Notes of a Desolate Libra

Tarot is supposed to give you a logical conclusion drawn based on your current circumstances, but for me, that apparently is really difficult. That’s why I’ve always had a “love-hate” relationship with my cards – I just change too much.

I have not always been a conscious fan or promoter of change. In fact, sometimes, like many people, I fear it. That’s why I have always been very careful with setting up my path in life. However, that is just not meant to be my fate. I am always looking for something new to try out, improving my personal skills and learning more, and also change my environment when there is a need. That’s why, when I try to tell my fortune based on current circumstances, I always end up with answer that are very logical, yet change in a few moments/days because I put myself on a different path already.

That is good and bad. Bad is that I could never figure out my fortune. Good is that I don’t need tarot to give me a kick in the butt to get myself moving. Tarot works for me in other ways, for self-development and helping other people, as a therapeutic tool mainly. It has worked wonders.  This is also why I love tarot, because I do not have to be driven by it (as I had feared in the past), but I can still be inspired by it.

Change is the only Constant.

Tarot 塔羅 Readings, Tarot 塔羅

General Background:
A friend of mine wanted me to just do a general reading for her about the relationship she is currently in. I didn’t have any background aside from that she’s having some sort of trouble in the relationship. Her first question was: should I stay with him or leave him? That yielded a face card, so I asked her to try again with a different question. Then she asked the question: what should I do?

Usually with something that general the cards do not produce very helpful readings. But this spread was one of the most coherent spreads I ever saw. Due to privacy reasons, I shall not reveal any of the background but will only tell the story of the spread.

This is the classic Celtic Cross spread. I asked her to draw an additional card to see find out about the biggest factor influencing this spread (her life). That came out to be the Emperor. Much of this is according to my own interpretation of the cards, so there may be differences with traditional readings of the cards. However, when intuition takes over and lures out the other side of the card, it’s the most interesting to see how they can evolve to fit a situation.

Trouble in Love

Cards + positions:
Situation: 2W – at a standstill, generally stable. For a relationship, then that means the relationship has reached a certain degree of maturity.
Obstacle: QnC (R) – QnC is the most passionate and loving person, but if (R) then she must be feared. She will use every tool in her scheming head to twist your heart and destroy your life.
Best that can be achieved: 4P (R) – no way to maintain stability, and therefore must break out of the mold and seeming stability.
Past: Death (R) – Fear of change, refusal to change
Present: Strength (R) – lack of internal strength to move on
Future: QnS (R) – the QnS is always a intelligent and fair person, but already has the tendency of being rather demanding on herself, when reversed, she is downright harmful to herself and possibly people around her.
True Self: 6C – unable to let go of the past, nostalgia, holding on to past kindness from other people (in this case, the man ).
Environment: High Priestess – a guiding factor, someone (probably female) who holds the key to the heart. In this case I wondered if that represented myself… but that is unclear.
Hopes/fears: Wheel – hoping for a twist of fate to help one out of a situation, except the wheel is fickle, and life can as easily take a turn for the worse as for the better.
Overall: 3W – Take your eyes forward to afar. There is much else in the world. The card also has a sense of entrepreneurship, which could mean that she should concentrate on career/business for now.
Ruling/Influence agent: Emperor – a man with a VERY strong personal and a control freak. The Emperor can be a sweet and comforting figure with his status and maturity, but on the other hand, can easily become a stubborn dictator who is not open to any reasoning except for his own.

Sequences:
2W->3W: if a stable situation comes tumbling down and produces more hurt than benefit, then perhaps it’s time to move out and forward.
QnC (R)->QnS (R): The straight laced and sometimes extreme QnS is no match for the conniving QnC. QnC can do substantial mental and emotional damage to QnS, causing her existing tendencies of self-inflicted pain to magnify. This does NOT bode well for the querent.
Reading Summary (for details see individual cards):
The querent seems to be in a relationship where she is controlled by her overpowering partner and is also facing an unfriendly female power that is doing much damage to her emotionally. She has always been unable to gain a fair share of control in a relationship and generally ends up to be the one who is hurt. Unfortunately, if the QnS (R) holds true, then this trend will continue. However, at this point, she can still break out of the relationship (4P(R)) and look elsewhere for her future. There are alternate futures for her, which she is very fortunate to have, but if she cannot break out of her mold and fall back into the same routine, she will continue to be the one who is hurt.
There are several feminine powers at war/work here, the two Queens, the High Priestess, and Strength. The two queens are both perversed, and Strength is unfortunately suppressed. Only the HP is still upright. The querent should seek help from trustworthy feminine powers around her and not continue to hurt herself and try to handle the situation on her own.

