Mindful Tarot: Bring a Peace-Filled, Compassionate Practice to the 78 Cards

About the Author

Lisa Freinkel Tishman, PhD, began studying the Tarot as a graduate student at Berkeley in the late 1980s. She has published extensively on Petrarch, the Renaissance poet thought to have influenced the Tarot trumps. An award-winning teacher, Zen Buddhist minister, and certified mindfulness educator, she is a former humanities professor and dean at the University of Oregon (UO) and founding director of UO’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. Lisa is now an interfaith chaplain at Sacred Heart Medical Center in Springfield, Oregon, and continues to offer mindfulness classes, trainings, and Tarot readings through her business, Calyx Contemplative Care. She can be found online at www.calyxcontemplative.com and on YouTube and Instagram as Mindful Tarot.

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

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Mindful Tarot: Bring a Peace-Filled, Compassionate Practice to the 78 Cards © 2019 by Lisa Freinkel Tishman, PhD.

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First e-book edition © 2019

E-book ISBN: 9780738758534

Cover design by Shannon McKuhen

Cover art is from Universal Tarot Premium courtesy Lo Scarabeo, Torino, Italy. No further reproduction permitted.

Illustrations from Universal Tarot © 2001 by Roberto de Angelis, Tarot of Marseille, and Tarot Sola Busca: Ferrara XV Century are used with permission from Lo Scarabeo, Torino, Italy. No further reproduction allowed.

Images from the Visconti Tarot deck are used courtesy of Lo Scarabeo, Torino, Italy. No further reproduction permitted.

Line art from A. E. Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, public domain.

Translation of the Rumi poem The Guest House used by permission, Coleman Barks.

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Names: Freinkel Tishman, Lisa, author.

Title: Mindful tarot : bring a peace-filled, compassionate practice to the 78

cards / by Lisa Freinkel Tishman, PhD.

Description: First Edition. | Woodbury : Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., 2019. |

Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019001231 (print) | LCCN 2019005658 (ebook) | ISBN

9780738758534 (ebook) | ISBN 9780738758442 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Tarot. | Mindfulness (Psychology)—Miscellanea.

Classification: LCC BF1879.T2 (ebook) | LCC BF1879.T2 F745 2019 (print) | DDC

133.3/2424—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001231

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& in memory of Homer

CONTENTS

List of Images

Preface: A Life of Largesse

Part One: From Mantic to Mindful Tarot

Chapter 1: This Is All There Is

Chapter 2: Cartomancy and Mindfulness

Chapter 3: The Wheel of Life

Chapter 4: Learning to Drop Anchor

Chapter 5: The Four Suits and the Boundless Abodes

Chapter 6: The Trumps: All or Nothing

Chapter 7: The Daily PULL: Pausing, Unknowing, Looking, Leaning In

Part Two: Reading the Cards

Chapter 8: The Trumps

0 • THE FOOL: Beginner’s Mind

I • The Magician: Alignment

II • The High Priestess: Unknowing

III • The Empress: Unfolding

IV • The Emperor: Structure

V • The Hierophant: Holding Truth

VI • The Lovers: Becoming Whole

VII • The Chariot: Harnessing Desire

VIII • Strength: Facing What Scares Us

IX • The Hermit: Waiting for Light

X • The Wheel: Turning Over

XI • Justice: Making Right

XII • The Hanged Man: Renunciation

XIII • Death: Rising and Falling

XIV • Temperance: Reconciliation

XV • The Devil: Enfettered

XVI • The Tower: Ignition

XVII • The Star: Faith

XVIII • The Moon: The Depths

XIX • The Sun: Restoration

XX • Judgment: The Trumpet Call

XXI • The World: Letting Go

Chapter 9: The Pips

The Aces: Gift

The Twos: Reflection

The Threes: Synthesis

The Fours: Stability

The Fives: Perspective

The Sixes: Recognition

The Sevens: Steadiness

The Eights: Surrender

The Nines: Culmination

The Tens: Going Beyond

Chapter 10: The Courts

The Pages: Care

The Knights: Compassion

The Queens: Cheer

The Kings: Calm

Acknowledgments

Works Consulted

Images

All cards in this book are from Lo Scarabeo’s Universal Tarot by Roberto de Angelis except for the images on page 85 (Marseille Tarot), page 87 (Sola Busca Tarot), page 146 (Visconti Tarot), page 180–page 181 (Visconti Tarot), and page 281 (Marseille Tarot).

