Highlights:
“The externalization of internal experience onto a physical object like a card creates some distance that gives us room to breathe, shifts how we relate to ourselves, and offers a new vantage point to look from. The cards allow us to safely see and understand the less palatable aspects our ourselves.”
- pg 4
“Legend has it that the mystics of Egypt hid their secrets for spiritual evolution - about how to attain the ideal of union with the Absolute - inside a set of playing cards. Tucking secrets into card form was a way for them to ensure the preservation of hard-won wisdom through human vice. They trusted more in the drive to gamble and play than they did the human desire to read sacred texts, or learn through oral transmission, and knew that some would ‘play’ tarot without ever using the cards to ascend. But for those inclined toward spiritual growth, the cards would function like seventy-eight magic portals, with secrets inside.”
- pg 3
“With sustained use, the cards can foster self-trust, introspection, and an interior grounding that can offset the tendency to look only outward for answers.”
- pg 17
“(Major and minor arcana: major and minor secrets.) Major secretes relate to overarching themes on what we might call a path toward re-membering, toward wholeness, or what we might just call a healing journey. The lesser, minor secrets explore the four domains of human being: Spiritual (energy): Wands Emotional: Cups Behavioral: Pentacles Intellectual: Swords”
- pg 19
“The World (card) tells of a return from interiority to interdependence. Of learning to experience the world as it is, in all its contradiction and difference, where both the village and forest exist side by side and have their time and place. Perhaps the way our minds process the world - as something divided, parceled off, and split up is a projection of our own internal partitions, things accepted and things exiled. The World is a promise that we might one day be able to access the wholeness of our being and the wholeness to which we belong, in all its wild ambiguity.”
- pg 21
“The Lovers (card) holds another image of the above and below paradigm, as well as symbols of masculine and feminine - in some decks this card is called ‘The Choice’.”
- pg 22
“In the study of how people behave, rule-governed behavior is a term for action that’s taken not because it is the best or right thing to do in a given situation but because a person has begun to do it automatically based on things like social reinforcement, avoidance of discomfort, or a need to feel good all the time.”
- pg 35
“The archetypes represented in the tarot are ancient and universal energies that live within us all. When we are unconscious of them, they can take on a life of their own, manifesting as feelings or behaviors that seem beyond our control. But when we engage with them intentionally—through reflection, ritual, or creative practices—we can learn from them, develop a relationship with them, and reclaim our agency in the process.”
- pg ?
“If magic is using the subtle to influence the dense, any process that involved using the invisible ‘subtle’ aspects of our experience (energy, emotions, thoughts) to influence the visible ‘dense’ ones (behavior and physical reality) qualifies as magic. The act of taking something you may have once believed to hold little value - like grief, rage, despair, social anxiety - and using it to move toward something precious is a kind of modern-day alchemy.”
- pg 39
“It’s tempting to believe that simply refusing to speak something aloud is a sure way to keep a secret, but the truth is that secrets tell themselves in all kinds of ways. They’re spoken in the choices we make, how we hold our bodies, what we do with our hands and feet, and the ways we behave toward others and ourselves. Behavior is also a language, and when we start to view it this way, we see how things swallowed and tamped down have the tenacity of water in their drive to find throughways. We begin to see that even when we haven’t moved our mouths and made a sound, we still speak And the people around us are listening, affected by what they hear even if the message comes out scrambled or distorted, and even if those not fluent in the language of behavior have to really strain their ears to understand, you can trust the message is felt somehow. Come closer. Go away. I hate you. Don’t leave me. I want this. I am scared of this. I’m ready to change. I want to stay the same.”
- pg 43
Thoughts:
This reminds me of what Emerson says about how our virtue and vice ‘breathe in every moment’ and we ‘cannot pass for what we are not’.
”… when you see the High Priestess in a spread, the card is often an indicator that something in the room is either not being said or may require a bit of decoding.”
- pg 44
”… the best motivator for behavior change is from the bottom up, meaning that coming into the body and actually feeling the impacts of a particular behavior will give us everything we need to know about whether to keep doing it or not… More than any other motivator for change… the capacity to experience how something truly feels may be one of the most important skills for change.”
- pg 49 (The Empress, who is Nature)
“In modern behavioral therapies, absolute reality (The World card) is accessed through what psychologist Marsha Linehan describes as the ‘synthesis of opposites’, a way of accommodating two or more seemingly conflicting truths. In dialectical behavior therapy, the therapists job is to help the client hold both the need for change and the need for radical self-acceptance at once. Both are real, and both are crucial to the process.”
- pg 119-120
Thoughts:
This makes me think of The Transcendent Function
“That’s one amazing thing about the mind. You have the ability to summon, through your own imagination, whatever world you want. And if you’re able to direct that capacity with intention, it can radically change your physical reality. Because that same psychological muscle that imagines worst-case scenarios and stimulates a whole heap of feelings about it can imagine best possible outcomes and stimulate sweet feelings too. Which can in turn stimulate the best and sweetest behaviors.”
- pg 206
“A person who holds true power is one who is able to occupy spaces of intense uncertainty, and all the feelings that brings up, while remaining stable in their actions, that is, renouncing one’s need to react in a way that will give them a false sense of control.”
