I was indulged with several readings at a coffee shop on Tuesday morning by a gifted friend in JC who is studying tarot. The reading I’m going to talk about here is a 5-card Life Purpose spread that is telling me a lot about emotions, which is delightfully aligned with the Constellations topic for Winter 2025. Here goes:
Card #1: II Wands (Reversed) – This position in the spread signifies how I’m really doing right now. The fact that it’s reversed tells me something about surprise, wonder, enchantment, emotion, trouble, and also fear. What Jessica Dore says about it in her book, Tarot for Change, is that this card has to do with staying stuck in a wrong situation to avoid the disappointment of something not living up to what my fantasies about it were. It’s about how one walks away from such fantasies, and back into flow; into what really is. The two wands represent a doorway of sorts. Each wand, or staff, represents an aspect of this particular moment in time. One staff rests on a battlement (war, suffering, chagrin), and the other is fixed in a ring (riches, fortune, magnificence). The picture is worth a thousand words. The man in the image holds a globe in his hand, and he’s standing in front of a stunning vista that is apparently his domain. Will he focus on the replica or the real thing?
Card #2: VI Swords (Reversed) – This position in the spread signifies what I am really good at. The fact that it is reversed speaks of declaration, confession, and publicity (proposal of love). According to Jessica Dore, this card is about breaking old patterns, which involves being honest about how I may be actually choosing things that bring me suffering and connecting with the fear that lies at the heart of that choice. This requires that I be willing to do what’s necessary to bring my attention to the emotions that I have for so long avoided (with good reason). This exact location, Dore says, is where the pattern can be broken.
She compares what happens in this realm as “driving a bus of monsters toward what matters to me.” The huddled figures on the raft that is crossing the water could represent self doubt, self criticism, feelings of inadequacy. The card, she says, points at the act of moving through inner obstacles on our way toward what is personally meaningful. Hell yeah. I’m good at that. That’s what I do. “Fear is not just a thing to be tolerated, but in fact an indelible part of living in alignment with what’s precious.” “Fear is the cost of admission.” Accepting fear as part of who I am, my mantra moving forward could be: I am willing to take a new route if it’s a better one. I am willing to grow.
Card #3: King of Cups – This position in the spread signifies what my purpose is, right now. (It is not reversed.) This card showed up in several places during the morning reading extravaganza, and each time it was upright, which tickles me no end. Cups, it appears, have to do with emotions. And as I well know, emotions appear to defy logic. Dore says that the cups suit is about delineators. “To understand water is to give oneself over to its currents, instead of trying to put it into containers with labels.” This card signifies, she says, that we’ve talked and reasoned and prepared enough, and now it’s necessary to drop into the water itself. And according to this spread, this is my purpose, right now. Go figure.
“People in cultures all over the world in geographic isolation from one another have generated and told stories with motifs and characters that echo or resemble one another since time out of mind. Queens belong to the realm of imagination while kings belong to the domain of will. But for King of Cups – King of Imagination – will looks different.” Here we see a more receptive application of will, or active acquiescence. So my mantra might be: I am prepared and ready to do what is required in order to accept and stay afloat as the waters rise. Luckily, the card tells me that I have the competence to find resolution where others have been unable to.
“Emotions are often passed down through generations until they reach someone who has the right set of resources and abilities to resolve them. Clearing a space for them to emerge, unfold, and find full expression.”
“The King of Cups protects the rights of emotions to have and experience the full cycle of life: to be born, to have a safe space to fully express and to die, eventually.” Emotions have a beginning, a middle, and an end (unless, of course, we clamp down on them to keep them from moving through, or otherwise repress them).
“Knowing this helps us to become willing to actually feel what we feel. Humans can endure more pain when they know it’s time limited.”
“This is the way an emotion makes its way out of an individual, out of a family, and ultimately out of a bloodline. And so if you are feeling something big and deep, consider your kingship.”
My takeaway from this card: I have the tools and temperament to usher the thing through once and for all, and this is actually my purpose now.
Card #4: II Swords (Reversed) – This position in the spread signifies whatever might be getting in my way. The fact that it is reversed speaks of Imposture, falsehood, duplicity, disloyalty. Swords are the domain of thought. I have long been aware that I rely heavily on my mind. This card tells me that I can use my intellect to my advantage and that I have skill at this. But it also signifies that it is my mind that can get most in my way. Fears of imposture, duplicity, disloyalty. Working with this card demands that I continually examine which thoughts I give weight to, and which ones I choose to speak out loud. It asks me to be exquisitely aware and present when I speak about who I am and what I desire right now. This has been a particularly important aspect of my life right now, as my identity shifts and morphs as I step more fully into these roles in my life that acknowledge and honor even more of me. Dore also points out that this card is about honing knife skills, which involve cultivating a bit of cunning.
