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What is an Archetype?

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To understand what an archetype is I first want to explain the structure of the psyche, real simple. This is not hard science so it’s important to understand that when describing the psyche and any invisible structure beyond the five sense, we have to imagine and feel into them, holding the idea of the structure loosely.

The psyche is the entirely of your being beyond the physical form and it is made up of three main parts. Ego, personal shadow and collective shadow. Shadow can also be called subconscious or unconscious.

Ego is the aware you, the conscious self. All the thoughts, feelings, motivations and imaginings you are aware of happening within you is ego.

The personal shadow is a place where all you are unaware of lives. Thoughts, feelings, wounds, gifts, true self aspects all get submerged by ego (whether you are aware of the submerging or not) into the personal shadow and live there growing gnarlier over time. Growing gnarly is real. If you submerge anger it will grow into rage. If you submerge sorrow it will grow into despair. If you submerge your true self it may also grow gnarly in some fashion and turn into a dark personality. (I am using the adjectives dark and light as a metaphor describing actual light and voidness of light).

The dark personality is the personality void of light. Light is awareness, what ego can see. Without awareness and hiding in the personal shadow, a very free spirit true self may grow into a careless rebellious dark personality like Marla from Fight Club as an extreme example. Often the true self gets submerged into the shadow early in life and the dark personality it becomes seizes ego unconsciously and runs the control decks. More on this later.

The collective shadow is the transpersonal part of self. Beyond self. It is where all collective beings live as well as your ancestors. The collective beings are called Archetypes. They have no physical form. Spiritual guides, gods, goddesses, and angels are some versions of archetypes. The archetypes have a sentience and will of their own. They rise up from the collective shadow and express themselves through the personal shadow and ego. This is just how they roll.

The collective shadow is just as much a a part of you as the ego is a part of you. You are just as much a collective being as you are an individual being. To understand this think about how all of life on earth is symbiotic. Life feeds on life. Bacteria needs a host just like archetypes need ego to express their nature.

Jung referred to archetypes as collective instincts we inherit the moment we are born and he named his own pantheon of archetypes. The Mother archetype is the instinct to mother within all of us, for example. The only way ego can connect to the archetypal world is to name them and imagine them. Tarot names them, astrology names them, Jung named them, the many cultural pantheons of gods and goddesses named them. Ego names the unseen to understand the unseen.

An archetype, whether seen as a collective instinctual force or a sentient being, has a will of its own that rises up from the collective shadow and into the personal shadow where it acts like a magnet pulling aspects in the personal shadow around it’s gravitational force. You can see this like planets forming a galaxy around a central sun. The sun is the archetype and the planets are the various aspects in the personal shadow. This galaxy is what Jung called a complex because it is made up of shadowed self parts connecting with an archetype to influence the ego. When a self part connects to an archetype it is called “constellating”. This slightly shifts the metaphor to one a constellation instead of a galaxy but it works. Parts of self constellate with the archetypes to influence ego.

The best way to see ego is like a control deck. I think of the deck of the main ship in Star Trek. The controls are constantly being taken by different aspects. All day long. Might be the abandoned inner child constellates with the Venus archetype to influence ego to constantly seduce men to feel worthy and needs to keep having sex to feel loved and avoid feeling empty. Or it might be the shunned inner child constellates with the Fool archetype to influence ego to never abide by any authority and this person can never hold down a job without having a panic attack or feeling trapped. Two examples of how these constellations in the personal shadow can cause a lot of suffering. Can the constellations cause happiness? Yes, it works in all ways.

The psyche is a never ending kaleidoscope of inner aspects taking turns running the control deck. I always ask myself, who is manning the deck? It is always changing.

You can say that all the gods and goddesses from every pantheon, all the planets, stars, and asteroids in astrology, and all major arcana of the tarot any any divination system are archetypes. When understanding astrology know that we aren’t speaking of the actual planet in the sky that is Venus, for example. We are speaking of the spirit that occupies the planetary body. Not all archetypes can be connected to a physical body but some can such as the astrological archetypes because the spirit of planetary bodies are collective.

An archetype is a collective force versus an individual force. Though you could ponder that even the human being is an archetype as each psyche is made up of individual and collective aspects. Jung did say that ego is also an archetype. I have felt into this and fo me it feels true that the “I” witnessing being a me is the Oneness witnessing a kaleidoscope of archetypes constellating a human being named Michelle. If you can feel into this last sentence you know what I mean and if not, don’t try too hard to grasp it.