The Fool card: new beginnings

Wastrel in the Four of Cups: the Four of Cups dilemma

Seeker in the Eight of Cups

The waxing/waning moon in the Eight of Cups

My current Wheel of Life spread

Three of Wands

Eight of Swords

The Aces in all four suits: Pentacles, Wands, Cups, and Swords

The Pentacles: tending the garden of the caring heart

Two of Pentacles: a life in balance

Tao symbol

The Wands: kindling the responsive heart of compassion

Seven of Wands: What am I fighting for?

The Cups: blessing the grateful heart of cheer

Ace of Cups: the waters of life

The Swords: grasping the expansive heart of calm

Five of Swords: double-edged victory

Death (XIII) and Judgment (XX): Triumphs of Death and Judgment

Death with his scythe in Trump XIII of the Marseille Tarot—from everything to nothing

Judgment with the trumpet of resurrection— from nothing to everything

Sola Busca Fool

The Emperor

Today’s Chariot spread

The Lovers

Four of Pentacles

Today’s expanded five-card spread

The Chariot

The Wheel of Fortune in the Visconti Tarot

en of Wands

Detail of the rising/setting sun in the Death card

Zero

Detail of the wreath in the World card

Four of Coins in the Visconti Tarot

The Emperor in the Visconti Tarot

Rainbow in the Ten of Cups

Elemental Associations of the Court Cards

The Knave of Wands in the Marseille Tarot

Preface

A Life of Largesse

I am large, I contain multitudes.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Leaves of Grass

What if we could live, in every moment, a life of bounty, openheartedness, joy, and generosity? What if, despite our life circumstances, despite our individual challenges with health, wealth, relationship, and family, we could live with ease and intimacy? What if we could live with hope for our planet’s future, despite twenty-first-century difficulties such as climate change, political demagoguery, and global conflict? What if our hearts could be made tender by the suffering of others while we nonetheless became engaged and energized by the positive opportunities unfolding all around us?

These what-ifs are not idle questions. They are invitations to you, dear reader.

There’s a wonderful old-fashioned word for the kind of generous, easeful disposition of mind I am describing: largesse. The word means openhandedness and bigheartedness. In fact, it literally means adopting a big outlook on life. Largesse derives from the word large, and so in a sense we could say that largesse means living large in the best of all possible ways. It means living from the standpoint of the Big Self: the self with a large S that is aware of its interconnectedness to all things. This is the Big Self that the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman describes in his poem Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

For Whitman, the individual self is large because it shares in all of creation. It is composed of, and decomposes into, every atom of this good earth. There is that lot of me and all so luscious, Whitman exclaims, exulting in a life lived in intimacy with the whole planet and all its history—with the whole lot of living creatures, human cultures, rocks and minerals, sun and stars and moon. Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy, he declares, pledging allegiance to the wide world around him.

What if Tarot, when practiced mindfully, could teach us to live with this much joy and bounty? What if it could help us turn toward the world, even in the midst of confusion and trouble, embracing what is with clarity, with love, and with a sense of possibility?

This book invites you to embrace your life, yourself, writ large!

It invites you to embrace the world.

Will you join me on a journey of Mindful Tarot?

A Complete Practice

Mindful Tarot is a complete practice: a practice that is as much about learning to live a more abundant and mindful life as it is about deepening our connection to that wondrous gallery of 78 archetypes, the Tarot.

A complete practice. What do I mean by that? First and foremost, I am signaling the integrity of this work: the integrity born from a path dedicated to integration. (Those two words, integrity and integration, come from the same root: the Latin word for wholeness.) I am inviting you onto a path of practice that has the capacity to transform your life one breath and one card at a time. But, perhaps paradoxically, I am also suggesting that in an important sense this transformation will change nothing. Mindful Tarot is a complete practice because it recognizes that this moment, where we are right now, is already complete. In this moment, nothing is lacking. We don’t need to do anything or fix anything. Mindful Tarot is a practice that helps us live in the midst of that completeness.

Now don’t get me wrong. The Tarot is also a very good tool for simply getting stuff done. The Tarot deck was invented in Italy in the 1400s as a card game, but even in those early days Tarot found other uses in gambling, writing poetry, and drawing lots (a form of divination). In the modern era, the Tarot has revealed even more versatility. It can very handily and beautifully be used for a variety of extrinsic and esoteric purposes. It can be used in magic, ritual, art, and psychotherapy. It can be used to channel guides and spirits, and it can be used (of course) to tell fortunes. It can be used as an oracle, and it can be used for veneration. It can even be used (as it still is in France and other parts of Europe) for its original purpose as a card game. In this sense, learning to read the Tarot can be like learning yoga postures. A modern-day yogi might simply practice their asanas (postures) as fitness, aiming for flexibility and strength—and there’s certainly nothing wrong with a nice, firm yoga butt! But yoga can also be practiced on its own terms: as a complete, self-contained path of transformation and liberation.

