Tarot and relationships — Part 1: Guided Visualizations

My friend Amy recently suggested that I focus more on Tarot and Relationships here on my blog since she says I do such great relationship readings for her.

Today, for my first post dedicated to Tarot and Relationships, I would like to present a technique for healing troublesome relationships using a guided visualization with a Tarot card.  But first, a bit of background on why you would want to do this. Perhaps you already know this, but for those who don’t, here is a basic Tarot truism:

The hardest person to do a reading for is yourself!

This is especially true when the reading is for a relationship question because you have such an emotional investment in the outcome of the reading that your ego-mind keeps interfering, shouting down the quiet voice of your intuition. It shouts things like, “This is what I want that card to mean …,” or “This is what I fear that card means…”  It’s very hard to hear the wisdom of your intuition over the ranting of your ego.

Fortunately, you can use the Tarot to help solve your relationship issues with techniques to trick your ego-mind into not interfering with your ability to hear the messages of the cards.  These methods are quite different from traditional readings.  They use the cards to imagine a story so your ego-mind doesn’t intrude because it thinks this is all just a bit of entertainment.  Today, in the first of several blog posts about Tarot and relationships, we are going to see how to use a guided visualization with a Tarot card to help you improve an existing relationship.

I described the process of doing a guided visualization with a Tarot card in a post a few months ago, and you can refer back to it for the details of the process. What I’ll describe here are the specifics that you can incorporate into that general procedure to adapt it to this specific purpose.

First, choose a card to represent the other person, and do this intuitively. In other words, go through your deck, cards face up, until you find a card that feels right. You’ll know when you come to it. You’ll feel it in your gut: “Oh yeah, that’s so-and-so, all right!”

During the visualization, use the person in the card as a surrogate for the other person in your relationship so that you can talk to this person about your issues with him/her.  This gives you a safe environment in which to have this conversation.
You can ask the person in the card about your relationship with him/her.
You can ask general, open-ended questions like “What do I need to know or do to improve or heal our relationship?” Or you can ask more specific questions, like “Why do you do X whenever I do Z?”
And you can safely tell the other person things that you want to tell your significant other … and then see how s/he reacts.
Also, during the visualization you can ask the other person for further clarification of anything s/he says, if need be.

Finally, I know this is part of the process write-up, but it bears repeating:

Upon completion of this process, it is important that you immediately write down as much about it as you can, including your thoughts about what it meant to you. This is because a guided visualization is similar to a dream, and like a dream, if you do not write it down quickly, it will soon begin to evaporate, forever to elude your conscious grasp of it.

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By the way, it’s important to go into this process with this attitude:

Be open to finding ways to improve yourself.

The problems we have with our relationships help us see the problems within ourselves.  Working on them within the context of our relationships isn’t easy, but it is essential to our own growth as well as to the success of our relationships. As Ram Dass says, “Relationships are the hardest Yoga.” Truly, it is when we fix our internal problems that we do the most to solve the problems in our relationships.

The image on this post is a card from my RWS 2.0 Tarot deck. 

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