The Symbolic Language of the Tarot

Why is a tarot reading by a competent experienced reader so helpful to many of us?

Well. I have my opinions, of course  - an ex-boyfriend or two might even claim I have too many of them! But having read professionally for thirty years, I think I have something to offer to the debate.

The tarot, along with astrology and other such tools for intutive guidance, play perfectly into the human mind’s preference for symbolic thinking. Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, identified this trait in the 1800s and began to treat clients with intractable mental problems by decoding the symbols that their minds used to hide painful information from their conscious selves.

The world is a scary place and almost all of us go through traumatic experiences that we don’t want to face. Sometimes, it’s not even a case of not wanting to face things, it’s more that if we want to be able to function on a conscious level in everyday life, we have to push the pain and fear deep into our unconscious  and just get on with it. But those experiences don’t go away; they are like bogey men, hiding in the closet, waiting to jump out at the most inconvenient time to scare hell out of us.

For instance, you might have had a terrifying relationship with a stalker when you were fifteen years old. The stalker’s name might be Bob and his effect on your life was such that you had to move towns.  This is traumatic and your mind cannot deal with it properly and get you off to school everyday.

So it pushes the experience deep into the unconscious so that your conscious mind can continue to function and files it away safely under the label ‘Bob’. The word Bob soon becomes the symbol in your unconscious for Danger! Run away as fast as you can!

The file evolves over time and also becomes the place where your mind stores all of its disappointments about men in general - it’s a matter of convenience really. Why make new folder and a new symbol for ‘Problems with Men’ when you already have a perfectly good one with plenty of room in there for new stuff?

And look - none of this matters one little bit. Well. Not until twenty years have passed and you’ve been married and divorced, you have a couple of kids to bring up largely on your own, and you still haven’t found the time or space to excavate and deal with all that old trauma Bob the Stalker caused you when you were fifteen.

But what happens when you meet a great guy who sincerely wants to love you and your kids but you just can’t trust him no matter how perfect he seems? Why? Why can’t you trust him when he’s done nothing wrong by you?

It’s simple really - can you guess why you look at this poor guy like he's Charles Manson every time he moves too fast around you? The poor guy’s name is Bob, of course, and he’s paying not only for the sins of Bob the Stalker but for every other guy who ever stood you up and every cad who didn’t call when he said he would.

Symbols are a like a filing system for our emotions and humans can be very easily manipulated via their identification with symbols. Flags and national anthems for instance, as symbols for the love of country, have always been used to lead young men into wars. If we don’t decode and keep which symbols work in our favour rather than against us, they can be very destructive.

One of the many things that the symbols of the tarot deck help us to do , is bring your own personal symbols to consciousness and unlock past traumas that are still affecting our lives and decisions at a conscious level. The process of bringing these painful things to consciousness is one of the most important things we do in our personal growth. Until you have shed light on your shadow selves, they will remain frightening ghosts you cannot hope to defeat.


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Nobody's Perfect

If I had to put it into one sentence, I would say that the purpose of tarot reading is this: To help you find your path in life again, no matter how long it is since you lost your way. 

I always wanted to write a self help book titled Nobody's Perfect. 

So many of us think we've made too many mistakes to ever be happy, that we've squandered our chance at a great life, that because of past actions, we can never deserve to be really content.

Wrong, wrong and, let me think about that last one for a moment... Hmmm, yep, that one's wrong as well.

My favourite movie with a spiritual theme is Groundhog Day. A lot of people scoff when I say that. A lot of people see Groundhog Day as just another hilarious Bill Murray performance in an amusing but impossible set of circumstances. A lot of people are wrong about that.

What if you kept living the same day over and over again with no explanation and no real escape from your issues, no matter how hard you try?

Oh. My. God! That's my life! Well, some days anyhow.

