Wintner - Wtf is tarot?: ... & how do i do it?

Owner of Everyday Magic

ILLUSTRATIONS BY AUTUMN WHITEHURST

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

TO SHERRI,

Who put on every hat I handed her

and some I didnt.

I have been reading tarot professionally for a little over four years, which is not a particularly impressive number. It is not a number that implies a lifetime of devotion and study in the same way that four decades might. It is enough time to acquire an undergraduate degree, which barely qualifies you for a babysitting job these days. And yet, in these short four years, I have built a full-time tarot practice, offered intensive group and individual trainings, facilitated workshops, taught classes, opened a retail store and healing space, created a tarot deck and, now, written a book on the damn thing.

If someone had told me that, in order to read tarot, I needed to join a monastery, spend a year in silent meditation, apprentice under a more established tarot reader for a few more years and then pass a rigorous exam at the end, that would have made much more sense to me than the swift, uncomplicated way tarot came into my life and changed absolutely everything.

Maybe that is why the Who the fuck am I? question comes up so strongly for people who are drawn to the tarot. There are no quantifiable tests, formal qualifications or degrees to frame and hang on the wall. You can study the cards, certainly, and you should. But what I have come to believe about the tarot is that there is something at the core of our souls, in the marrow of our bones, that recognizes these images, archetypes and energies. The experiences and emotions captured by the cards, while steeped in myth and symbolism, are universal.

When someone meets the tarot for the first time, there is often a spark of recognition because the cards function as a mirror. The longing we feel to connect with them is the longing we feel to connect with the truest version of ourselves and others. The tarot is your most honest friend, the one who loves you enough to call you out on your shit. Who can hear you tell a story and strip down the exaggeration and bravado and ego and see you clearly. Weve all offered this to a person we love, probably without using cards, at some point. The tarot is a tool that allows us to provide this clarity to anyone, including strangers and ourselves.

Standing at the beginning of my journey with the tarot, I felt an immediate connection to the cards. I was also totally overwhelmed and a little bit paralyzed by the Who the fuck am I? question. The only indication that I had any spiritual inclinations was my lifelong Harry Potter obsession (but trust that is a very intense, full-blown, arguably problematic one) and an affinity for the astrology section of magazines. I do not come from a magical lineage. I wasnt initiated by the elders of my spiritual communityunless hallucinogenic drugs countand while I thought esotericism was fascinating, I was also deeply skeptical of it. I owned a few crystals, but only because I found them in bookshops and thought they were beautiful. I had no idea what the tarot was.

Sure I watched Matilda when I was younger and tried really hard to move objects with my mind like any self-respecting millennial child. Maybe I read a middle-grade mystery novel about a girl who astral projected all over the world and spent years trying to peel my consciousness from my body like an irrelevant but stubborn shadow. The day after my mother passed away when I was six years old, I dreamt that she walked out of my bathroom, glowing in white light, sat down on the foot of my bed and talked to me for ten minutes. But growing up has a way of beating your belief in magic out of you. When I received my first tarot deck, I was twenty-three years old and had very little memory of my magical predilections and even less interest in reconnecting with them. I was a new-to-Brooklyn little whippersnapper fresh out of college and about a year into my first adult job, where I had to put on real clothes and go into an office every day.

I studied publishing in school and landed a job at a literary agency in Manhattans Flatiron district. Housed in an old brownstone, it contained the charm of a converted residence and the mystery of a very old building. Former bathrooms-turned-tiny-offices for junior agents, hand-hewn woodwork and ornate stained glass, a massive vault in the back office of the ground floor that revealed the buildings banking history. Accessible only by a narrow winding staircase, my office was a sunlit attic room. The company was small and full of charactersmost of them decent, incredibly hardworking, fiercely intelligent people. The place was magic in its own right, and landing a job there felt like winning the lottery.

Like any self-respecting millennial adolescent, I was also in therapy. In addition to a pretty horrific childhood that guaranteed lifetime admission to the needing therapy club, I was quickly promoted in aforementioned adult job and while my ego was flying high on that achievement, my nervous system had other ideas about it. At the suggestion of a dear friend and author at my agency, I started with a new therapist a couple months before. A raven haired, impossibly beautiful goddess-of-an-older-woman named Sherri. Her office was a bright corner room overlooking 28th Street that always smelled like gardenias and white sage. The only objects in it were a simple mid-century armchair where she sat, a light gray couch where her clients sat, a shelf in the corner that showcased books, trinkets, crystals andI would soon learnseveral tarot decks. There was a huge foam cube in the corner that, when strong emotions were evoked during a session, Sherri would encourage her clients to beat the shit out of with a tennis racket and scream. She practiced a form of body-based psychotherapy that folds in the spiritual element.

At the time, I called this the weird hippie therapy that I do. Now, I understand the importance of intuition and the mind-body-spirit connection when it comes to healing a person.

For the first few months, sessions with Sherri were made up of me whining about my job, managing the stress of adult life and unpacking my poor life decisions regarding finances, sleeping habits and men. Occasionally she would try to steer me into the murky waters of my childhood, which was a tactic that after a decade and a half in therapy I was able to detect and avoid with ease. I refused any of the bodywork or physical exercises she suggested. I never cried.

Every Monday morning at 7 a.m. (AKA the worst hour of the whole week probably) I would come into Sherris office in a blaze of glory, massive coffee in hand, armed with the list of that weeks issues.

On this particular morning, however, Sherri asked me something before I got a chance to take out my list.

I just bought a tarot deck for someone as a gift. Do you want to see it?