How to Use Tarot Cards to Increase Your Mindfulness and Self-Awareness

How tarot card readings can be used to help you decrease your stress and increase your self-awareness

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If you aren’t acquainted with tarot cards, you might associate the practice with fortune telling. While it is true that some people enjoy using tarot to predict future events, the practice is also widely used, alongside other mindfulness pursuits such as meditation, to learn more about the self. When approached for this purpose, it is a deeply introspective pursuit that can help battle stress and identify the aspects of one’s life that one can change for the better.

What Does a Deck of Tarot Cards Comprise?

There are two types of cards in a deck: the Major Arcana cards (of which there are 22) and Minor Arcana cards (of which there are 56). The Major Arcana cards represent a character of deep significance, or an event of crucial importance. These cards represent something larger than oneself; they represent the different components of being a human being in this world. The Minor Arcana cards, meanwhile, describe issues that you may need to address.

How Can the Cards Increase Self-Awareness?

You can use the cards to analyze aspects of your life, both those you are happy with and those that may need changing. Just one card can provide hours of mindful contemplation, and in this sense, they can benefit your mental health.

Mindfulness — or simply ‘being in the here and now’ — has been proven to be a powerful way to foster mental health and battle stress. Rather than blocking out negative thoughts and feelings, it encourages us to recognize them, allowing them to flow over us yet maintaining a sufficient distance so that they are not allowed to lead us to a state of negativity or behavior that is harmful to ourselves or others. When used this way, tarot cards can help make us happier by removing many triggers for stress, anxiety, and depression.

A Practical Example of Tarot in Action

Some tarot practitioners recommend meditation on just one card. Take the Ten of Wands (a Minor Arcana card which symbolizes burdens in life and depicts a man carrying ten heavy wands as he walks). You may imagine you are the man carrying the wands, and envision yourself getting rid of these burdens one by one, using the exercise to formulate a strategy regarding the best way to make these changes.

Take a long time to think of as many as 10 things in your life that may be stopping you from being your best self. Could it be too many working hours, or a lack of physical activity, or a conflict at your work that has been unresolved for too long?

Despite the fact that most people associate tarot readings with the future, they can actually be used to make the present a much better place, one in which you are free to be your best self at work, at home, and in social situations, because you are willing to put in the hard work that is required to live a life of passion.

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You may also enjoy reading Which Way? Finding Your Inner Truth and Purpose by Jamie Zimmerman