the one I styled with a parenthetical asterisk, above. I did that because, unusual for me, I didn’t really decide on a spread before drawing. I drew the first three, sighed because I wasn’t really in the mood for this combo, and then—on a whim—drew a fourth. I do that sometimes, even though I always say we should know what we’re going to do before we shuffle and draw. What can I say? I’m mercurial.

When I think of The Universe, or The World, I think of “everything.” That’s typically how I read it: everything. a lot. much. tons. I don’t assign it a positive or negative meaning, because the reading decides that for me. Sometimes everything is great! Sometimes everything is carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, not unlike Atlas who is often depicted hefting a globe on his shoulders—an image somehow porno-like to the Randian political right. Having “the whole world” on your shoulders is heavy. But sometimes we ask for that. Sometimes we tell people, “ah! please allow me to carry all your burdens for you. please allow me to sacrifice my own load so that I might take yours upon me. For, you see, I am insecure and need to feel loved. Not be loved, you see, because to me the perception of love is more important than any feeling you have for me.” 

Whoa! He went long there, eh? OK, I don’t think the reading is going that deep, but it sure speaks to a part of me that has motivated my actions a lot of my life—and I’m sure many of you recognize it, too. What’s the burden The Universe carries? The Hanged Man. He literally rests on The Universe’s shoulders. So what are we doing here?

Not what I expected, actually. When I started down the path of people who beg to take on other people’s burdens, I thought this lesson was going to be about how readers need to avoid that tendencies with clients or friends. But it’s not about that at all. No, it’s about the importance of plateaus. Oh boy, right? Ah, but this is a rather special topic to explore, reader, for you see the plateau is a blessing and a curse in the life-long development of the fortune teller—as well as most spiritual practitioners. (For what it’s worth, I seem to be settling on “spiritual” as a catch-all for what I typically referred to, somewhat ruefully, as “new age” “woo-hoo” or “witchy.” Spiritual, a word with nebulous meaning these days, never attracted me. It’s the very nebulousness that makes me prefer it, now. It’s neutral. It lacks the kind of sneer I typically reserve for this stuff, but it also avoids pretension—which is a thing that really turns me off. For what it’s worth.)

On our learning journeys, we will reach extended periods of time where what we thought was the peak of a mountain we’ve been laboriously climbing turns out to be an endless-seeming flat table of land, arid, treeless, no oases, no birds—not unlike the aridness we see in PCS’s Emperor card. Very that. Very deserted. Very demure; very mindful. (I couldn’t help myself—and allow me one more tiny digression: I love that meme, because it has enabled the trans person who said it to afford gender affirming care—and social media so often is so cruel to queer people, that this is a joy and I celebrate it.) Anyway. We arrive at these plateaus and, despite our inner devotion to the lifelong journey of learning and honing our art, we suddenly find ourselves in the same places for a long time. 

Perhaps we feel uninspired, apathetic, or like we’re going through the motions. The physical sensation of joy that came from doing divinatory work yields to a sameness that can eventually extend to much of life. This is the combination of The Hanged Man and The Universe in this reading, at this moment in time, in the mind and fingertips of this reader. Let us pull ourselves away from the act of divination for a moment and note that the earthiness of The Universe and the wateriness of the Hanged Man (it’s the major associated with the element of water) don’t matter here. Their combination somehow creates the exact opposite—dryness. Why? Cuz that’s how tarot works! Smiley face. 

Actually, this is influenced by the cards that form the crossbar: the three and four of swords. This is a reading about learning because our pal the suit of swords has arrived in force and reminds us that the crazy expansiveness of a mental growth spurt (learning and activating learning) gives way to . . . not that. That’s the feeling we feel when we have climbed the mountain only to discover we’ve reached not the peak but a plateau. That four-ish bleh-ness. That stupid, static lack of progress; that wandering without a map through an unchanging, unyielding, unpleasant landscape of blah. Feeling suddenly not special, not cool, not gifted, not good; feeling stalled, stuck, stale. We want to forge ahead, god dammit; we’ve just done so much, discovered so many new-to-us worlds! How fucking dare we not be constantly ignited with crackling, sparkling, glittering, gorgeous revelations at all times?

Because, and I’m about to drop one of those revelations on you right now, if that went on all the time, we’d go mad. 

In Amadeus, a movie I’m stupidly fond of, the petulant and arrogant little Mozart, huffs after the Emperor reviews his latest score as containing “too many notes.” Wolfgang is stunned! “There are just as many notes, sire, as I required. Neither more nor less.” But, and for perhaps the only time in the story, the Emperor has said something that makes sense: “There are only so many notes and ear can hear over the course of an evening.” Now, of course, that’s not literally true. The ear can hear as many notes as there are. It doesn’t stop after it has achieved its maximum melody intake. But we do get taxed when we stay in the same state for too long. In those days, an opera could be four or five hours long. Even in a world with no TV or smartphones, that’s an exceptionally long time to remain in a state of active listening. 

While the learning process isn’t quite as intense as five hours of opera (for all my love of musical theatre, I cannot really get behind opera—alas, because the opera world is scandalous!), we do reach points where our brain can only handle so much information. We reach a saturation point. Think of it this way. If you have some salt or sugar in your kitchen, take a glass of water and add a spoonful of either to the water and stir it until the grains dissolve. Repeat this. Eventually, the water will no longer be able to absorb the granules, because it will have reached its saturation point. Our brains are like that, too. This is especially true of those of us with ADHD and other neurodivergences. We are prone to hyperfocus, which—while exciting in the moment—can leave us spent because of the amount of energy this takes. But even neurotypical people will reach saturations points. It may take longer, but we all get there. 

This is the plateau. And it makes us feel like we’ve reached the top of the mountain only to discover it’s merely an endless mesa—with implied additional mountains beyond. 

This isn’t quite the same as burnout (my favorite topic—can’t go a week without using that term), because it’s not so much that you’ve spent all you have to spend. In this case, it’s that you’ve consumed all you can consume. You have cleaned out the buffet, so to speak, and you may be feeling a bit bloated—mentally. 

This is totally OK! Unlike burnout, this is easier to recover from. All that’s required is nothing. By which I mean, take a break! Go do literally anything else. It doesn’t mean you can’t do divinations, but stop reading about the tarot—or stop writing about the tarot (or whatever else you use). Go learn about, oh I don’t know, the school to prison pipeline or the process of designing oyster farms. Literally anything else so that your mind can digest all the delicious food you’ve forced fed it, like some poor goose in France about to be made into rich people food (rich people food? rich people food? rich people food? — food for people with too much wealth). Just take a break from cramming the old noggin with new divinatory details. Make like Elsa and let it go.

