tarot for grief

content warning: brief mention of depression and suicidality

Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-the potency of grief as a universal experience
-different ways that grief can look and feel
-my own experiences with grief
-three simple ways to use tarot for supporting your grief
-resources to help

Free tarot spread archive
Grief & hope workbook
Archetype Medicine lecture
Magician’s Lens imagination & hope course
3am.tarot readings
Full collection of grief resources
Good Grief Network

For more on Meg, check out 3amtarot.com, and order your copy of Finding the Fool through Bookshop.org or your favorite local bookstore.

Find episode transcripts and more over on the CARD TALK website. And as a special thank you for CARD TALK listeners, click here to download a completely free, exclusive workbook for building your best personal tarot practice.

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Chapters

• 0:11 Exploring Grief With Tarot Practice
• 6:45 Navigating Grief Through Tarot Practice
• 12:46 Tarot Spreads for Grief Healing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:11

I'm Meg Jones-Wall and this is Card Talk, a mini podcast for tarot basics and evergreen insights. I'm here to help you build a tarot practice that works for you. Glad you're here. Glad you're here. In today's episode, we are going to talk about using the tarot as part of a personal grief practice, or using the tarot for grief work.

Speaker 1: 0:34

A lot of my work centers on and focuses on and explores grief in various ways, and I find grief really fascinating and important because grief is a fundamental human experience. It's pretty universal, regardless of gender, race, class, identity. We all experience personal loss in one way or another, even the most charmed, even the most wealthy. We're all going to experience grief in some way or another at some point in our lives. Now, the ways that we process it, the resources that we have available to us to move through it, might be really really different, but grief itself is extremely common and extremely human. Now there are a lot of really beautiful and useful frameworks for approaching and understanding grief, but because my work is in tarot and because the framework that I use for so many things is tarot, I will say that I find tarot to be a really powerful tool for making a companion of our grief Tarot can really help us explore what grief means to us and how it looks for us personally, identifying the different ways that grief takes up space in our life, and can also help us walk alongside our grief.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Grief does not have to be the enemy, even at times when it feels really heavy or painful or impossible to live with. Now, as a global community, we are living through and in a period of deeply profound collective grief. We are observing and being impacted by an escalating climate crisis. We are witnessing multiple genocides that we live stream every day through our phones. We are watching the increasing impact of COVID and long COVID. We are witnessing rising fascism. There are so many things happening that demand our grief. Grief is really deeply pervasive in a global and collective way and, of course, there's also a lot of personal grief happening. Right now. Some people are losing loved ones, others are experiencing grief around relationships, around safety, around a lack of ideals or differing ideals, lack of finances, lack of resources, fear of the future and so many more things. Right, personal grief living within the context of collective grief can be so much. Now. Grief is an extremely real part of being alive, as I said, but I think it can be especially painful if, like me, you live in a place like the United States, where grief is not something that we are particularly equipped to manage or to navigate or really to even identify.

Speaker 1: 3:09

Our society tends to really downplay grief, to minimize it or to consider it an inconvenience. Right, we might hold space for grief for a little bit, but then it kind of becomes just something that is annoying or frustrating, something that we want to move through or move past. Grief becomes something we want to get over as quickly as possible so that we can get back to normal. Think about the intense pressure put on employees and also on leadership to be back to work as soon as possible after even a major loss. The lack of time that is given for grieving or for mourning in any capacity. Think about how, even though people are still dying every single day from COVID, we don't even have a day of mourning set up or a national place for the grief for those who have been lost. Think about how uncomfortable people are with really overt expressions or displays of grief and how quickly support can drop off in the weeks after even a major loss.

Speaker 1: 4:06

I say all of this because grief can be really isolating, no matter where you are, but especially in places that don't have a lot of respect for loss or that would prefer to deny that death or loss or grief are parts of life. And look, tarot is not the same as a person that can hold you or that can wipe away your tears or cook you a meal or clean your house right. Tarot is not the same as a social group that is going to be there for you or chosen family that's going to show up in dark times. But tarot can give us a therapeutic and honest space to process some of our heaviest feelings, to find the support that we need in dark or lonely moments and to explore what we're feeling in a really gentle and open way. I don't believe that tarot should be the only tool you use to reckon with and navigate your grief, but tarot can be a really great tool to have in your toolbox. It can work really beautifully with other support modalities like breathwork, like therapy, like group therapy, like medication, like other things that are going to help you move through the darkest periods of your grief, and with these larger kind of broad, collective griefs that don't necessarily have a clear end in sight, I think that tarot can be a really useful framework and system and regular routine or ritual or practice to have as a way of consistently visiting your grief, of making a companion of your grief and of really learning what your grief looks like and how it shows up and what it can use in times of real sharpness or real tenderness.

