The Wisdom of "Bad" Cards
Not exactly the ideal spread to pull before a meeting
This morning I was feeling really good about the day ahead of me. I took the initiative to set up some meetings on a big project I’m creating, and…out come the swords. I have a conversational relationship with my deck, so I kept asking questions and kept pulling. “What knowledge will serve me best for this meeting today?” THE TOWER, you know, just people being hurled out of a burning structure. Thanks deck, good talk.
In my early days of playing with the cards, I would have assumed this meeting was doomed, that my project is ill-advised, maybe that I’m not ____ enough to do this at all. I associated good cards with my “goodness,” which made me see “bad” cards with…you guessed it. But I’ve #grown, and no longer want to live in a bullshit good/bad binary. So instead, today, I pulled my journal out and sat with it all. I listened to those little voices, and I listened to the cards. I looked at the total of twelve or fourteen cards I pulled (lol), and took it all in.
My belief is that the cards are here to support us, even “bad” or “scary” ones. So how does the tower support me in this day, what needs to crumble here? (Hint: it’s damn near always conditioning, probably from capitalism.) Instead of increasing my anxiety about the day ahead, I acknowledged that this spread is not foretelling my doom (no spread is doing that, imo), it is supporting my growth (this is the way of the spread). By working with it rather than against or around it, it helped me see where my approach to this particular work is not aligned with my values, and how to reorient towards that alignment (three of cups, yaaaas).
Sometimes we come to the cards seeking validation, and we might not even realize it. But it can be a gut punch to see black skies and lightning bolts when we hoped for rainbows, and that alone is incredibly revealing for us. The cards are here to affirm and guide us, and those unexpected sharp ones can be the most affirming of all. They fall from the deck when we’re ready to be honest with ourselves, they illuminate what might be eluding us, and, most importantly, they let us know it’s time for us to see it.
