Why I Read My Own Cards
Words are like sutures. They can close up ancient wounds. They’re magic, we know this. Words heal not just from the meaning they convey but also the energy they contain. Words can hold, as if tiny little vessels, the energy that transmits from the writer to the reader. Or from the speaker to the listener. Words have the power to transport us and transform us just from taking them in.
And even more so, the words we take in that we tell ourselves. When we are both the one speaking and the one listening, the impact is even greater.
Words we hear from within us are like small flashlights. Each one, if true, can take us through the dark. Each one can lead us to what we haven’t found before within us.
Here’s what I wanted most to suture: my small ego-everyday-me and the me that’s a lighthouse-type-of-soul. What the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung would describe as Personality #1 and Personality #2. My ego kept longing for love, to be loved, completely. And my soul kept reminding me that I am that love, intrinsically.
It was like those two aspects of my being were mud wrestling inside of me. And I was exhausted from that unseen struggle.
After that first and last card reading while I was at Harvard Divinity, by a tarot card reader in downtown Boston, I started reading my own. Typically, I read them to resolve a situation I was in or a question I needed answering. I used the tarot cards as a way to mine for my own answers within me. And that practice, of beginning to hear, and even more to trust, that inner voice I met with that became the most unexpected and life-altering experience of my life.
I started using the cards not to find answers anymore, or even when I was in crisis; I used them daily just to connect to that voice of love inside me. I used them to hear what uncontrived words might want to arise from the simple and profound practice of just returning again and again to my heart.
So, years and years later, when I was creating my own oracle, THE DIVINE FEMININE ORACLE, I wanted to have both powerful words and an inquisitive question to go inward with for each card. I wanted each card to help continue to draw us inward, to uncover our own truth. And then to have a powerful intention that we can repeat inside us like an incantation, until the answer arrived.
Devotion I found is the key. Devotion to my own inner voice, to the process, to the way the words arise, or don’t. Devotion to the silences, to waiting with unconditional love. Devotion to the beauty of trying with words, once they surfaced, to become one with my soul. Whether it was possible or not, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the love that was being forged by becoming the person I could trust, by just showing up, every single day. And so, this is the divine equation that was revealed to me
Unrepeatable, wacky, needy, small-ego-me + the eternal soul of love that I am = Joy.
It’s my most treasured offering to anyone who also wants to experience their own, most stable source of love within them. It’s what Shiva and Shakti might whisper to each other, or Rumi and Shams, or Christ and Mary. Not here in words, but from within that mystical place called heart. The intentions and the questions with each card are icebreakers, bridges, between your everyday self and the self that never changes.
At the end of Nina Simone’s hauntingly beautiful song, "Consummation," she repeats the word joy as if it was no longer a word, or a signifier for anything we’ve ever thought we understood before. She repeats joy in a way that makes my eyes close from the heat of the feeling that fills me. She tells us about joy by experiencing it herself as she sings to us.
The joy, the infinite love, the unending resource we each have within us is the most critical aspect about being human I have always felt most compelled to share, to illuminate. It is where our dreams originate; it’s where the trajectory of our lives can take shape.
I have never given a card reading, and I never will. Because for me, the most transformative relationship we could ever have is between the self and soul. And reading my own cards demands that I am both the speaker and the listener. I am both the guide and the one guided.
With only more love,
M.