For how long? Y’aint gonna like this answer, pal-o-mine, but: as long as it takes. How will you know? Because, like hunger tells you it’s time to eat, curiosity will tell you it’s time to learn. It always happens. After the four comes the five, which says, “hey four, you lazy old conservative fart—I’ve come to fuck some shit up!” This is the journey of learning: feast, digest, get curious, feast again, lather, rinse, repeat. And it’s quite easy to do!

Except that it’s not. Because you are passionate and you want to know more, do more, learn more! Why shouldn’t you? There’s a ticking clock and you want to go pro before there’s no more pro to go (whatever that means). But, dear one: No. This is not so. There is no time limit. First, you are already good at this. No, I know you know you’re not the “best”; I know you feel imposter syndrome and you envy the people you admire who seem to be doing what you wish you could be doing; I know you want the validation that comes from having reached the mountaintop, just as those names that line your bookshelves and social media feeds. But here’s the tea, sis: none of them have reached the mountain top either. And any one who says they have is lying and should be avoided because they’re arrogant. Show me someone who has finished learning and I’ll show you a corpse. And learning does require downtime. It is part of the process, as much as letting bread dough rise, babies gestate, and not hurrying love. We can’t have skill without the internalization of information. Most of us internalize important info pretty quickly, but of course that gets harder as we age. But when we fill ourselves to rim the brim, we can overflow—over saturate—and the info doesn’t have the time to work itself way into our brains. Because that’s what learning does: it creates pathways in our brain. Grooves. That make recall possible. It can’t do that if we don’t give the information time. Just like we can’t rush most of life. It takes however long it takes. 

Which takes us to this week’s spread.

A Read of One’s Own
We may feel anxious when allowing ourselves a fallow time to let our learning proof. Here’s a spread designed to help you find more helpful ways to spend your time. 

Position 1: How much in need of a learning break am I in?
Position 2: How long will this break likely take?
Position 3: In the meantime, what can I focus on?
Position 4: What can I do when I get anxious that I’ll never be ready to start learning again?
Position 5: How will I know it’s time?
As always, I recommend using three cards per position. As I frequently do, for the sake of brevity, I’ll only use one for this example.

A quick example:
How much in need of a learning break am I in? Card drawn: Queen of Swords. 
(For context, like last week, this is for an imaginary client.) The queen suggests you’re pretty well in need of one, in fact. Of course swords pertain to the mind, and queens are mature—so this suggests a long time (maturity) learning (swords). The queen’s chopped off some dude’s head, so they’re a little cranky. Nap time. 

How long will this break likely take? Card drawn: The Hermit
Ah! How delightful! Although, as an answer, somewhat frustrating. I think here the Hermit says, “as long as it takes.” Which is, if you recall, exactly what I said above (thank you, validation1). “Oh, he’s just justifying his own answer!” Not at all, dear reader, for The Hermit is associated with Virgo—which is the sign of the harvest. You cannot harvest crops before they’re ready. So, ha! (This could also mean “Virgo season next year” or “the duration of Virgo season.” Given the timing of writing this (late August, on the cusp of Virgo season), that’s not a bad answer! 

In the meantime, what can I focus on? Card drawn: Death
Oh how wicked; how delicious! Can we talk about the connection between the harvest season above and death literally harvesting here? I love when this happens. The card also reminds me that this question or spread position isn’t well-worded. It’s not specific enough to be easily read. Were I re-doing this, I’d likely make it something more like, In the meantime, what can I dedicate my curiosity to? Or something like that. Feel free to change it yourself! Anyway, this is saying that you can focus on how wonderful things will be when you’re ready to harvest all your knowledge—by which I mean, put it to use. It may also be a reminder to enjoy the transformation. Don’t focus on anything else, just don’t cram more food in your brain. 

What can I do when I get anxious that I’ll never be ready to start learning again? Card drawn: Six of Swords. 
Unusual for me, I think this suggests that meditation on the process of intellectual growth (six = three + three, growth + growth!). To spend time feeling what you’ve learned working with in you and creating the neural pathways you’ve laid the foundation for. It may also mean to relax, the process is beautiful, just go with the flow and remember that you’ll get there soon. 

How will I know it’s time? Card drawn: Ace of Swords. 
All the passion will come rushing back in a massive boner of curiosity. It will, reader, be totally irresistible and unavoidable. ​

LESSON 9: YA BURNT
Cards drawn: An arc of five--Wheel of Fortune (4), Nine of Swords (2), Judgment (1), Two of Wands (3), Ace of Pentacles (5). 
Deck: Tarot of H’arts by Isabel Hayes (If you haven’t seen this new deck yet, check out my walkthrough on YouTube. It’s wonderful.)

I feel like a lot of folks struggle to read Judgment. What are we really dealing with? The christo-centric tarot we know today paints the last judgment as the end of days, the awakening of the dead to “new life.” In Lisa St. Croix’s Tarot de St. Croix, we see Maat here. The weighing of the heart after death in Egyptian tradition. Frequently there’s a posthumous nature to the card. But what’s it mean?

I typically read the card as an alarm clock. Time to get out of bed! But having spent the summer with Lady Frieda Harris’s paintings, I’ve also come to see this card as representing a new era. Crowley would have said that this was the new age, not unlike the Age of Aquarius we hear referred to that no one can seem to agree on. Crowley believed he ushered in the new era, the Age of Horus, when he received the Book of the Law. I tend to be somewhat snide about this. Did he really receive it, or was it just the ramblings of a man who might have been using intoxicants? But, and I hate to admit this, he did define the new era in such a way that a backward glance shows his prediction of a long period of upheaval, war, and distress seems true. Unfortunately for anyone reading this, if he was right, we’ve got more than another 400 years of that to go. 

But whether we’re talking about a wakeup, a new era, or anything else, what does it mean in a reading? This is the great question for many folks. Lots of readers see this card and think fuck. I know, because I’ve been one of those readers. But the good news is we don’t have to know yet. When we encounter a card in a spread that isn’t singing, we turn to the other cards. This is one of many, many, many, many, many, many reasons I dislike one-card draws for anyone—but particularly for folks just starting out. More cards = more context and context is everything. So, this is my typically long-winded way of saying, “don’t worry what Judgement means right now.” 

Judgment is flanked by the Nine of Swords and the Two of Wands—both of which are flanked, respectively, by the Wheel of Fortune and the Ace of Penties. (Did I just call “pentacles” “penties?” Yes. You’re welcome.) The Wheel and the Nine of Swords are a cute pairing, because everyone hates the nine, and The Wheel is another one folks often don’t know what to do with. The Wheel is simply turning. The Nine of Swords has to do with the mentality of swords and the exhaustion of nine. The paring says, “You’re burned out now, but you won’t always be,” and suddenly we see what Judgement means: coming out of that burnout. 