A’s notes: Apart of whether or not this spread fits the situation completely, I was amazed that I was able to get such clearly defined cards. Everything made sense and the cards in their positions flowed so smoothly into each other. I think the querent must had been considering this question for a long time for the cards to form such a clear statement. As for the future of this spread… who knows. In my philosophy, tarot serves to guide, not dictate. I only wish the querent all the best, as I was also once the QnS.

Readings, Tarot 塔羅 Love, Readings, Tarot 塔羅

Many people have asked me whether or not I do readings for myself. Well, the answer is yes. Actually, most of even all tarot readers probably do many readings for themselves. It’s not necessarily for divination purposes, but actually for self growth. Many people regard tarot with a suspicious eye, thinking that as a sect of Mysticism, it’s filled with inexplicable secrets that are, well, unbelievable. These moments certainly exist, usually coinciding with when someone tries out tarot (or any type of divination for that matter) for the first time and realize how it functions and sometimes in awe of how accurate it is. That sense of reluctance to accept that results of a pack of cards can speak about my future caused me to put down my tarot cards for almost 8 years. However, now the most important function that tarot has for me (contrary to popular thought) is that it helps me grow emotionally and understand the world around me. But I digress.

To further explore my answer of: yes, I do self-readings, I’d like to add the other side to the matter – the issues inherent in self-readings. The main problem with doing a self-reading is, as one may expect, that sometimes the reader try to twist the meaning to fit what you want it to be, regardless of what the cards say.

For example, in a span of 3 days, I got the following cards while doing various readings:

Day 1:
Tarot Diary: World (R)
Day 2: On the day of the materialization of a great opportunity -
Tarot Diary: Wheel of Fortune + Ten of Pentacles
Random card spread asking about the situation: World (R) + Three of Cups (R) + Knight of Cups
Day 3:
Tarot Diary: Death (R) + Tower (R)

Explanation (based on my own and not necessarily traditional readings of the cards):
Day 1, when I was doing my daily Tarot Diary (which I’ve been slacking on lately), I got the World (R). It generally means that the environment that one has built is not stable or insecure, or a more literal one of “the world turned upside down.” Now, at this point I didn’t know what was going to happen, but just had a feeling of things to come. So I had to wait for the events to happen in order to figure them out. At this time, my main focus was the part of “world turned upside down.”

Day 2, I got news of an opportunity, that if realized, would indeed turn my world upside down. I flipped out and started thinking that my life will be changed forever and that I had to prepare for it. I did another reading and it was the Wheel and 10P. Now, along with 10P, it means that the Wheel has granted you some luck that will bring stability and money. Naturally, this is what the opportunity would bring me if it indeed pans out. But at the same time, I got a World (R) again with 3C (R) and KtC. KtC represents the opportunity, 3C (R) is the group cooperation necessary, and the World (R) was repeated. I took it to mean that there may be some issues with people in my life (related to the life change).

Day 3, I got Death (R) and Tower (R), both indicating an inability to change. My thinking at the time was that I would have this wonderful opportunity on my hands but due to my own fears and lack of readiness to change, I would miss out on it, so I was determined not to let that happen.
Now looking at everything in retrospect, I realize that at every step, the World (R) was giving me a warning of something with a weak foundation. But I was so immersed in the “my life will be changed – oh no!” sentiments that I neglected that part of it. Also, 3C (R) warned of disharmony, but not in my own life. The combination of the opportunity + weak foundation + disharmony with people points to that the opportunity itself is flawed. Of course, I didn’t see that until later.

In the Cards and in Your Mind.

So as you can see, your mental state at the moment will definitely affect your reading of the spreads/cards. No question about it. You may comment that, of course when you look back at it and fit everything in, it’s all neat and clear. Well, it was not difficult to see the other side of the story if I had the mental capacity and cognitive ability at the moment to do so.
Tarot reading is an art. It’s also practice. The more you understand yourself and the cards, the more you can examine and decipher the situation at hand. Of course, I don’t ask that anyone believe in it. But I do think that if you give it a chance, tarot can show you a “self” and a “world” that you didn’t realize existed but indeed, do exist within you.

Musings, Tarot 塔羅 Tarot Diary, Tarot 塔羅

“Wheel of morality, turn turn turn. Tell us the lesson that we should learn…” -Animaniacs

Wheel of Fortune

Well, that’s the Wheel of Morality, but more generally the wheel that we are familiar with is the Wheel of Life 生命之輪.  Life often sets twists and turns in your way to test your faith (no, not religious, just faith in yourself, in life, etc.).