Groundhog Day was first written by Danny Rubin as a way to make the concepts of Buddhism and spiritual growth through reincarnation more accessible to a mainstream audience. When the story begins, Phil is an obnoxious, sexist, self-centred ... well, arsehole. But through some mysterious blessing, he is trapped in a single day, in a town he hates, for eternity, or so it seems, and is forced to repeat that one boring day over and over until he learns it doesn't matter where he lives, who he loves or what he thinks, many of his life's events are out of his hands and the only control he has over anything is how he responds to it.

In the beginning Phil responds to everything in life with contempt and superiority but through his many mistakes, he eventually learns to respond with grace, patience, love and humour. Most of all, he learns humility. To see his journey from puffed up ego-monster whom everyone hates to humble but effective man about town whom everyone loves is both fun and inspiring.

In one of my favourite scenes, Phil explains to Rita that he is A god, not THE god.

We are all imperfect. We are all just trying to find the best path towards our purpose. By the end of Groundhog Day, Phil is still imperfect, of course, but he has been busted out of that awful lonely cycle that we, as humans, can get into, of cowering behind our egos, hiding our wounds and fears. We either try to pretend that we are perfect or we beat ourselves up for our shortfalls - as if somewhere out there, if we just try hard enough, if we just sweat and hate on ourselves enough, if we just worry and obsess enough, we will someday BE PERFECT.

We won't be. We can't be. It is literally impossible on every level of being you can imagine to ever be perfect.

Nobody is perfect. Why can't we get that through our heads? Nobody is perfect! Why do we persist in beating ourselves up when we discover some new imperfection in ourselves?

Why not just acknowledge the latest in our many many imperfections, resolve to try to do better next time and continue our journey, glad to be alive and in the fine company of an entire world full of imperfect beings?


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what the tarot says about trust issues...

Tarot art by Emily Balivet

Like all cards, The Fool has several meanings - one of my favourites is Radical Trust. Trust in The Universe. Trust in the future. Trust in those you love.

I seem to be doing a lot of readings that revolve around the issues of trust and privacy lately  - both people who invade their partner's privacy and people whose privacy has been invaded.

Some clients will ask me if they should leave their partner because they can no longer trust them; either because the partner has been through their purse or their phone,  or because of what they found when they themselves went through their partner's purse or phone. Do invasions of privacy necessarily mean the invader can't never be trusted again? Does it mean that the invader necessarily doesn't trust the invadee in the first place? When is the invasion of privacy a ticket to ride and when can it be forgiven?

Like every issue within a relationship, only those within that intimate circle of two can really make those decisions. The cards won't tell you what to do; they can only help to clarify the issues and point the best direction for you to proceed to get to where you need to be in your life's journey.

But personally, I have to say, I do think that sometimes there is a little hysteria regarding these matters nowadays. Let's face it, privacy is a luxury that came into being very late in the evolutionary scheme of things. It is still a reality for only about 1% of the world's population*

Privacy is a by-product of wealth - you need to have enough money to buy space just for yourself.
Now, I know that most of us who are just working johnnies don't consider ourselves wealthy - but if you have a drawer with a lock on it, you are richer than much of the rest of the world. If you have an email account on your own computer to protect, you are rich beyond the dreams of the vast majority of the world.

I would argue that trust and privacy have very little to do with each other; trust is far older than privacy and has been inextricably entwined with our evolution. For instance, as we evolved, group members needed to trust other group members to find and kill food on a daily basis in order to survive. As they became farmers, they needed to trust that the rains would come. When their countries went to war, they needed to trust that soldiers wouldn't rampage through their village in the dead of night to burn their homes and kill their sons so they could never grow up into soldiers.

Needless to say, that trust was, and still is, being broken everyday in a thousand places around the world. And yet, those people get up in the morning and try to trust all over again. Everyday. Because humans cannot survive without a certain amount of trust in the future. If you love someone who was temporarily overcome with insecurity enough to go through your things and they demonstrate that they are sorry, suck it up.

Get up in the morning and try to go on. Come on, you can do it! Did you never sneak a peek at something you shouldn't have?

Life's short. Trust hard.