In contrast to the Tarot-as-tool approach, Mindful Tarot takes up the Tarot as an end in itself. It considers the Tarot in its own right as a path of self-discovery. Mindful Tarot is both a mindfulness practice anchored within the language of Tarot and a Tarot-reading practice anchored within mindful awareness.

How to Use This Book

You do not need to have any prior knowledge of either mindfulness or Tarot to benefit from this book. The book is designed to accompany you, step by step, into the practice of Mindful Tarot.

When it comes to Tarot, it’s easy to get discouraged by the sheer volume of esoteric information out there. Just gaining familiarity with basic card meanings and correspondences can seem like an endless chore. Similarly, when it comes to mindfulness practice, it’s easy to feel daunted by the stressors in our environment or by the sheer noisiness of our own hearts and minds. Finding calm and peace in the midst of our lives can seem like a hopeless task.

Not to worry, dear reader! Mindful Tarot has your back. You don’t need to memorize card meanings and you don’t need to clear or calm your mind. This book will gently guide you into greater self-compassion and awareness just as you are right now. Together we’ll explore greater intimacy with the present moment and greater familiarity with the 78 cards.

If you’re completely new to the Tarot, you may want to pay particular attention to the discussions of Tarot history and the structure of the Tarot deck in Chapter 4–Chapter 6 before trying to work through the book as a whole. Reading Part Two of this book in its entirety may also be useful as you start. There I offer a unified system of card meanings that is designed to resonate with mindfulness practice but is also traditional and flexible enough to use with any Tarot deck you choose. Don’t try to learn these card meanings by rote! Instead, dive into the sequence of meanings like you might read a good novel or a collection of stories. Read to get a sense of the big picture—the whole story. Getting a sense of the whole is what Mindful Tarot is all about.

If you’re new to mindfulness practice, part 1 of this book will introduce you to mindfulness concepts, methods, and skills that build upon one another. You don’t need any special tools, background, beliefs, or training. Mindfulness is simply the art of paying attention, with basic kindness and curiosity, to the full range of human experience in the present moment. It’s the art of noticing how things are for us right now—without our getting hooked or derailed by our reactions, stories, aversions, and desires. Mindfulness is a skill that can be learned. That’s why we practice it. It’s a state of awareness that can be cultivated and deepened over time.

Mindfulness practice is also what pharmacists call dose-independent. Some medicines require a certain threshold, a saturation point, before they are effective. In contrast, mindfulness practice is the kind of medicine whose impact is linear: it seems to work no matter how little exposure to it we have. With a little practice, we’ll see a little impact. With more practice, we’ll see a greater impact. The more we put in, the more we get out. But even a teeny bit of mindfulness practice has the capacity to change our lives.

In ) in the text, you’ll be able to find an associated mp3 file. These exercises are meant to support and help you develop your work with the Tarot, but they can also be used on their own, in any order and as often as you like, to deepen your habit of mindful awareness, with or without the use of Tarot cards.

And, of course, if you’re already well versed in both Tarot and mindfulness, there’s nothing like beginning anew, taking the daintiest of steps into the unknown, into this present moment—like the traditional image of the Fool, the first figure in the Tarot deck, who steps off a cliff and into the future, with that little dog nipping at the heels.

All you need to do is turn the page—and breathe.

Welcome!

The Fool card: new beginnings

A Note about Gender

Whenever possible I have avoided the use of gender-specific pronouns, such as she or he, in favor of gender-neutral forms, such as they. That said, it remains important to grapple with the binary oppositions that we find in the cards. The Tarot is a product of Western culture, and shares its deep history of dualism. Binary oppositions flood the Tarot’s imagery. Everywhere we look we’ll find dualities of male/female, white/black, active/passive, spirit/flesh, heaven/hell, etc. Nonetheless, the Tarot continually invites us toward nondual wholeness. Thus, throughout this book I will note the traditional gendered and dualistic associations where relevant while also disrupting them as much as I can.

[contents]

Part One

From Mantic to

Mindful Tarot

Chapter 1

This Is All There Is

It was a mild Oregon winter morning about a dozen years ago. The low sun filtered through the mist. The air was damp but crisp. Bundled in a fleece blanket in a rusted garden chair by the side of the building, I tucked my legs underneath me, sitting cross-legged like I might on a meditation cushion. But I wasn’t meditating. I was sipping my tea during a break in the seven-day silent retreat at this urban meditation center.

