Preface
I am large, I contain multitudes.
W hat if we could live, in every moment, a life of bounty, openheartedness, joy, and generosity? What if, despite our life circumstances, despite our individual challenges with health, wealth, relationship, and family, we could live with ease and intimacy? What if we could live with hope for our planet’s future, despite twenty-first-century difficulties such as climate change, political demagoguery, and global conflict? What if our hearts could be made tender by the suffering of others while we nonetheless became engaged and energized by the positive opportunities unfolding all around us?
These what-ifs are not idle questions. They are invitations to you, dear reader.
There’s a wonderful old-fashioned word for the kind of generous, easeful disposition of mind I am describing: largesse. The word means openhandedness and bigheartedness. In fact, it literally means adopting a big outlook on life. Largesse derives from the word large, and so in a sense we could say that largesse means living large in the best of all possible ways. It means living from the standpoint of the Big Self: the self with a large S that is aware of its interconnectedness to all things. This is the Big Self that the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman describes in his poem “Song of Myself”:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
For Whitman, the individual self is large because it shares in all of creation. It is composed of, and decomposes into, every atom of this good earth. “There is that lot of me and all so luscious,” Whitman exclaims, exulting in a life lived in intimacy with the whole planet and all its history—with the whole lot of living creatures, human cultures, rocks and minerals, sun and stars and moon. “Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy,” he declares, pledging allegiance to the wide world around him.
What if Tarot, when practiced mindfully, could teach us to live with this much joy and bounty? What if it could help us turn toward the world, even in the midst of confusion and trouble, embracing what is with clarity, with love, and with a sense of possibility?
This book invites you to embrace your life, yourself, writ large!
It invites you to embrace the world.
Will you join me on a journey of Mindful Tarot?
A Complete Practice
Mindful Tarot is a complete practice: a practice that is as much about learning to live a more abundant and mindful life as it is about deepening our connection to that wondrous gallery of 78 archetypes, the Tarot.
A complete practice. What do I mean by that? First and foremost, I am signaling the integrity of this work: the integrity born from a path dedicated to integration. (Those two words, integrity and integration, come from the same root: the Latin word for wholeness.) I am inviting you onto a path of practice that has the capacity to transform your life one breath and one card at a time. But, perhaps paradoxically, I am also suggesting that in an important sense this transformation will change nothing. Mindful Tarot is a complete practice because it recognizes that this moment, where we are right now, is already complete. In this moment, nothing is lacking. We don’t need to do anything or fix anything. Mindful Tarot is a practice that helps us live in the midst of that completeness.
Now don’t get me wrong. The Tarot is also a very good tool for simply getting stuff done. The Tarot deck was invented in Italy in the 1400s as a card game, but even in those early days Tarot found other uses in gambling, writing poetry, and drawing lots (a form of divination). In the modern era, the Tarot has revealed even more versatility. It can very handily and beautifully be used for a variety of extrinsic and esoteric purposes. It can be used in magic, ritual, art, and psychotherapy. It can be used to channel guides and spirits, and it can be used (of course) to tell fortunes. It can be used as an oracle, and it can be used for veneration. It can even be used (as it still is in France and other parts of Europe) for its original purpose as a card game. In this sense, learning to read the Tarot can be like learning yoga postures. A modern-day yogi might simply practice their asanas (postures) as fitness, aiming for flexibility and strength—and there’s certainly nothing wrong with a nice, firm “yoga butt”! But yoga can also be practiced on its own terms: as a complete, self-contained path of transformation and liberation.
In contrast to the Tarot-as-tool approach, Mindful Tarot takes up the Tarot as an end in itself. It considers the Tarot in its own right as a path of self-discovery. Mindful Tarot is both a mindfulness practice anchored within the language of Tarot and a Tarot-reading practice anchored within mindful awareness.
How to Use This Book
You do not need to have any prior knowledge of either mindfulness or Tarot to benefit from this book. The book is designed to accompany you, step by step, into the practice of Mindful Tarot.
