Robertson - Pathworking the tarot: spiritual guidance & practical advice from the cards

What is Pathwork?

P athwork is a journey, in that it takes you from one point to another, but it is also an active exercise, not a passive practice. This journey can be physical in nature, meaning you literally travel through the steps one at a time, as you will find in some of the exercises in the wandering section of this book. But not everything about pathwork is physically active. Sometimes it is merely a matter of raising your level of awareness about who or what is around you as you move from one thought, feeling, or action to another. For example, you may find yourself standing next to the Magician or someone who acts like the Magician in your life, only to then find yourself in the company of someone who has similar qualities to the High Priestess. You might even find yourself needing to physically walk your way through the energy of one of the cards or, for something like the Five of Swords, walk it off! No matter how you end up pathworking with the cards of the tarot, you will find yourself engaging with their lessons and messages more actively, which means you have to be willing to deal with what comes up while you take this journey. This is where the messy nature of pathworking comes in: dealing with the emotional stuff. Spiritual expansion is messy; it pushes your buttons and makes you uncomfortable. If you dont feel any of these things, you are not going deep enough. Pathwork will push and trigger those of you who like to dwell on the surface of your emotions. You can only ever observe from the surfacepathwork means diving in, breaking the surface, and getting yourself wet with emotional fluids. If something makes you feel comfortable, it is not going to push you to grow. Comfort is for resting, stopping, and saying I am good where I am. It is perfectly okay for people to crave comfort; I just advise you not to allow it to make you stagnant, as that is when lifes problems arise.

For this book I have come up with three different ways to pathwork with your tarot cards, which I use myself and use with my clients. They are not overly complex nor are they rigid in structure, and they have a tendency to overlap. This is something else one learns through pathworkthings are more fluid and more connected than we like to admit. The lines between exercises and labels will at times seem tenuous at best, but just flow with them anyway. The differences may be more suggestive than you are actually giving them credit for. Although I have not really set up the book to be read in a specific way, you will find suggestions on how to approach each part of the tarot deck; for example, with the suits, Aces through Tens work in a sequence. You can choose to work with just all the intentional exercises for your cards if it seems more fitting for your readings, or you could work with each exercise from top to bottom. But there are no real hard and fast rules here. Use the book intuitively. Allow the exercises to guide you and help deepen your understanding of the cards, your spreads, and your work with tarot. The three pathworking exercises I want to introduce you to are as follows.