Why Yes, I Am Creating a Tarot

Life and Business Update!!

Hi Substack family. I am back. It’s been a chaotic and incredibly hard past couple months. I am in the process of trying to find a new job as the teaching thing didn’t work out, for many reasons. My days are currently filled with job searching and this!

I have decided to finally put some REAL effort into creating something that I started more than a year and a half ago. I am creating a Tarot.

The following is a FIRST DRAFT of my introductory section.

I am toying with the idea of publishing my reading points, card by card, here first for you all to read and provide feedback on. Once I publish I will be sending a deck at no charge to any of my paid subscribers as a thank you for sticking with me while I’ve been silent.

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

Here’s the introduction!

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Why the Mindful Empath Tarot?

Why does the world need another tarot deck?

To be quite frank, it doesn’t. So why did I do it anyway?

In the past 6 years I have cultivated a practice of pulling a few cards *most mornings and journaling my response to their prompting. It has been an incredible experience that has provided quite a bit of clarity, peace, and a TON of questions.

So. Many. Questions.

A Brief History

Now, to be completely transparent, early on it was mostly me writing almost word for word what the guidebook was giving me (keywords and concepts) and adding a few sentences of my own in an effort to synthesize and make sense of what I was reading. To be fair, I was a rookie tarot slinger and needed to get comfortable with the themes and ideas that many, if not most, tarot decks consistently offer.

As my practice grew and I became more comfortable with the archetypes and symbolism, I also became a bit of a collector. As of this writing I have a sum total of 22 tarot and oracle decks. When I pull cards for myself, or my friends and family, I will often pull both tarot and oracle cards in the same sitting. But, I’m getting ahead of myself…more on that later.

As I began to collect and compare I became obsessed with how the different authors and artists interpreted the same 78 cards over and over again in both word and art. I collected the different decks in order to have some variety, yet I kept coming back to a core few that I especially liked. I will tell you the one thing that was common among all of them.

The guidebook.
The words.
The meaning that the author extracted from the suits and characters of the tarot.
The way in which they communicated that understanding to the user.
The guidebooks that entranced me most were the ones that were poetic without being so elevated and out of touch that it didn’t feel specific to me.

Not all guidebooks are created alike, and that is ok.

Many tarot decks count on the reader/seeker having a foundational understanding of the classic Rider Waite system, so just as long as you know those interpretations you might not NEED a guidebook. I was not one of those readers. I absolutely needed a well thought out guidebook in order to learn something of the deck and, invariably, of myself in the process.

Now, let’s fast forward to the pandemic. In my timeline it was not long after I first started learning tarot. My job at the time was remote and I was working from home, which was definitely to my advantage. I was itching to do something different, to learn something new, so I began the process of earning a mindfulness and meditation facilitator certificate. I yearned to do something with the pastoral call I first heard when I was a young man. Back then it was very specific, very baptist and evangelical. Now, since I had eschewed most forms of organized religion within the previous years, it was more broad and universal.

I felt, and still feel, like my calling in the world is to be a pastor to people regardless of religious background, and especially to the non religious.

I am a pastor in the public arena. A pastor with no church.
I want to help, love, and connect people together so that they can grow and evolve into the best versions of themselves that they can be.

I learned mindfulness (and many of the principles of Buddhism, by extension) because I believe that the human mind is both our greatest tool and our biggest obstacle. Sometimes we need to just breathe, pause, and get out of our own way.

Practicing the Pause

Simply put, mindfulness is the state of being aware of the present moment. If it’s that simple, then why is it so hard?

I think you might know the answer to that.

Historically, and evolutionarily speaking, we as humans have never REALLY moved much beyond our lizard brain instincts. Sure, you can point to certain groups of people that have achieved a certain amount of enlightenment, but as a collective we are often stuck in an endless cycle of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. I also add another F to that cycle: fake - you’ll see how that fits in a moment. Let’s consider how these instinctual stress responses might present for us.

We engage with the world looking for a fight because there’s always been conflict, and we’ve been given a particular view of strength and power that tells us that you should never back down from a fight.

We engage with the world by flying away, because retreat and avoidance have been modeled to us over and over again.

We engage in the world by NOT engaging, but by freezing, standing by while shit goes down around us, with our fingers crossed, hoping that we don’t get noticed and the shit comes our way.

We engage in the world by fawning. This one might be new to the casual observer of the instincts, but you know it when you see it. This looks like ingratiating yourself to a threat in order to avoid conflict.

Finally, my additional F, faking. This is avoidance dressed as certainty. This is spiritual bypassing. This is gaslighting yourself and others that the threat is not THAT bad. This might be the most corrosive and harmful of the instinctual responses, because at its core we think we are confronting the danger, but we’re doing it in a way that represses the real internal work of managing our emotions and our awareness. This is what one of my early pastors would have called “cotton candy spiritualism”. It tastes sweet, like it might be good and right, but too much of it makes us sick.

We practice the pause to confront our instinctual selves and give space for our emotions, intellect, and skill to do the good work of managing the present moment energy in a way that is healthy and productive for ourselves and everyone around us.

In that way, mindfulness is a contact sport. Mindfulness done in community is contagious. It requires empathy and skillful thought. Mindful living is active, interactive, communal, and productive without being busy. It is flow. It is being aware of the energy in front of you and working with it to the best, most positive, outcome without being attached to that outcome.

Mindfulness is NOT just meditation, in fact I would argue that meditation is merely 20-25% of the whole that is mindfulness, but so many stop before they even get started because they’ve told themselves that they are unable, or are bad, meditators.

