
I just taught my very first tarot-reading class, to two young women who volunteered to be my guinea pigs, and it was so much fun! And also rather deep. One of the ideas that clarified itself while we were discussing the philosophy of the tarot seems worth sharing.
As humans, our purpose and our power lies in our ability to create, develop, and transform. We do this by following the compass needle of our desire, which directs us along the path of our creative development. So many of the things that we mistake for goals—health, money, loving relationships—are actually byproducts of creative growth, rather than ends in themselves.
Health is what develops as we use our negative experiences and sense of lack to inform our understanding of what we wish to bring into being. When we view health as a goal, we focus on our pain, our trauma, our illness, as wrongs done to us which must be addressed from outside (leading to addiction and victimhood). If we are focused on development and growth and creation, we will use our negative experiences as information about what we wish to change, and as we create that change, health will occur as a side-effect.
Money is a resource (and very far from the only resource) that supports and nurtures a process of development. Money is also an energy that flows in to support a fruitful path of expansion. People spend money on things they want to have or experience or support into being. No one wants to throw money into a pit to fill it up. “I need money because I don’t have any” does not inspire investors. We make money when the world needs or desires what we are building or creating. Money is a side-effect of our creative expansion. When we stop developing or growing and try to catch up or stand still, it drains away.
Relationships come into being as we walk our path and encounter others who are going the same way. Relationships are healthy and happy and mutually supportive as long as both people remain on their own creative paths, following the compass needle of their own desire, and the relationship supports both people on that shared journey. When we view the relationship as the goal, we make fear of loneliness our focus, and (maybe unwittingly) attempt to seduce or coerce another off their path and onto ours. Or we seize onto the relationship and then attempt to stop growing and creating in order to keep the relationship the same, leading to stagnation and the death of desire. What if Taylor Swift had stayed home to “work on her relationship,” rather than going on the Eras Tour? Paradoxically, the only way we can remain happy in our relationships is by being willing to let them go when they stop supporting our creative expansion, and trusting that the people who will lastingly delight and desire us are the ones we can only find by walking our own path and meeting up with those whose desire for creative expansion is leading the same way.
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