* statistic completely fabricated in order to demonstrate a point


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The Universe sends Townsville tarot reader a message of peace and joy...

I did a nice pre-breakfast reading for one of my favourite regulars in London - Hi Karen! xx -  via Skype this morning. How about this world we're living in, huh? The miles don't mean anything any more.

But that's not why I'm writing this.

After the reading, I took my lovely daughter out for a very posh breakfast at a very suave establishment. Okay. So, it was actually MacDonald's. There. I confess. I drink Macca's coffee and I'm not ashamed to tell the world.

But that's not why I'm writing this either.

I'm writing this because I wanted to share with you the fact that the Universe sent me a very cheery Have a nice day! message with my coffee this morning. I took the lid off and laid it on my free newspaper and here is what I saw:

Of course, I was quick to notice the bikini clad woman who appeared to be leaping out of my coffee lid smiley face because of the position of the newspaper and so decided it was time to have a little fun with her. 

And so, The Coffee Lid Showgirl was born.

You have a nice day now too!

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Death and The Fool - more tarot fun!

There are a couple of cards that really sound as though they should be bad news when they turn up in a reading. As I lay the cards down in front of a client and either Death or The Fool comes up, I see most of them wince.

No! Don't look! Don't try to read the cards for me. Even if you do read yourself, every reader works sodifferently that you can't possibly know what my cards are telling me about your situation and trying to second-guess them will only block out the fresh perspective that you were looking for by coming to an outsider.

Most readers will agree with me that the Death card hardly ever means an actual physical death. There are very rare occasions when it might be a warning - but in general, the maxim holds that when your number's up, your number's up and my cards aren't going to tell me about something that will only distress you and which you can't do anything about anyhow.

In general, Death indicates a complete change in some area of your life  and the resulting sense of loss. Yes, it's true that you will rarely get out of a situation that's being symbolised by the Death card without a period of readjustment and readjustment is often painful. But then, of course, situations - jobs, relationships, belief systems - all die for a reason and that reason is generally that they have outlived their usefulness. When the situation has 'died', you are free to invest the energy you were wasting there into a brand new situation. It can be hard to do, I know, but really, the smartest reaction when you see the Death card in your reading is excitement; it means that there's still some life and adventure left in you yet.

Then there's The Fool.

I guess it's hard to imagine, when you come to a reader with the hope of gaining insight into whether the next big risk you're planning to take in your life is a smart one, how seeing The Fool turn up could possibly turn out to be a good omen.

But to me it almost invariably is. Of course, each card has many different interpretations depending on its context within the reading as a whole and very occasionally, when The Fool turns up, it is saying to you, 'STOP! DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! WRONG WAY! GO BACK!'

But most of the time, The Fool is telling you to take that next leap, that risk. The only way any of us progress is by taking risks that others will see as foolishness. The only way humanity in general has ever progressed is by doing things that seemed crazy the first few times someone did them.

Now we all eat fungus to save us from germs (penicillin). We routinely get into vehicles far heavier than we are in order to travel miles above the ground when any fool knows that we ourselves are too heavy to fly. We communicate with each other across vast distances in ways that would have been called supernatural three hundred years ago.

There is no progress in life without someone taking the risk of failing and therefore looking foolish.

Both The Fool and the Death card herald new and exciting times in your life. Yes, in order to get to the new, you have to leave some of the old behind - but you may as well embrace that change; it will never stop happening for as long as you are alive.



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no, I can't read your mind...

Something I have always found a little disconcerting is the number of people who think that I must  be all-knowing if I’m an effective card reader/spiritual counsellor.

Recently, I went to my hairdresser and after I’d been there a while, a woman and her sixteen-ish daughter came in. My hairdresser - Tanya, God bless ‘er - runs a very successful home business from a cosy room under her house and when other clients come in, everyone talks to everyone else. It’s like a tea party only with one very chatty woman wielding scissors.