Speaker 1: 5:40

Now, while I'm not going to share my life story, I do think it's worth exploring a little bit why I am so interested in grief. Besides the fact that I have Chiron directly on my Ascendant and a sixth house, scorpio sun that is co-present with Pluto, saturn and the South node, I think there's also a lot in my own personal history that really points to a deep relationship and an intimate long-term relationship with grief. As a white person from a middle-class family, I have lived a fairly privileged life in a lot of ways, but I have also experienced quite a bit of grief. I spent the first few decades of my life really aggressively hiding who I was, pretending to be straight and cis and able-bodied in order to better fit in with my very evangelical family and conservative social groups. It was easier to hide in plain sight, but that does have a cost. I didn't get medical care that I needed. I didn't get social support that I needed and when hard things happened I felt more isolated than ever. I've lost close friends, from a best friend when I was 16 to friends later in life, from illnesses but also from painful falling outs.

Speaker 1: 6:45

I have lived with major depressive disorder for most of my life and have endured periods of self-harm. I have also survived two suicide attempts. I'm glad to be here, but it's been a long road. I have endured neglect and abandonment. There's also just a lot of grief as someone who is chronically ill and disabled and immunocompromised, especially in a worldwide pandemic, and I have had to set really strict, difficult boundaries with people that I love, people that I cannot safely have in my life anymore, which brings a tremendous amount of grief that I still have to navigate every day. Of course, more broadly, I am also a person who cares really deeply about our environment and about marginalized communities, which means that pretty much every day right now, I'm reading the news and find something to grieve deeply.

Speaker 1: 7:29

Now, now, I wouldn't trade my tender heart or my big feelings for anything. They are such a important and big part of who I am. I'm really grateful to be compassionate, but it is very painful to bear witness to atrocities and devastation, to witness pain on such an immense scale and to feel so powerless to combat it. Now, I'm not telling you this so that you feel sorry for me or something, but I am telling you this so that you recognize that grief is everywhere and that everyone has some kind of grief story or grief experience. We all have to find ways to live with our grief, to move through our grief, to sit with our grief, to weather those internal storms in different ways. There is a lot of grief in the feeling of uncertainty. I think for a lot of people, uncertainty is kind of what grief looks like that sense of anxiety, that inability to control something which is so co-present with grief. Those famous five stages of grief that you might be familiar with were never designed to be a through line trajectory or like a map for how grief manifests in everyone, but I think that rage, denial, bargaining and depression are all very, extremely common and very legitimate reactions to grief.

Speaker 1: 8:43

For a lot of people, compartmentalization is a true and necessary survival strategy. Especially if you have a really demanding job or a lack of support in your life, it might literally feel like there's no time for you to grieve, or if you allow yourself to grieve, you're going to completely fall apart and not be able to put yourself back together again. I will say that in my experience, unfortunately, I found that while you can compartmentalize and kind of kick the can of grief down the road for a while, you're still generally probably going to have to deal with it at one point or another, which is why compartmentalization, while it can be a good short-term survival strategy, is not generally a great long-term survival strategy. For others, grief can be incredibly raw just all the time. It becomes this really tender, like aching open wound almost. It just feels like it's right at the surface all the time, like something that's never going to heal. And that can be a really different but also completely valid experience of grief that just endless overflow, that feeling that you can't keep yourself together, regardless of the circumstance or situation.

Speaker 1: 9:50

There's a reason that the death card in tarot is a four card because it is a boundary of sorts. It is a kind of control that we don't necessarily have agency over. It's a hard line that we didn't draw and there is a lot of pain in that, and that inability to fix something or change something, that forced surrender, that sense of uncertainty around what we can actually do to overcome or move through something. Now, regardless of how your grief expresses itself or how it feels, as well as how you manage it or move through it in your daily life, I really do think that grief is one of the most authentic and powerful sensations that we experience as human beings and as corporeal beings in this world. Right, grief reveals so much about us and who we are and what we care about and what matters to us. And when we're able to show our grief, love and compassion, instead of just being frustrated at ourselves for going numb or getting angry or feeling like we're drowning, it can really help us to navigate it with a bit more generosity and can make it an easier thing to swallow. I can't fix the problems of the world. I cannot take away your grief and I cannot give you back whatever you've lost, but I can give you a couple of ways really simple ways that you can use the tarot to explore and tend to your grief, and I can also offer you some different resources I've made that live in this specific intersection and might be able to help.

