The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, August 5, 2012

By Sarah Taylor

This week’s cards work lyrically together, and that lyricism speaks to the sense of what is available to you to work with when they are activated and you’re flowing with them in your own experience.

At the core of the reading, there is a coming together of two distinct parts of the psyche, which provides access to reserves of energy — more specifically, creativity — that had hitherto remained in the shadows, unable to reach their full expression. Now, it is up to you to give them expression; they are available to you.

On the left, we have the Queen of Cups: feminine, watery, emotionally mature, unafraid of her feeling nature. On the right, the Princess of Wands: feminine yet youthful and intense with it, fiery, unafraid of confronting the shadow and of working with energy that is both dynamic and potent. In the centre, the Two of Wands: Dominion. Both Queen and Princess come together in a finely tuned but no less impactful balance, the fire present in the colours in front, the water present in the blue-hued background, each symbolised in a crossed wand.

The Two, masculine as it is (with the Princess, who also exhibits masculine qualities), brings the reading into an equilibrium of activity and receptivity. The choice will be yours as to whether to move or to hold your ground, and there is no need to rush because all indications are that you will know what needs — and doesn’t need — to be done, and when.

There are no Swords or Pentacles in today’s spread. This means that neither analysis nor throwing ‘stuff’ at something in order to deal with it is going to work in your better interests. As someone who has been in therapy on and off for a long time, one of the things I have learned, and which is borne out by experience, is that ‘talking things through’ doesn’t work if the foundation work hasn’t been done. If there is no integrity to the structure, and there is no dynamism or the ability to receive nourishment from the source of your creativity, getting into a long discussion, drawing up game plans, making promises that it won’t happen again — all of that falls by the wayside because the force of the unconscious will have its out in spite of everyone’s best intentions.

In the same way, anything that you can do to manipulate your physical environment (what you take into your body, what you buy, where you travel) won’t bring you that sense of dominion that the Two of Wands describes either. Not that thoughts or a focus on the physical are to be avoided — it’s just that the Two of Wands asks us to access it in a different way.

What needs to change is flow itself: the release of what has been ignored and denied and gone unacknowledged. You do that through your feelings. The more you express what is coming up from within, the more you break down the barriers inside you, the greater the flow that is possible.

This doesn’t have to be done all at once, nor does it have to be forced. The key word here is ‘allowing’ — a compassionate devotion to the truth of what wants to be heard and felt, whether it is joyous or painful, whether it comes with ease or is deeply uncomfortable. If need be, find a person, a group, a pastime that will support you through it, knowing that some of the hardest work has been the effort you’ve been expending keeping everything at bay.

I write a lot about ‘paper tigers’, and it’s something I feel is worth repeating. It is most often the idea of what we feel we are letting ourselves in for when we surrender to our feelings that holds the most charge. The reality is seldom what we imagined. I mean, look at the image of the Princess: the tiger becomes a pussycat at her feet, working in unison with her, hand and tail meeting as they dance on the fires of life.

Because what is important to understand is that this is a reading to be celebrated. It speaks of something beautiful and transformational. It is also a reading to be lived rather than analysed, in keeping with what it’s showing us today. Given that, I’d like to invite you to click on the image and spend a moment communing with the cards, seeing the interplay of each colour and element and how that feeds your soul. This is soul work, after all. Work with it in the language it is using to communicate with you, hold the tension of two worlds — water and fire, heart and belly — and find that place of creative friction between them. That is your introduction into an experience of dominion that is entirely personal to you.

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.