There are times in life when the world goes quiet inside you—
not peaceful quiet, but a kind of numbness.
A shutdown.
A shutting away.
A feeling that your heart has stepped into another room and closed the door from the inside.
I’ve been in that space lately.
Not broken.
Not lost.
Just… muted.
So I turned to the tarot, the way some people turn to prayer or meditation or the woods.
For me, the cards have always been a mirror—one that reflects what I can’t quite say out loud yet. One that helps me see the forest when I’m tangled in the trees.
What Tarot Really Is: A Map of the Inner Landscape
People often mistake tarot for fortune telling, but tarot is really an energetic map—a symbolic conversation between the conscious mind and the unconscious one. It doesn’t announce what is going to happen. It reveals what is already unfolding beneath the surface.
Long before tarot was shuffled on velvet tables or tucked into silk bags, its imagery grew from deeply mystical roots. Many historians trace aspects of tarot’s symbolic structure back to Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah, where numbers, letters, and archetypes were used as pathways to divine understanding.
In Kabbalah, each symbol is a doorway.
Each number is a vibration.
Each image is a bridge between the earthly world and the inner one.
Tarot absorbed that same symbolic architecture—an intricate system of meaning designed not to predict fate, but to illuminate the soul’s journey. Early tarot wasn’t used to foresee events; it was used as a contemplative tool, a visual guide to understanding the psyche, much like a spiritual map.
And yet, tarot’s symbolism didn’t stay confined to mystical circles. Over time, its structure evolved into something far more familiar.
How Tarot Became Modern Playing Cards
Most people don’t realize that the deck of cards sitting in a drawer in nearly every household is actually tarot’s descendant.
The suits of the modern deck mirror the four suits of tarot:
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Hearts → Cups
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Clubs → Wands
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Diamonds → Pentacles
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Spades → Swords
Even the court cards survived—Kings, Queens, and the Page who quietly became the Jack. The Knight cards were removed, however.
What didn’t survive were the Major Arcana, the 22 archetypal cards that represent the deeper psychological and spiritual journey: The Fool, The Hermit, The Star, Death, Strength, The World, and so on.
Those cards were removed intentionally.
When divination began to be frowned upon in certain regions and eras, especially in parts of Europe, people still wanted a way to work with symbolic systems, intuition, and “reading the cards” without openly using a tarot deck. So the Major Arcana — the 22 archetypal cards representing the big spiritual forces (like The Lovers, The Tower, The Star) — were removed, leaving only the 52 Minor Arcana.
Those 52 cards evolved directly into what we now call a modern playing card deck.
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The four suits remained (Wands → Clubs, Cups → Hearts, Swords → Spades, Pentacles → Diamonds)
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The numbers 1–10 stayed the same
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The court cards simplified (Page/Knight/Queen/King → Jack/Queen/King)
With the Major Arcana removed, people could still “read” using symbolic suits while appearing to just be playing a game. It was clever. It was survival. And it allowed the language of the tarot — intuition, psychology, pattern-reading — to continue quietly beneath the surface.
This is why card readers can still do surprisingly accurate readings with a simple deck of playing cards:
they’re built from the same ancient symbolic bones, just wearing a different outfit.
Jung, Archetypes, and the Power of Symbolism —
Carl Jung, a Swiss Psychiatrist, and founder of Analytical Psychology, (think shadow work) taught that certain symbols and patterns appear across all cultures — universal archetypes living in the collective unconscious. These same symbols are found in myths, dreams, art, and tarot.
To Jung, symbols weren’t superstition.
They were mirrors of the psyche.
Tarot works like a dream:
it bypasses logic and speaks directly to the emotional and intuitive self.
It doesn’t predict the future — it clarifies the present.
When you pull a card, you’re not tapping destiny.
You’re tapping the shared symbolic language that lives inside every human being.
Tarot reveals:
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the emotional climate you’re in
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the patterns shaping your responses
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the wounds influencing your choices
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the longings beneath your actions
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the direction your inner self is already moving
It shows the forest and the trees.
Tarot doesn’t dictate fate.
It illuminates the inner architecture so you can move forward with clarity, intention, and self-awareness.
The cards are the mirror.
You are the one who steps into the reflection and chooses how to grow.
How Tarot “Reads” Other People —
Tarot does not read minds, spy on people, or reveal their private thoughts.
It reads energy — the emotional field and relational dynamics between you and another person.
1. Tarot reads your energetic relationship to them.
The cards reflect how you perceive the connection, what your intuition senses, the emotional patterns at play, and the current energetic truth between you. It shows the bridge between you, not their hidden thoughts.
