About the Author
Leeza Robertson is the author of Tarot Court Cards for Beginners and Tarot Reversals for Beginners, and she’s the creator of two tarot decks, the Mermaid Tarot and Animal Totem Tarot. Leeza spends her days dreaming up new tarot decks and exploring new ways to introduce more people to the world of tarot. When she doesn’t have her nose in a book or her fingers running across a deck of cards, she runs an online Tarot Academy with her business partner Pamela Chen, which can be found online at Bit.ly/uftamagic.
Llewellyn Publications
Woodbury, Minnesota
Copyright Information
Pathworking the Tarot: Spiritual Guidance & Practical Advice from the Cards © 2019 by Leeza Robertson.
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First e-book edition © 2019
E-book ISBN: 9780738758220
Book design: Samantha Penn
Cover design: Kevin Brown
Cover illustration: Christiane Beauregard / Lindgren & Smith
Editing: Annie Burdick
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ISBN: 978-0-7387-5787-2
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This book is for all those who have heard the call
of tarot and decided to walk its path. This book was written for the tarot seeker, the tarot teacher, and the tarot reader. From beginner to lifelong acolyte, this book is for you.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: What is Pathwork?
Chapter Two: The Major Arcana
0. The Fool
1. The Magician
2. The High Priestess
3. The Empress
4. The Emperor
5. The Hierophant
6. The Lovers
7. The Chariot
8. Strength
9. The Hermit
10. The Wheel of Fortune
11. Justice
12. The Hanged Man
13. Death
14. Temperance
15. The Devil
16. The Tower
17. The Star
18. The Moon
19. The Sun
20. Judgement
21. The World
Chapter Three: The Court Cards
Pages
Knights
Queens
Kings
Chapter Four: the Minor Arcana
Aces
Twos
Threes
Fours
Fives
Sixes
Sevens
Eights
Nines
Tens
Chapter Five: Pulling It All Together
A final note
Introduction
If you are new to tarot cards, then there is a good chance you are looking for ways to connect with the seventy-eight cards of your deck. If you are already knowledgeable in tarot, perhaps you are looking to deepen your relationship with the cards.
Tarot cards themselves can be confusing and overwhelming to novices. Each card is a complex construction of symbols and design features, geared to tell a very specific story. The version of that story will differ with each deck, as each deck creator will tell and retell that story in a unique and different way, emphasizing some elements and dismissing others. This means that the deck you hold in your hands right now is telling one version of a tarot story. Regardless of which deck you hold in your hands, you are looking at a unique interpretation of a story. I know from my own experience that each of my decks tells a story that is very heavily influenced by myself, my artist, the creative team, and the energy of the theme itself. This is one of the reasons I love creating tarot decks so much: so I can see how the story changes in its retelling based on who is involved in bringing that story into the world. In this respect, the very act of creating a tarot deck is also a form of pathwork or pathworking. It has specific rules and lessons, for both the deck creators and people just like you, who then pick the deck up and read with it. It has steps, processes, and a way of measuring progress. It is also an amazing personal and spiritual growth exercise. I am never the same after finishing a deck; I am forever changed, expanded, pushed, and pulled. My awareness is enhanced and my life deepened. Pathwork, just like tarot, is a story that is constantly told over and over again because it keeps changing and evolving. It is a walking meditation that guides you through the concerns, concepts, and philosophies that we call existence.
This book is broken up into five chapters. The cards themselves are broken up into three of those chapters, with the major arcana in chapter 2, the court cards in chatper 3, and the minor arcana, Aces through Tens, in chapter 4. In chapter 2, each card in the major arcana has its own pathwork exercises. However, I have set up the exercises differently in the minor arcana and court cards sections, and you will find only one set of pathwork exercises per number or court ranking. By this I mean there is only one set of exercises for the Pages, one set for the Knights, one set for the Queens, one set for the Kings. This format is replicated with the numbered cards, with one set for the Aces, one set for the Twos, and so on, all the way through the Tens. I have done this on purpose, as I see each element representing one part of a whole story for the numbered or court-ranking cards. In other words, all the Fives combined tell the complete story of the Fives, and all of the Knights combined tell the whole story of the Knight’s experience. While this is not the only way you can pathwork with these cards, it is the way I have chosen to do it for the sake of this book. I have made sure that in no way is the pathwork experience diminished by doing it in this manner. chapter 1 is an introduction to pathwork and the exact processes I have chosen to use in this book, while chapter 5 wraps everything up and explains how to take this journey into your spreads and the spreads of your tarot clients.
