Tarot as a Life Tool - Sex~Kitten.net

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My favorite thing is when I come across a reading I did months or years ago and find remarkably true, accurate insight. Not so much about predicting the future, but about getting down to the real truth about a person or a situation. If you can find the truth, predicting the outcome is often the easy part.

For instance, I did a reading a couple of years ago for a friend, who was struggling to choose between two potential lovers. Both men were good people, she really couldn’t make a bad choice. But she made herself miserable for months going back and forth, changing her mind, juggling both men and trying to keep her options open. She asked me to do a reading to tell her which man she should choose. The key card in the reading, The Hanged Man, is a card about sacrifice. This is a card of the Major Arcana, those cards which address major life lessons and destiny. Clearly, my friend was struggling to learn a lesson about sacrifice.

In my reading, I explained that “sacrifice” may seem like a negative thing. We think of sacrificing something as giving it up, doing without. But applying it to her situation, I felt it was more like the necessity of sacrificing something in order to have anything. If you’re going out to eat, you can choose many different styles of food. If you choose Chinese food, you don’t think of it as sacrificing but that’s really what you’re doing. You’re giving up the option to have steak or Italian food so that you can have the Chinese. If you refuse to sacrifice any of your options, you’ll wind up going to bed with no dinner. I believed this was what my friend was struggling with in her love life. She was not willing to sacrifice either choice so that she could have one man and so she was left with none.

I advised my friend then, these Major Arcana cards are pesky critters. If you don’t learn the lesson this time around, don’t worry because you will see this card again and again in your life until you get it figured out.

When I came across this reading recently, my friend was suffering from the broken-hearted aftermath of another, nearly identical love triangle in which she had been unable to choose between two men and had ultimately lost them both. When I saw what I had read for her in the cards, I was in awe of my own insight. Not only had my prediction come true (that her failure to choose would result in losing both men) but my comment about the life lesson returning to her until she learned it was almost eerie because the whole scenario had played itself out again for her in exactly the same way more than a year later!

Where did this brilliance come from, I wondered.

Predicting the Future

For me, the cards don’t foretell the future except as a snapshot of the possibilities presented by the forces at work in this moment. These forces are constantly changing and being influenced by other forces so any given prediction is never a sure thing. The prediction is based on what is likely to happen, considering the energy at play right now.

When you get really good at it, you can appear to perform amazing psychic predictions based on your readings. All this means is that you have a very clear connection with the energy and the messages conveyed by the symbols on the cards and you’re wise enough to see patterns and to accurately predict actions and events based on them. This doesn’t mean the future will be what you see it to be. It just means your guess at what the future will be is probably a safe bet.

This is why, of course, it’s easier to do an accurate reading when you know something about the person you’re reading for. That’s true of any fortune-telling method. When a fortune-teller begins asking you questions about yourself during a reading, it’s not a gimmick to try and get information so she can pretend to have some kind of psychic power. It’s necessary for her to know a bit about you in order to make the connections and read the symbolic messages for you. And just because she’s skillful in reading the cards and predicting the outcome doesn’t mean she can psychically know everything about you or your future.

For Yourself; As a Tool for Meditation

I find a great deal of spiritual understanding in the ancient symbolism of the Tarot. When I want to focus my mind on a specific person, I can study one of the court cards. When I want to meditate on a concept, such as Justice, I turn to the appropriate Major Arcana card.

As you get better acquainted with the cards, you can even begin to use them as a language, constructing entire stories in your mind by linking cards together as you do in a reading. Huge concepts can be condensed down into an easy-to-grasp symbol and as those symbols are linked together and built on top of one another, your mind is soon full of deep, profound insights. You may even discover the Meaning of Life, without even taking any LSD!

For meditation, it’s often helpful to have a variety of decks. You can take the same card out of each deck and meditate on the differences and the similarities. You may find surprising ideas come to you in this way during your relaxed meditative state.

For centuries Tarot has been feared and demonized by mainstream Western religious culture, but those who find profound insight in biblical scripture and meditate on Bible verses every day are accessing the same spiritual knowledge source. Tarot is nothing but a tool and should not be misunderstood or overly mysticized.