Editor’s Note: Sarah Taylor is attending an intensive training workshop this weekend, but suggested this particular archive selection for this weekend’s tarot column. She also says that Monday’s Tarot Reading is still active, and worth revisiting in light of this weekend’s astrology. — Amanda
By Sarah Taylor
You’re a gorgeous mystery with a wild heart and a lofty purpose. But like all of us, you also have a dark side — a part of your psyche that snarls and bites, that’s unconscious and irrational, that is motivated by ill will or twisted passions or instinctual fears.
It’s your own personal portion of the world’s sickness: a mess of repressed longings, enervating wounds, ignorant delusions, and unripe powers. You’d prefer to ignore it because it’s unflattering or uncomfortable or very different from what you imagine yourself to be.
— Rob Brezsny
When I was younger, I used to dream about monsters — usually horned beasts that roamed corridors, or little bright lights that fuzzed along the floor towards me and tickled my childish self, jarred and unsettled, back into waking life.
There are two things that I have subsequently learned from these dreams.
The first was that my monsters may have been outwardly terrifying — and they were — but what they masked was something that I deemed ‘monstrous’ in the corridors of my own psyche. They symbolised what was outcast and downright alien to my waking self, calling to me in the way they knew how. I wasn’t attuned to their language, though. All I could hear was the sound of fear pulsating in my ears, driving me away from them. And I kept running in my dreams for a long, long time.
The second thing I learned came much later: that I had it in my power to approach them differently. Some years ago, I had started seeing a Jungian analyst who worked with my dreams in ways that previous therapists had not. I had recounted to her the recurring dream with the little bright lights — lights that waited for me, and which drew me in like awful gravity — and looked at her, exasperated: “Why would they keep doing that to me?”
“Maybe they wanted to wake you up.”
Her response hit me like a lightning bolt. A moment of illumination. What it illuminated was that it was my waking life that had been the nightmare. So it was that the unacceptable circumstances in which I found myself as a child — and all that I consequently believed was unacceptable about me — were consigned to the shadows, playing peekaboo in my dreams.
Unsettling as they were, they had patiently been repeating their message until I had been prompted to pay attention. Today when I meet a monster in my dreams, I have a tendency to run towards it with the battle cry, “Show yourself to me!” A step in the right direction, I guess. Tomorrow, I might be able to strike up a conversation with one of them. That might be an idea.
What we have accepted about who we are is something we can see in ourselves relatively easily, in much the same way that we are able to see ourselves clearly during the day. Our sum daylight total is what we have brought to the light of consciousness. It is what illuminates our way, and the light is not restricted to us: it illuminates the way for others too. (Which is why we consider some prophets to be enlightened.)
Trying to see what we have hidden — even, and especially, from ourselves — is harder. This is what psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung referred to as our shadow, and it is comprised of both the things that we don’t want to be — what we fear we are, what repels us — and the things we don’t believe we can be — what is too good to be a part of us, what we don’t deserve. The shadow is unconscious; we cannot look at it directly. It reveals itself to us obliquely in the form of dreams (as did mine), symbols and patterns, and in what we project onto other people, places and things.
One of the primary reflectors of our shadows are relationships. We do a lot of learning in the arena of relationship. But the water of that particular reflective surface is often confusingly choppy — and the closer we are to the other person, the choppier it gets. Sometimes it is downright stormy. What’s theirs? What’s ours? Where do the waters join to create a new eddy or wave altogether?
This is where tarot comes in. It can be a wholly effective tool that we can employ to look at our shadow — not by telling the future or by reassuring us (which stops us from finding our own truth), but by showing us who we are.
Tarot is different from other forms of much closer relating in that the two participants — querent and reader — are not so emotionally and psychically intertwined, although that intertwining is still there beneath the surface, make no mistake about that. There is still ‘relationship’, just on a more subtle end of the scale.
Therefore we are still connected by the same body of water and the surface still ripples, but the reflection is smoother. Or it should be if you’re in the presence of a good reader. (Note: tarot readings for someone in whom you have an emotional investment are fraught with their own particular currents and undertows: two people with an investment means two equal measures of the unconscious and a dollop of suspended objectivity, and I would suggest you approach with caution. You might learn a lot, but it is often in the school of hard knocks. Sometimes a hard knock is what it takes.)
When we look into this calmer surface of the major and minor arcana, we have the opportunity to see everything that we are reflected back to us — those things we are aware of, and those things we are not. This is where our shadow work takes place: at the card’s interface and how we react to it. Tarot is particularly useful because it has a card for each aspect of the personality and for each kind of interaction we can have. It is complex enough to mirror the complexity of our lives.
How we work with the shadow in tarot is something that I have covered in other articles (see below), and I’ll be focussing on it again in the near future in Part II. Today, I simply wanted to reintroduce the concept of the shadow and of tarot as a form of shadow work, and to offer one observation:
Whenever we recoil from a tarot card, there is the implicit invitation to go deeper. It isn’t easy. Like my childhood self in my dreams, when I get a tarot card that I’d rather not get, my first reaction is to run. But our shadow will always run with us. That’s why it is called the shadow: it is part of us, always there, and it is asking for the light to be seen. You can try, like I have done, to run at it screaming, but then you will close off receptivity. The best thing you can do is to strike up a conversation by asking some questions:
“What do you mean to me?”
“What are you trying to tell me?”
“What is it that I feel when I look at you?”
“Why do I not want to explore that feeling?”
“How can that feeling help me?”
“How would you enrich my life?”
And if you find a card that feels too good to be true? Ask the same questions. Every answer is a part of who you are.
I believe we all have parts of ourselves that we don’t want to accept. I also believe that this is not only nothing to be ashamed of: it is integral to the process of becoming whole. It is the coalface (the visible seam of coal to be mined, where the real work gets done) of the work-in-progress that is us.
Sometimes we might feel like we are alone in the dark, far below the surface of what we have come to consider ‘normal life’. Conditions might feel inhuman. We might want to raise a fist and snarl at whatever taskmaster it is who insists that we still have things to do, that we are better off in the search for that elusive something than we are in trying to surface prematurely. We might feel like railing at the unfairness of it all — until we arrive at that moment when we accept the calling to keep at it, to dig deeper. Because in that moment lies the opportunity to find what it is that we have been searching for, and to understand that what we endured was worth every part of the hard slog.
What is there, hiding in the shadow, waiting for us, is what we discover about ourselves that is indescribably precious.
To confront a person with his shadow is to show him his own light. — C G Jung
Other articles on working with the shadow in tarot:
– Journeying into a tarot card — Queen of Wands, Sacred Circle Tarot (by Emma Sunerton-Burl)
– Working with the archetypes in tarot
– Tarot — dreaming while you’re awake
Rob Brezsny’s article on the shadow at Free Will Astrology.
If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.
thank you Sarah