I use the term “burnout” a lot and I sometimes worry that will make it mean less. But one reason it shows up so often in my readings is because so many people are suffering it and don’t know. Any one of the nines can signal it, but the swords and wands—being the weapons—can be the most painful versions of this very real, very important experience. In the case of the Nine of Swords, the burnout is going to be mental. It’s mental exhaustion—being worn out, being tired, being stressed, having nothing left in the old noggin of any value. It’s, in essence, when we’ve spent our entire intellect and have to replenish. 

The Wheel does describe the experience of burnout, too; it suggests the ways that, in the middle of being burned out, we have some decent moments. Moments that make us think there’s nothing “wrong” with us and that it will all be OK. These moments can last for a few hours, days, or even a couple weeks. But the wheel will turn and the burnout will return. It’s inevitable. We often find ways to treat the symptoms—and most of modern medicine is obsessed with treating the symptoms—rather than curing the disease. 

So, how do we cure it? Burial. No, not burying our feelings. Rather, burying ourselves. By which I mean resting. Now, a few things: burnout is a real medical experience. Rest isn’t the only cure for it. You can rest and feel great and then return to the thing that burned out out and you’ll go right back to feeling like garbage. The problem with burnout is that you have to fix the situations that caused it, not ease just the symptoms. Honestly, having been through this more than once in my life, I can tell you it’s better to avoid burnout entirely if you can, because coming out of it is not easy. But Judgment does give us clues to non-medical support. It’s just important that if we’re experiencing burnout, we both get professional help as well as divinatory. They need not be exclusive and frequently work best together. (This is my way of saying, “I’m not a doctor and I’m not qualified to give medical advice, and you’d do well to consult a doctor.” OK, American Medical Association? Happy? Of course you’re not. Capitalism.)

My deep-dive into the esoteric has forced me to face my own concepts of “life’s” cycle, and though I’m fairly convinced that when we die, we become nothing more than fertilizer (one reason why I’m fundamentally opposed to embalming), I’m very much in the minority on that. Much of the world seems to believe that death isn’t the end, but rather a transition point. The burial of the body, or more generally the “disposal” of the body, is often part of the process journey from State-of-Being X to State-of-Being Y. What happens when what happens? We decompose. The things that make up everything we tend to think we are transform into pre-human matter (assuming we’re not pumped full of carcinogens during the burial process that are dangerous for the embalmer and the environment). One might draw a line between the decomposing human corpse and the transformation of the caterpillar into the butterfly. It ain’t a pretty sight. And yet. It is necessary. So is death. We have to die. I don’t know why, but we do. We have to go through the process of decomposing (or any variant on that, which does include cremation and water burial, along with concepts like sky burial), we have to go from the state we know ourselves to be into another state. 

I’ve long said, but never really believed, that we need fallow times in life. We need pauses, rests, intermissions; we need times when we’re not creating, not making, not producing, not acting, not moving. We need downtimes, pauses, and they often need to last a few months. I know this to be true, I just don’t believe it because I’m not good at doing that. (You probably aren’t, either.) And, in looking back on my life, some of the times I’ve experienced moments of high-level, clinical burnout, these were times where I couldn’t or wouldn’t pause. To borrow from Alanis Nadine Morisette, I equated stopping with death. When we do not take fallow periods, though, life will take them for us—and that may be one reason we experience burnout: because if we go on any longer, we truly will short circuit. The Earth itself demonstrates this necessity. The earth itself goes fallow for about half the year! Most of us can’t take that time. Capitalism has fucked our rhythms. I sometimes think seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is less a disorder and more a reaction to our body being forced to do shit it doesn’t want to do at a time of year when the rest of creation is resting. But what do I know?

Anyway, the point is that we need to undergo little burials in order to keep ourselves functioning well. This is what sleep is supposed to do, but for many of us sleep doesn’t cut it. Sleep, wonderful as it is, seems not to be a powerful enough force against the current culture of doing. And that is why (I think) so many people are experiencing such deep levels of burnout. We’re simply not getting enough fallow periods. 

Because we can’t take a three-month “rest cure,” the way wealthy British colonizers used to do, we have to find other ways to do it—and the final two cards in the spread speak to it. It’s important to note, first, that the remaining cards are quite low numbers: one and two. Compare to the rest of the cards in the reading: A ten, a nine, and a twenty! When we get burned out or reach a time when rest is necessary, the temptation is frequently to do the opposite—to push through until the exhaustion passes, the need dissolves, and the energy returns. It won’t, of course, we know that, but we also know we can’t stop—so what the hell else is there to do but hustle? (Have I mentioned that in addition to massive amounts of burnout, more people are self-medicating than ever? More people are experiencing high blood pressure and cholesterol? More people are sleeping worse? Literally everything about our current culture is poison, and we somehow believe that we can just push past it.) So what do we do?

A little bit.  That’s the main lesson of these two cards: their tininess. Just a little bit. A little bit of what? A little bit of fire and earth. What’s that mean? Often, and I know this from experience too, when we are feeling burnout, reconnecting with our joy, our spark is a great way to move through the pain. A quick story: the first time I experienced burnout was in my mid-twenties. I’d been in a job that I used to enjoy for about five or six years and I’d reached a point where I’d started hating it. Even more exciting, I had a lot of personal issues going on around my living situation. I had nothing left in my battery but I lived alone and had to keep pushing. I needed health insurance, I needed to pay rent, I needed heat and hot water (but I definitely went a winter without those during this time). So I couldn’t leave my job. And one of the things that happens in toxic jobs is that they slowly extract your self confidence from you, so you believe (much like in a toxic relationship) that you can’t do any better. I’ll spare you the gory details, but in addition to winding up in the ER, I nearly lost that job because—after years of great reviews, my boss suddenly decided to download every awful thing about me. Somehow I survived that termination, but not the feelings of despair that permeated my flesh and bones. 

How did I get through? Purpose. I was forced to attend a conference shortly after that terrible review and though I loathed my job and especially my bosses, I had no choice but to go. And what I discovered while there I discovered why I’d been so burned out and what to do about it—not from a medical expert, but from reconnecting to why I wanted the job to begin with. And I began learning new techniques to make myself better at my job, which in turn made me happier doing it and improved my overall wellbeing. It also improved my work performance, but I didn’t really give a flying fuck about that at that point. My bosses had already proven to me they were inept leaders who didn’t deserve my effort. But I deserved my effort, and so did my students (this was my early days of working in adult learning). I did it for me and I did it for anyone who would sit in my classes. And a year from that time, I won an employee of the year award. And I’m proud of that award not because it meant I’d changed peoples’ minds about me (although, in retrospect, it’s fucking amazing I did that), but because I saved myself and found great joy in doing it.

