By Darin Shock
What are you making of this (maybe?) one life you've been given? That, to me, is the ultimate embodiment of the Magician. While the photo I chose is tongue in cheek, the Magician in the Tarot sense is not one who pulls rabbits from hats or pulls a half dollar from behind your ear. However, the wonder and mystery that one feels when in the midst of truly magic work are all in active play.
The Magician is the active principal, the alignment of what is in the ether: your thoughts, your goals, your values, your sense of self, and the creation of that Being into the real and active world. This is the great principal behind "The Secret", that we can use the very act of our focus to create the things we want on our lives. We can align how we think about ourselves in the world with what we want. The Magician is powerful, unwavering, and committed. Through our will we can manifest great change and transformation. Gandhi was a Magician. Leonardo di Vinci was a Magician. The woman who bootstrapped her way into getting a degree with three kids in tow is a Magician. 1. What are you Magicking into your life right now? 2. What requires your total commitment and focus? 3. What is it that you truly want to create in the world, and are your thoughts, values and will in alignment with that, if not, why not? 4. Tell me about a time where by sheer dint of your determination and effort, you became/won/started something others said was impossible or unlikely? 5. Do you realize how truly, tremendously and completely powerful you are?
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Shadowscapes Tarot
Originally called Fortitude, Strength concerns itself with the strength that comes over a concerted effort over a long period of time. Strength is controlled, coercive, compassionate, and most of all, patient.
Strength derives from the balanced aspect between the "animal" aspect of ourselves, our inner lions and all of the emotions and urges they bring, and our rational nature as humans. Strength encourages you to hone the lion's strength to support you during a challenging time. Strength also expects you to reign in your temper, to manage your impulses and keep your focus on the goal using a compassionate application of rational control. The balance, once achieved, is the apex of fortitude and the kind of strength we all hope to achieve. 1. Do you under or over regulate your lion self? Do you trust your lion nature? 2. What does a well integrated self (lion's strength, energy and emotions reigned in under compassionate control) look like to you? Are you there yet? 3. Do you forgive yourself when you make mistakes based out of emotion or impulse? Are you loving and compassionate to your lion nature? 4. Do you resist rational control and let your emotional self run free (and all it's side effects)? If so, why?
"The Wheel of Fortune": E. Burne-Jones
The Wheel of Fortune, or more correctly, Fortuna's Wheel, is a very old concept with many literary mentions in classic Greek literature. The idea of the capricious nature of luck and fate is an old and enduring concept still captured in Tarot's very own Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel of Fortune often represents a change in luck, or a very lucky streak which is about to run out mostly this has nothing to do with you but greater events largely out of your control.
In our modern lives we purchase insurance, wear our seat belts, and take our vitamins. We are obsessed with mitigating any negative effects Chance would like to play on our lives. Alternatively, Las Vegas is the city that reveres Fortuna by never sleeping and about the country lottery tickets purchased to win ever increasing pots of gold we also curry Her favor. Rabbit's foots, lucky pennies, and four leafed clovers are carried to an attempt to sway the direction of the wheel in our lives. The modern Western world is preoccupied with completely controlling every aspect of life but sometimes Chance rolls the dice and it is your turn: to get cancer, to lose a child, to experience tragedy and loss that often makes no sense and we keep running in our heads over and over, "How can this be? This is not fair! What did I do to deserve this?" This is the experience of the Fortuna's Wheel spinning against your favor. But when She decides to smile upon you, you find $50 on the ground, you get that job or that house, you give birth to a beautiful, perfect baby. Usually we congratulate ourselves when it goes right and blame God when it does not. But often, it just makes no sense, it is just Fortuna spinning her wheel over and over again. 1. Do you consider yourself a lucky or unlucky person, why or why not? 2. Right now, are you in a period of good fortune, or running through a time of bad luck? 3. Are you a cautious person, or do you let the 'chips fall where they may'? 4. Do you believe that luck is largely an uncontrollable aspect within our lives, or do you believe you make your own luck?
Morgan Greer Tarot
Everyone loves the Lovers. The Lovers card can mean, very obviously, passion, sexual love, rolling about in a field with hay in your hair kind of good times. The Lovers also means intimacy and connection of platonic type; the person who just makes you shine and unfold into your best self when they are around. In our over committed lives its not often, I think, that many of us get to spend time with the one who makes us unfold into our best selves. Or, we miss the one who did.
1. Who are you connecting to in your life in an intimate way and how does their presence allow you to unfold into your best self? 2. What does your sexual life look like right now? Are you happy with it or would you like some changes? What are your hangups around this? 3. Who is your lover? If you don't have a lover right now, think about a lover you have had in the past, what happened, how did that experience unlock an aspect of you?
