By Sarah Taylor
What do you feel when you see these cards? Tell me. What do you feel? Once you’ve identified your feelings, how about this: what was the thought on which your feelings were predicated? And how were you feeling before you had the thought? Was there a significant shift in how you were feeling before you saw the reading, and how you felt afterwards?
If so, then perhaps you have come away with a greater sense of the power that your thoughts about what you see have in affecting your perception of reality.
Thoughts create beliefs — a belief being a thought that has been repeated to the point where it isn’t as immediately open to enquiry. It can become entrenched like the grooves of a record, which is only capable of playing the same song, over and over again.
If that song is a song of fear, one that drowns out your connection to what lies at the very heart of you and separates you from your Self, then you have a choice. You can stick with the song you know — predictable, familiar, conjuring equally predictable and familiar feelings. Or you can see the song for what it is and the effect it has on you each time you get it out and play it. When you can do that, your options expand and you open yourself to freedom.
Take a look at the cards again. It may be that all is not what it at first seems.
On the left there is The Tower, in the centre the Three of Swords, and on the right the Eight of Swords: one major arcana card, which points to an archetypal experience, followed by two cards that describe the thoughts about that experience.