In my study and practice I have distilled four aspects of mindfulness to the aspects of intention, meditation, cultivation, and appreciation. These four ways of being are represented in the suits of the Tarot. While we’re on that subject…

Here Comes the Tarot

I have a challenge for you.
Here, while you’re reading this…be mindful!!

Go ahead, do it!
You can’t, can you?

Of course, I suggest this in jest, but it does prove a silly, but necessary, point.

If you were to ask somebody on the street if they thought that being mindful was a good thing, I can’t imagine ANYONE saying no. There might be a few, but the vast majority of people, when given the prompt, would absolutely concede that mindfulness as an ideal is a good thing.

Unfortunately I think that most people, when confronted with the idea of mindfulness as a skill that you should practice, shrug it off as something that they should be able to do alone. But, as mentioned above, we are not exactly up to the task when considering how our instinctual emotional and physiological responses are mostly automated at this point to fight, fly, freeze, fawn, or fake. Moreover, as time passes, we begin to hold on to these instinctual responses as fundamental, foundational, will never be able to change, incontrovertible aspects of our self.

“It’s just the way I am!”
Nobody has ever uttered that in frustration, right?

Speaking of pithy cliches, I’m sure you’ve heard this one.

“Practice makes perfect.”

In the words of that noble prophet Dwight Schrute, “WRONG!”

I’m sure it’s not new news to you that practice does NOT actually make perfect, because if you practice a free throw incorrectly 100 times in a row, you’re just more likely to create a bad habit that makes it that much harder to break! Practice really only makes permanent.

The better way of thinking about practice is summed up with one tiny addition to that trope.

“PROPER practice makes perfect.”

I’m not a huge fan of the idea of perfection, but I didn’t want to change the quote too much for my purposes, but I digress.

So…how do we practice mindfulness properly?

First, I would suggest that you do it AT MINIMUM as part of a pair. This is the reason why, as a mindfulness coach, I encourage people to at least begin a new discipline with the guidance, support, and encouragement of an accountability partner. It doesn’t need to be a coach, but I would be remiss if I didn’t throw my hat in the ring and suggest that I could be helpful in that regard.

Second, find a tool that you like and learn that tool first.

Thus, the reason for the tarot.

Creating a tarot deck specifically focused on mindfulness principles offers a unique and powerful tool for self-exploration and emotional well-being. Many traditional decks might emphasize in their guidebooks some concept of divination or future-telling, but a mindfulness-based tarot deck might reframe the cards as prompts for present-moment awareness, self-reflection, and compassionate inquiry. It’s important to tie the internal discipline of reflection into some kind of outward representation. If doing so with a coach or a partner, it could come in the form of a conversation. Once the practice is well established as a good habit, that conversation can turn into a journaling activity, or even audio notes on your phone.

In a mindfulness-centric tarot deck, each card's imagery and traditional meaning could be reinterpreted through a lens of acceptance, non-judgment, and the cultivation of inner peace, providing a fresh perspective for both seasoned tarot enthusiasts and newcomers to mindfulness. For the mindful empath’s tarot, this comes in the form of those four aspects previously mentioned. When you pull a card there will be a theme of intention, meditation, cultivation, or appreciation tied to it, along with keywords and guidance based on the traditional meanings and archetypes. The introspection will always be connected to questions to ask of yourself and an activity for you to physically engage in. Oftentimes it will be some sort of writing, but other mindful practices will be offered as suggestions as well.

Tarot, in my practice, is NOT some sort of magical fortune-telling practice that is pulled out of the ether, it is more powerful than that. It is a tool to connect yourself to YOURSELF. It helps us tell our story and understand our own emotional landscapes better. It provides prompting in very practical ways for very practical matters. Imagine pulling a card and being prompted not to predict an outcome, but to notice the sensations in your body related to the "Tower" (change), or to observe your thoughts without attachment when drawing the Air Suit (mental challenges), or to notice that we are always learning and must approach life with a beginner’s mind (The Fool).

This approach transforms tarot into a practical exercise for grounding, emotional regulation, and fostering a deeper connection with one's inner landscape, making the abstract concepts of mindfulness more tangible and relatable. It helps to increase our emotional vocabulary when we take time to TRULY identify our own experience and feelings.

Ultimately, a mindfulness-focused tarot deck empowers individuals to cultivate greater emotional intelligence and resilience. By consistently engaging with the cards as tools for mindful inquiry, users can develop a practice of observing their emotions, challenging unhelpful thought patterns, and responding to life's challenges with greater wisdom and compassion. It offers a creative and visually rich pathway to integrate mindfulness into daily life, fostering self-awareness and a more peaceful relationship with the full spectrum of human emotions.

I have written three intentions that you might find helpful in regards to WHY you might take this journey with me.

Intention 1 (Focus: Self-Awareness & Acceptance)

My intention for this practice is to cultivate present-moment awareness through the accumulated wisdom of the tarot and my increasing understanding of myself. May each card serve as a mirror, helping me observe my thoughts and emotions without judgment, and fostering deeper self-understanding and acceptance in this moment.

Intention 2 (Focus: Insight & Skillful Response)

I set the intention to use this practice to gain clarity and insight into my current experiences. May the tarot guide my attention to what is truly arising, allowing me to respond to challenges and opportunities with greater mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion.

Intention 3 (Focus: Emotional Connection)

My intention is to gently connect with my emotional landscape through the imagery of the tarot and the questions posed. May this practice help me feel and acknowledge my emotions—both comfortable and uncomfortable—and bring kindness and presence to whatever arises within me.

As I’m still in the process of creating the guidebook I recognize that many of my ideas might shift. I am constantly iterating in order to create something that will be evergreen. If you are interested in being a part of the community that informs and guides this project please reach out!