There’s a phrase/idiom in Chinese: 塞翁失馬，焉知非福。 塞翁得馬，焉知非禍. The moral is that when you are blessed with a “gift,” you don’t know if it will bring happiness or trouble; and when you are hit with a calamity, you don’t really know if that is truly a stroke of really bad luck or a harbinger of good fortune. When you look from behind, you may realize that things have a strange way of falling into place.

In 2008, I had the most (physically) traumatic experience in my life: I developed a severe inflammation that was really quite painful, to the point where I wasn’t sure if I was going to survive the early mornings (that’s when inflammations are the worst). I was carted off to the ER for the first time, where they performed a procedure on me, just to later find out (two days before I was supposed to leave for Taiwan and Japan) that I would need another surgery. Needless to say, I was having major emotional issues. However, now, looking back, I realize that this was for the best. I apparently (now that I can really look at things more clearly) have been brewing this condition for quite a few years (since iaTV time) but I just didn’t realize it at the time.

Now, a year after the event, I look back and realize that if the issue had not exploded at the time that it did, I would never have gone through the mental changes that made me who I am today, and if I had gotten sick much later, who knows if I would be near people who could help me (in this case I had my parents). So, albeit this sickness brought me pain and suffering that I would never want to experience again, it also freed me from many of my previous (mostly hidden) constraints and I can travel freely.

In another example, when I became a lit major, I didn’t have faith in myself. I didn’t really believe that I would be able to make a living for myself using things related to my major. So I tried many other fields: Law, Web design, Marketing… etc. What seems like lifetimes (of careers) later, I realize that I’m doing for a living something my major would have applied exactly to: translating. Critics, take that! From this I realized, sometimes we just know better what’s the best for ourselves, even if at the moment we didn’t know. That’s why, if you really want to do something, go do it. If you fail at your dream, at least your hard work was for something you love. If you fail at something you hate… you just have a lot of lost love and time. Lose to your dreams, don’t lose to your reality. 寧願輸給夢想，不要輸給現實。

Just go for it!

In 2008, many other things happened.For quite a while, my heart was shattered and I thought it would remain forever broken. But at the time I didn’t realize this was the time when I would grow immensely emotionally and as a person, the furthest I have ever gone in such a short period of time. It set the wheels in motion, finally, after being on standstill for so long. And I saw so much that I was unable to before. I believe now in the strength of my heart – of its potential to grow and to love. And to realize this is one of the most amazing gifts anyone can hope to have.

There is a reason I brought the Wheel of Morality into the picture: do everything as you deem right. You can lie to the world, but you cannot lie to yourself. If you are true to yourself and do everything in the best interest of everyone and everything (including yourself), you will find that fate and fortune will smile upon you. If not, at least you will smile and be proud of yourself.

Everyone and everything will find their place. And Karma will be silent judge.

Musings, Tarot 塔羅 2008, Animaniacs, Tarot 塔羅, Wheel of Fortune

Question: Will I succeed?

Spread: Diamond + suggestion card

[Strength (R)]

[Death (R)]              [Page of Swords (R)]

[7 of Swords (R)]

Suggestion: Sun

A friend of mine recently was “promoted” to a new position at work but is afraid that she is not up to the task. She is freaking out (has been for about 3 wks) wanted to know if she would succeed. Generally I would say that relying on cards for something that can be achieved through one’s own hard work and persistence is silly (and told her that clearly), but since she had been asking for a while, I just did a reading for her.

Past: Strength R – lack of internal strength
Present: Death R + PgS R – fear of change and lack of motivation and drive
Future: Lack of new ideas and solutions

It was pretty bleak. I know that her own mentality had affected the outcome of the cards and there’s no way to convince her that her future is not in the cards, they are only reflecting that with her current mental state everything will be sure to collapse. All of the cards in the actual spread are reversed, which is unusual but not impossible. Her personality is reflected in all of these cards (as she explained to me). The suggestion card I pulled for her to see what she needs to get out of this situation. She has the possibility of the Sun, but this strength must come from within her. She must see the light and hope in the situation (promotion, new knowledge, appreciation, RAISE) rather than the downside of it (stress, lack of knowledge and ability, fear of failure). Whether or not she can succeed… well, I did what I can (i.e. gave her a good yelling).

Readings, Tarot 塔羅 Readings, Tarot 塔羅