Image via WikipediaWe are part of the world, and of everything in it. each breath we take, we take in oxygen which has been given off by plants. We exhale, and our breath is taken in by plants. Every act we perform has ramifications far beyond ourselves. Working with the Tarot helps us to see our place in the world. It’s a healing process, because we also come to see and understand how we have been wounded by the world. In healing ourselves, we heal the world.

Take out your Tarot deck, and sort the cards into 2 stacks. First, the cards which you think are pleasant enough: those cards which you either enjoy, or which draw no real reaction from you at all. In the second stack, put the cards which disturb you. These are the cards which you recoil from, like Death, or the Devil, or those cards which you love, like the World. Both sets of cards are equally important. However, you will learn a great deal from those cards which disturb you.

The work we do with the Tarot activates our subconscious mind. We can’t know what is going on down there, and we don’t need to know. When we work with and study the Tarot, we begin the work of integration: we release energy which has been locked up by our unconscious repressions, and we can use this energy in our life. The integrative work is done in silence; the best way we can help this work to take place is by relaxing, and looking at the cards, especially those cards which disturb us. It’s a way of working which is similar to the work which people do with their dreams.

Working with the cards in this way helps us to transform our life. As we transform, the cards seem to transform with us. Over time, the cards which repelled us begin to appeal to us, and those cards which appealed to us, will lose their attraction.

The Death card repels many people, at least initially. It’s a card that reminds us that everything is impermanent. Nothing lasts. It reminds us of the people we have loved, who are now dead. The card shocks us. However, the card can also be a comfort. It reveals that it really is darkest before the dawn.

Think of yourself ten years ago. What happened to the person you were then? You changed. That person of ten years ago is dead. The preoccupations she had, the loves and the enthusiasms, are either gone, or have changed in vital ways. Over longer periods of time, we change even more. Think of yourself as you were when you were five years old. Where is that five year old now? You can’t say that you’re still the person you were at five, if you’re now 50.

Over time, we come to see the Death card as a beginning, as a constant becoming, rather than as an ending. Look at the bones in the Death card. They are the centre, life stripped to the essentials. And life goes on, with the seeds of the old, which transform into the new. If we understand the Death card well, if we internalize the meaning of the card, we become comfortable with the vast cycles of constant endings and beginnings.

Look at the Death card. Close your eyes, and feel the emotions which it arouses in you. Feel where in your body those emotions are located. In your chest? Your throat? Your belly? Focus on the emotion, and try to intensify it. as you do that, you’ll find that the emotion will change into something else.

What do we learn from the cards which attract us, and those which repel us? We learn to become whole. We learn not to be afraid. We feel our fear intensely, and as we feel it, so it changes to something else.

Take out your Tarot journal, and write down the date. Now write down the five cards which disturb you most, and the primary emotion which they arouse in you. In years to come, you will see that those cards which most repelled you, will cease to do so. You will either come to like them, or view them as neutral. This is inevitable, because you will change. The cards can help the process of change and integration.

We all have wounds, and just by looking at the cards, by being willing to be with the hurt parts of ourselves, those hurts are transformed by love.

How is this helpful in business? Business is life. To be successful in business, you need to be able to see yourself, and the situations you find yourself in, clearly. You need a sense that try as you might, you don’t  have as much control as you think you do. Events and situations will transform, and you will transform. Laying out the cards will give you the sense that your life makes sense.

You’ll be able to enjoy your work more, as you understand more about yourself, your motivations, and your life. You’ll be healthier in body, mind and spirit.

Image via WikipediaEvery Tarot aficionado has their own favorite deck of Tarot cards.

My long-time favorite is the Universal Waite Tarot, which has lovely soft colors.

From a review:

 The soothing, pastel coloring, done so beautifully by Mary Hanson-Roberts, brings out all of the delicate intricacies of Lady Pamela’s famous drawings.  Each card now seems ready to step out and guide you along Tarot’s path of wisdom.  The facial features and their expressions are more readily decipherable now, showing the sorrow, pain, joy, happiness, greed, wisdom, resignation and anticipation of each figure.

Each esoteric symbol on every card can be seen and better understood.  Subtle nuances, such as the patient, waiting gaze of the Hermit as he watches for others seeking knowledge; the healthy stalks of grain growing before the Empress and the fresh green and gold in her starry, Earth Mother crown; the despair on the faces of the Tower’s victims; the weary, but still resolute face on the IX of Wands; the pensive wariness of the IV of Cups; all of these and more now leap out at the reader.

It’s a lovely deck, a joy to use.

Image via WikipediaHighly successful people are successful because they use their intuition.

Why not try using the Tarot cards and other esoteric symbol systems to help you to focus your intuition, and to make it work for you?

If our conscious mind makes up 10% of our mental abilities, our subconscious makes up the other 90%. Our subconscious is also the gate to the collective unconscious. The Buddha says that we live in a mental world, and the physicist is saying the same thing.

So if our total mind contains such wonders, how do you get in touch with the whole thing? How can you communicate with the other 90% of you which is normally closed off to you?

You use the Tarot, or a similar symbol system, through which to focus your intuition. This is not complex or difficult. Forget anything you may have heard about developing ‘psychic’ powers. You’re not developing any supernatural ability at all. You’re simply bringing your true knowledge into awareness.

Think of yourself of two people. There’s you, and your subconscious mind, whom we’ll call Fred. In the movie Drop Dead Fred, the Fred who caused such havoc was an aspect of the heroine’s subconscious mind.

You have your own “Fred”. Your Fred knows and understands much more than you do, but he has no way of communicating with you, other than through emotions, memories and symbols.

For example, let’s say you get to work this morning, and a memory pops into your mind. The memory involves a trick you played on an old girlfriend, twenty years ago. Being slightly more mature now than you were when you were seventeen, the memory makes you squirm.

Beyond the embarrassment, wrapped around the memory is a feeling of vague discomfort, a tightening in your stomach muscles. You couldn’t call this mix of emotions real anxiety, but it’s close. At ten o’clock you’re due to sign a contract with a new supplier. You don’t connect the memory of the old girlfriend and the trick you played on her with the signing. Six months later, when it turns out that the plastic conduit the supplier sold you was shoddy, costing your company big bucks, you still don’t make the connection.

Tarot helps you to focus your intuition, and to make connections.

Image via WikipediaIntuition is vital to our life. Unfortunately, many of us have been hypnotized to imagine that our intuition doesn’t exist. This makes as much sense as going through life blindfolded, which is what we do, when we don’t use our intuition. The more you trust and use your intuition, the more smoothly your life will flow. Our intuition is part of everything we so, and a signal that our intuition is working properly, is when synchronicity emerges into our life.

Often, when I am writing, I will get an impulse to pick up a certain book. There is no discernible reason why I should pick up this book, except the strong feeling that I should. Invariably, when I pick up the book, it refers to something that I am working on at the moment: something that is exactly appropriate to my work. In fact, I know that my work is going well, because synchronicity happens with such regularity.

No one really knows why and how Tarot works, but Carl Jung believed that it worked through synchronicity.

From Wikipedia:

Jung coined the word to describe what he called “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” Jung variously described synchronicity as an “‘acausal connecting principle’” (i.e., a pattern of connection that cannot be explained by conventional, efficient causality), “meaningful coincidence” and “acausal parallelism”…

It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious, in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlay the whole of human experience and history — social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Events that happen which appear at first to be coincidence, but are later found to be causally related are termed as “incoincident”.

Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were not merely due to chance but, instead, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic.

One of Jung’s favourite quotes on synchronicity was from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, in which the White Queen says to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards”.