So, everyone was talking to everyone else - except for Ms Sixteen. She was NOT talking to me. In fact, she was noticeably uncomfortable and refused to meet my eyes, though she seemed quite fine with everyone else.

After a while, she began to relax and then someone mentioned my car which has my logo - a big pair of eyes with That Tarot Lady written above them - out and proud for all the world to see parked in front of the house. I told them that I’d decided to apply modern marketing methods to my work as a reader.

This opened a whole lot of questions from our little tea party.

Did I think that commercialising in this way goes against the spiritual principles of helping others? In a word - no!

Do people stare at my car? In a word - yes!

But, as always, it’s from out of the mouths of babes that the most honest questions and answers come. Ms Sixteen, with her facial piercings and her purple hair, leaned towards me suddenly and said, ‘Can you read my mind?’

I laughed and looked at her for a long moment as I decided whether to screw with her head or not, and then said, ‘No, I can’t read your mind.’

‘Are you sure?’ she said suspiciously.

I laughed again. ‘I’m sure. And you’ll find that most other successful card readers can’t either.’

She looked relieved. I’m used to that. Some people think that even if I could read minds, I’d have nothing better to do with my time than to invade the privacy of their head-space.

Look, the honest fact is - I don’t want to read your mind. I have enough trouble with my own crazy thoughts without yours and those of every other passing Tom, Dick and Harry as well, thank you very much!

I said to Ms Sixteen, ‘Think about it - how on earth would I be able to function normally if I was going down the street hearing everybody else’s thoughts as well as my own? I’d be a basket case!’

I explained to her that we humans come with a built-in sanctuary that is ours and ours alone. No-one else can go there without our permission. It’s called our own mind. You will notice that most readers take the time to ‘tune in’ to their client one way or another at the beginning of a reading. For me, it is while I’m shuffling the cards. 

I believe that the increased intuition common in successful readers is a result of the ability to lower our own guards rather than the ability to penetrate the guards of others. I like it that way! Imagine shopping and being able to hear the check-out chick think about the great sex she had with her boyfriend the night before or the guy in front of you thinking about how much he hates his wife.

There are some people who are so sensitive and their psychic boundaries so minimal that they can in fact ‘read thoughts’ - but the truth is this state of receptivity is often so painful and frightening that they find it difficult to function in the real world where they are constantly bombarded by the troubles and sadness of everyone they meet.

A good reader has many skills at their disposal - intuition is just one of them. There are also empathy, experience, humility and a full knowledge of what the cards mean so that you can interpret what serendipity is trying to tell you instead of imposing your own opinions onto the reading.

But I guess the main thing I want you to understand here is that you really really don’t have to worry about your privacy during your average reading - I don’t know what you got up to last week at the office party and I don’t want to know in graphic detail; that’s between you and the photo-copier. 

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Where to keep tarot cards

I've always liked to have something special to carry my tarot cards in.

For years, it was a carved wooden box made of some lovely smelly wood that my sister in law gave me for Christmas. Whenever I'd take my cards out of the box, we'd get a puff of perfume to start the reading. Now my daughter has made me - with her own clever little hands - a fluffy royal blue knitted pouch for them so unfortunately, the box has now been retired.

A friend gave me a silk scarf many years ago and my cards are always wrapped in that before being put to bed. Wrapping tarot cards in silk is a fairly traditional way of keeping them - it's said that a natural fibre helps cleanse the cards of the energy of the last reading.

Meh. I don't know about that. I just like traditions for tradition's sake really - I keep my cards stored in the silk scarf mainly because my friend gave it to me and it's nice to have something that you always do with them when you finish a reading.

I admit to being quite territorial about my cards. I left them at work one day and someone used them without even asking!

:O

I was kind of put out about that. Not that I think it means my cards aren 't going to work anymore; it's just rude. Cards are, to most readers, like a favourite shirt. You buy them because you love the design. You know that one day they will wear out and you're sad when that day comes. You wouldn't borrow someone's favourite shirt without asking and I wouldn't pick up someone else's cards either.


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