(One of the insidious things about burnout is that it’s often not your fault. It’s the machine you’re caught in. But that doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility to get help. No one else will do it for you. It’s fucked up but true.)

The Two of Wands and the Ace of Pentacles tell us to come back to our passions, to our attraction to the work we do (passion=fire; attraction=two). That we ground (Ace of Penties) ourselves in that love, that fire. But just enough (the smaller numbers), not so much that we just burn out all over again or in a new part of our life—no, that we take periods of gentle, active rest. The kind of rest that feels productive but that is also replenishing our batteries. What this is will be different for everyone, but so many times in my life (and I feel so lucky about this), that thing has been tarot. Just being able to spend time with my cards has frequently been a way to relight my fire. Whatever it is for you, do it--but don’t overdo it. A thing I love to harp on when talking to newer readers is that you can get burned out doing things you love doing just as much as things you have to do. I have gotten burned out with divination, too, and I had to take a few years away from it. I thought I’d honestly never come back to it. But it refused to stay dormant, which, when you think about it, is exactly what the Judgment card is doing! The Judgment card reminds us that when something is truly for us, we can leave it be for a while and it will come back. If you love something, let it go? I guess? But truly. I have had to give tarot a break and when I came back to it I was a better reader. The same thing happened when I was acting. I took a break in my twenties, not because I wanted to but in part because of that job that was burning me out, and when I returned to it finally I’d improved so much. 

It’s probably worth pointing out that, having typed the above, I realized that my burnout at work may have been in part because I was being forced to deny myself an activity that did replenish my battery. Because I had to work nights 90% of the time, I couldn’t audition for plays—or I could, but I couldn’t be in them—nor could I take acting classes, or, hell, even go see theatre. My nights belonged to my job and my days belonged to sleeping off the depression I felt from not being able to do the thing I thought I was meant to do.

The point of all of this is (and so much for my attempts to make these blogs terser) is that when you feel burned out, you might do well to return to the ignition point of your passion. That might mean coming back to basics, it might mean rediscovering old methods you dropped along the way, it might mean shaking things up and learning something new. Whatever it is, though, stay grounded and don’t let it take over your life. Otherwise, you’ll end up right back where you started—which, The Wheel warns us, is quite possible. And lets not ignore the visual resemblance between The Wheel and the Ace of Pentacles. We could easily end up back at the start if we’re not careful. As I always say, everything is its own other—including healing.

A read of one’s own
This spread is designed to detect areas where we might be on the verge of burnout and what we might do to prevent ourselves from spilling over into it. I have found that when I do example readings for myself on situations I’m not currently struggling with, the readings are kind of clumsy and not particularly useful. So, in this case, I’m going to pretend I am reading for someone else. This imaginary person, let’s call them Bo, has sought out a reading because they feel like something isn’t quite right. They want to know if burnout might be a culprit. 

The spread:

• Position one: An area of life where burnout might be developing.
• Position two: The potential root cause of this burnout. 
• Position three: How deep/serious the burnout may be.
• Position four: What to do about it immediately.
• Position five: What to do long term.

As always, I recommend using three cards per position. For the sake of brevity, I’ll use only one except for the first position—which I think needs much more context than the rest. Here goes. 

A brief sample:
Position one, an area where burnout might be developing. Cards drawn, Ten of Pentacles, Seven of Swords, King of Cups. This suggests the area is family and particularly care-taking. The Seven of Swords suggest that this is creating a lot of inner stress around their ability to do all the things that need doing, caring about all the things that need caring about. They might well be capable (king), but only for so long—and if the King of Cups isn’t getting some care, that’s not good. Being cared for is how they replenish their electrolytes. 

Position two, the potential root cause. The Lovers. I’d say this card suggests people pleasing tendencies (“Please love me!”)—they think that their ability to be loved has everything to do with how much they “love” (read: give themselves away to) everyone else. 

Position three, how deep/serious the burnout may be. The Nine of Wands. This is serious. This is already just about as bad as it can get and should be addressed immediately. The Nine of Wands is the burnout card. 

Position four, what to do about it immediately: Two of Pentacles. Oh, how tarot tickles me, even when we’re not doing a real reading. This is the “balancing all the things” card to a lot people. In this case I’d interpret this as “juggling only what is fully necessary.” Anything else needs to be put down, delegated, postponed. Grounding is probably necessary to. The only thing that will work immediately is to put all non-essential labor on hold for the time being. 

Position five, what to do long term: Seven of Wands. This is a restructuring of our role in life. This is actively defending ourselves against taking anything on that we do not have the energy for. This is deciding what is worth “fighting” for or clinging to and what isn’t. This is a re-assessment of what we deem worthy of our energy, worthy of our time, worthy of our spark. We’re going to have to commit to protecting ourselves from that which does not really require our attention. With fire, there’s also the quality of needing things that we’re passionate about, too; though I hate saying things like that to clients, because most folks don’t have the ability to spend more time doing what they’re passionate about—particularly folks who are on the edge of this level of burnout. Nonetheless, where we can find time to devote to what is truly important to us, we must. ​

LESSON EIGHT
Cards drawn
An arc of five: Six of Wands/Victory (4), Hermit (2), Adjustment/Justice (1), Ten of Wands/Oppression (3), Eight of Disks/Prudence (5)
Deck: Harris-Crowley Thoth Tarot

Justice has never been one of my favorite cards. Mostly because in the course of human events, it occurs so rarely. It’s also a fairly mythic topic. The only “justice” that exists, at least in this country, is when someone who has done something that the general population can agree is “wrong” (murder, say), and the accused person happens to be both guilty of the crime and found guilty of the crime. But to look back on the history of criminal “justice” in the US, you’ll know that things aren’t ever this simple. Sure, folks go to jail all the time for murder. And there are too many stories of innocent people sitting on death row, too many stories of planted evidence, too many stories of leads not followed because of institutional biases. Like, it’s almost insane that we trust anyone who would actually want to do the job of a cop to be a person who gets to mete out “justice.” Like, I suppose, politics: the people who would be best never run, so we get the narcissists who do. Same for judges. It’s all part of the same system. Justice isn’t real. It’s simply what the powerful decide is legal--and for whom it is legal. 

