Pathwork is a journey, in that it takes you from one point to another, but it is also an active exercise, not a passive practice. This journey can be physical in nature, meaning you literally travel through the steps one at a time, as you will find in some of the exercises in the wandering section of this book. But not everything about pathwork is physically active. Sometimes it is merely a matter of raising your level of awareness about who or what is around you as you move from one thought, feeling, or action to another. For example, you may find yourself standing next to the Magician or someone who acts like the Magician in your life, only to then find yourself in the company of someone who has similar qualities to the High Priestess. You might even find yourself needing to physically walk your way through the energy of one of the cards or, for something like the Five of Swords, walk it off! No matter how you end up pathworking with the cards of the tarot, you will find yourself engaging with their lessons and messages more actively, which means you have to be willing to deal with what comes up while you take this journey. This is where the messy nature of pathworking comes in: dealing with the emotional stuff. Spiritual expansion is messy; it pushes your buttons and makes you uncomfortable. If you don’t feel any of these things, you are not going deep enough. Pathwork will push and trigger those of you who like to dwell on the surface of your emotions. You can only ever observe from the surface—pathwork means diving in, breaking the surface, and getting yourself wet with emotional fluids. If something makes you feel comfortable, it is not going to push you to grow. Comfort is for resting, stopping, and saying “I am good where I am.” It is perfectly okay for people to crave comfort; I just advise you not to allow it to make you stagnant, as that is when life’s problems arise.
For this book I have come up with three different ways to pathwork with your tarot cards, which I use myself and use with my clients. They are not overly complex nor are they rigid in structure, and they have a tendency to overlap. This is something else one learns through pathwork—things are more fluid and more connected than we like to admit. The lines between exercises and labels will at times seem tenuous at best, but just flow with them anyway. The differences may be more suggestive than you are actually giving them credit for. Although I have not really set up the book to be read in a specific way, you will find suggestions on how to approach each part of the tarot deck; for example, with the suits, Aces through Tens work in a sequence. You can choose to work with just all the intentional exercises for your cards if it seems more fitting for your readings, or you could work with each exercise from top to bottom. But there are no real hard and fast rules here. Use the book intuitively. Allow the exercises to guide you and help deepen your understanding of the cards, your spreads, and your work with tarot. The three pathworking exercises I want to introduce you to are as follows.
1. Intentional
Each card of the tarot has a very specific story, theme, or set of lessons and challenges it presents. With intentional pathwork, you may need to deliberately select your card and your journey based on the theme, lesson, or challenge you wish to work with, work through, or deepen. This means going into your deck and actively choosing a card you wish to pathwork with. Let’s say you want to attract more money into your life or you want to attract a new job or get your energy aligned with that big promotion that may be coming up. You should pull out your deck and find the card that vibrates to the energy you wish to achieve.
For these work and money queries, it might be the Nine of Pentacles or the Queen of Pentacles. The Nine of Pentacles may radiate the feeling of being financially secure and abundant, which is how you want to feel so you can attract even more of that energy. Also helpful, the Queen of Pentacles may make you feel in control, empowered, and viewed as someone of importance.
Each of the cards in your deck offers you a journey, one that will move you into the vibration you need to manifest your goal. Do you see how you deliberately choose the card and the energy you wanted to work with? This is, in essence, how the intentional exercises work in this book. But it is not the only way, and you will see some of the intentional exercises can be just as intuitive as the intuitive exercises. This is the nature of pathwork: things merge and blend; sometimes the boundaries aren’t as clear as you would like them to be.
2. Intuitive
In the intuitive exercises, you may find yourself prompted to release what you think you need to know and just let the card tell you. This is more like channeling the card, listening to it speak to you, and allowing it to guide you on your journey without any nudging from your ego mind. This process opens up possibilities for a card that you would never receive another way. Oftentimes we can get fixated on what a card means or how it has to be interpreted, but this way you take all of your preconceived ideas and throw them out the window.
How you go about selecting your card intuitively will depend on you, although I do have instructions in most of the intuitive sections. You can shuffle your deck, hold it to your heart with your question or intention in your mind, then just split your deck, taking whatever card happens to be on top. Or you can shuffle, cut with your cards facedown, and draw the card from the top of the deck. Or you can choose not to shuffle them at all, fan them out facedown, and run a pendulum over them to see which card is speaking the loudest in answer to your question.
This section is really about letting go—stop trying to force or control an outcome and instead allow the outcome to flow to you. Most tarot readers already work with this intuitive approach when they do a reading anyway, so this part of the pathwork process should come easy enough to most of you reading this book. But again, this is not the only way the exercises in this section are presented. So do not balk if you come across one that looks more intentional than intuitive.