My hope is that this book will inspire you to go further, deeper, and wider with your knowledge and understanding of how the cards influence your daily experience and assist you in expanding your spiritual being.
[contents]
1
What is Pathwork?
Pathwork is a journey, in that it takes you from one point to another, but it is also an active exercise,
not a passive practice. This journey can be physical in nature, meaning you literally travel through the steps one at a time, as you will find in some of the exercises in the wandering section of this book. But not everything about pathwork is physically active. Sometimes it is merely a matter of raising your level of awareness about who or what is around you as you move from one thought, feeling, or action to another. For example, you may find yourself standing next to the Magician or someone who acts like the Magician in your life, only to then find yourself in the company of someone who has similar qualities to the High Priestess. You might even find yourself needing to physically walk your way through the energy of one of the cards or, for something like the Five of Swords, walk it off! No matter how you end up pathworking with the cards of the tarot, you will find yourself engaging with their lessons and messages more actively, which means you have to be willing to deal with what comes up while you take this journey. This is where the messy nature of pathworking comes in: dealing with the emotional stuff. Spiritual expansion is messy; it pushes your buttons and makes you uncomfortable. If you don’t feel any of these things, you are not going deep enough. Pathwork will push and trigger those of you who like to dwell on the surface of your emotions. You can only ever observe from the surface—pathwork means diving in, breaking the surface, and getting yourself wet with emotional fluids. If something makes you feel comfortable, it is not going to push you to grow. Comfort is for resting, stopping, and saying “I am good where I am.” It is perfectly okay for people to crave comfort; I just advise you not to allow it to make you stagnant, as that is when life’s problems arise.
For this book I have come up with three different ways to pathwork with your tarot cards, which I use myself and use with my clients. They are not overly complex nor are they rigid in structure, and they have a tendency to overlap. This is something else one learns through pathwork—things are more fluid and more connected than we like to admit. The lines between exercises and labels will at times seem tenuous at best, but just flow with them anyway. The differences may be more suggestive than you are actually giving them credit for. Although I have not really set up the book to be read in a specific way, you will find suggestions on how to approach each part of the tarot deck; for example, with the suits, Aces through Tens work in a sequence. You can choose to work with just all the intentional exercises for your cards if it seems more fitting for your readings, or you could work with each exercise from top to bottom. But there are no real hard and fast rules here. Use the book intuitively. Allow the exercises to guide you and help deepen your understanding of the cards, your spreads, and your work with tarot. The three pathworking exercises I want to introduce you to are as follows.
1. Intentional
Each card of the tarot has a very specific story, theme, or set of lessons and challenges it presents. With intentional pathwork, you may need to deliberately select your card and your journey based on the theme, lesson, or challenge you wish to work with, work through, or deepen. This means going into your deck and actively choosing a card you wish to pathwork with. Let’s say you want to attract more money into your life or you want to attract a new job or get your energy aligned with that big promotion that may be coming up. You should pull out your deck and find the card that vibrates to the energy you wish to achieve.
For these work and money queries, it might be the Nine of Pentacles or the Queen of Pentacles. The Nine of Pentacles may radiate the feeling of being financially secure and abundant, which is how you want to feel so you can attract even more of that energy. Also helpful, the Queen of Pentacles may make you feel in control, empowered, and viewed as someone of importance.
Each of the cards in your deck offers you a journey, one that will move you into the vibration you need to manifest your goal. Do you see how you deliberately choose the card and the energy you wanted to work with? This is, in essence, how the intentional exercises work in this book. But it is not the only way, and you will see some of the intentional exercises can be just as intuitive as the intuitive exercises. This is the nature of pathwork: things merge and blend; sometimes the boundaries aren’t as clear as you would like them to be.
2. Intuitive
In the intuitive exercises, you may find yourself prompted to release what you think you need to know and just let the card tell you. This is more like channeling the card, listening to it speak to you, and allowing it to guide you on your journey without any nudging from your ego mind. This process opens up possibilities for a card that you would never receive another way. Oftentimes we can get fixated on what a card means or how it has to be interpreted, but this way you take all of your preconceived ideas and throw them out the window.
