In a 2016 blog post, Tarot expert Mary K. Greer quotes educator Parker Palmer’s famous dictum: “Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.” She goes on to challenge the Tarot community:
Many people come to Tarot readings in hopes of “fixing” their lives—obtaining information and guidance that will help them make the “right” decisions and no mistakes—guaranteeing perfection. …
I ask you, as a Tarot reader, how can we help the querent “embrace brokenness”? 6
My challenge in this book takes Greer’s (and Palmer’s) point even further: How can we help the querent, the seeker—how can we help ourselves—embrace our fundamental unbrokenness?
The majority of Tarot readers today focus on the work of inner transformation and realization. We follow the advice that Mary Greer herself first taught us more than thirty years ago: we read Tarot for ourselves, embarking on a path of self-discovery. 7 But even so, most readers are still bound within the confines of what I call mantic Tarot: the Tarot of prediction and prophecy. (Mantic, as used in terms like cartomancy or geomancy, comes from the ancient Greek word mantis, or “prophet.” 8) We may be reading the cards with an aim toward personal growth instead of old-fashioned fortune telling, but nonetheless we typically begin with a problem or question. Something is broken, missing, or inadequate. We may not be seeking our fortune or our future, but we nevertheless begin with a sense that something is wrong.
What I call mantic Tarot seeks solutions. Mantic Tarot sets out from the standpoint I discussed in the last chapter, the standpoint of the Four of Cups: a position of lack and dissatisfaction. Mantic Tarot begins by looking elsewhere, seeking elusive meaning and shrouded answer. Mantic Tarot is fixated on the future and often stuck in the past.
All of this is very natural and very ancient. The mantic impulse is probably as old as written language itself. As long as we humans have been readers and writers, using visual symbols to record and convey our ideas, we have no doubt felt the urge to interpret naturally arising phenomena as if these too comprised a written language—a text that could be interpreted and obeyed. From the structure of entrails or bone remaining from an animal carcass to the wheeling constellations in the night sky to the pattern of dregs left in a drinking vessel, we have read the world all around us. We have assigned meaning and intention to the random occurrences in our lives. Psychologist and Tarot author Arthur Rosengarten refers, in this light, to our drive toward an “empowered randomness.” 9 We grant a nonhuman world the power to speak.
Over the centuries, as human cultures became increasingly literate, this conviction in the empowered randomness of the world also became more literate. Along with naturally arising phenomena, human texts and artifacts were themselves interpreted for hidden patterns of meaning. Across world cultures, from east to west, we start to find examples of sortilege: divination by random selection from a group of symbols or writings. In late antiquity, sortilege was further refined through the practice of bibliomancy: augury via the chance selection of a passage in a book. The book might be the Bible or Virgil’s Aeneid or any other volume chosen at will. St. Augustine famously demonstrated the life-changing power of bibliomancy when he flipped open his copy of the Epistles of Paul, landed randomly on Romans 13:13–14, and instantly converted to Christ. Nearly a millennium later, the Renaissance poet Petrarch (1300–1374) in turn echoed that act of divination by practicing bibliomancy with his copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions. As we’ll see in Chapter 6, Petrarch is the same writer whose poetry influenced the invention of the Tarot trumps. Petrarch’s example of divination with a book helped shape early Renaissance culture and influenced the way Europe first integrated a Muslim import—playing cards—into their own society. It’s not so surprising then that only a few generations after Petrarch, we find our first evidence of cartomancy: sortilege using playing cards instead of the pages of a book. The divinatory, or mantic, impulse at the heart of modern Tarot usage finds its origins with the very first European card decks in the fourteenth century.
This impulse has crafted for us the modern esoteric Tarot, thanks to the creative efforts of Tarot players over the centuries: men and women who not only have played card games but have interpreted the cards in the process, redrawn the card images, mapped and remapped their meanings onto human experience. Over the centuries, the mantic impulse has brought us a deeply rich and continually elaborated gallery of 78 images—a language of 78 ideograms—with a seemingly inexhaustible capacity for meanings that can be reshuffled, reordered, and recombined. Hurray for mantic Tarot!
At the same time, the ancient impulse to divine our fate only contributes to our sense that something is missing. When we seek auguries in the stars or consult an ancient text or set of symbols for answers, we reinforce the idea that the truth lies beyond us—hidden in the night skies or squirreled away in books. We reinforce a sense of our own incompleteness, of our own brokenness and lack. Our methods to fix the hole in our life only dig that hole deeper.