2. Humans constantly signal subconsciously.
Body language, tone, memories, patterns, hopes, fears — all of it lives below awareness. Tarot pulls that intuitive information to the surface symbolically.
3. Tarot works through universal archetypes.
People express archetypes when they’re hopeful, guarded, grieving, attracted, confused, or avoiding.
The cards reveal which archetype someone is showing in this moment — not forever.
4. Relationships are energetic exchanges.
Every connection has resonance. Tarot translates that emotional current into symbols you can understand.
5. Tarot is metaphor, not surveillance.
Asking “How does he feel?” doesn’t access his mind.
It reveals the tone of the connection, the direction it’s moving, and the emotional patterns unfolding.
6. Tarot reads patterns, not destiny.
Withdrawing energy appears. Conflicted energy appears. Loving energy appears.
It’s not prophecy — it’s pattern recognition.
7. Tarot shows alignment, not thoughts.
It clarifies whether you’re in sync, mirroring wounds, repeating cycles, or calling growth forward in each other.
8. Tarot reflects what you’re attuned to.
Strong connections create strong readings.
Tarot amplifies what your intuition already knows.
In short:
Tarot doesn’t read minds. It reads energy — the shared field in the collective unconscious where all of us are connected.
It turns intuition into language and the unseen into something you can understand
The Dangers of Asking the Wrong Questions in Tarot —
Tarot isn’t dangerous — misguided questions are.
When we ask from fear, obsession, or a need for control, the cards stop being a tool for clarity and become a mirror of our anxiety.
1. Wrong questions disconnect you from your inner wisdom.
“When will this happen?”
“What are they thinking right now?”
“How do I avoid getting hurt?”
These questions close you down. They force tarot into fortune-telling instead of insight.
2. They feed anxiety instead of healing it.
Fear-based questions create chaotic or contradictory spreads because you’re not reading the situation — you’re reading your own panic.
3. They create loops, not clarity.
Repeating the same “What do they feel?” question in different forms traps you in reassurance-seeking, not growth.
4. They try to override free will.
Tarot shows energy and patterns, not fixed futures. Asking for certainties about another person’s future actions misunderstands the entire point of the cards.
5. They weaken intuition.
Trying to make tarot tell you the unknowable makes you dependent on the cards instead of your inner voice.
6. They replace emotional processing.
Wrong questions appear when we’re avoiding feelings. Tarot can reveal truth, but it cannot do the healing for you.
7. They close the very door tarot is trying to open.
A bad question shrinks awareness (“Is she going to leave me?”).
A good one expands it (“What part of me fears being left?”).
In short:
Wrong questions distort the mirror.
Right questions open the path to insight, healing, and self-awareness.
So what is a “right” question?
A right question is:
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self-reflective
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emotionally honest
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empowering
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open-ended
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grounded in curiosity, not fear
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centered on your growth rather than someone else’s behavior
A right question awakens your inner healer.
A wrong question awakens your inner panic.
In the end…
The danger is never in tarot.
The danger is in using tarot to bypass the deeper work instead of guiding you into it.
When we ask the right questions, tarot becomes a map, a lantern, a teacher.
When we ask the wrong ones, tarot becomes a megaphone for our fears.
The cards don’t punish us for asking poorly.
They simply reflect the state we were in when we asked —
and sometimes that reflection is murky, confusing, or overwhelming.
But when the question is aligned, honest, and rooted in self-awareness?
The cards speak with breathtaking clarity.
Asking the Right Questions
Recently, I asked the cards,
“Who am I right now?”
And the answer arrived as Kings.
Not Queens.
Not Pages.
The King of Swords.
The King of Pentacles.
Aces. Tens. The weight of responsibility. The armor of clarity. The logic that steps in when emotion steps out.
Kings hold the line.
Kings protect.
Kings manage the storm when the heart is too tired to feel.
The cards were showing me the internal structure holding everything together while my emotional world felt muted.
This wasn’t failure.
It was self-preservation.
But it was only the beginning of the story.
Why the Shutdown Happened
When I asked why my emotional body had gone quiet, the tarot unfolded the truth:
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Queen of Pentacles — my inner nurturer was depleted
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Four of Cups — emotional withdrawal
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Nine of Wands — the exhausted survivor
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Page of Pentacles — the small, hopeful beginning
I saw clearly, maybe for the first time:
I shut down not because I was indifferent,
but because I had been giving without being refilled.
My heart wasn’t gone.
It was resting.
Reorganizing.
Waiting for safety before reopening.