You can’t really learn this stuff mentally. It won’t work. You’ll just wind up spouting grandiose concepts. To engage with this knowledge you have to feel it. You have to merge with it. The universe is alive. Earth is alive. Everything is alive. Archetypes are living beings constantly connecting with ego and influencing your will, desires, thoughts and choices. You want to connect with these archetypes to learn about them.

To connect with the archetypes is to create rituals, journal, paint, dance, imagine, take journeys, and work with them creatively in any fashion that is most alive for you.

You can use any archetypal system too. Tarot, astrology, Jungian archetypes, etc. The ego names them but they have no names. When you work with the archetypes you begin to have control over them versus them controlling you. And by you, I mean ego, the conscious self. The archetypes are always possessing ego whether you are aware or not.

I will use myself as an example. When I was a young woman and still very unhealed and disconnected from my body, the high priestess archetype came up from the collective shadow.

Suddenly, I had psychic skills and was able to delve deeply into the personal and collective shadow to retrieve whatever information I needed. The high priestess is queen of the unconscious world of wisdom living beneath ego awareness. She never left me and is now the main archetype I work with on the daily. I connect to her as Isis and sometimes Danu or Quan Yin. But back then, when physical life in my body was filled with suffering, she took over. Ego escaped into her. I abandoned my physical life for a psychic life only.

This happens with highly sensitive types who have been through childhood trauma and connect to the high priestess or any spiritual archetype. If ego abandons the physical due to too much trauma and lives too much in the spiritual world through the archetypal possession of a spiritual archetype, imbalance ensues. Ego and body are equally important and needed as much as soul and the invisible realms often labeled as higher realms which implies more important. Not true. All dimensions and aspects of life are of equal value and importance.

The archetype doesn’t care what it’s doing to ego. It will grow and inflate and keep on expressing until ego says no and creates boundaries. You don’t have to be aware this is happening either. A very dark example of this would be a cult leader who thinks he is god incarnate. Actually, the hierophant archetype has taken over the cult leader’s ego without him realizing it and due to his childhood trauma (is there any cult leader that does not come from childhood trauma?) he escapes the ordinary human world and gets swallowed up by the archetype until he believes he is god.

That is an extreme example of the danger of archetypal possession. What happened with my archetypal possession is the high priestess became a sanctuary for me while I needed her to be. Eventually other archetypes rose up to help me incarnate fully into my body (mostly Saturn and Pluto) and the high priestess found her proper place at my round table. I call it my round table but call it anything, your particular crew of archetypes, ancestors and allies that are a part of your psyche and here to help you heal and grow.

I have been merging with the archetypes consciously for many years and it’s become just the way it is now. I find immense comfort in them and sometimes awe. For instance, If I need discipline, I work with Saturn. Or rather, when discipline needs me, Saturn rises. The constant question is, who is visiting me now and why?

The natal chart and tarot deck are my go-to maps to know who is working with me and why. I teach this work and use this work with clients as a depth therapist because of first using it for myself. When working with archetypes life gets easier, you don’t have to do all the work and you can become more fully actualized through them. When you call Saturn or when Saturn calls you, discipline gets easier and you can really engage with it in a new way…unless there’s a complex blocking flow. Healing the complexes essentially set the archetypes free within you. But that’s for another blog.

Archetype Talk and Diving into the Fool

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One of the groups I facilitate is taking a transformative healing journey through the major arcana of the tarot, as The Fool, the first archetype out of twenty two that make up the tarot. This morning I feel inspired to write about The Fool and every now and then focus the blogs on these specific archetypes.

An archetype is a sentient collective instinct.

Sentient because the archetypes have a life of their own, independent of the individual, larger than the individual. Transpersonal.

The archetypes live in the collective unconscious. In a shamanic framework this may be known as the underworld. In the indigenous framework, which we all come from as we are all animal creatures of earth, the archetypes are known as gods and goddesses. Indigenous wisdom of life is connected to nature because we are nature and hence, wisdom is connected to the natural world.

The archetypes are just as much a part of nature as a tree or a layer of the earth’s interior. The psyche, individual and collective, is a part of nature not detectable by the five senses but detectable to felt senses experiences on deeper levels. These deeper levels of awareness are not in fashion in today’s religious or atheist black and white cultural narrative, but they are real and exist.

An archetype is a collective instinct because it is an urge we all share in common.

The urge to dive into a new experience with no past or future is the instinct of The Fool. The instinct to mother, create, nurture, and love unconditionally is the The Empress…and so forth. Whether you use the tarot or another archetypal system is does not matter. You can use Jungian, tarot, astrology, pantheons, or channel your own names for the archetypes….it is up to you.