Instead of digging holes with Tarot, we need a Tarot that will make us whole.
Mindfulness … and Tarot
One of my mindfulness students once told me that Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now changed her life, freeing her from the emotional and mental spirals she’d often lose herself in: anxiously dwelling on future fears or ruminating on past losses and regrets. After reading Tolle, she began paying attention to things—to the presence of the present moment. “I would notice my bike as I rode to school, for instance. The rain channeling off the tire, the glint of the metal bell, or the stroke of the wind on my face. I was becoming mindful for the first time in my life.”
Mindfulness is a buzzword these days. Almost daily, some proponent is extolling its virtues—or a detractor is questioning its benefits, since the so-called mindfulness revolution has gotten big enough to spawn a backlash. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs, as they’re sometimes called) are cropping up in industries as disparate as education, corporate finance, technology, sports, law enforcement, and even the military. But most predominately, mindfulness has become a favored application in the worlds of health care and the behavioral sciences. There are MBIs to work with chronic illness and pain management; MBIs for work with addiction, eating disorders, and substance abuse; MBIs for anxiety and depression; MBIs for post-traumatic stress; and MBIs for impulsivity and borderline personality disorder.
At the base of all these interventions has been the influential work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and the wellness program he founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in 1979. Forty years later, thousands of individuals have become trained instructors of Kabat-Zinn’s curriculum in “mindfulness-based stress reduction” (MBSR), and MBSR itself has evolved and spread internationally. Some tens of thousands have participated in versions of the curriculum worldwide, and the little stress-reduction clinic founded in a basement room at UMass has expanded into the international Center for Mindfulness in Health Care, Medicine, and Society—influencing the growth of similar centers elsewhere and fostering an expanding interest in the research and application of mindfulness techniques.
There is no question that Kabat-Zinn’s approach grew out of his spiritual training in the Eastern awareness traditions of yoga and Buddhist meditation. His use of the term mindfulness was taken directly from Hindu and Buddhist terminology. As we’ll see, however, the term has a far broader scope than the Hindu or Buddhist usage.
In early Buddhist scriptures, the word sati literally means “memory” in the sense of reminder or remembrance. The Buddha teaches that no separate and enduring ego exists. Sati entails recognizing that truth and repeatedly and diligently bringing it to mind. By attending to their own bodily and mental experiences through meditation or other awareness disciplines, followers are reminded of life’s impermanence.10 The early Buddhist scriptures thus invite us to observe the shifts and twists of breath, mind, and body. Doing so, we begin to realize our authentic reality, noting the transience of even the most stable phenomena. As the Buddha suggests, we can mindfully note that even the self, our precious egoic self, morphs and fades. T. W. Rhys Davids, the nineteenth-century Buddhist scholar who first translated sati as mindfulness, described it as a “constant presence of mind”: an awareness of who and what we truly are.
In a similar vein, the same English word—mindfulness—was used a few centuries earlier, at the same time that the earliest woodblock Tarot decks were being printed in Europe. The authors of the King James Bible used “mindfulness” to translate the Hebrew root word for remembering (
, zkr). We are asked to be mindful of God’s commandments and are invited to marvel that God remains mindful of us.11 Like sati, refers to the memory of our fundamental orientation in the world.
As I often say to my students, mindfulness is an equal-opportunity spiritual term, one that transcends sectarian boundaries and points us toward our shared and authentic human condition. In its broadest spiritual use, mindfulness invokes our shared and essential human capacity to remember who we are and what connects us to this earth and to each other. One doesn’t need a particular worldview, religious outlook, or set of beliefs to lay claim to the value of mindfulness. As a spiritual term, mindfulness simply denotes our presence of mind (as Rhys Davids puts it) when it comes to the fundamental truths of human life.
Presence of mind. There’s the rub. Just how often do we really have our wits about us? How often do we know our own mind? How often are we fully present-minded as opposed to absent-minded? To be sure, I’m not just wondering about our awareness of our thoughts. Our mind contains more than just ideas, words, images, and judgments. It also contains our emotions, our physical perceptions, our pain and pleasure, and the full gamut of our feelings and sensations. Indeed, the contents of our mind include the entirety of our mental, emotional, and physical awareness. What I’m really asking, then, is how available our body, heart, and mind are in any given moment. To what extent are we aware of the full scope of our experiences?
