Picture copyright of Taylor Ellwood 2023
I recently got a new Tarot deck and one of my practices around learning the deck is drawing a card for the day and allowing myself to be open to the experiences of that card, as a way of getting to know the card. I’ll pull the card, read the booklet and then contemplate the imagery of the card, asking myself what comes up in my consciousness around that card. Then I consider how best I can embody that awareness and work with it for the day.
I find that this can be a good practice to take on in any aspect of your life, including your exploration of your masculinity. Pull a card and use that card to help you focus on a particular aspect of your masculinity that you would like to learn more about. For example, I pulled the Hanged Man in the picture above and use it to consider where I was feeling blocked in my life, as well as what perspective I could cultivate to help me with those blockages.
A one card pull will provide you a variety of cards over time and I would invite you to explore the relationship you have with each of the themes of those cards in a curious and open manner. For example, you could pull the Tower card, which is a card that indicates disaster and the upending of the world as you know it. Naturally this isn’t a card people want to pull, but it invites us to explore our relationship with disaster and the upending of the world as you know it. Spending some time contemplating this kind of experience can help you understand how you would actually handle the experience and how you might use the insights of the Tower card to help you work through whatever disaster comes up.
Likewise you might pull the death card. The death card isn’t an indicator of death so much as its an indicator of transformation. Pulling the death card might be useful for contemplating our relationship with death, but it could also be useful for contemplating our relationship with change and transformation and how we handle when change and transformation shows up in our lives.