The archetypes don’t have names and they live in their own dimension as psychic nature forces that the ego names in order to have a relationship with them.

Depth perspectives in psychology (Jungian and beyond), occult magic, shamanism, astrology, and tarot all narrate the same archetypal forces with different titles, beliefs, and frames of reference. The important thing is to choose what narration and belief fits you the best.

Naming, beliefs, and narration itself is a mental process that helps the ego connect with life. It is a function of being human not an objective solid truth outside of our minds. We get so caught up in the mental narration of beliefs in culture, warring over who is right, needing to be right, craving power, or even just wanting to put your name on a system of thought and get recognition for it…all of that is ego play and nothing more.

Nature cannot be claimed.

Back to The Fool!

I love The Fool because this archetype is free of the past and future. The Fool lives in the present. The Fool literally does not have a past or future.

One of the most literal understandings of The Fool is the fetus being born into the world for the first time. The brand new infant has no memory of the past, no awareness of a future, and no understanding of linear time. The new born does not even know it is different or separate than the external world.

A infant experiences being one with all of life. This is The Fool.

From a more spiritual perspective, the soul dives into the body of the mother but once nestled in, forgets where it came from. This is the first deep dive of the soul. Incarnation. To forget the origin and only know the absolute present is The Fool.

From a healing perspective, The Fool is the instinct to start anew with no preconceived notions, feeling the urge to experience life in a new way, forgetting the hurt, wounds, stories, and the behaviors of the past. In relationships this could herald a fresh new perspective in the relationship you are in, a new relationship, or a returning relationship wanting to start over in a new way. Internally, The Fool invokes the urge to be new inside…and it always starts from within no matter if relationships, jobs, locations, or circumstances are asking for newness in your life.

To experience internal and external life anew the healing has much to do with letting go of what was.

This is not so easy….but that’s the brilliant beauty of the archetypes. They are sentient transpersonal forces that give us help, life, internal shifts, miracles, and ease in the form of an urge inside to express their agenda.

They need us to express their agenda. We need them to express our agenda. It’s a two way street.

If The Fool rises up in your psyche, you will not only feel the urge to begin anew and be only in the present, you will also find it easier to let go of the old because The Fool has got your back.

Caution may also be needed as the archetypes don’t stop, don’t hold back, have no concern for human needs, The Fool will metaphorically or literally throw you off a cliff and cause careless action in the shadow of its urge if you don’t learn how to have good boundaries with its instinctual force.

Part of consciously working with archetypes is understanding each force has a light side and shadow side. A friend recently said that it wasn’t about the coin or black and white taking of sides but life is more like a prism. I love her prism metaphor and paraphrase it here to say that the archetypes contain a prism of urges from destruction to creation and they don’t care about how their force effects humans. This is not because they are devious or malicious, no…it is simply because they are not human and so they are not moral story makers like we are. They simply express with no limitation until the human ego puts up a limitation.

It’s up to the human ego to say yes and no the archetypal urges that rise up in the psyche.

For instance, I often feel The Fool rise up in me to blow up my entire life and move to a different city. I say no to this urge from The Fool unless it fits in with my chosen plans and soul narrative because it would be destructive and careless of me to do this. The Fool rises up in me just as often to chuck my beliefs about myself and relationships so that I don’t become dogmatic or rigid in my thinking. This Fool urge I always embrace to cleanse my psyche.

Consciously working with the archetypes is a wonderful way to connect with the transpersonal and feel supported and loved from within. We are never alone.

Consciously working with the archetypes is a wonderful way to create your life for as much as you are able in this world. It is a wonderful way to connect with nature and your psyche.

There are many tools to connect. As a therapist, I work with clients to connect and consciously work with the archetypes using tarot, ritual, and journeying. I use the same methods on myself on a regular basis. I also take the journey along with the others in my group. We form our crucible and journey together. Each time I journey as The Fool I get to start anew and the journeys get more specific over the years.

You can take this journey too in therapy, in a group, in a class, through watching videos or reading books…it’s up to you. You can use the tarot or Jungian archetypes. You can use a specific pantheon or blend pantheons. You can set up an alter for the archetype you are working with or paint, draw, sing, dance or creatively express it however you wish. I want to stress taking the creative and individualized path because how you connect best is what is most effective.

Is The Fool rising up within you?

