Tarot: A reading in ten cards
I completed the certification course that I've been talking about. Or, rather, I attended all the classes and did the class work. But there's one final step before I'm legit certified. I have to do a reading. The directive was to do a reading for someone else or yourself. But there seemed to be an implied, "please, don't read for yourself," and I think I'm beginning to understand why that is.
I've spent the last 18 months in fits and starts reading for myself. I ask a question, throw cards, and then making the connections was easy. I have the benefit of context in order to aid in the heavy lifting that intuition would normally fulfill and what I'm really out to do here is flex my intuition. It's like working a muscle. Pull ups are incredibly hard to do. Yes, I'm talking about grabbing a bar and lifting yourself up. The more you do it, though, even if you're not pulling off a single one, is going to work the related muscle groups and little by little you'll get to that point where you're banging them out like a Navy SEAL. Sure, you can aid yourself in this act by putting a foot in a resistance band and tying the band to the bar to offset some of your weight, but remove the band and you're still not working all the muscle groups that will eventually work in concert to get your chin up over the bar. You need to remove the safety mechanisms and work all the muscles because, back to tarot, you're not just remembering the significance of the card meanings. You're using your own intuition and psychic abilities to add the connective tissue between the cards. Sure, you can open a book or pull up your favorite reference website but it's just going to tell you what each individual card means and not the story that the cards are telling you and your querent. Without my own life as the context for the readings, I have to do some real thinking and trust myself draw the right conclusions.
So here's me putting it all together. Ten cards, drawn for my wife. I've tried reading for her in the past and the cards come out all jumbled but I think that the problem is that I always try and apply our marriage as the operating framework behind the card meanings but I forget that she also has a life outside of this house and that there's more going on in her life than just our romance. So I struggled with this one for a bit until I'd thrown the first five cards and realized: This was about her and her sister.
I love my sister in law dearly. She bends over backwards to help us. We work two full time jobs. We have two kids and all the responsibility that comes with being a parent of young kids. You have places to be and sometimes it's impossible to be everywhere you need to be. So she has always helped out and we help out with her. But she's also excessively emotional and I, strongly suspect, an undiagnosed case of bipolar disorder which sometimes blows up and causes a lot of drama where we could have done without. As it happens, we're going through that drama right now and these cards talk all about it.
The Situation: 5 of Swords (Reversed)
There's been a lot of static in my wife's (henceforth to be known as Waifu) life lately between she and her sister. It's not even a fight, it's just meaningless tension. The 7 follows the 6, which features a woman (maybe) and her child (maybe) moving away, which speaks to Waifu's previous situation, a health crisis where she spent the majority of her time with our son in a hospital. It took a lot out of her; both of us, really, but her in particular. Before that there was the nightmare of dealing with me going insane. This has been a tough time for her and now she has to deal with this emotional nonsense where she is seen as the aggressor, the one wielding the weapons. Her sister also sees her as one who takes, takes, takes and makes everything about herself, which is categorically untrue but is how she is perceived, nonetheless. Waifu is also the one who ends up bearing the burden for other people's nonsense. Really what she wants is to walk away from the whole thing and not have to deal with the static.
What's really on her mind: Page of Wands
Really, what she wants to be doing is working on her own stuff and finding her way. I have my magic practice and she has hers and she hardly ever gets to get down to some ritual, which is very centering and calming for her. There's a lot of work to be done in her own life and our life as a family and she'd really like to be focusing on that and strengthening her own spirit. She spends so much time dealing with everyone else's life that she never gets the time to do work on her own stuff and enjoy her time with us and with herself. The Page on this card is a lot like The Hermit, except younger and undeveloped. He wants to explore and find his own way but needs to do the work and learn the theory before he can put it into practice. This is precisely what we're dealing with as a family right now.
The Current Challenge: 8 of Cups (Reversed)
There's really nothing to be gained here. Waifu has her own problems and concerns that keep her occupied and she just can't deal with the drama. The road leading her sister to this point in her life is a long one filled with bad decision making and poor impulse control and if she had the emotional maturity to deal with the choices she's made she might handle things like an adult and get the help that she needs but she heaps it on Waifu, instead, and makes her problems someone else's problems. Waifu wants nothing to do with it.
At first, I didn't quite get this card, so I pulled a second card for this spot for a bit of clarification and I drew The World (Reversed). We're out of the woods. We've made the journey and came through. As a family, we have everything we need. Her sister has her own journey to make. This is really not our problem. We could help, sure, but we've tried to help in the past but it only seems to compound the problems. She's tired. She just wants this to pass.
Your Spiritual House: The Magician (Reversed)
Waifu has all the tools she needs to actually do something for herself to make the situation better for herself but probably not her sister. There's no plan, though. She's made attempts in the past to settle her sister and assure her that everything is fine and that there is no static between the two of them but it doesn't really go anywhere. It's mental illness. I know how this works and the rational mind can't really figure it out because a mentally well-adjusted person is going to ask a lot of questions of the crazy person that they can never answer because that just how it is until you actually dig in and get to work on your shit. But her sister will never make the change. There's a bit of a family legacy at work that this is just how it is and you somehow deal but as you'll see in a card a little later on, things just tend to go in circles.