All of this is why I really appreciate the change made to the Justice card in this deck. You can read it in line with the older concepts, but in fact the concept of Adjustment is one that sums up the act of divination. Let’s do something uncommon for me: let’s consider the actual image of this card! (Whaaaat??) Typically, Justice sits in a throne, holding a sword, mimicking the statue of justice we know from outside courthouses. It is a completely passive thing, and so is the justice system. The justice system isn’t interested in finding guilty people and protecting innocent people; it’s interested in creating the perception that guilty parties have been found so that the population won’t bother them anymore. Adjustment, on the other hand, is a painting of a figure balancing on toe atop a sphere. Not only that, but from the figure’s crown balances the scales (containing Greek letters alpha and omega, known to Catholics as a way the Christ described himself—as the beginning and the end). Not only is the justice figure balancing, things are balancing off the figure. And while it looks like the card is completely still, in order to achieve that posture for more than a second, hundreds of muscle movements must be made every few seconds in order to rebalance and recenter. 

This is an incredibly active card, but in the way of human biology, it is an automatic activity. It’s like breathing or blinking—two things that become harder when attention is drawn to them. Supposing we are typically abled, we likely don’t have to think about either of those actions—but they’re actions nonetheless. The body knows what to do and does it and it only becomes flummoxed when we start thinking about it. And the same goes for the act of divination. Once we see the cards arrayed before us we are constantly making countless adjustments—in our interpretations, our understanding of the situation, our impression of the question and/or querent, in our own way of seeing the world. And, if we’re really in the zone, this is all happening automatically. You likely do this without thinking about it, but when you think about it it becomes difficult. We (or many of us, anyway) are built to do this kind of work. Our brains understand it. We simply have to let go and let it happen. 

Of course, that’s the hard part. The two cards flanking Adjustment illustrate it. On the one hand, we have what happens when we get into this fantastic state of being: The Hermit. The Hermit, tied to our pal Mercury thanks to his association with Virgo (ruled by Merc), demonstrates what happens when we can navigate based on our divinatory instincts. Mercury is associated with divination (as well as the underworld, which shows up in this card as the three-headed dog who marks the gates of the underworld). The Hermit isn’t worried about all that (this is Virgo in its best aspect—most Virgos I know are over-thinkers on the edge of control freaks). This Hermit keeps their eye squarely on the cosmic egg—which, in this context, we can take to mean the reading. The Hermit is doing their thang and not thinking too much about it.

On the other side of the equation, however, we have the Ten of Wands (Oppression). This is what happens when we try too hard. This is performance anxiety, this is putting too much pressure on the muscle, this is working too hard, getting too tense (too hot) to let go and let the reading arrive before our eyes. This is something I’ve struggled with so much in my reading life that I’m amazed I’ve managed to get over it. It was truly the biggest obstacle to my readings—particularly when reading live and face-to-face. And it wasn’t all that long ago I still faced it. We put so much ego (fire) into the equation that we forget what we’re actually here to do (read the cards) and instead focus on the wrong thing (being impressive). But because we’re focused on the wrong thing, we can’t be impressive because we’re actually blocking our own ability to read. We’re getting in our own way. Our desire (fire as passion) to be impressive (fire as ego) gets in the way of being able to do the thing. And it also means we will absolutely burn ourselves out. When we feel the fire starting to get too hot, in this case when we start getting cruel to our inabilities, we are not longer reading. We’re stressing. And we cannot do two things at once, no matter how much it seems we can. 

The cards that partner with these two (Six of Wands + Hermit; Ten of Wands + Eight of Disks) tells us how we can achieve the good (Hermit) and avoid the bad (ten). Let’s start with the more difficult one. The Eight of Disks (Prudence) reminds us of a few critical antidotes to the Ten of Wands’s oppression: First, get grounded. That’s what the earth element does. Get grounded. It’s like you’re repeatedly being struck by lightning in the ten. You’ve got to ground yourself. How? The number eight (work) tells us: stop obsessing (ten) and start working (eight). Just come back to the task at hand. Return to the work of reading. Get away from the ego. Because the downward spiral that tells us we’re not good enough? That’s the ego, too, as much as arrogance is. We can be egotistical and insecure as well as arrogant. Arrogance is frequently just a different manifestation of insecurity, anyway. (And by “frequently” I mean “always.”) You can’t be concerned with your ego when you’re concerned with reading the cards. It is impossible. Work is the answer. Reading the cards. 

Now, that’s not easy, either. But it’s really the only way. I know from personal experience. I’ll spare you the many, many, many, many, many, many times I crashed and burned as a reader because of this very tendency. The key is being able to get out of ourselves long enough to recognize that we’re self-flagellating, not divining, and what we need to focus on the job in front of us. We have to become aware. And so I think this calls back to the lesson where we talked about that sort of active noticing. The ability to just be aware of ourselves as we move through the reading, aware of our feelings and sensations, without letting them distract from the reading. The reason this matters is we need to be aware of when the signs of downward spiral start kicking in. It’s better to head it off if we can. It’s harder to pause in the throes of it to stop and re-ground. But I think the cards on the other side of the reading highlight something we can practice to avoid this. 

The Six of Wands (Victory) is, we could say, the Hermit’s real focus. Yes, it’s the egg—but what’s in the egg? In this case, the Six of Wands. And I’m about to say something I find totally out of character for me: You have to know you can do it going in. Ugh, but I hate that. It’s true, though. There’s a certain amount of “I will do this well” that must be internalized before spreading the cards—no matter who we’re reading for. We have to know that we will be “victorious” (the six’s keyword) at this reading, and the Hermit knows they will be. They know they’re “bringing the heat,” as it were. And because of that, they’re not going to get mired in the garbage presented by the Ten of Wands. And even better than that, they’re making their job easier because they’re not going to have to get out of a funk before they can finish the reading. They’re not going to be tempted to swipe all the cards off the table and into the trash. They just know, deep down, and without question that they will get the answer. And that’s so annoyingly the key to so many things. As a massively insecure person, I really don’t like that reality. But I can also say that as my confidence has grown as a reader, my readings have gotten better. 

This is the healthy side of fire, the good part of ego. This is when it becomes useful and instructive rather than destructive. When we know we’re going to get the thing done well, we’re not worried so it makes it easier to focus. And I can tell you first hand that sitting down and shuffling without fear that I will embarrass myself has been a life changing experience. Alas, I can’t tell you how I got there because I don’t know. I think in part it was writing my books. I think in part is was my YouTube work. And I think in part it’s that I have been pulled to this work against my better judgement and so at a certain point I think I just said, “OK, fuck it. I’m good at this.

But let’s dig deeper. Let’s do a spread about how we can really trust and believe in ourselves as diviners. 

A read of one’s own

1. Draw from one to three cards representing your insecurity. This is what keeps you doubting yourself as a reader. 
2. Draw from one to three cards representing your confidence. This should be the reason that you trust and believe in your skills. 
3. Draw one-three cards representing how to convince yourself that your insecurities are just phantoms ready to be disavowed. 
4. Draw one-three cards representing how to make yourself believe in your gifts. 