Let’s take this question one step further. Since our experiences are our connection to the world around us, I also wonder how aware we are of our surroundings. I encounter the universe around me through a Lisa-shaped lens comprised of my five physical senses, my thoughts and judgments, my emotional framework. If I lack presence of mind and remain completely unaware of the Lisa-lens through which I encounter the world, will I ever realize the limitations of my perspective? If I lack presence of mind, what am I failing to see? What do I fail to notice? How much of myself, how much of the world, remains invisible to me?
The modern mindfulness movement began with these sorts of questions, encouraging us to notice the self and the world we habitually fail to see. Kabat-Zinn offers a particularly succinct formulation in this light. He says that mindfulness means “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” 12 There are four distinct components of Kabat-Zinn’s formulation. In the first place, mindfulness requires that we pay attention. As mammals with a well-developed central nervous system, we’re quite good at paying attention. However, we don’t normally do so with a strong sense of purpose. Typically we pay attention because life grabs us by the lapels and shakes us up. We encounter a world full of things we want and things we don’t want. We’re pulled hither by our desires and pushed thither by our aversions. Our likes and dislikes jerk us around. We swipe right, as it were, to a world that pleases us—and swipe left to avoid displeasure and pain. In fact, psychologists will tell us that we are hardwired to pay attention to pleasure and pain. From an evolutionary perspective, that makes good sense. In our caveperson days, it was vital that those saber-toothed cats grabbed our attention—and equally vital that we paid attention to the delicious berries that might get us through a hard winter. Paying attention to likes and dislikes ensured that our evolutionary ancestors survived.
But Kabat-Zinn asks us to pay attention on purpose, not just reflexively or absentmindedly. Instead of simply being yanked around by our likes and dislikes, Kabat-Zinn invites us to pay attention deliberately. To pay attention on purpose is to practice attentiveness in the same way that we exercise our body, building up our muscles in order to develop capacity and increase strength. Attention is its own kind of muscle. If it’s well developed and in our control, we can direct our attention anywhere. Yet we often struggle with our attention. When we seek to control it, we typically find that it’s nearly impossible to focus. I’ve often joked that my house is at its cleanest when I’m in the middle of a writing project. I try to sit down at the computer, but it’s just so hard to pay attention and complete the task. The more I tell myself that the work is important, the more my inner Lisa rebels. Cleaning the oven, scouring the pots and pans, scrubbing the floors: anything is preferable to paying attention where I “should.”
Numerous research studies have demonstrated this truth that the more we strive to control our attention, the squirmier it can get.13 This is where the third part of Kabat-Zinn’s formulation becomes critical: mindfulness arises when we pay attention on purpose in the present moment. My inner Lisa rebels when I tell her to do something unpleasant or difficult now in order to achieve some future goal. I’m asking myself to delay gratification, to work hard in the present moment, but without giving any heed to my present experience. Of course my inner Lisa rebels! I’m hardwired to pay attention to things that bring pleasure or deliver pain. When I ask inner Lisa to focus on an unpleasant or difficult task in the name of a future reward, I’m working at odds with myself—at odds with my evolutionary wiring.
Instead of paying attention on purpose for a future reward, mindfulness practice involves paying attention on purpose right here and now. To practice mindfulness, I pay attention to my experiences in this present moment. To do so requires that, for this moment at least, I suspend judgment. I pay attention nonjudgmentally (the fourth part of Kabat-Zinn’s formulation). I don’t worry about what I should do or about what I do or don’t like. I don’t try to direct my attention to what I think is good or to divert my attention from what I think is bad. When I practice mindfulness, I don’t try to force inner Lisa to avoid sugary snacks or to write that difficult memo. Instead, I simply and gently bring my attention back to what I’m experiencing at this very moment in my body, in my emotions, in my thoughts. I pay attention on purpose, in this present moment, nonjudgmentally.
