Lovers

And lastly but not least-ly we come to one of the most known and most-debated card of Major Arcana i.e. The Lovers.
In its classical interpretation The Lovers is usually related and read in relation to connections, relationships and love life. It shows us where the key to conscious and meaningful relationships lie. It may be read as an invitation to understanding closeness on spiritual, emotional, sexual level between partners. But it is also a good card to understand relationships in families or between friends and comrades.
The Lovers, however, has many other paths to interpreting them.
While we are entangle ourselves in the love magic of enchantments, sentiments and romanticism, The Lovers can be a quite appropriate way to dwelve in depth the candid relationships, truthfulness, honesty in communication between ourselves and our loved ones. Not necessarily only in terms of truths we live by but also through understanding how female/male aspects of our psyche work. How they influence our principles and beliefs.
The usual problem with finding the beliefs and principia that represent us truly is through integrating our experience and introspective analysis of what the life is truly about. Understanding it through analysing our traits and how true are we to working on them, both the ones that stem from subconscious and conscious aspects.
The choice is yours as the common expression says. But do we truly understand our choices?
and do we truly follow our heart or just by chance think that we do?
Quite often the problem lies in a broken relationship with self-love and respect. Do we really respect ourselves and what we bring to this world by denigrating our sense of self-belief and understanding our potential which can be both of analytical and sensitive as well as initiative and progressing in action?
Question of understanding and valuing our strengths is often unrecognised by not recognising it in others. We are truly at war with ourselves while not admiting it but radiating that to others and commencing unnecessary conflicts...
Love is the answer - but how we understand its core is even more important.

Death

Death in the whole tarot deck is probably the most misunderstood and underrated card ever.
How we often tend to preceive death reflects our fears, our prejuidices and everything that comes along.
As the passing away in the course of life comes often as a sudden and unexpected change - we may stop for a little minute and ponder on some issues that are linked to it.
Can we get ready for a big change by understanding both the fragility of life and what we take for granted? Can preceding a change that comes as a surprise with making a conscious change by yourself bring us closer to understanding what we need and what is needed for our growth?
The card as a symbol brings the fact of passing through one door to another, opening the new pathway and closing the former one. Putting the past away seems like a likely ritual to cleanse ourselves from what we leave behind. Re-assessing our daily routines in relation to change is the other important thing to consider as we move forward in our lives.
Life is like a box of chocolates  as one sage said - we choose to find out which one agrees with us. We can also try to think of this process as letting go of the attachments, unhealthy habits to release more vital energy and leave space for the habits that actually help us to feel better as the people who we really are.
The belongings, matters of little importance, memories that create even more attachment create a shadowy aspect of what accumulates as burden and cannot be easily released without using the willpower.
To precede change by making our own is a good tactics when you are not avoiding it and resisting - to embrace it with your awareness and use it to be a part of your own story of sucess - ponder on it for a second.

The Emperor

The Emperor, the father of the tarot cards, is the protagonist of our new blog entry today.

In times of chaos and instability we often crave for structure with rationality and pragmatism in the background as well as a policy towards solving problems through their analysis and understanding the parts that make up the whole structure. Organising our strategy through perseverance and thought through structure. And foremostly the expertise we can gain through learning about our life challenges.
The Emperor is a card which sets out the trip to achieve stability by resolution to be in charge. Being in charge here means to use tools such as your ability to be a teacher, a decision making persona whose experience is both valued and respected by creating rules.
This card has also the other side of it.
With power comes great responsibility as well as questions you might ask yourself when it comes to the interaction of other people. Asserting your power is one thing but leaving others in a position when they cannot fully express their own might be a counterproductive process and also unethical.
Individuals who gain from your expertise can be a little bit uneasy when it comes to bringing in their own experience into the picture. Why not help them?
The Emperor is also an invitation for taking up the action when you are in a situation such as dealing with hierachical organisation, a clash with authority that bears no "no" answers. You can come up to the conclusion that maybe it's better to be your own boss.
Last but not least it's also an invitation to perseverance, to commit to what you have promised to yourself. Your goals, your plans, everything that you wanted to achieve. Update your own guidelines by checking how much what you used before serves you now. The structure and healthy routines can come in handy. 

