When do people suddenly feel the urge to consult tarot or the I Ching? Perhaps you have discussed the same relationship with friends five hundred times, but still cannot stop yourself from asking: “So what does he actually think of me?” Or: “Should we keep going?”
Perhaps you know that your current job is no longer right for you. But it is stable, the income is good, and it took you many years to arrive here. Or perhaps the question concerns an apparently straightforward life decision: which house to buy, whether to move to another country or city, whether to accept an opportunity. You reach the threshold and suddenly cannot take the next step. Every advantage and disadvantage is already visible, yet you remain undecided: should it be A or B?
People do not necessarily turn to tarot because they lack practical judgment or self-understanding. You may have researched and analysed, gathered enough information, gone to therapy, meditated, kept a journal, taken many courses and maintained some form of somatic practice. You may understand your attachment patterns and your trauma. Then one day, you discover that you are still asking: “But does he actually like me?”
I often sense the shame beneath these questions when clients bring them to me. The unspoken thought seems to be: “I have practised for so long—why am I still asking something like this?” As if someone who has done a great deal of psychological work, meditation or somatic practice should gradually become interested only in “higher-level” questions—life purpose, creativity, values and direction—and should no longer agonise over a yes-or-no question such as: “So what should I do now?”
The questions that seem insufficiently profound
Yet a person with a great deal of self-awareness may still draw cards three times in one day to ask: “What does he think of me?” “What will happen to me in the next year?” “What is my gift?” Even as a somatic practitioner who works with practice every day and has spent years in deep self-inquiry, I still find myself opening collective tarot readings on Xiaohongshu.
Rather than meaning that our practice has failed in this moment, perhaps it simply means that this is where the greatest amount of energy is gathering in our life right now. Practice was never meant to leave us with only so-called noble questions. Maturing in self-awareness may mean becoming increasingly able to take seriously the fact that this apparently small matter carries enormous weight in me at this moment.
There is no shame in asking the divine
In English, we call these practices divination. The word comes from the Latin divinus—divine, belonging to the gods. Divination is the art of seeking guidance through a symbolic system.
For me, the most moving quality of divination is the way it permits a particular entrance into inner inquiry. It lets me accept, without qualification, that there are moments when my life truly contains a problem that urgently needs to be addressed; that I am caught inside it, profoundly lost and longing for an answer. Asking the divine for an answer, in the past or in the present, is not something shameful.
Why I once put tarot aside
Tarot was, in fact, one of the first tools of inner inquiry that I studied systematically. Many years ago, when I was just beginning this path, I studied tarot for about a year and offered paid readings for a considerable period of time. Later, my interests gradually moved toward hypnosis, the Feldenkrais Method, somatics, dreams, imagery, and long-term practices of the body and unconscious. Tarot slowly receded into the background. It seemed to become a “toy,” and I stopped taking the information it offered seriously.
Looking back now, I can see two interesting reasons for this. One was the importance I placed on agency. Many of the methods I have studied over the years strongly emphasise that “I” have capacity, “I” possess knowledge, and “I” can change myself. I therefore remained cautious about tarot: something not entirely controlled by the self, carrying an element of the unknowable.
The other reason was a quiet arrogance. Dreams, the body, active imagination and unconscious creative work were already bringing me a continual flow of information. Receiving information through a deck of cards could feel almost redundant.
Only recently have I begun using tarot again in my client work and personal practice, and rediscovered its value. Held now by somatics and Jungian thought, it has acquired clearer boundaries, greater capacity and more ground. In combination with these methods, I have once again felt tarot’s power.
Letting hidden information emerge
If I once understood tarot as mystical, authoritative and predictive, it is now closer to a way of allowing hidden information to become visible.
When someone is caught inside a question—should I leave this relationship? Should I accept this job? Why can I not let go when I know I should? Why do I suddenly lose my judgment whenever I reach a certain kind of choice? Is this asking me to persist, or to stop? What am I actually afraid of?—the inner world is often not truly searching for a single answer.
Different desires, fears, bodily responses, practical concerns, fantasies and old experiences are present at the same time. We can hear only the loudest voice among them. Symbols have a particular capacity: they can temporarily interrupt the story we have already told countless times. They reduce the ego’s monopoly over experience and allow other inner material an opportunity to emerge.
Dreams, imagery and bodily perception can all do this. Tarot, however, is an already highly organised symbolic system. An unfamiliar image or an unexpected constellation of symbols can often let a problem that has become fixed begin moving again.
Drawing cards is not only a matter of random psychological projection. It also accepts a Jungian framework of synchronicity: inner and outer events meeting in a meaningful correspondence at the level of symbol.
Not surrendering agency, but recovering choice
Recently, I have wanted to bring tarot back into my work. It is particularly suited to the questions for which someone might ordinarily seek tarot, divination or a reading of fate—but when they do not want only a yes or no. You are ready to become someone who can hold symbol, body and real-world consequences at the same time.
The cards do not need to become the final authority. You do not need to surrender your agency. Instead, they can bring more information into a question that has already been thought about for too long.
I will not tell you: “The cards say you should resign.” “This person is your destined partner.” “This event will definitely happen.” Instead, we keep going. We inquire through bodily perception and the development of imagery. We dance with tarot; we dance with the divine.
Sometimes we stay with the card and become a person, object, colour or abstract pattern within it. Sometimes we move into bodily sensation, movement, imagery, dreams, relational patterns or memory. Sometimes the process eventually returns to an entirely practical question: what are you actually prepared to do next?
All of this uses symbol to invite what could not enter consciousness to enter the body—and then to recover choice.
You can bring questions such as these: Should I end this relationship? Why can I not let this person go? Should I accept this job? Should I buy this house? Why do I suddenly lose my judgment whenever I arrive at a certain kind of choice? I know I should leave, so why can I not go? Is this intuition, or fear? Is this asking me to persist, or to stop? What am I truly afraid of losing?
These questions do not first need to be transformed into a psychological question that sounds sufficiently profound. They can themselves be the material of our work. Tarot does not need to elevate a supposedly superficial question into a profound one. Perhaps, in the process, you will discover that none of the questions that appear in your life have ever been superficial.