Happy May Day, Beltane, Feast Day everyone! I find it very interesting that on this day, I pull the Hierophant
(hee-roe-fant) for today's card. The Hierophant describes a religious leader traditionally in a benevolent act of bestowing a blessing upon a couple. The Hierophant represents religious tradition, authority, a human who helps you connect to the Divine as well as act as a symbol for your own cultural tradition and identity. For many reasons, especially of late, people are having growing suspicion, doubt and questions about the humans who take on the mantle of being religious leaders, and religious authority on the whole. That being said there are many religious leaders who do act in a place of Love and Compassion and call for Peace because whatever the religion is; the message is pretty much the same: love, love, love. 1. I have the following reservations about the religion I was brought up with. Or, I was brought up with no religious tradition and I have always wondered about... 2. I feel the following about the religion I grew up with... it affects me by... Or, I have always been curious about a certain religion... I am going to do the following about it... 3. I have the following conflict regarding the religion I grew up with... it affects my relationship with the Divine in the following ways... I am going to take steps to create inner peace by... Or, growing up without a religious identity has affected my adulthood such as... and I feel the following about it...
Today's card draw is The Fool. The fool was once literally interpreted as a fool but the interpretation has changed to be one of joyful innocence, new beginnings, open-mindedness, and an internalized belief that Spirit is guiding and protecting him (and Spirit is). The Fool does not worry about the coulda, woulda, shouldas but rather is the moving now; the present and pure expression of each moment. Like a infant there is only experience and expression.
1. Think back to a time where you felt as if you were truly living without worries. How did that feel and what changed? 2. What new beginnings are unfolding in your life right this very moment? How can you better live within the innocence and trust of that unfolding? 3. Reflect on past moments where your Higher Power was guiding you; what happened? How did it feel, how did you know?
The Emperor by ~SceithAilm
The Emperor represents regulation, control, legacy building and ensuring a stable environment for his subjects. He has worked hard to become the master of all he surveys and he guides and protects it with a firm hand. The Emperor is the strong All Father, the paternal line; very different from the pregnant and flowing Empress, this is a guy with boundaries and discipline.
Kings and Emperors were important to the common person, they often established order and safety against the wild forests and people's outside of society and demanded loyalty in return. 1. What are your opinions about authority? Do you have issues with authority? If so, why and what do you do? Is your attitude about authority a healthy one? 2. How is your relationship to your Father? How did your Father shape your current attitudes toward Authority?
Old English Tarot
And for your last card of the week, we have The Moon. Maybe today you awoke and felt like something was 'off', you are not sure what it is and you cannot put a name to it but perhaps it had something to do with a troubling dream you cannot quite remember. The Moon is about the troubled waters of our psychological state, the unknown, the mysterious, the lost. Like the Moon, waxing and waning it can also figure prominently in troubled relationships; never settled but bipolar, rushing from headlong passion to barely a whisper. The Moon can also indicate a time to listen to that unsettled feeling and await the answer that will eventually come bubbling to the surface.
1. When you feel unsettled, and you do not know why, how do you honor that feeling? 2. How do you deal with ambiguity, do you fight it or do you accept it and why? 3. What relationships in your life are waxing and waning, never settled or peaceful? 4. What is that whisper so quiet inside of you, that you are afraid to listen to?
1. To temper: to dilute, qualify, or soften by the addition or influence of something else.
2. Temperance: moderation in action, thought, or feeling, restraint. Temperance in the Tarot usually shows a person or an angel mixing two substances together. This is not a slap dash throwing together but a careful, measured, steady combination of ingredients. Today's card is one of the major Virtues included in the deck and calls us to moderate our actions, speech and influence; to take the middle path, to seek harmony over individuation with a soft touch and an calm manner. 1. I feel a little out of control about... I need to reign in my impulse to... 2. I am dealing with a delicate situation that calls for... the qualities about myself that I am using to manage it are... 3. I have a hard time being moderate about... and if affects me in the following ways...
Golden Tarot
This morning on my walk to my reading room this morning, I said to myself, "I bet I pull the Death card for my Tarot connection today." Lo and behold when I got in, I cut the deck and out comes Death, literally jumping out of the deck. Often the Death card can mean transformation, a sudden change, an abrupt ending in an aspect of one's life. But, as much as people do not like to think about it, Death can also mean just that, death. My husband is on his way to Boston for a sudden funeral on his side of the family on the heels of my kind elderly shut-in neighbor who lost her dog to cancer, "where is the third one?" I think to myself as I go about my day. Modern society does not like to think about death and we have sanitized it to be hidden but our ancestors had a closer association with death hence why the death card in those older decks are often grinning.
I used to work a Renaissance Fair in California (not surprised are you?) and I loved a troupe of dancers and singers called the Danse Macabre, they would joyfully dance about as skeletons reminding us to wring every moment we can out of life because it will all soon be gone. 1. I am profoundly affected by the death of this person... and it changed my life in the following ways... 2. My ideas around death are... my idea of an afterlife is... and it affects me in my living by the following ways... 3. I imagine my death might be like... and so I empower my living by... 4. I need to prepare for my eventual death by... I need to make sure others know... |
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Jenna Matlin
M.S. in Organizational Psychology and Leadership CategoriesAll |