When it comes to Tarot, it’s easy to get discouraged by the sheer volume of esoteric information out there. Just gaining familiarity with basic card meanings and correspondences can seem like an endless chore. Similarly, when it comes to mindfulness practice, it’s easy to feel daunted by the stressors in our environment or by the sheer noisiness of our own hearts and minds. Finding calm and peace in the midst of our lives can seem like a hopeless task.
Not to worry, dear reader! Mindful Tarot has your back. You don’t need to memorize card meanings and you don’t need to clear or calm your mind. This book will gently guide you into greater self-compassion and awareness just as you are right now. Together we’ll explore greater intimacy with the present moment and greater familiarity with the 78 cards.
If you’re completely new to the Tarot, you may want to pay particular attention to the discussions of Tarot history and the structure of the Tarot deck in Chapter 4–Chapter 6 before trying to work through the book as a whole. Reading Part Two of this book in its entirety may also be useful as you start. There I offer a unified system of card meanings that is designed to resonate with mindfulness practice but is also traditional and flexible enough to use with any Tarot deck you choose. Don’t try to learn these card meanings by rote! Instead, dive into the sequence of meanings like you might read a good novel or a collection of stories. Read to get a sense of the big picture—the whole story. Getting a sense of the whole is what Mindful Tarot is all about.
If you’re new to mindfulness practice, part 1 of this book will introduce you to mindfulness concepts, methods, and skills that build upon one another. You don’t need any special tools, background, beliefs, or training. Mindfulness is simply the art of paying attention, with basic kindness and curiosity, to the full range of human experience in the present moment. It’s the art of noticing how things are for us right now—without our getting hooked or derailed by our reactions, stories, aversions, and desires. Mindfulness is a skill that can be learned. That’s why we practice it. It’s a state of awareness that can be cultivated and deepened over time.
Mindfulness practice is also what pharmacists call “dose-independent.” Some medicines require a certain threshold, a saturation point, before they are effective. In contrast, mindfulness practice is the kind of “medicine” whose impact is linear: it seems to work no matter how little exposure to it we have. With a little practice, we’ll see a little impact. With more practice, we’ll see a greater impact. The more we put in, the more we get out. But even a teeny bit of mindfulness practice has the capacity to change our lives.
In Chapter 7, “The Daily PULL,” I introduce the fundamental methods of a daily Mindful Tarot practice. I share my own daily practice, step by step, along with a sample Mindful Tarot reading from my own experience. The chapter also includes a coordinated set of guided mindfulness exercises that are available as mp3 files on my website (https://www.calyxcontemplative.com/mindful-tarot practice). In fact, wherever you see a bell symbol
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in the text, you’ll be able to find an associated mp3 file. These exercises are meant to support and help you develop your work with the Tarot, but they can also be used on their own, in any order and as often as you like, to deepen your habit of mindful awareness, with or without the use of Tarot cards.
And, of course, if you’re already well versed in both Tarot and mindfulness, there’s nothing like beginning anew, taking the daintiest of steps into the unknown, into this present moment—like the traditional image of the Fool, the first figure in the Tarot deck, who steps off a cliff and into the future, with that little dog nipping at the heels.
All you need to do is turn the page—and breathe.
Welcome!
A Note about Gender
Whenever possible I have avoided the use of gender-specific pronouns, such as she or he, in favor of gender-neutral forms, such as they. That said, it remains important to grapple with the binary oppositions that we find in the cards. The Tarot is a product of Western culture, and shares its deep history of dualism. Binary oppositions flood the Tarot’s imagery. Everywhere we look we’ll find dualities of male/female, white/black, active/passive, spirit/flesh, heaven/hell, etc. Nonetheless, the Tarot continually invites us toward nondual wholeness. Thus, throughout this book I will note the traditional gendered and dualistic associations where relevant while also disrupting them as much as I can.