For the sake of brevity, I’ll use only one per position—but I encourage at least three!

For my first card, representing my insecurities, I got Death. The second, representing my confidence, The Fool. The third, how to convince myself my insecurities are phantoms, the Seven of Cups (Debauch). The fourth and final, how to make myself believe in my gifts, the Nine of Swords (Cruelty). 

Tarot never ceases to surprise me. For the first, representing my insecurities, we get Death. And of course this cuts right to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it? My insecurities have a lot to do with the fact that I’ve got a limited time on this earth to make my mark. And this has truly been the core of my insecurities since childhood. I’ve said in prior posts that I’ve felt my whole life like I was working against the clock, and this card sums that up. It also sums up the fact that, ultimately, none of us is particularly special because we all come to the same end—however we get there. Humans, well, we’re not that unique. We like to think we are, but even in terms of our general appearance—how many times has someone told you that you look like so-and-so or that you have a doppelgänger? Our ideas aren’t that unique, our looks aren’t, our cosmologies aren’t. I am “just” another human. And the insecurity in my case is that I’m constantly trying to prove to myself and the world that I’m actually not mortal, that I’m not common. I’m special. But I’m not. Not any more than anyone else is, and if we’re all special, then none of us are. 

I’m a very late gen x-er. We were the generation everyone says got participation trophies. The boomers resent us because we didn’t make anything of ourselves and because we’re sardonically uninterested in their self-inflicted plights. Millennials basically assume we’re boomers. And anyone younger than that just thinks it’s The Breakfast Club, when they think of us at all (and, really, there’s no reason they should—because we’re in many ways the non-generation…we don’t really exist). But we were the group everyone said could do whatever we wanted. We could be president! We were supposed, somehow, to represent the promise of . . . America. But we were also the first ones to face insane college costs, decades of instability in the housing market, and the slow realization that this country—which we were told was exceptional, just like us—was in fact a scam perpetrated by the wealthy and nepo babies. So if you’re in that age group, you likely have felt much of what I just described with the Death card. 

The card representing my confidence is, in an almost too on-the-nose occurrence, The Fool. If you read my prior posts, you’ll see why this is perfect. It’s the ability to lay the cards out and approach them openly with no expectation. To simply see what’s there and experience it as though for the first time. To look with “innocence” on the deck every time. And, I guess I’d go a little further and say, to contain the entire deck within myself. To, in a way, be tarot. (Which is getting a little highfalutin for me.) To just trust the process. To trust the cards. To trust myself, which in a way is also not an entity, because it is part of the reading. 

The final two cards are about as wrong-seeming as their predecessors were right. The card reflecting the way to show myself that my insecurities are just phantoms is the Seven of Cups (Debauch). Although, having typed that—what card could better represent phantoms? Of course the Waite-Smith shows someone staring at phantoms in the cups. But in this deck, I often jokingly refer to it as the Absinthe card. First, because Crowley was known to imbibe in that (nasty) beverage (I hate anise-flavored things—but I’ve tried it); second because, though this is typically a really bad card in Crowley’s view (all the sevens are, in that system—annoyingly. Seven is my number), I don’t think of it that way. Debauchery can be good. But of course in this case it’s literally highlighting the mythology of insecurity. The fact that it is a vapor, a phantom, an intoxicant. And that may sound like an odd thing, to call insecurity an intoxicant, but it really, really is. It’s a kind of ego validation. Not a positive one, but it’s sometimes very satisfying for those of us with low self-esteem to wallow in our own worthlessness. It feels awful, but in a good way. It’s like picking at a scab or jabbing a soar tooth with your tongue repeatedly. It hurts so good. And this card said, “that’s just navel gazing.” It’s indulging in self-abuse (the mental kind, not the kind the church says will make you blind). It’s just a myth, though. The card actually is the most literal in the reading!

The final card, how to convince myself to believe in my gifts, is the Nine of Swords (Cruelty). Oh boy. Here’s what I think. I saw a meme the other day that said: Every shitty thing you reflexively tell yourself in day is the echo of a lie that was fed to you once upon a time by someone who was trying to control or hurt you. That’s what this card is saying. Convince yourself? You’ve been lied to about yourself. Show ‘em all what you got. 

And that, my friends, is pretty fucking powerful to me. Maybe one of the most surprisingly impactful readings I’ve ever given myself. Take that, me.

LESSON SEVEN
Three card arc
3 of water (2), 3 of fire (1), contemplation [hermit] (3)
The Awakening Tarot by Monica Bodirsky


Note: Monica Bodirsky’s two recent decks (this, and the Between the Worlds oracle) happen to be two of the most brilliant, creative, wonderfully experiential cartomancy decks ever. I cannot recommend either highly enough, and I highly recommend reading the attendant books. They’re excellent. 
    
In spending this summer with the Thoth deck and reading every book I can find about it and its offspring, I’ve discovered the Kabbalistic numerology is often very different from the system I’ve evolved into over the years. It’s one of the reasons why the keywords or titles on the Thoth decks drive me nuts so much. In my way of reading, three is expansive. If we think of one and two having sex, three is the baby. Because these two vibes (odd and even) have united, there’s a rapid growth. But in many ways, three is the first odd number. One is less of a number to me than an idea or a summary, at least in divination. It’s the potential for the thing, but not yet the thing. Two comes along and brings generative force (because two is an attractive number, everyone wants to get with it), and makes three. Three, then, being the first truly odd number. And because it’s so young and fresh and because it finds itself growing so rapidly, it is an intensely creative number. In many ways, three is the best you can get in each suit. It’s not feeling the latency of the ace, but it’s also not getting tired the way things begin to do as soon as four. 
    
Elementally, we’ve got fire and water (along with spirit, which is an element I don’t particularly find useful in readings—but, hey, who knows what we’ll find today?). The Three of Fire is a growing conflagration; the Three of Water, a growing flood. Ah, but when they’re together! That’s another story entirely. Fire and water are frequently considered adversarial or ill-dignified, and when I read using elemental dignities, I typically interpreted them that way. As I’ve evolved, I’ve begun thinking of the elements not in terms of their friendly or adversarial relationships to each other, but instead to the essential function of the element. This is something I learned from Camelia Elias in regards to lenormand. In essence, she explains that we’re not reading the “heart” as “love,” because that’s just what someone decided it “meant.” Instead, we think about what the heart does literally and that becomes a metaphor for the card that we then interpret in the context of a reading. For example, the heart is really a pump. Its function is generating blood flow throughout our body. Now, other cards around it may suggest that this is pumping love, I guess. But what I would think, instead, is that something is being pumped, generated, maybe even accelerated. That could be a feeling of some kind, and with the lilies or the flowers or the ring, it may be a feeling of “love.” But if paired with the whip, say, it may be purely sexual. “Pumping.” You get the idea. 