What I Need to Give Myself
When I asked what I needed in this season, the tarot gave me a map of healing:
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grounding
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collaboration
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joy
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creativity
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beauty
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rest
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truth
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boundaries
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emotional release
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self-compassion
All signs pointed to the same two medicines I’ve turned to my entire life:
cooking and writing.
Cooking as Healing
The Eight of Pentacles (Mastery-Skills), Three of Pentacles (Collaboration-Work), and Nine of Pentacles (Material Independence) illuminated what my body already knew:
Cooking grounds me.
It is rhythm.
It is ritual.
It is the warm smell of onions caramelizing—the same scent that lived in my grandmother’s kitchen, wrapping me in a love deeper than words.
Cooking brings me back into my senses.
Back into my lineage.
Back into a place where nurturing comes from abundance, not depletion.
My grandmother’s kitchen was the first place that ever felt safe to me.
Warm. Predictable. Grounded.
A place where love wasn’t spoken out loud, but it was everywhere — tucked into the corners like sunlight, folded into the dough, simmering in every pot.
When we cooked together, I didn’t realize what was happening.
I didn’t understand why being beside her, stirring something simple, made my whole body exhale.
I didn’t yet have the language for safety or grounding or nervous system regulation.
All I knew was that something inside me softened there.
It awakens the Queen of Pentacles—(Nurturing Abundance, Groundedness)
the version of myself who feels stable, connected, and whole.
Writing as Renewal
Long before I ever stepped into a kitchen with intention, before I studied Ayurveda, before I built a plant-based apothecary on my shelves, I had another instinctive tool for making sense of the world:
words.
The second half of my reading was the Ace of Swords, Queen of Cups, Page of Swords—
a clear message from the deepest part of me.
Together, the Ace of Swords, Queen of Cups, and Page of Swords show that writing is my truest method of healing.
The Ace of Swords gives me clarity — the clean, sharp truth that rises the moment I put words on a page.
The Queen of Cups brings emotional depth, allowing my feelings to soften, open, and find their voice through language.
And the Page of Swords reflects my lifelong curiosity, the instinct to question, explore, and understand the world through words. When these three come together, they reveal that writing is where my mind clears, my heart releases, and my spirit finds meaning — a sacred space where insight and emotion meet and become healing.
Writing is where my emotions return.
It is where truth rises gently to the surface.
It is where the heart speaks without needing permission.
Writing has always been my passion — not in a performative way, not for perfection or polish, but because it is the most natural thing my soul knows how to do.
Sometimes the words come faster than my hands can move, like they’re pouring through me from somewhere deeper, older, wiser.
My mother loves to tell the story that my first words came at nine months old, and they weren’t “mama” or “dada.”
They were:
“What’s that?”
I started life with a question on my lips.
Curiosity was my first language.
I’ve always needed context, understanding, reference points — a way to translate the world around me into something I could hold. Words became the way I soothed myself, the way I made sense of emotions, the way I reached for truth.
No wonder I ended up with a degree in psychology.
No wonder symbolism, human behavior, archetypes, and meaning have always called to me.
No wonder tarot felt like home the first time I picked it up.
Writing is my emotional compass.
It is where I process, where I alchemize, where I turn chaos into clarity.
It is a mirror — one that shows me who I am, who I’ve been, and who I am becoming.
One nourishes the body.
The other nourishes the mind and heart.
Both are rituals.
Both are grounding.
Both are love, translated.
And both have carried me through every version of myself.
Writing is clarity.
It is catharsis.
It is meaning making.
It awakens the Queen of Cups—the emotional, intuitive, receptive part of me.
Just like cooking, writing is another extension of the healer I once was — and still am. (My next post will be about a reading I had professionally done living as healer/midwife in my past life called “The Bridge Between Lifetimes.” ) Stay tuned. 🙂
What Cooking and Writing Bring Out in Me
The cards painted the most beautiful portrait:
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Queen of Pentacles — grounding
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Two of Pentacles — balance
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Eight of Wands — momentum
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Ten of Pentacles — legacy and memory
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Five of Cups — emotional release
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Ace of Wands — creative fire
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Three of Cups — joy and connection
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Three of Pentacles — purpose
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Page & Queen of Swords — insight and understanding
Cooking brings me back to earth.
Writing brings me back to truth.
Together, they bring me back to myself.
The Most Beautiful Part: My Progression From Kings → Pages → Queens
The tarot revealed a progression I didn’t expect:
I began in King energy—structured, controlled, protective.
But when I stepped into the kitchen and onto the page, those Kings softened into Pages—the small spark of beginner’s hope.
And from those Pages emerged Queens—the embodied, intuitive, emotionally connected versions of myself.
