Tea-break Tarot School

It’s the summer of 2016.  I have been signed off work with vertigo.  I can’t drive.  I struggle to walk.  We take a family holiday up to Scotland.  One day I manage to make it up to the top of North Berwick Law.  I have to sit down, clinging to the grass around me, convinced I am going to pitch off the edge. I resign from the job I have been working towards for the past three years, we have to relinquish the house purchase we were in the middle of as I now have no income, I am back to square one.

I see a counsellor.  I want to know WTF is wrong with me.  How can I go from my “dream job” to completely flattened in the space of a few months?  What is going on?  She mentions the book Women Who Run With the Wolves and I discover one explanation for my seeming un-seaming.

My wild self wants out.

It’s here that I first read about tarot as a tool to connect with intuition. I shut my own intuition down firmly when I was born again at aged twelve.  Such practices were considered dangerous and satanic by the churches I attended.

Now I begin to explore, starting with angel cards because they feel “safe” and I have a lot of unwinding of old teaching to work through.

It’s not long before I have a Rider-Waite Smith deck and I’m studying daily.

Tarot gives me a new way of looking at the world.  I read in the pictures the changes and chances of human life, the path of self-knowledge, self-understanding.  I read the age old story of our human condition.

Tarot gives me a daily practice, introduces me to the elements, teaches me about the ebb and flow of life.  It offers me a framework by which I can reflect on and explore my experiences.

Tarot gives me the ability to welcome shadow as well as light into my life, to live with paradox, when my world is disintegrating.

It has continued to be a companion and wisdom keeper for me in the years since.  It provides comfort and challenge, it calls me out on my BS when I’m falling back into unhelpful ways of being and doing.

It has helped me to a place of greater wholeness and a fuller and more complete understanding of my human life.  My health is much improved, I am able to work, I have rediscovered the enchantment of being alive.

All I can say is TF for tarot.