 

 

 

Hope through Tragedy

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Today’s blog is inspired by a friend going through a very difficult time who suggested I write about enduring hope when I requested a topic. This blog is for her and everyone traversing their own version of tragic circumstances.

What is hope?

Hope is an archetype….an archetype called The Star, according to the ancient wisdom of the tarot.

Archetypes are the collective instinctual drives we all share in common and inherit the moment we are born, according to Jung.

Archetypes are the gods and goddesses, according to the ancients and indigenous people.

Whichever way you want to see archetypes, see them as sentient energies that live in their own place and this is the place we all birth from on a soul level. The collective unconscious is our mother birthing the individual psyche. The archetypes are transpersonal helpers, instincts, forces, and beings.  Hope is a goddess, a god, a sentient energy, and a collective instinct.

Hope is the “light when all lights go out” as said in Lord of the Rings when Frodo is trapped by a deadly giant spider and needs the light of hope to literally not die.  Victor Frankl wrote a book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he links feeling hope to the chances of survival for concentration camp victims in Nazi Germany. Could this really be true? Could hope keep us alive?

What we endure as humans is beyond rational comprehension…

From the natural tragedies of break-ups, death of loved ones, illness, and sudden losses of all sorts….to the diseased type of tragedies that stem from multigenerational trauma and systemic oppression such as sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, prejudice, poverty, and mistreatment of humans, animals, and the planet on many levels….human life and tragedy are bound together.

You cannot answer why on a spiritual level without finding a lesson in the darkness. When you endure hope through tragedy you come out the other side of it with more compassion, more liberation, more knowledge, more love, more understanding. This is a truth of human kind.

When you collapse into tragedy with a sense of doom, blame, punishment, despair and resentment you come out the other side more bitter, closed off, abusive to self or others, hateful, and sick. This is also a truth of human kind.

I want to be careful here and say that every feeling needs an outlet. Hope is not turning a frown upside down. It is not putting a positive spin on a terrible situation. Horrible experiences happen. Unfair circumstances happen. Nobody should spiritually bypass the feelings of anger, despair, resentment, rage, and resignation (among many other feelings) by saying, “this tragedy is meant to be because it will make me stronger, wiser, loving, and aware.”

The process is key and the journey is everything. Feelings are like poop and like chemical storms. What happens if you don’t let yourself poo because you tell yourself it is wrong or bad to poo? What happens if you try to stop a raging hurricane? You can’t stop a storm and not letting yourself poo will make you sick.

All feelings need time and space to be honored and felt.  The key to moving feelings out of the body is to not wrap a mental story around the feeling. Feel the resentment when your partner betrays you but don’t tell yourself you are piece of shit and it’s your fault or whatever the story may be. Keep stories off the feelings and use your mind to keep repeating, “I feel resentment” as you find a way to express it.

Express feelings through exercising, making art, acting, singing, venting to a friend, dancing, cooking, cleaning…find your way and let the feeling out purely without a narrative of why and what the feeling means.

I promise you, the feeling will pass as every storm and every bowel movement does. I am being crude on purpose. Negative feelings are crude. They are not elegant and they don’t smell good but they still need to be honored and let out.  If you let your feelings out you won’t spiritually bypass them with answers, solutions, reasons, meaning-making. Even the best of tools can be used for harm.

Karma, which is simply the accumulation of feelings that are not released from the body (due to stories or what the Buddhists call “attachments”), can be turned into a scolding and judgmental concept when you say, “I won’t feel my anger because I don’t want to create karma.” If you don’t want to create karma, feel your feelings fully and let them pass through.

Astrology is a great tool that can also be used the wrong way if you won’t let yourself feel despair by saying something like, “I have a Scorpio eighth house moon so despair is in my chart.” The tiniest bit of reasoning, no matter how true, can shut the actual feeling off.

Many therapeutic modalities do this too. Re-framing, a cognitive-behavioral technique of turning a negative story into a positive story, may shut off a feeling of anger that needs to surface and be released. It is best to first release the feeling and then re-frame the story.

The point I want to make is that all tools in the spiritual-psychological-self-help tool box can be misused. Take positivity for example. Positivity is not about only feeling and thinking positive thoughts. For that secretly judges and scolds negativity and the act of judging and scolding is extremely toxic. True positivity is remembering that all feelings are innocent when felt and expressed purely.

The truth of how the human body works is that honored and expressed feelings leave the body and cause no harm. When feelings collect in shadow they change over time. They putrefy and create bigger uglier monsters that erupt as chronic illness, projections, neurosis, and imbalances of all forms.