3. Wandering
Wandering uses a little of the first method’s intention, a dash of the second method’s intuition, and a lot of action. The wandering technique is really more about how well you know your mind and what level of control you have over it. It is easier to focus on something by setting an intention, and it is even pretty easy to open up to a concept, idea, or problem and see what intuitive hit you might get. But to allow yourself to wander and explore with no real destination—that’s where the deep digging really happens. I discovered this technique during my own meditation process, as I observed how one thing would trigger something else and send me in a totally different direction, until that also triggered something else, and I would ping off again. I learn more about who I am while wandering, though it is not for everyone.
So, what is wandering in the scheme of this book and in the process of pathwork? Wandering is a twofold active process, as it can be done in the mind or through the body. You can take a thought for a walk inside your head, or you can walk it out in the world around you. I am a walker; I live for my morning walks and they are very much a part of my healing and mediation practice, as they literally move energy in, around, and through my physical body. Sometimes this is exactly what a thought, problem, or question needs to do as well. It needs to be moved physically. It needs to be allowed space and opportunity to move unhindered. This is what the prompts in the wandering sections of the cards will do for you. Sometimes they will involve a physical wandering and you will be asked to move your physical body; other times it might just be mental wandering to see where a thought, idea, or problem takes you. This is probably the section that may give some of you the most difficulty, as I am not sure how many of you have ever taken a tarot card for a walk. Again, this section is about flow, about letting go and learning how to engage with your cards in a new and deeper way. There is no wrong or right way to do it, so just let the prompts in this book guide you.
Now you have the framework, or at least a rough idea of pathwork and the methods used here in the cards sections of this book. Don’t worry if this still all sounds like an alien language. It will come together as you do the exercises for each of the cards. New concepts take time, and they need to be practiced over and over again. This is another great thing about the pathwork process: it is repetitious. I would suggest you just work with one card a week to begin. Sit with the exercises for the card and see how each of them plays out in your daily life or watch to see if they change your point of perception. Maybe you want to work with the suit of wands and you choose to just go through the intuitive exercises until you have a better understanding of the suit on an intuitive level. Or maybe the idea of taking the majors for a walk really appeals to you, so you spend the next twenty-two days doing a wandering challenge with your twenty-two major arcana cards. However you decide to launch into this book will be the right way for you. My only suggestion would be to initially only work with one card per day until you get the hang of the process. There is information in chapter 5 on how to take this one step further and bring the pathwork process into your spreads.
I also strongly recommend keeping a separate journal to keep your pathworking notes. It’s important to note that journal writing and pathworking are not the same. They can share similar elements, but they are very different. They do, however, go together like ice cream and chocolate. We have already established that pathwork can be messy; it brings stuff up from the murky emotional waters and you may find you need extra time to work through what the pathwork process pushes to the surface. This is where your journal will come in. In many respects, the pathwork process triggers the journal process. What you feel, see, and experience on your pathwork journey will ultimately trigger issues, points of healing, and other sore spots that you may wish to keep a record of. The deeper you pathwork with your cards, the more you may find yourself reaching for your journal. To assist you in knowing how to best use a journal through this specific process, I have included journal tips and prompts within the exercises, just so you don’t get confused along the way. But please, don’t let my prompts be the only things to get you to your journal. Use your journal as a companion buddy to your pathwork, reach for it whenever you feel it necessary, and don’t use it if you don’t feel it is applicable to the information or energy you engage in with a specific exercise or card.
Choosing Your Pathwork Deck
Although technically any tarot deck will do for this sort of work, you may want to either go through your deck collection to find a deck that fits this sort of work, or buy a new deck. I myself have decks that I don’t read from but I do use for pathwork, spellwork, and journal work. These decks tend to have less traditional images and offer space for the imagination to take over. A couple of decks I enjoy using for this sort of work are the Gaian Tarot, the Raven’s Prophecy Tarot, and the Paulina Tarot. These decks are visually intriguing beyond their assigned tarot meaning. They offer a visual feast and let one get lost in the image itself. You will need to find one or two decks that do that for you, ones that just visually move you and draw you into the scene. What works for me more than likely won’t work for you, as each of us has our own level of visual sensitivity. Some people prefer softer images with more pastel colors, some like darker colors with high fantasy art, and others might want something somewhere in between. Only you will know what images you are looking for in a deck of cards. Most of you will more than likely already know which deck in your collection ticks all the boxes for you and offers itself intuitively to the pathwork process. If you are fairly new to tarot or don’t have a very extensive collection of decks, I encourage you to seek out a deck just for this work. Find groups on Facebook or Instagram where you might be able to trade decks, or take yourself shopping and find the perfect deck for your pathwork journey. It might even take you a while to settle into a deck. Just set your intention for the most aligned deck, see it arriving to you in the most perfect of circumstances, and before you know it you will have your very own pathwork tarot deck added to your collection.
Okay, pick a deck of cards and let’s jump in!