How you go about selecting your card intuitively will depend on you, although I do have instructions in most of the intuitive sections. You can shuffle your deck, hold it to your heart with your question or intention in your mind, then just split your deck, taking whatever card happens to be on top. Or you can shuffle, cut with your cards facedown, and draw the card from the top of the deck. Or you can choose not to shuffle them at all, fan them out facedown, and run a pendulum over them to see which card is speaking the loudest in answer to your question.
This section is really about letting go—stop trying to force or control an outcome and instead allow the outcome to flow to you. Most tarot readers already work with this intuitive approach when they do a reading anyway, so this part of the pathwork process should come easy enough to most of you reading this book. But again, this is not the only way the exercises in this section are presented. So do not balk if you come across one that looks more intentional than intuitive.
3. Wandering
Wandering uses a little of the first method’s intention, a dash of the second method’s intuition, and a lot of action. The wandering technique is really more about how well you know your mind and what level of control you have over it. It is easier to focus on something by setting an intention, and it is even pretty easy to open up to a concept, idea, or problem and see what intuitive hit you might get. But to allow yourself to wander and explore with no real destination—that’s where the deep digging really happens. I discovered this technique during my own meditation process, as I observed how one thing would trigger something else and send me in a totally different direction, until that also triggered something else, and I would ping off again. I learn more about who I am while wandering, though it is not for everyone.
So, what is wandering in the scheme of this book and in the process of pathwork? Wandering is a twofold active process, as it can be done in the mind or through the body. You can take a thought for a walk inside your head, or you can walk it out in the world around you. I am a walker; I live for my morning walks and they are very much a part of my healing and mediation practice, as they literally move energy in, around, and through my physical body. Sometimes this is exactly what a thought, problem, or question needs to do as well. It needs to be moved physically. It needs to be allowed space and opportunity to move unhindered. This is what the prompts in the wandering sections of the cards will do for you. Sometimes they will involve a physical wandering and you will be asked to move your physical body; other times it might just be mental wandering to see where a thought, idea, or problem takes you. This is probably the section that may give some of you the most difficulty, as I am not sure how many of you have ever taken a tarot card for a walk. Again, this section is about flow, about letting go and learning how to engage with your cards in a new and deeper way. There is no wrong or right way to do it, so just let the prompts in this book guide you.
Now you have the framework, or at least a rough idea of pathwork and the methods used here in the cards sections of this book. Don’t worry if this still all sounds like an alien language. It will come together as you do the exercises for each of the cards. New concepts take time, and they need to be practiced over and over again. This is another great thing about the pathwork process: it is repetitious
. I would suggest you just work with one card a week to begin. Sit with the exercises for the card and see how each of them plays out in your daily life or watch to see if they change your point of perception. Maybe you want to work with the suit of wands and you choose to just go through the intuitive exercises until you have a better understanding of the suit on an intuitive level. Or maybe the idea of taking the majors for a walk really appeals to you, so you spend the next twenty-two days doing a wandering challenge with your twenty-two major arcana cards. However you decide to launch into this book will be the right way for you. My only suggestion would be to initially only work with one card per day until you get the hang of the process. There is information in chapter 5 on how to take this one step further and bring the pathwork process into your spreads.
I also strongly recommend keeping a separate journal to keep your pathworking notes. It’s important to note that journal writing and pathworking are not the same. They can share similar elements, but they are very different. They do, however, go together like ice cream and chocolate. We have already established that pathwork can be messy; it brings stuff up from the murky emotional waters and you may find you need extra time to work through what the pathwork process pushes to the surface. This is where your journal will come in. In many respects, the pathwork process triggers the journal process. What you feel, see, and experience on your pathwork journey will ultimately trigger issues, points of healing, and other sore spots that you may wish to keep a record of. The deeper you pathwork with your cards, the more you may find yourself reaching for your journal. To assist you in knowing how to best use a journal through this specific process, I have included journal tips and prompts within the exercises, just so you don’t get confused along the way. But please, don’t let my prompts be the only things to get you to your journal. Use your journal as a companion buddy to your pathwork, reach for it whenever you feel it necessary, and don’t use it if you don’t feel it is applicable to the information or energy you engage in with a specific exercise or card.
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