What is the function of fire and water? Obviously, they don’t have a function in the same way the human heart does. That said, they have things they do. Fire consumes. That’s its primary action. It eats fuel. Air and wood (earth), for example. Now, that might be good. If fire is eating air, it’s potentially burning energy rather than letting us stew in over thinking. If fire comes into contact with earth (wood), it might be good—we need fire to warm ourselves; it might be bad, we don’t want our houses burning down. If there isn’t enough air or earth in a spread, fire has nothing to feed on. It dies. Suffocates. One might say fire’s function is to warm, but that’s merely a consequence of fire’s actual purpose: feeding. Like yeast. From fire’s point of view, it doesn’t care that its hot. It just needs to sustain itself with new fuel. Yeast doesn’t know or care it’s burping gasses into a dough. It’s just eating. Those gases are beneficial. They give bread its flavor and texture. But the yeast isn’t doing that it’s doing so we can have bread; it’s doing what it’s doing because its hongry.

Water flows. That’s what it does. Its nature is flowy. Yes, it cleans; yes, it cools; yes, it floods; it nurtures and destroys. But from water’s point of view, its main aim is to flow, to fill.  It just wants to get where it’s going and fill up as much of its path as it can. Water isn’t bothered by obstacles; it finds a new path when its way is blocked. If there isn’t an “around,” it will find an “over.” Or an “under.” Sometimes even a “through.” Water doesn’t give a flying fuck about anything but flowing, but going everywhere it can possibly be. It doesn’t care about your basement or your roof; it doesn’t care about your street, town, or country; it doesn’t care if you’re desperate for it while its far away; it doesn’t care if you have too much of it and need a break. It does what it wants, which is to flow. 
    
These are selfish elements. But we can’t assign motive to them. They’re not good or bad, they just do what they’re here to do. That said, when partnered new things can happen. As this reading suggests. When fire and water encounter one another, there’s a bit of a West Side Story situation going on. They don’t like to be outmatched, because fire will evaporate water if it has the chance and water will suffocate fire if it is in charge. They work best when balanced. And when balanced, they create steam. Alchemists believed that air is the child of fire and water because of steam. I don’t believe any one element generates another—metaphorically or not. Steam isn’t air; it’s steam. Each element exists on its own, but it can’t exist without the others because the others define it. We can’t have earth if we don’t have fire, water, and air to compare it to. Without them, earth is just everything, which also means it’s nothing. 
    
This is fun, etherial thinking—and I suppose it’s apropos that the edible I took after work is kicking in—but how does any of this apply to life? Excellent question. Before we answer it, let’s consider the final card: Contemplation, typically the Hermit. The majors in this deck are entirely restyled, and it’s one of the exciting things about this great pack. Contemplation. What a word! Let’s do my favorite thing of checking the dictionary to see what the word literally means. “Thoughtful observation.” Ohmigah. I love that phrase. Oh, yes. Yes, yes, thoughtful observation of expansive fire and expansive water. Effortful, in its way, because Contemplation is nine, and nines are effortful. If three is effortless expansion, in order to sustain three times that, effort is required. (Six lubricates the works.) We must make an effort to thoughtfully observe fire and water in our readings.
    
Of course I don’t mean only fire and water, but what the elements here signify. In fact, what we’re really thoughtfully observing is steam (3 of fire + 3 of water). Here we get to play with poetry—because of course this isn’t recommending we study literal steam. (Though it might encourage us to enjoy some smoke or steam scrying.) What is steam, if we think poetically while also staying in the world of divination? I would say that steam suggests the sensational experiences of a reading, the shifting energies. This is a theme that seems to want exploration is this blog, the focus on the ephemeral (which, if you’ve read prior posts, you’ll know is not a strength of mine). But what I think I’m getting at is the act of stepping out of our role as reader even as we’re reading so that we can simultaneously experience what is morphing in and before us. Imagine that the act of reading creates a psycho-spiritual steam within and around us. And that steam is communicating things. This is a convoluted way of saying that we should pay attention to our physical and emotional experiences as we read, because we may find additional context in them. 
    
What’s important, though, is the Contemplation aspect of the reading. When I think of “thoughtful observation,” I think of my general idea of curiosity. Essentially, curiosity observes without judgment. It merely studies and absorbs. I think that’s important to call out, because this kind of self-reflection and self-study can quickly turn into navel gazing and self indulgence. I’m very anti readers centering themselves (unless they’re reading for themselves) and focusing too much on their “feelings.” It reminds me of an actor who needs to stop rehearsal to hijack the process to talk about his “motivation.” I don’t mean that we become self-obsessed; merely that we become aware to the physical and (I guess) psychical expressions that occur during a reading. This isn’t about getting distracted, but pausing occasionally to just “feel” the moment. 
    
These are the kinds of concepts most difficult to set into language. We don’t really have words for what it is I mean. I discarded phrases like “check in” and “scan.” They’re too active, too much about withdrawing from the moment and turning inward. It’s not that. And it’s not a long process. Maybe it’s a moment of mindfulness. Of noticing. “Here we are. This I detect X sensation in my body. I detect Y sensation in the air before me.” It may fully be, “Here we are, I detect zero sensation in my body or before me.” But it might be, “I detect a small anxiety in my chest. I feel blueness at the table.” We needn’t know what any of that means and shouldn’t remove ourselves from the engagement to study. At least I don’t think we should. What I think instead is that it could suddenly unlock something, much the way a detail in a card that you never or rarely notice might unlock an aspect of this reading in this moment.
  
 It’s easier to experience to describe. And so I’ll dedicate our spread to helping us understand and achieve this potential. And in the interest of making this blogs shorter (at least sometimes), let’s jump to that now!

A read of one’s own
In this case, there’s only one spread “position,” but you can use as many cards as you like to answer it. The spread is simply an answer to the question, “How do I ‘notice’ more in readings?” With the idea that the word notice suggests all I wrote above. And more! As always, I’m turning to a Thoth deck because of #thothgirlsummer. Any deck’ll do, though. In this case, I’m using MM Meleen’s Rosetta Tarot.

I’ve drawn: Prince (Knight) of Swords (2), Queen of Cups (1), Hanged Man (3)
    
Well well well, if it ain’t our old friend the Hanged Man showing up to give us an entirely different side of him from the last time we saw him (in lesson five). I adore that this has happened because it allows me to highlight the single most important aspect for reading tarot: context! Huzzah! But before we get there, we must reckon with some royalty first. 
    