When negative feelings are honored and expressed they leave the body and hope has room to enter. Hope needs room to enter. Hope wont bludgeon its way into the heart.

Why some people have an easier time feeling hope while others struggle to feel hope is part mystery and part rational. The mystery roots down into temperaments. We all have a temperament. No need to judge yourself if your temperament is not very hopeful. I am sure you have another archetypal instinct pouring through you in spades.

Every human is a unique finger print of qualities and this is not in our control. The mystery owns our temperament.

Yet even the most hopeless temperament may experience hope because hope is an archetype we all connect with in the collective unconscious or spirit world. Every. Single. One of us.

Sometimes it takes a little work, which leads to the rational understanding part. If you struggle to feel hope due to your temperament, due to struggles internal or external, or due to being pummeled by tragedy all at once…you can do two things to invoke hope.

First, you can stop rejecting your feelings with judgements and make the dedication to feel your feelings without a story wrapped around them. You may get help doing this with a therapist or healer, a friend, or even a pet. Maybe being with spirit in solitude or in nature is helpful.

Feeling your feelings without stories may take a while. Patience is not easy but needed. For most of us have been told by culture, family, or both that negative feelings are bad and wrong and we experience literal cut-off from feelings as a result. Many of us instead find refuge in various addictions and distractions such as drinking, working, working-out, over-analyzing, focusing on others in service, partying, escaping through drugs, eating, shopping, etc.

But it’s every human’s birthright to reconnect to our feelings. Everyone is capable.

Another aspect to check is the story showing up as identity.

Maybe you identify too much with despair, depression, resentment, etc. Identification is when it’s not really despair you are feeling, it’s the story of despair you are telling yourself and have been your whole life.

You can tell the difference between a feeling and a story by seeing if you identify with it. If you identify with being a depressed person, chances are you have cut-off from many feelings due to being stuck in an identity. Feelings of anger and even self-empowerment may be longing to express but cannot get through the depressed story or persona.

Sorting out feelings from the story, starving out the stories, honoring and expressing the feelings is a process. Process is the most important part. Nobody can bypass their own process. For some it is quick, some slow… but for most of us healing moves in a spiral. We make progress then fall backward yet when we do we are a little wiser, a little more aware, a little more loving.

The second thing is you can invoke hope through ceremony and ritual.  The ancients and indigenous were very connected using ritual and ceremony to stay healthy. Arhcetypes such as hope speak to the conscious-self through images, sound, taste, movement, and feeling. The ancients and indigenous also understand that we are literally made of the elements (earth, air, fire, water, ether) and we may call upon them to ground and connect self to earth.

Whether you partake in a more formal ritual, alone or with a group, or whether you express ritual through making art, singing, listening to a song or a sermon…. ritual and ceremony simply means that you intentionally use your creativity, feelings and senses to invoke the archetypes.

It is everyone’s birthright to invoke hope.

Invoking may be as simple as lighting a candle and calling upon hope in meditation. It may be as elaborate as performing a sacred dance on the full moon after calling the directions, elements, angels, ancestors and allies.

Invoking hope may be as simple as singing a song that makes you feel hope. It may be as elaborate as writing a song about hope and performing in a hospice setting to inspire those close to transitioning into death.

You might find the perfect crystal and invoke hope into the crystal, wearing it over your heart each day.

Or perhaps you put your hands around every glass of water you drink and invoke hope into the water.

Hope does not ask for a specific kind of ritual or ceremony. Hope only asks to be acknowledged.

Many leaders have hope moving so powerfully through their hearts that they inspire everyone around them. Martin Luther King Jr comes to mind as a perfect example of this. Hope catches flame. You may not intend to call upon hope but hope finds you anyway.

Sometimes hope enters the body so strongly that it wipes out any blocks in the way and washes you clean. We have all experienced this through listening to song, watching a movie, being moved by a speaker, looking at a sunset, into a loved one’s eyes, or a work of art.

Hope is always available to us no matter how dense the jungle of tragedy, betrayal and injustice we are traversing. May hope find its way into your heart in your darkest night of the soul.

Tarot Card Medicine

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Tarot cards may be used to predict the future and for healing. I have been a reader for about twenty seven years and professionally for about seventeen years and in my own practice, I have witnessed both aspects reveal through the cards. Not all readers use the cards to predict and many do not believe in prediction. I use the cards in service to the healing journey and if psychic predictions come through, I share them and include the sentence, “take this with a grain of salt, ” because I do not want to hold the power of an all seeing/knowing eye.

My intention is to be a very human ally and guide even if I channel psychic messages at times.