The analogy to developing muscle is helpful here. Mindfulness practice is like doing bicep curls: a repetitive action that builds strength over time.14 If I’m like just about every other mammal on the planet, when I try to bring nonjudgmental attention to my present-moment experience, my mind will squirm away. Before I know it, I’ll be “lost” in thought. The concrete details and specific contours of my bodily sensations, my emotions, and even my thoughts themselves won’t register in my awareness. My mind will spin on autopilot—its default mode. Perhaps I’ll start drifting into sleep, or perhaps I’ll find a familiar groove of daydreaming or rumination. In short, my mind will simply wander. But this wandering just helps me do my “reps,” like in strength training. The minute my attention drifts away, I can notice its drifting and gently bring it back to the here and now. Over time, those reps build capacity. In fact, simply noticing that my mind has wandered, that I am lost in thought, is to find myself again. Simply noticing that I’m falling asleep is to wake up. And then, no doubt, my mind will squirm away again… And again, I can simply notice its squirminess and bring it back. And so on and so forth, over and over again.
My wandering mind is not an obstacle for mindfulness; it’s an opportunity. The more my mind wanders, the more chances I have for mindfulness practice. The muscle of my attention gets stronger.
Jack Kornfield, a contemporary meditation expert, compares this activity of training our mindfulness muscle to the effort to train a puppy. “You put the puppy down and say, ‘Stay.’ Does the puppy listen? It gets up and runs away. You sit the puppy back down again.” 15 Like puppies, our minds are wriggly and squirmy and have a hard time settling down. We can try to force the issue—we can restrain the puppy or scold the puppy, or do even worse in our frustration. But other than traumatizing the poor cuddly creature, our heavy-handedness is unlikely to yield lasting effects. By and large, the only way to train the puppy will be through firm yet patient persistence. Kornfield reminds us that our minds are much the same. “In training the mind, or the puppy, we have to start over and over again.”
Kornfield’s puppy metaphor also reinforces a key message: to pay attention nonjudgmentally requires a fundamental gentleness and kindness with ourselves. Of course our minds and hearts are squirmy. Of course it’s hard to pay attention when we “should.” It’s hard to suspend judgment, to resist our cravings, and to hunker down in our life as it actually is. We’re just mammals, after all, more or less doing what evolution has engineered us to do. Mindfulness practice, however, begins with the recognition that it’s time for a little gentle redirection.
In the last chapter, I described our chronic state of dissatisfaction as the “Four of Cups dilemma.” We tend to be yanked around by our likes and dislikes and end up never being fulfilled by any particular state of affairs. I also described our efforts to overcome this chronic dissatisfaction by heading toward the hills, like the pilgrim in the Eight of Cups. Whether we’re tossed around by our desires and aversions, or whether we try to refocus ourselves on a distant goal like the pilgrim seeking higher ground in the Eight of Cups, we will never find true ease of mind. Our inner puppy will never settle down until we meet it firmly, but also with gentleness.
Paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally. Sometimes mindful attention is confused with “bare attention”: with a nonverbal, nonconceptual awareness of mere sensation. Sometimes practitioners worry that thoughts or ideas will take them away from the present moment. They grow concerned that in order to “live in the moment,” they need to avoid having judgments, concepts, opinions, etc. For instance, my student who had read Eckhart Tolle envisioned mindfulness in these terms. For her, the mere sensations of riding a bicycle in the open wind were a revelation because they “freed” her from thoughts and emotions.
However, mindfulness is about a full and constant presence of mind—and our minds contain a lot of things. Developing a more direct awareness of our bodily sensations is indeed a foundational exercise in mindfulness practice. For this reason, many of my guided meditations are oriented toward physical sensations.16 Bodily awareness is an essential first step in training the puppy. But nonetheless, we shouldn’t be concerned about our thoughts and emotions. No less than physical activity and sensation, the activities of heart and mind form a crucial part of my present moment. In mindfulness practice, we learn how to become aware of these verbal and conceptual experiences too. We learn that it’s possible to bring nonjudgmental awareness even to our judgments. Right now, for instance, my neck hurts. I can notice that pain and simultaneously notice that I don’t like it. I can even notice an irritation with myself for my bad posture. My awareness of this present moment can include the entire smorgasbord of physical sensation, emotional reaction, and conceptual judgment. Presence of mind includes concepts and emotions as well as bare sensations.
