In Part One of this series, we talked about how to use the tarot’s Major Arcana to determine your location on the Grail Map. We then learned how to take the information from that Major Arcana card and formulate it into a lesson, which serves as your current focal point as you go through daily life, looking for clues and synchronicity. Again, if all of that is new to you, catch up with this post.
Prepare Your Tarot Deck
Today, we’re going to go further and use the tarot to identify new ways to embrace and learn this lesson. For example, let’s say your lesson is learning how to be more grounded. For this next step, you will separate out all of your Minor Arcana cards from the rest of the deck.
If you recall, the Major Arcana cards are numbered zero through twenty-one, and they typically have names like Death, Temperance, the Lovers, etc. When you separate out the Majors, what’s left is the Minor Arcana and the court cards. Remove the court cards, which are the page (or princess/daughter), knight (or prince/son), queen, and king, one for each of the four suits for a total of sixteen cards. You’ll be left with the Minor Arcana: four suits (cups, pentacles, swords, and wands–or some variation on these, depending on your deck), each with ten cards for a total of forty.
As you shuffle this stack of Minor Arcana cards, ask how you can best embrace your lesson. Focus on receiving this information as you shuffle. Then, choose a card. The card you draw indicates how best to embrace the lesson you are focusing on right now, the lesson you derived in the last step from the Major Arcana card.
Interpreting the Card
Using our previous example, let’s say your lesson is learning how to be more grounded, and when you draw a Minor card, the detail that sticks out is a shiny, bright coin that the figure in the card is picking up off the ground.
Use the process outlined in the previous post to interpret this in a way unique to you, but here’s an example to get you started: Perhaps money is an issue for you, and specifically, feeling like you never have enough contributes to your sense of being ungrounded.
A possible interpretation, then, is that it’s time to focus on the flow of money into and out of your life to fully embrace the lesson of being more grounded. Getting even more detailed with the card imagery, the act of picking money off the ground could suggest that you are letting money fall out of your pocket, so to speak, and it’s time to start collecting that wayward cash. Go over your bank statements and actually look at where your money is going. Maybe one little book from Amazon here and another book there are adding up more than you think.
Begin to think of money as a tool to enhance or detract from your sense of grounding.
When you’re tempted to buy another book, maybe you check in and see if spending this money right now will make it harder to pay your rent–and do you really need another book when you have ten unread ones already? This isn’t about extreme self-deprivation, it’s about making more conscious choices around spending, and specifically, exploring how your spending choices affect how grounded you feel, not just in the moment but also in the long term.
In addition to looking at the practical, budgetary side of things, I would encourage you to go deeper.
Meditate on the connection between money and feeling grounded in your life.
Journal on it.
Ask questions before bed and make note of your dreams.
Chances are, there are deeper themes playing out in your spending habits, and this self-inquiry will lead to rich insights.
Remember to pair these insights with real-world action, too; it’s not enough to simply meditate on money issues while making zero changes in the physical world. But when you pair the inner and the outer work together, get ready for your life to change!