The corridor of many doors

Tarot and the act of story telling birth exciting possibilities for those looking to know themselves better

I am currently listening to a book titled Tarot for Change by Jessica Dore. I have been following Dore’s work ever since I got curious about cards in 2018. She locates cards and their meanings within several, seemingly disparate disciplines such as literature, history and psychology and reminds us that we hold the agency to define what our life looks and feels like. And eventually, the story that a life becomes.

When I would reach out to readers, they would always tell me a story. I’d give them a question and they would build a narrative around it. A context, a conflict and eventually a resolution. It reminds me of the three-card spread where one card represents the past, the next the present and the last the future. When I started to read for people, I found myself talking in the same framework, organizing my findings into a similar story structure. The person I was reading for became the protagonist who had to overcome a conflict and emerge victorious.

But that’s the thing about Tarot. The more you read, the more you are pushed to go within your own life. The Tarot cards to me, among other things, are mirrors. And how we interpret them tells us just as much about the person who the reading is for as about the reader themselves. And so, the reader must grow and expand to be able to find the emotional vocabulary to channel messages for the diverse and unique experiences of their clients. And in my quest for that expansion on that dark night, I sometimes get lucky and spot a spark of light.

This morning, a friend reached out to me for a reading. She is a reader herself and we often read for each other when we need some objectivity in life. I had read about the issue she was enquiring about and I felt like I had already told her everything I could. And yet, here she was, seeking guidance, something new, from me. I realised because my friend found herself asking the same question every few months, she probably needed to identify her story. The story, where the question was the conflict, and the answer, clearly a dead end. In this story, she wasn’t a victor. She couldn’t exit the story. The conflict wasn’t ending. The loop was endless.

Armed with this new insight, I asked my friend to write her story. I gave her three steps.

Step 1 was to write the story in third person using her name.

Step 2 was to replace her name with a random name and re -reading the story.

Step 3 was to tear the page up and dump it in the trash can.

As she completed the three steps, she shared that she felt lighter but wasn’t sure where we were going with this. At this point, I decided to pull a card from the Light Seer’s Tarot by Chris Anne, a deck which is visually striking because of its highly detailed and contemporary imagery. I usually shuffle and pull a card from the centre of the deck. This time, it was the 7 of Swords.

Traditionally, the 7 of Swords is a card of deceit. But since we were going beyond tradition in our experiment here, I urged my friend to look at the image and write a new story for herself. She is now torn between writing a story and believing it to be true and going back to traditional interpretations of the card to have them “tell” her what she “should” know.

This, is the beauty of tarot. You never know what the path through a reading will look like. In this case, it was a circular corridor that showed multiple doors and all one had to do was choose which one to walk through. And indecision could only lead to stagnation. Makes me wonder, isn’t indecision a form of self-deception too?

I then tried the three steps for myself. After the third step, I felt at peace. I liked the space where there was no story. After a point, urged by the need for closure, I pulled a card for myself.

A new story is beginning to form in my mind. What remains to be seen is whether it will land on paper or manifest in my life first.