Indeed, my experience of the present moment always braids together three elements: sensations, emotions, and thoughts. Body, heart, and mind. Teasing apart these elements requires not only a constant and gentle attention but also a fair amount of discernment. To be mindful, we need to become connoisseurs of our own lives, taking note of the fine details and nuances. Language is our friend in this respect: we become better observers of our experience when we become better at describing its intricacies. It’s just like telling a little kid to “use their words”: if we can describe what we’re experiencing, we’re less likely to be yanked around by the experience itself. As I often tell my students and clients, noting (i.e., taking note of) our experiences through language helps us notice them more completely. Indeed, fundamentally, without the capacity to note our experiences, to put them into conscious thought through words and images, we’re not able to hold them for very long in our awareness. In a typical mindfulness class, then, the instructor helps students take note of their experiences through guided inquiry, inviting students to give language to their sensations, emotions, and thoughts. Inquiry is an essential component of mindfulness practice.
I remember D., an older mindfulness student with Parkinson’s disease. One day, after a particular meditation exercise in my class, D. shared that the exercise had made her tremors worse. “Usually meditation helps the tremors,” she told the class. “Today, not so much.”
“What’s different about today?” I asked. The process of inquiry requires a certain curiosity about our experience. Inquiry begins with questions.
D. thought for a moment. “Today, I kept thinking that I could control the shakes. And then I got afraid that I couldn’t. And then, in fact, I couldn’t control them.”
I was struck by D.’s mention of fear, and how it seemed to relate to something she’d discussed in past classes: her fear of the future and losing control as the disease progressed. “Can you tell me more about being afraid? How did you know you were afraid? Was there a particular place in your body where you could feel it?”
For a moment, D. was silent. “I can feel it in my stomach. My stomach hurts.”
I noticed the present tense in her response. “Are you still feeling afraid?”
“I think I’m always afraid,” D. said quietly. “Or always trying not to be afraid.”
“It almost sounds like you’re trying to control the fear. Sort of like you were trying to control the shakes?”
D. paused again. “Yeah,” she said simply. “I’m just afraid.”
“Afraid of the tremors? Afraid of something else?”
Again, there was a pause. Suddenly D. smiled. “I think I’m afraid of being afraid!” She half-chuckled. “How goofy is that?”
“Wonderfully goofy,” I said, grinning back.
I returned D.’s attention to the topic of control; the word still seemed weighty for her. “Maybe there’s nothing here that you need to control. What do you think?”
“I think I don’t need to be afraid of being afraid!” By now D. was laughing. The whole class was beaming.
“Yeah,” said another student in the class. “Being afraid of being afraid—that’s just crazy sauce!”
In a mindfulness class, the inquiry is where integration and insight begin to take place. Inquiry can be an occasion for joy, laughter, and community.
Inquiry forms a crucial component of Mindful Tarot as well. Mindfulness practice requires the clarity and precision of inquiry. Like a good wine connoisseur, we need ways to observe and articulate nuance. With its deeply rich vocabulary of archetypes and images, Tarot invites us into a finely tuned interpretive practice. We may think that the cards respond to the questions we ask, but the practice of Mindful Tarot reveals that the reverse is actually more accurate.
When we spread out the Tarot, it is we who are responding to the questions posed by the cards.
First and foremost, Mindful Tarot is a practice of inquiry. It is a deep dialogue with the cards and a thorough investigation of this present moment. Through the language of the cards, Mindful Tarot helps us pay attention on purpose, in the present moment, nonjudgmentally.
6. Greer, “Removing the Last Thin Veil.”
7. Mary K. Greer’s landmark text, Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for Personal Transformation, was first published in 1984.
8. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online) is the source of all etymological information in this book.
9. See Rosengarten, Tarot and Psychology, 72.
10. In earlier Hindu uses, sati (or smrti in Sanskrit) refers to the role of human memory in transmitting sacred history, tradition, and revelation.
11. See, for example, Psalm 8.4: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” and 1 Chronicles 16:15: “Be ye mindful always of his covenant; the word which he commanded to a thousand generations.”
12. Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are, 4.
13. See, for instance, the body of research on “choking” in athletic and high-stakes performance. Sian Beilock summarizes the research in his book What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
14. Dan Harris has popularized the bicep-curl metaphor. See his 2014 book 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works—A True Story.
15. Kornfield, A Path with Heart, 58–59.
16. My guided practices can be downloaded from my website: https://www.calyxcontemplative.com/mindful-tarot-practice.