- pg 52
“Where there is authority… there compulsion is superfluous.” (Of The Emperor, from Meditations on the Tarot)
“Clarissa Pinkola Estes has remarked that in old stories, those who are gentle with what is undesirable or ugly are many times blessed. While those who scorn and reject ugliness are either barred from their desires or punished, often cruelly. This lesson can be applied to how we respond to things about ourselves we don’t like. Justice teaches us that when we’re cold and rejecting toward the things in ourselves that we find grotesque and undesirable, that attitude yields consequences just as it would if we were to treat a friend that way: loss of trust, dignity, and personal power. On the other hand, when we practice kindness and willingness to engage with parts of ourselves that we view as hideous or unlovable, we’re bound to receive a benediction.”
- pg 80
“The ninth major secret, the Hermit, is often interpreted as relating to the peace and prudence that come from walking what Buddhists call the Middle Path. In the words of Buddhist monk Ajahn Chah, ‘You see both sides, so you have peace. If you only see one side, there is suffering. Once you see both sides, then you follow the Middle Way. This is the right practice of mind. This is what we call straightening out our understanding.’ The lesson of the Hermit, the spiritual aspirant, is learning to dwell inside liminal spaces between extremes, because poles are illusory by nature and breed suffering.”
- pg 71
”… not everything that feels bad is wrong. And when you’re breaking an old pattern or doing something different, it’s very common to feel worse before you feel better. You were doing something the old way because the old way let you avoid things that scared you. And when you break free of this old pattern, every monster, demon, and terrifying thing is going to show up, and the thing that once protected you can’t do that anymore.”
- pg 77
“Philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote that ‘no creature can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist’, stern words about the reality of growth and transformation. In the language of psychology, it is not so much the self that must cease to exist, but everything that is not the self - the defense mechanisms, maladaptive conditionings, destructive coping strategies, the behaviors that developed in response to childhood trauma that paradoxically seem to invite more trauma in adulthood. These are the things that must die in order for us to transform.”
- pg 88
“Lon Milo DuQuette, in his interpretations of the Thoth tarot, writes that ‘the Princess of Disks, like Demeter, Greek goddess of harvest and fertility, arises in her glory from our of the Earth itself and establishes her alter in the midst of a grove of barren and dying trees that her fertile presence will now restore to green health.’ A green altar erected in a forest of ailing trees.”
- pg 277
“On top of being predisposed to categorizing all things into pairs of opposites, when we experience trauma the sorting can become amplified. To protect ourselves from getting hurt again, and because the nuance and ambiguity of life leaves too much to chance, the brain creates rigid categories: all good and all bad. But this makes it hard, if not impossible, to navigate long-term relationships and endeavors because nothing in this world is only beautiful or only flawed. It becomes hard to make decisions because no choice is perfect, and it makes it tough to stick with things that contain high and low moments, as things tend to do. In many ways, healing from trauma is learning to hold polarities, to be in life’s gray areas again. It is also the path of the mystic, who wishes to experience the truth and totality of things: the good, the bad, and the ugly at once.”
- pg 92
“Psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan believed that the core motivating force for all human behavior is anxiety, and that our personalities are essentially a collection of habits and strategies we gather over time to minimize anxiety, avoid disapproval, and preserve a positive sense of self.”
- pg 99
“When our towers crumble, we’re thrust headfirst into a direct experience of the stuff that’s struck terror in our hearts since infancy and that we’ve been unconsciously avoiding ever since. If our personality, our tower, is built with the bricks of behavioral patterns that make us feel protected from what we perceive as threatening, including the experience of anxiety itself, when we begin to pluck those bricks out, we feel vulnerable and exposed. Exposed to the elements of social rejection, abandonment, unworthiness, failure, unlovability, and isolation. One core belief that I think forms the foundation of many towers is that anxiety itself is dangerous and must be avoided at all costs… We built walls in a time when we thought that anxiety itself was a threat to life, but the reality is we can both tolerate and learn from it. We can live with not being liked, we can survive being misunderstood, we can make mistakes, we can feel bad. Having released the goal of avoiding discomfort as much as humanly possible and by any and all means necessary, we free ourselves up to pursue new visions that aren’t about the absence of suffering but rather the pursuit of fulfillment, connection, and the stuff that makes life worth living. What a relief that turns out to be. To realize that not only can we take our walls down, we can do so regardless of whether anxiety goes away. We can live really beautiful, fulfilling lives with anxiety instead of feeling like we have to avoid it.”
- pg 100
“…healers and teachers have been using confusion as a tool since time out of mind. Zen koans, ancient riddles used by Zen Buddhists in meditation, date back centuries and are designed to help people better understand the nature of reality by puzzling them and in doing so revealing the limitations of knowing with the analytic mind. As one particularly well-known koan goes: ‘When both hands are clapped sound is produced; listen to the sound of one hand clapping.’ A classroom study was widely publicized after researchers found that when teachers stimulated states of confusion in their students, the students learned more. And in the field of mental health, psychiatrist Milton Erickson taught, ‘confusion techniques’ to hypnotherapists, who learned to use disorientation in therapy to help patients change.”
- pg 108
“To be in a state of not knowing creates openings, illuminates new pathways, and is thus ripe with potential, even as what we can’t grasp yet may scare us. When defenses drop, new edges and footholds appear, and when we’re flailing, we’re a lot less picky about what we grab hold of to stay alive.”
- pg 109
“So if you’re afraid about making some change, maybe you’ve touched on something precious. Dennis Tirch, psychologist and a friend who specializes in compassion-focused approaches to healing, once said that if you wait for every part of you to be on board with some big change, you’ll be waiting a long time. Indeed, that temptation to wait for fear to subside is a trap. The fear is the cost of admission.”
- pg. 315