The way it works is that I connect with the divine/higher self/true self (whatever word works best for you to describe the transpersonal aspect). I channel messages using the cards as keys that unlock my unconscious to see into the unconscious and life of the client.

Sometimes I will channel a loved one who has passed or a specific soul guide. Sometimes I am given a picture of what is to come, usually in metaphor. The cards have predicted the endings and beginnings of relationships, lives, jobs as well as inner transformations/cycles for myself and clients for so many years that it does not seem like a big deal. Prediction is a very minor aspect of the Tarot’s medicine.

The medicine of Tarot is in their ability to illuminate what is hidden from the ego or conscious self. Many years ago, a Tarot client said to me, “you have uncovered in a half an hour what would have taken months in therapy”. My calling to bridge Tarot reading with therapy was sparked by her words. How often I have said in a reading, “this would be beneficial exploration for therapy.”  My desire is to be a messenger and a guide through the therapeutic journey.

I love using Tarot as a therapist. To be honest, I don’t see too much difference between these two roles. Every Tarot reader I know is a healer but the persona of therapist is more legitimized in our masculine-heavy culture. Although, there are many readers who are not healers in their soul-calling or their training. Point being, for those readers who are healers, the only thing separating them from having therapy clients is largely the way society does not legitimize the tarot reader as a healer. I have served on both sides of this fence and have a strong opinion, hence the diatribe. Back to the Tarot talk…

Tarot reveals different aspects of the unconscious. Archetypes, feelings, personality traits, vows, wounds, soul gifts, and the true self may be dwelling in the ocean deep of the unconscious. The magic of Tarot is when aspects are suddenly revealed to the  conscious self it…just feels right. The illumination feels so good, as if a missing piece has been returned to the whole. The illumination itself is healing. Though more than often, aspects emerge like tangled balls of yarn needing to be sorted out and understood. Family of origin, personality traits, vows, feelings, and multigenerational wounds create complexes and take time to process on a cognitive level.

Awareness and meaning-making is medicine for the conscious self while embodiment and expression is medicine for the unconscious self. What first brings unconscious content into conscious awareness are dreams, projections, triggers, creative expression, “freudian slips”/blurting out without awareness, ceremony/ritual, and images that speak directly to the unconscious, such as Tarot cards.

When aspects emerge from the deep you feel that relieving feeling of something missing that is returning even if it’s incredibly painful. We all crave integration. The great divide between the conscious and unconscious self is unhealthy and we long for wholeness. In therapy the sacred space to release and process what comes up and out is often painful. Just as often, joyful and confident parts emerge from the shadow, starving for the nourishment of conscious integration. Those of us who have over identified with the pain body relegate self-worth, self-love, and happiness into the shadow. Tarot cards illuminate all.

Another wonderful medicine of Tarot is the illuminating of one’s soul karma, purpose, and lessons. From the ego or conscious self’s vantage point, we seek the same basics; belonging, success, security, health and healthy relationships. But the soul does not seek these things. The soul seeks to fulfill its destiny, which is rooted in evolving its character as being spirit embodying as an individual self.

The soul is the meeting of spirit and matter.

For instance, the ego may want to experience success in work and experience suffering when success does not come over and over. But the soul may be wanting to evolve through learning how to let go of worldly success and to surrender to a deeper sense of fulfillment through unconditional love or the divine.

The ego may be attached to success as a way to validate its self worth. The client may come in with the problem of not being able to manifest success in their work life unaware of how their soul longs to feel self-worth through surrender to love. The cards will reveal this. Paradoxically, success in work may suddenly occur once this reversal of energy has taken place.

Everyone is at a different point on the journey with different soul lessons, purpose, callings. Tarot reveals the specifics.

Some people do not want to uncover in one session what might take months otherwise. Some people might not want a guide to tell them what is going on inside of them. For those who do not prefer this but still want to use the cards, I have them read their own cards. You do not need to logically understand the cards to read them. In fact, some of the best readings I’ve received were by those who never looked at a deck in their life.

By looking at any image or set of images, we speak directly with the unconscious. The client may do their own digging and meaning making.

Tarot cards may be used solely to explore the unconscious if the client does not believe in soul lessons, karma and the evolution of ensouled spirit. The cards may or may not be used to predict. They may or may not be used to understand the dynamics of relationships with others and the self. Tarot can be read as effectively by a novice as by an expert because intuition does not require practice to be strong and The Fool can bumble out unconscious wisdom through playfully making a story out of an image, without realizing it.