I was also crying. My heart, in fact, was literally aching. I could almost feel the cracking of bone and cartilage across the sternum. There was nothing wrong. I had a great marriage and a fulfilling job, all my loved ones were safe and healthy, and I myself was healthy as an ox. My heart wasn’t breaking from any external forces. Instead, it felt like my core, the inner reaches of my chest, my chest cavity itself, had become a vacuum so acute, such a yawning and empty space, that my heart was now splitting open from the inside.

I had spent the previous four days in silent contemplation, wrestling with all the myriad ways that I tended to lose myself through daydreaming, through sleepiness and the heaviness of boredom, or through the giddiness of restless energy. I had been grappling with all the habitual ways that I would often push and pull my world, leaping forward into the future or obsessing backward into the past, always trying to escape the confines of the present moment. In short, in the last four days of contemplation, I’d been assiduously working with my own chronic dissatisfaction.

In the ancient Indian language of the Buddha and his followers, this state is called dukkha: a word that is often translated as suffering but literally means something more like unsatisfactoriness. Dukkha describes our deeply ingrained sense that this present moment is not enough, that we can’t be sated or full or find abundance in the world as it is right here and now. Things that are good are either not good enough or too temporary to soothe our hungry hearts. Things that are bad need to be shed and shoved off quickly. And things that are sort of meh—that we neither want nor reject—are pretty much unacceptable too. Dukkha shapes our world into the mobile-app terms of swipe left and swipe right. Thanks to dukkha, we see our lives as a series of thumbs-up and thumbs-down, likes and dislikes. Dukkha is the currency of a world in which we lose ourselves continually, because we are always darting off somewhere, seeking that other something that (we imagine) will finally fill us up.

I had just spent four days perched cross-legged on my meditation cushion striving to overcome my chronic state of dissatisfaction. I had kept reeling myself back in, reminding myself not to look for meaning or juiciness somewhere else. I had kept bringing my attention back to my breath, to the sense of my hips poised on the cushion, to the weight of my body, to the concrete sensations of my skin, nose, eyes, ears, and mouth. I had kept reminding myself: There’s nowhere else. There’s nothing else. There’s just right here and right now.

And right then, sitting with my perfectly good tea, the waves of dissatisfaction were swelling to tsunami proportions.

This bleeping universe—this is all there is?! Really? This is it? This tea, and this winter morning, and this silly body of mine, and this silly sky overhead, and this silly broken heart, with these silly tears mingling with snot and chilling in the air against my skin? Really? Are you kidding me? Is this silliness all there is?

Is this really all there is?

I’m not sure who I was talking to, but I just kept repeating those words, silently to myself at first and then out loud—in that funny, masochistic way we have of repeating words that name our pain.

Really? This is all there is?

This is all? Really?

This is all there is?!

And then the sounds of a city morning burst in. There was a clattering of glass and an echo of hydraulic gears engaging and disengaging. In the midst of my existential crisis, the city sanitation truck had arrived at the meditation center and was clearing away our garbage and recyclables. And then I noticed the chirping of the thrushes and towhees and the scratching and scrambling of squirrels at the base of the yard’s gnarled and spreading fig tree. And a slight breeze brought the tang of woodsmoke and the mulchy, slightly moldy smell of dark, waterlogged earth. And the taste, like green wood, of my tea still lingered on my tongue. And the cold and heavy ceramic of my mug weighed smooth in my hands.

Something shifted—in me, in the world. My heart softened. My breathing slowed and deepened.

This is ALL there is.

As surely as the cup in my hands contained the swirls of my tea, this moment—this silly now—contained the whole universe.

This is ALL there is.

There was a world of difference between the two ways I had understood the same phrase: This is all there is?! At first, my imploding broken heart had yearned for something else, for something further and deeper than the meagerness of the present moment. And then came the recognition that, yes, this is indeed all there is: it’s ALL here, nothing is missing, nothing is left out. In the space of a heartbeat, I had gone from the devastating sense of scarcity to the raucous joy of abundance: This is ALL there is! Wow! Nothing is left out. In this present moment, in the evidence of my five senses and the pulsation of my heart, in the waves of emotion and the currents of thought in my mind, the whole universe is here with me. This silly moment contains MULTIVERSES!

My whole body tingled with joy: with the sense of fullness, of gift—of the present moment as, literally, a present. Where before my body had ached with yawning, yearning emptiness, now it was bursting full.

The Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh describes this sense of abundance as a recognition of interbeing: of the ways in which all things exist, at the same time, together, completely cooperating and coexisting, molecule by molecule. Nhat Hanh tells us that nothing exists simply on its own. Instead, all things inter-are (a verb he coined himself). All things exist only because countless other things also exist. He invites