April Giveaway: Free Tarot Card Reading

FREE READING OFFER!

Open to all followers of this blog who leave comments during the month of April. 

The winner's reading will be featured on this blog in May. 

Though commenting on my blog automatically includes you in the draw, the prize is optional. If the winner doesn't want the reading, I will draw another name. 

I'm looking forward to my very first giveaway and to seeing you all here during the month of April. Thanks for visiting me at Rowan Tarot!

An Oracle for a Change: Mystical Lenormand

In the last few years, I've put on ten pounds of the 70-odd I lost in 2004. It's finally hit home to me hard this year, because I finally have moved up a size in clothing. This makes me unhappy! I've not been very successful so far this year in changing my habits, and I was having a look at the Mystical Lenormand (AG Muller, 2005) and decided to do a quick draw about it. 


I'm new to Lenormand cards, so had a look through the LWB and found 'The Runway Layout', in which you are to select your significator (The Lady if you're female, The Man if you're male) and a card that represents your goal and place it away from the significator, then shuffle and draw some cards to place between to show what will get you from A to B. The instructions suggest to start by drawing three cards, up to seven, but no more than seven. 


So my question was: 'What should I do in order to achieve my goals of losing this weight and achieving vibrant health?' I selected The Sun as my goal, as it represents success, energy, will-power and optimism. 

Lady, Ship, Tower, Tree and Sun from Mystical Lenormand,  Urban Trosch, AG 2005

Universal Waite: 3 of Swords

Universal Waite, US Games 1990

What is the deal with the 3 of Swords? It's a curious card, no matter how you look at it, and not what you'd expect in the swords suit. Nearly every RWS deck uses the image of a valentine heart pierced by three swords, with some sort of rain or dripping around it. And of course it's traditionally seen as indicating heartbreak. Well, that doesn't seem quite right to me, somehow. I associate that sort of abject 'heartbreak' with the cups suit, the suit of emotion; I think a card meaning heartbreak would fit in better there, though none spring to mind at the moment. The swords I associate with thinking. So while these swords pierce the heart in the image, it is a false piercing of the heart. It's a false heart (being a valentine, after all). And it's even a false piercing, there being no blood in evidence. So this card doesn't read to me to be 'heartbreak' so much as 'making yourself miserable by what you're thinking about a situation.' You THINK you're heartbroken. But your heart is neither broken nor pierced, in reality. It's something you are doing to yourself. Or prolonging, or intensifying, in yourself. You keep stabbing YOURSELF in the heart.  You can stop. And just like the pain wouldn't go away instantly if you stopped poking yourself in the finger with a pin, the pain in your 'heart' won't stop instantly when you realise you're doing it to yourself. But it will stop, eventually. You have to stop stabbing yourself first, though. And stop believing that you're the victim of someone or something else. You're in control of how long you let this 'stabbing' continue.

Today's draw: The Empress

Today's card is The Empress from the Universal Waite tarot deck. I'm generally a bit perplexed by  majors in a daily draw, because they just seem too big and far-reaching for the events of a single day. (To be fair, I'm also generally perplexed by the 'daily draw' itself, and seldom try to read for myself using this technique.) It doesn't help that I rarely feel much like the Empress in myself, personally. With all her juicy pomegranates and waving matured grain, she represents aspects of the feminine that I don't readily identify with. I'm certainly no earth mother, definitely not interested in getting pregnant! On the other hand, I am interested today in avoiding the sort of squabbles that went on yesterday, so there is the sense of seeking harmony. And my hope is to get a lot of tasks done today...although I would have expected something like 8 of Coins for general productivity, whereas the Empress suggests producing something of an altogether more creative nature, and that seems unlikely to happen today!

Universal Waite: I shall not be moved

Yesterday I decided to get out my Universal Waite and as usual, I was surprised and delighted at how very good the deck is. Whenever I look at it, I realise that a good copy of the RWS is all you really need. Or at least all I really need. If I were down to just one deck, it would have to be Universal Waite.


Today I'm back to work after a week off, and also starting my a new timetable. It seems like a back-to-basics kind of day, so I'm using Universal Waite. Today's draw: 5 of Wands reversed. Now I don't usually shuffle for reversals, but last night, I accidentally knocked the deck off the arm of the sofa, and when I picked the cards up, I was aware that they weren't all upright, but didn't fix it. So today, I've drawn a reversed card. (I haven't posted it reversed as I can't bear to look at an image upside down! If I ever were to read reversals, I'd turn the card upright and mark it with a little stone or something).