The Queen of Cups is sort of the stereotypical “intuition” card, and both PCS and LFH show us a contemplative queen. MM Meleen’s queen diverges from Harris’s in an interesting way. This queen leans over the water and, like Narcissus, gazes into its depths. Now, unlike Narcissus, I don’t think this queen is gazing at herself. I think she’s actually scrying. But I haven’t had a chance to read The Book of Seshet yet, which is the guidebook for this deck, so I’m too curious not to see if she references Narcissus. Hold please. 
    
Nope! Well, good, because Narcissus isn’t contextually relevant. 
    
The Queen of Cups sums up exactly what the reading above said. It is a passive noticing. An awareness without full engagement. This is a practice, and I think that this image of the Queen (I’ll try to remember to put a picture of the card here when I post the blog, but Weebly has been shitty lately and posting images within text is one of several issues I’ve had. Hey Weebly can you see this? I’M FED UP WITH WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO YOU SINCE SQUARE BOUGHT YOU—AND I’M STRONGLY CONSIDERING MOVING HOSTS) is practicing. (The photo is below. Weebly won’t allow me to put in inline text, because, I don’t know, it’s 1997.) That’s why I said she’s scrying. Scrying is a fascinating concept to me, probably mostly because it’s out of the realm of my abilities. I don’t think you can have ADHD and scry. At least I can’t. It is a patient passivity and waiting for something with the expectation of nothing. I don’t know why, but it makes me think of the phrase “their eyes were on the middle distance.” We know what that means, but when you think about it—it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s an entirely nebulous idea, and yet we (many of us) know precisely what novelists and screenwriters mean when they use this (admittedly cliched) term. 
    
I often describe doing a tarot reading like the Magic Eye posters of the early nineties. Those digitally-generated seemingly abstract images that, when gazed at softly, transformed into a three-dimensional shadow of an airplane or giraffe. This is sort of the experience of scrying (from what I gather) and very much the experience of divination generally. In a way, it’s experiencing our body’s sensations and allowing them to influence the flow of the reading. We don’t necessarily consider “bodies” as a particularly watery thing, but of course the human body is mostly water! What better suit to represent our corporeal selves, because if you read my descriptions of water above, you’ll see that humans have similar underlying goals. (Evidence our treatment of the planet and each other in our quest to flow our own way.) So we’re noticing our body in the moment of reading. Actually, we’re practicing noticing our body in the moment of reading without doing anything about it. It’s simply experiencing it. And then allowing it to do whatever it does. 
    
Dear god, this is a screamingly out of character reading for me to give, no? Insert all the laughy face emojis. 
    
The Prince of Swords, airy air, is the perfect compliment to this queen in several ways. If you’ve read prior posts, you’ll recall the ways water and air are so inseparable. In previous readings we’ve explored how the overabundance of air and water lead us to feeling unstable, messy, anxious, bitchy, generally fucked-the-hell-up. But this is a different situation, reader! This is contextually much different. Here, the Prince (Knight) isn’t the arrogant, smug, know-it-all that this card can sometimes represent. Rather, he is a scholar. He doesn’t care to show what he knows, he’s instead interested in learning everything he can. 
    
It’s not common to associate swords with sight, but increasingly I’m finding myself doing that. First, it’s something I don’t think we talk enough about in readings—how people “see” things. But also because our intellect perceives and that happens in our brain, same as thinking. In fact, an astonishing ballet occurs within our bodies that allows those of us with sight to see what we do. It’s almost impossibly magical, when you think about it, and certainly impacts how we experience the world. What we see impacts what we think. It also impacts what we feel. Some of us will see the treatment of people on this planet and grow desensitized and look away. Others will see it and want to act. Perception defines our reality. We see every day in the news how what is true so often doesn’t matter at all if someone perceives something a certain way. And the truth cannot change perception easily. Getting people to change their mind about something is a game of psychological manipulation designed to trick people into thinking they’ve “discovered” the truth for themselves. (I work in adult learning, and you can summarize training and adult education in exactly the same way.) So, anyway, this is my long-winded way of justifying the fact that swords can encompass sight and vision as much as intellect and communication. They’re all part of the same system and they are quite dependent on each other. 
    
The queen is passively noticing, the knight is actively perceiving. 
    
Oh, god, I hate when I write such grad school sounding sentences! But there you have it. What in actual fuck is “active perceiving.” What can I compare this to?
    
OK. You’re super pissed off about that thing they did. Like, you’re actually shaking with rage and you’re texting bae about it. You’re frantically smashing your thumbs into the screen with all your might as you channel your rage into the words that you need to express the sheer gall of that fucking motherfucker. Know what I mean? OK. So you’re actively texting. That’s the action you’re doing. At the same time, you’re perceiving the language you need to express the rage you feel. So you’re brain is translating your rage into words. You’re not describing how you feel, you’re explaining what happened. But in the word choices you’re selecting and the intensity you’re typing, your rage is clear. Because while you’re actively texting, you’re also actively perceiving your own ire. See what I mean? You can’t say your primary action is raging, even though you’re enraged, because what your energy is achieving is a text message. But you’re still actively aware of your rage and its informing what you’re saying and how you’re saying it—as well as the way you’re typing it, typos and all. 
    
That’s actively perceiving. 
    
Or something akin to it. And if we take that analogy and think of a reading, it’s not a difficult leap: we’re actively delivering a message. If you’re anything like me, your center of gravity in that moment is really in your brain. That’s the part of me that tingles most when I’m reading cards. (It’s probably different for everyone, but I’m very cerebral.) But at the same time there are other sensations occurring in my body. In the same way that the angry texter is engaged in texting and their brain is highly activated, the rest of the body is also experiencing high-level Hulk mode. It’s simply about the practice (queen) of becoming more aware (prince) of the other parts of us in a reading, without actually stopping the text—or in this case, the message of the cards. 
    
Now, the Hanged Man. He just says, “sustain that as long as you can.”
    
Nothin’ complicated, nothin’ bad, nothin’ surprising. “Try to do it as long as can.” That’s it. This is what I mean when I say how much context matters. Because the fact that it’s a “MAJOR ARCANA CARD” can make it seem so “BIG.” But it’s not. In this case, it’s just saying, “sustain.” It’s like the pedal on a piano, or something. Maybe not quite that, but it’s sustained. This is why I think we can learn so much about reading by reading about reading, because it’s going to show us so many magical context shifts. 
    
I love when this happens!
  
So that’s the method, I guess. Less down-to-earth than I’d like, but to practice this sort of active perception as long as possible to see what. Which is pretty much the way we learn to do anything, I guess, so there’s that. But what I love about this particular example is that it underscored and elaborated one elements from the lesson reading. And I find that quite validating!

​