Tarot for When You’re Not Sure – How to Make the Right Choices, with Shelley

 

“When nothing is sure, everything is possible.” -Margaret Atwood

The fundamental reason we come to the tarot is that we’re looking for answers.

We feel like if we could only know the right answer, or the “why” to a particular situation, we could then do the right thing. Or if we could only know that everything is going to work out the way we want it, we wouldn’t have to worry anymore.

And the reason we do all of this? We want to avoid pain, hurt, unpleasant surprises, and disappointment.

It’s human nature! We want to seek pleasure and avoid pain. We come to tarot for the answers we hope will help us to do just that.

Yet here’s where the real magic of tarot comes in: conscious and evolved work with tarot teaches us that it isn’t the cards themselves that passively tell us our future.

The cards are instead like a roadmap, like a dashboard indicator, giving us pertinent information, objective clues, and guidance along the journey of our lives so that we are in the driver’s seat, right where we should always be.

So, how do these cards help us to co-create with the universe?

And how can we use the cards to uncover the “right” decisions when we’re living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty, and when we want to make sure that we’re right on track with our soul’s mission for our own personal journey?

Recognize that the cards aren’t in control, you are!

When I work with my clients I bring them into a space where they begin to understand that a deep and conscious tarot practice allows them the beauty of being the authors of their own story.

While it’s true that we are always faced with limitations within which we must make our choices (difficult exes, job loss, hostile co-workers, life transitions), and while it’s also true that we aren’t in control of all of the circumstances surrounding our situations, still—we aren’t victims of our circumstances.

Tarot cards help us to see pathways that allow us to navigate within our limitations and also to make choices that we can feel empowered about.

Recognize that the “right” choice is not a predictive outcome to sit back and wait for, but rather just that: an active CHOICE!

While it might feel comforting in a way to come to a tarot reading with the idea that the reader will provide you with the answer to your story and then you’ll simply just wait for it all to “happen”, the truth is that living consciously means that we use the cards to assist us in taking full responsibility for our choices, so that we can live by them each and every day.

When we approach our lives as a co-creative process with the Universe, we realize that tarot serves as a tool to help us get to the next step in our evolutionary process.

We are responsible for how we evolve as individuals and as souls, not the cards.

We work with the cards as one of our companions in co-creating with unseen forces that assist us in our growth.

That takes away the question of whether the choice is “right” or not—tarot actually becomes an evolutionary process and conscious practice in which we become so aligned with our own path that we can easily flow from one step to the next, making choices as our own unique situations ebb and flow through time.

Recognize that while we crave security and answers, tarot works best when it helps us in an overall approach to living consciously with uncertainty

Just like the card The Fool, who is about to take a step off of a cliff into unknown territory based on a deep faith and trust that the next step will reveal itself at exactly the right moment, we who work with choice-based tarot understand that the heart of the matter lies in finding ways to open to and embrace the essential uncertainty of life itself.

Living with uncertainty is one of life’s great challenges. But paradoxically, once we accept that challenge and once we can truly be at peace with “not knowing”, we can use our tarot readings and tarot practice to illuminate each step along the way.

The cards give us confirmation that we’re on the right track, or, highlight for us when we might be running off course and into a danger zone.

But no reading is foolproof; each reading is an organic picture of that moment in time. And each moment in time, like Pema Chodron says in her brilliant book Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living—”Every situation is a passing memory.”

When we know that every situation is a passing memory, we begin to work in harmony with the ever-changing cyclical nature of our situations. We use tarot as a way to understand that there is a force beyond our physical selves that governs the nature of all things, all circumstances, all interactions, and we use tarot to help us flow and work together with this force so we can live our lives authentically and out loud, fulfilling our highest possibilities.

Granted, this approach calls for a much more active participation in the process of a card reading. It wakes us up to the responsibility and the beauty of each and every situation we face, and helps us in consciously crafting each and every choice we make, whether we are facing a situation that is joyous or heart-wrenchingly difficult. But that is what makes the journey worthwhile.

“In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

About Shelley

Shelley has been working with the Tarot cards since 2001. She is a talented Tarot storyteller, combining her professional writing skills with her intuitive abilities to create in-depth and insightful Tarot readings.

She is an Endorsed My Tarot Club Reader and is available for Tarot readings here.

PSST... Do you want to boost your Tarot reading confidence and become the Tarot reader everyone raves about? In April, I'll be opening the doors to my signature program, TF2: Read the Tarot with Confidence, and you're invited!

>> Click here to find out more about TF2 LIVE and get on the wait list!