It’s as if the cards said:
“Your strength protected you.
Your creativity heals you.
Your sensitivity returns when you feel safe again.”
The Kings held the structure.
The Pages allowed me to begin again.
The Queens helped me remember how to feel.
That is the forest.
Not the anxious tree I kept staring at.
Seeing the Bigger Picture
This is what tarot does when you ask the right questions.
It doesn’t predict the future.
It reveals the present with honesty, compassion, and depth.
It illuminates the emotional season you’re standing in
and shows you the path back to yourself.
And in those cards, I finally saw:
I am not shutting down.
I am shifting.
Healing.
Rebalancing.
Coming home to myself through the work of my hands and the truth of my words.
Through cooking.
Through writing.
Through the wisdom of ancient symbols
and the quiet strength of my own intuition.
Sometimes the forest really is bigger than the trees.
And sometimes the cards help you finally see it.
✨ My Tarot Card of the Year: The Lovers
It’s funny — I’ve been using tarot for more than thirty-five years, and yet this year, of all years, The Lovers decided to sit with me. And I don’t mean in the romantic, fairy-tale sense people often assume. The Lovers is so much more than that. It’s an invitation. A reckoning. A mirror held up to your deepest truth.
A Lovers year asks you to choose from the heart, not from fear.
And that has been the theme of my entire year — learning to listen to the quiet inner voice that whispers, this is what aligns, this is what feels right, this is the path that’s yours.
✨ A Year of Crossroads
The Lovers met me at every crossroads.
Every time I felt pulled between duty and desire, between habit and growth, between what I knew and what my soul was trying to become, The Lovers appeared again and again saying:
“Choose what’s real. Choose what’s true. Choose what feels like love—not what feels like fear.”
And I did.
Sometimes clumsily, sometimes boldly, but always with my whole heart.
✨ Mirror Connections
The Lovers brings people into your life who act as mirrors — connections that stir something awake inside you. Some people ground you. Some people inspire you. Some people walk in and activate pieces of your soul you forgot were even there.
This year, Gateway became my home, my heart, my purpose, my great love.
Cooking, creating, building something real — that love is deep and unwavering.
But that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of loving anything or anyone else.
This is what The Lovers teaches: love is not a single doorway. It is a constellation.
Some connections arrive to steady you.
Others arrive to show you the parts of yourself that are still alive and burning.
Both are true.
Both can coexist.
And that doesn’t diminish either one.
✨ Integration, Not Division
For so long, I thought choices had to be either/or. (My moon and rising are both Gemini).
This or that.
Here or there.
One thing or nothing at all.
But The Lovers gently showed me that life is rarely that binary.
This card taught me how to hold two truths in the same hand without breaking anything:
I can love Gateway with my whole being…
and still feel something meaningful when another connection brushes against my soul.
Loving one thing doesn’t cancel out the capacity to love another.
That is the lesson of The Lovers.
✨ Healing Through Connection
This year didn’t heal me through solitude — it healed me through people.
Through the ones who challenged me, the ones who inspired me, the ones who confused me, and the ones whose energy lingered long after they left.
The Lovers taught me that healing can happen in the presence of others.
That connection can be sacred.
That love — in all its forms — reveals who we truly are.
✨ The End of a Lovers Year
As this year closes, I can feel the clarity settling in my bones.
Through friendships I know what real love feels like.
I know what aligns with my spirit.
I know which choices honor who I’ve become.
My Lovers year didn’t give me answers — it gave me truth.
It rearranged the way I see myself, the way I love, the way I choose.
And perhaps the biggest revelation is this:
My heart is allowed to be expansive.
I don’t have to shrink love into a single shape or a single story. Living in the truth of The Lovers energy doesn’t just attract romantic partners — it attracts every kind of love that is meant for me. When I’m aligned with myself, when I’m grounded in who I am, I naturally draw in friends, jobs, soul-connections, and partners who reflect that same integrity back to me.
The Lovers teaches that “like calls to like.” So whether it’s a friend who feels like home or an actual lover who wants to meet me soul-to-soul, the relationships that show up in my life will begin to match the frequency of the truth I’m living.
When I honor myself, I attract people who honor me.
When I live in clarity, I attract people who communicate clearly.
When I stay rooted in love — real love, the kind that feels like safety and expansion — I call in relationships of every kind that feel nourishing, reciprocal, and aligned with who I’m becoming.
Gateway is my great love.
But that doesn’t mean my heart can’t recognize something sacred in a person as well.
This is the legacy of my Lovers year:
I follow my truth now.
I choose from the heart.
And I trust that love — real love — is on its way, and something my soul will always recognize.