In staying in contact with what one knows to be true, Dore says, sometimes you need to lift your head up, roll your shoulders back and act like you know. Here’s an interesting line from this chapter: “I’m too scared to admit what I know, or to do what knowing requires of me.” And keeping the blindfold on (not making a decision) can be protective when it’s not the right time to make a choice.
“We form an alliance with ourselves by choosing narratives that are supportive and empowering rather than disparaging. If you wouldn’t describe a friend who was hesitating to act on what they know to be true as ‘confused’ or ‘lost’ maybe don’t talk about yourself that way either.” I really appreciate this.
Card #5: Ace of Cups (Reversed) – This position in the spread signifies how I can love myself so I have the energy to fulfill my purpose. The fact that it is reversed speaks of mutation, instability, revolution; House of the false heart. This card was exactly what I needed during this time, as my focus is on emotions; on seeing and dealing with them newly. I have not known my emotions well enough to name them, much less to be true to them, but I am willing to grow from here. It is the work of a lifetime, making good enough friends of our bodies so that we can access what is alive in us in the moment.
Ace of Cups represents “House of the true heart, joy, content, abode, nourishment, abundance, fertility; Holy Table, felicity hereof.” In this chapter, Dore talks about how psyche is something we exist within – it’s bigger than our physical body. She points out what mystics have known for centuries, that internal and external life are linked. As this card shows up in a spread, it might be asking, What is my environment expressing through me?
This card is also linked to the High Priestess, and the practice of contemplation (as the creative process of coming into dialogue with other forces such as emotions). Breaking down the roots of the word contemplation, she points out that “The prefix con-, meaning ‘with,’ tells us that it’s a collaborative process, and templum, the Latin word for temple, connotes a sacred space where a deity was believed to reside.” And so to contemplate is to engage in spiritual dialogue, which, like all dialogues, is going to involve both speaking and listening.
This card encourages me to slow down enough to listen. “What you’re listening for might be an invisible force, like that of helping spirits, energetic currents, or a Higher Power. Or you could be listening for something concrete, like a river over rocks, birdsong, a groundhog’s rustle through high grass. This way of being in a receptive relationship with what surrounds us seems difficult for modern people of the West to understand. We think in terms of the individual, the hero, the character who performs tasks and overcomes obstacles.
“But the cups, in addition to being emotional, are also symbolic of a certain receptivity, as a cup receives water. Receptivity implies relationship and asks us: What would a more relational way of engaging with our surroundings look like? What would happen if we reoriented the imagination toward a way that sees the self both as dreamer and that which is dreamt?
“Could we make room for the possibility that what we feel and experience in the flesh house of the body is not always rooted in a private individual experience, but comes from an ecosystem to which we belong? What if, for example, rather than seeing ourselves as taking a walk through the woods, we see ourselves as being a wave of energy rippling through the consciousness of a family of redwoods? How would this change the way we move through the environments we dwell in? How would it change the way we relate to our experiences?
“Emotions are how we understand our raw experiences, not in an evaluative or judgmental way as with intellectual understanding but rather as an intuitive, felt, cellular-type knowing. The trick – and what’s taught in many behavioral therapies – is learning to suspend action for long enough that this kind of knowing can move through us.
“In her Dear Sugar column, Cheryl Strayed once advised a reader, ‘Don’t own other people’s crap.’ And I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. To understand the cups suit, we have to get clear on what aspects of our experience even fall into the realm of ownership. For example, my behavior is something I can ‘own’ or be accountable for, while other people’s behavior is not something that I can or should. But with emotions, it’s not always clear who ‘owns’ them. I’ve woken up heavy with the boulder of my grandmother’s grief on my chest, breathed deeply while sweating from the fire of my mother’s rage, and I could say, ‘That’s theirs, not mine,’ if I wanted to, but what good would that do? Emotions are living energetic currents with life cycles of their own. They tend to survive down the vertical and horizontal lines of human relationships – through generations, through communities – until they arrive to the place where they can be fully experienced and expressed. That can take a while.”
I’d better stop before I owe Jessica too much for using her material, but I think you get my point. My reading was a blessing, as is Jessica Dore’s Tarot for Change: Using the Cards for Self-Care, Acceptance & Growth. Maybe I’ll put you in touch with my tarot reader friend, too, if you want. She’s amazing.