Your Secret Super Power: The Hanged Man
What Waifu has on her side is endless patience to ride this kind of thing out. We've been through it before and it'll happen again. If she just hangs out and waits long enough, her sister's mood will shift and even out and things go back to normal. But hanging around doing nothing is still doing nothing when something could possibly be done and there's a second side to this card: There is wisdom to be gained from sacrifice. Sucking it up and dealing is a big part of why these two are the way that they are. Words go unsaid and everyone stoically marches forth, "dealing with it". But let's get hypothetical for a second because after the Hanged Man gets off his cross, there is Death. I'm obviously looking ahead here but let's say that Waifu gets down off the cross and stops waiting things out and does something about. Maybe there's a conversation about bipolar disorder and taking the steps to get properly medicated. I don't know. But if something is done instead of hanging out waiting, there is Death, a conclusive end to the cycle.
The Catalyst: The Tower
Oh boy.
So Waifu has hypothetically done something about it. She comes at her with the truth, "You have a problem up in the brains. You've made a number of decisions that were exceptionally bad and your motivations for making those decisions sucked," It's the awful truth but ain't that The Tower? There are other cards in the deck that deal with delivering the truth and maybe Waifu could have been a little more delicate with things. That's the thing with these two; with that whole side of the family, really. When the chips are down and things are being done instead of being stoically ignored, no one cane be moderate about how they go about talking about what needs to be talked about. And I get that. It's hard. I suck at it and avoid getting to that Tower point with my own family at all costs because families and feelings are complicated. In this case, everything blows up and there's a big falling out but was The Tower torn down like it's supposed to be? One side of the lightning strike has taken place. Has the enlightenment come with the truth?
Upcoming Influences: The Devil (Reversed)
Jesus Christ...
The answer to my last question is a resounding "no". As a matter of fact, her sister digs in and chains herself to the block that's holding her down. "I'm not crazy! You're crazy!" Bad decisions and poorer impulse control come harder and faster, almost deliberately. It's a case of "I'll show you all" that is self-destructive on purpose. The best of intentions are completely misunderstood and turned into a cause for her sister to ruin her own life. This certainly wouldn't be the first time. We've actually been through a Devil Reversed time in this woman's life before and I'll tell ya, it wasn't pretty. But I get it. Bad habits and mental illness really blow.
Again, at first this card didn't make a lot of sense to me in this context, so I drew a second card to clarify and I drew The King of Pentacles, which is how I got to the whole digging in and going ham with all the bad decisions and excessive bad behavior.
Others Looking In: The Chariot (Reversed)
For everyone in the know, this is just another case of Waifu and Waifu's sister going around and around again. Her sister chases phantom worries, makes a lot of weird accusations and projects her own insecurities onto her sister, who has managed to make a nice, stable life for herself. The Chariot is one of the most plain-spoken cards in the entire deck and in this instance, it's pretty clear that we're just going in circles again. We start out, there's static and tension, it grows and turns into a whole thing and then cools and we're back where we started, waiting for the next cycle to begin. If there was room to work this out like grown-ass adults, this card might have been thrown upright but no. It seems like if any attempt to work things out and move in a unified direction is met with the usual runaround.
Your Subconscious: Queen of Cups (Reversed)
What does Waifu think of her sister? This is some brutal stuff right here and also not wrong. Sister is emotionally unstable? Check. Insecure? Check. Does she let her emotions run away with her? Oh yeah. She has all the classic symptoms and is the living embodiment of this card. Where Waifu has always been pretty conservative about her emotions, Sister has been exceptionally liberal with hers. When she feels something, she feels something. When she feels like life is moving against her, she feels like everyone is conspiring against her. Even total strsangers. Again, as a diagnosed crazy person, I get this. Paranoia makes recovery pretty much impossible. Sister is kind of waiting for the 10 of Swords moment that I had to set things right. She just doesn't realize it yet.
Jumping Off Point: The Lovers
Well, it looks like nothing is learned. This isn't so much as a story arc so much as it's a story loop. I'm not really sure if any lesson can ever really be learned here. This is a repeating cycle that we've seen in other parts of their family and these two are just playing out the same games as other relatives. But at the end of the day, these two are sisters. They've been sisters in lives before. These two go around the wheel of spirit like Waifu and I do again and again, trying to work out their spiritual baggage and they're joined at the hip by Heaven. But they're also wildly different people separated by spirit. There's a family love that keeps them together and if something were to happen to one, the other would feel it as deeply as any other person in the same position. Nothing will ever actually break that bond, in spite of all the nonsense they'll always come together around this fact. Things will be rocky but one way or the other, trying to make a change for the positive or not, the story ends the same way every time. Sisters.