Introduction

Can You Fix
My Life?

A long-time tarot client asked me for a reading. She’d been going through a really difficult period of time. She’d gotten into a car accident after losing her job. She’d become disabled, and while going through this experience, her marriage ended. She had to find a new place to live that was wheelchair accessible, and then her son went into rehab after overdosing. Oh—and both of her parents died.

All of this happened in six months. Think about that. When she called me, she was in her new home (that she hated), her divorce was pretty much final, and her parents had both been put to rest and their estate finalized. Her son was in rehab, doing well, but damn. She was exhausted—mentally, spiritually, physically, and emotionally. She said she was doing “Okay? I guess.” You know the way you say that you’re “Okay?” and your voice goes up at the end? It becomes a question that’s trying to answer itself. It’s the polite thing that you say when you feel like your heart has been run over. You don’t want to overburden your friend with the absolute train wreck your life has become, but you also don’t want to lie. You go to this half-honest, shadowy place and you test out this answer. “Okay?” really means “I can’t breathe. Please help. Unless, you know, you’re too busy, because I know you’ve got a lot going on.”

This “Okay?” is generally followed with a solid “I guess” because saying that things are okay is such a complete and utter untruth that your whole self wants to fight it in the parking lot after school. “I guess” turns the presumption that “Okay?” is even in your wheelhouse into a laughable fantasy.

So we talked for a little bit. Turns out she was not, in fact, okay. She wasn’t even “Okay? I guess.” She didn’t have a job to distract herself with. She didn’t have a partner to talk to, and her son was unable to help. She had no siblings, and all her friends had briefly vanished. She laughed about this, saying, “Every time I called them, something even more terrible happened. They need a break from me.”

I asked her what she wanted to ask about, and she said, “I don’t know. Everything? Nothing? Can you just fix me? Can you fix my life and hit a reset button or something with the universe? Because I just need one thing to be okay. And right now? Nothing is okay.”

I said that I couldn’t fix her life, but that maybe I could give her some tools that she could use to do the heavy work herself. The reading was pretty gentle, and the best/worst card that she got was the Ten of Swords: “Hey, sis. Listen. You’re at rock bottom. You’re here. It will literally only go uphill from here. I promise. I promise.”

We finished the reading and were saying goodbye when she said it again. “It would be great if I could just get, like, a cosmic do-over, you know? New outlook on love, on my stupid house, on my job situation …” I remember being disappointed in myself and my cards for not knowing how to answer that. It would be nice. Hell, I’d love to do that for myself sometimes, but that’s not how my readings work.

I kept thinking about her, though.

A few weeks later, I might have hallucinated a tiny bit. No drugs or anything, Dad, I promise! I have a friend named Aidan Wachter who is a talismanic jeweler. He posted a picture of a pentacle that he’d made and said, “It’s too small.” I couldn’t stop looking at this tiny pentacle. I was tossing the image around in my head and I saw it split apart into pieces, then come back together as a whole. I saw the integration of earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. They all come together to make the pentacle. To make us.

earth

Earth is our home.
air

Air is our mind.
fire

Fire is our body.
water

Water is our heart.
spirit

Spirit is our soul.

They make us. They’re the bones of who we are.

But they’re buried, right? Our bones are stuck deep, deep beneath self-esteem issues and tragedy and heartbreak and frustration and boredom. You can’t see them. You can’t feel them. So you react to things in a way that is Not-You. You carry around all the detritus and bullshit that people lay on you. You add to it with self-doubt and fear. You carry it and carry it and then you look into the mirror and you’re not sure who you are anymore in your core. My client was suffering from a serious case of “Who am I, and how in the hell did I get here?”

It is true that our broken parts are what catch the light to make us shine, but it is also true that if there are too many broken parts, we can shatter into bits. I think that we spend a lot of time going around the hurt instead of healing. We shove it to the side and pretend that we’re fine. It’s easy and difficult at the same time. If we compartmentalize our pain, we can tiptoe around it and pretend it never happened. Then, when we least expect it, it frickin’ explodes all over our lives. When we put our broken bits back together, it creates a beautiful mosaic that is us. However, if we put our broken bits together with lies, it’s not going to stay. The cracks will grow and the pain will find us again.

When I ask you during a reading whose sadness you are carrying around and you say you don’t know, there is healing to be done. When you tell me that you know you should get healthy, but you can’t make it worth your time, there is a reason. That reason is not that you’re stupid, incompetent, or lazy. That might have been what you were told, but it’s just not true. We do this thing where we’ll invest countless hours in the problems of a friend and completely ignore our own. Why do we do that? Are we not as valuable as our people?

With all of this swimming around in my head, I called my client. She was surprised and a little weirded out to hear from me, because you don’t often have your tarot reader call you, but she was interested in my idea.

What if we broke down her life into these elements? What if we did five readings, one for each part of her life? What if we used these readings to look specifically into what her frustrations were? Where are the supports in her life? What resources were out there for her? We talked about it for a bit, and she agreed to be my guinea pig. Brave woman. What I taught my client who lost so much is what I’m going to teach you.

I designed a reading for each element based on its alchemical symbol. I created a kit to use in an exercise designed to help her start the process of making change. I compiled community and online resources for continuing the change. I wanted to get to the heart of the problems. Not “Why can’t I find a partner?” but “What can I fix in me emotionally that will lead me to being happy without a partner?” Not “Why can’t I lose weight when I want to?” but “How can I see myself as worthy of good health?” When I was ready, we started with earth, talking about her home and how unhappy she was. After we figured that issue out, we moved on to air and took a good look at her mind and how tired she was of being at home. Fire addressed her physical self, and water her emotions. We finished with the spirit reading and helped her find a spiritual practice that resonated.

I did not fix her. This is so important. I cannot fix people that I didn’t break. She fixed herself. I gave her the tools she needed—that’s my job as a tarot reader. I’m the guide, but all the hard work starts with the client.

This program is a reset button for your life. For your heart, mind, body, soul, spirit, and home. This is not a replacement for counseling or meds if you need them. Tarot readings are excellent for helping you figure out what’s next, and sometimes the next step is therapy. This is not a bandage for a gaping wound; this is essentially a New Age self-help book. We’re going to talk about each part of your life and figure out what is helping you, what is hurting you, and which tools you have available to help you move forward to your most authentic self.

That’s what it’s all about, right? Living an honest, uncluttered life in which you can breathe freely, stand tall, and roll with the punches. Part of living, though, is picking up damaging habits, other people’s opinions, and misinformation. Tarot Elements will help you sort through the detritus of living and pull away those things that don’t serve you. We’ll get to the root of the problem.

These readings and this journey can be intimidating. It can be full of tears and longing and wondering if your reset button is stuck or lost or broken. That’s where I come in. We’re going to do this together. We’re going to walk through the scary stuff to the other side, and take a deep breath, and wipe our eyes, and realize that the way forward might still be hard, but it will be good. And we’ll be carrying less baggage, so our steps will be lighter.

Each element reading process will follow this formula:

Let’s do it.

XO,

Melissa

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