The Chariot

Welcome again to our weekly blog about the cards of tarot and their meaning. Today we are going to focus on the next Major Arcana card which is in this case The Chariot.
The time of Autumnal equinox is a special season when we turn towards reassessment of what are our priorities and the crucial aspects of our life here. Quite often amidst all the fervour and strenous trials our mind seeks the answer of where should we focus our attention when there is so much to do.
The Chariot doesn't initially give a clear answer to it but if we look closer - it can dawn on you, quite literally.
Once you assert yourself and take a bold stance - it will become crystal clear that everything you need is at hand. Insight into your abilities and how they have served you until now can be a useful signpost to recognise what is important and what you have to focus on.
The tools we have are usually the most understimated ones. The process of understanding how abundant we are in what can be used can be quite slow and painful but the easier it gets when willpower and confidence come into the picture.
The Chariot is also a remark and a hint that we often misunderstand others through our impetous stance, irritability and pushing through the human wreckage. A collateral damage of a life road trip.
Maybe stopping for a moment to take a reflection on what is the purpose at this particular stage of your life is a good idea. Having in mind the risks as well as the people and above all understanding the keyword of "control" in our lives is crucial.
Who is in control?
Are you too controlling over your and someone else's life?
Maybe it's the time to set your goals and intentions in alignment with your higher self?
Maybe you just need some time to get a grip on things and grasp what's important.
Take your time.
The road is calling...

The Devil

Given the time and space to make some reflections on what drives us in the real world of ups and downs, we often ponder on what are the negative forces that are at work that we cannot master and cannot fight over. They might might our habits, our addictions or other ways to react to  what we experience that eludes the conscious way of choosing how we are and what we want to achieve.

But there are always opportunities to do some goodness to yourself in times when we feel that the dark shroud has befell on us. The first step to understand it is the major temptation - to sort out things at once - the instant gratification of ego and helping yourself by seemingly easy steps. The case cannot be far from being mistaken in this belief.
Sometimes the long-term and quite ardous path lies before us to truly understand what is there to be done. The patterns that recurr can be managed in the way of reassessing our stance, understanding the subconscious drives and motives of our choices.
The devil is often a distant call to open yourself to a deeply hidden potential. To eliminate the forces in your emotional world that are harmful, break the bonds of it. It is also about creating healthier habits as in the shift towards something that reverses the picture of ourselves.
The last but not least it is also a trip to the depth of your inner world - often through darkness and by hitting the rock bottom. The struggle to understand can be real but never as much beneficial when you actually understand yourself and have willpower to slowly change it.

The High Priestess

The end of summer is usually the time when we are re-assessing our stance and position preparing for seasonal break and getting ready for a new change. At those times we manage to analyse our moral judgements, our ailings, alignment with what we really want and everything that comes along with it. How much further inside ourselves can we venture to understand our true blessing, our real goals and challenges that we set?
The High Priestess is the one of the most innate drive towards understanding The Unconscious, the most intimate and the most intuitive. it invites us to focus on developing our skill to use the intuitive powers and shift our attention to feeling rather than intelectualising, working together rather than competing, creating rather than deconstructing.
Listening to your inner voice and understanding both your feminine and masculine side - both the feeling and acting is something that The Priestess encourages us to do.
There is a calm centre, an asylum that dwells in each and every person that helps us to understand how much depends on our ability to perceive the reality through wisdom that we have but in the rushed pace of life we tend to forget and abandon to something less helpful, something that we don't even know how to stabilise as it cannot be stabilised - the unrestrained limbo of the unconscious - something that clearly won't lead us anywhere positive.
The sage inside us can both help and reinvigorate our lives, especially now in beautiful Autumnal time of change. 

The Hierophant

Welcome again to our blog and the new post in the series of articles helping you to understand the meaning of the tarot cards.
In the fast pace of life we often forget the most important values which relate to rules that stem from perenial philosophy but the ones we have to abide in order to conform to certain social circumstances.
The challenge of finding the teacher that dwells within is quite difficult when you think of a constant chase to fulfill someone's expectations and the competition that chases us everywhere.
To set up your own spiritual set of beliefs is to understand how much we create by creating the rules that we know how to follow but in deeper understanding of it - it's the acknowledging your own experience and transposing that into wisdom.
With the Hierophant there is a tendency of tension between the rules of the world - especially communal aspects of it. How much of ourselves we see here greatly depends on perception of individuality and its purpose in a group.
Questioning and challenging the status quo can be a mere act of rebellion or a greater scheme that is derived both from our feeling of discontent and ideas for a design change.
Are your personal values in agreement with values that are taken for granted? Do you really need to follow what is objective to a certain group of people? The conflict is on its way but it may not necessarily be destructive in its nature.