Speaker 1: 11:22

The first thing I want to talk about is tarot readings or using your cards to shuffle, ask a question and pull a card and interpret that card as an answer or as a response. Now, tarot readings can be really polarizing when you're grieving, because for some people they feel really good and for other people they might feel really bad. So I really want to encourage you to use discernment when you're trying to decide if you want to, and how you're going to, pull tarot cards for yourself around grief. Especially, I think, using a spread that's kind of broad or general that isn't particularly clear or support focused, or just pulling cards without a spread and not necessarily having a super clear question. Sometimes those kinds of readings can do more harm than good. It's why, when we're feeling really activated or really stressed or really emotional, tarot readings for ourselves can be really challenging. So if you really want to do a reading, this could be a great time to ask a friend to pull cards for you or to get a professional reading from someone who can be a little bit more objective. However, if you want to pull cards for yourself, I typically would recommend a really simple tarot spread. That's going to be the most helpful for giving some shape and framework to your readings, especially because in the depths of grief. It can be easy to see tough cards and sort of get lost in those cards or to feel really activated or stressed out by those cards.

Speaker 1: 12:46

If you want to do a two card spread, I suggest shuffling up your deck and pulling out two different cards, one for each position. The first card is going to be a card to represent how you feel in this moment just a way of the cards acknowledging your emotions and the way that you feel right now. And then read the second card as representative of how you can show some compassion to yourself and to your grief right now, an action item, something that you can literally do in order to take care of yourself. I really like this one when I'm feeling particularly alone with my grief, because the cards get an opportunity to just acknowledge the heavy feelings that you might be holding and also just offer a path forward, something that you can do in this moment to take care of yourself, which I find really helpful when I'm having a hard time. And if you prefer three card readings, you can also try shuffling up your deck and pulling three cards out.

Speaker 1: 13:39

Read the first as an outlet for your grief that you can utilize. You know some place that you can put some of your grief, a way that you can let your grief express itself. Read the second card as a way that you can show yourself some love, so kind of like the second position. In that first reading we did something you can do for yourself in this particular moment to offer yourself some grace, some sweetness, some kindness. And then read the third card as a truth, to remember something that remains true no matter how you're feeling in this particular moment, this can really serve as something to hang on to or a way to anchor into yourself, even if it feels like you're lost in your grief completely. I like the spread when my feelings feel too big and I don't quite know what to do with them or how to manage them. This feel like really actionable steps to me to show up for myself in ways that are realistic and are going to be actually supportive. And the reason that I recommend these two spreads is because they're really about comfort, clarity and self-compassion. They are really designed to hold space for your heavy emotions without bringing in too much sharpness or leaving too much wiggle room to kind of get lost in the sauce if you pull a card that feels challenging for you personally and, of course, I have lots of other tarot spreads available on my website and through my newsletter, so I'll put links to those in the show notes as well.

Speaker 1: 15:00

Now, if a reading just feels like too much, which I think is extremely real, one of my favorite exercises to do instead of tarot readings is to manually go through the cards in your tarot deck and find a card that represents the emotions you're feeling in this moment. You can choose more than one If it feels like a combination of cards is going to best represent the emotions that feel the most present or the loudest for you. But really think about the emotions that you're feeling and the cards that reflect those emotions. Once you've chosen them like lay them out on a surface, and then I want you to look at those cards and really think about what the medicine for those cards might be, what might serve as a comfort or a balm or a solution to the problems of those cards. And once you've identified what you think the potential medicine for those emotion cards is, then go through your deck a second time, leaving those emotion cards out, and find some cards that you feel represent that medicine that you were just thinking about. Lay them out side by side and look at them all together and then you can really journal about them.

Speaker 1: 16:04

You can think through what that medicine might look like for you, how that card could serve as an archetype that you want to work with or just as inspiration for a way that you can take care of those emotions in this exact moment. To give you an example of what that might look like you might just be feeling really stuck, really stagnant. There's all of these obstacles around you. You've kind of backed yourself into a corner and you just cannot see a path forward. It feels like you just can't think through what to do next. You just feel really stuck and frozen. So you might end up pulling the hanged one as an archetype, as well as like the eight of swords. It might feel like you cannot move in any direction, like you don't know what to do, like you're out of control, and it might feel like those two cards really represent that feeling of stuckness and being trapped and just feeling out of options. So then, looking at those cards together, you might think, okay, what's a balm for this? It might be movement, but it might also be imagination, right? It might also be looking at the situation from a different perspective right, it might also be getting creative with your problem solving or being able to approach the situation in a new way. And when you think about cards, of creative problem solving, of imagination, of perspective, of looking at something in a new way, you might think about the magician archetype. Or you might think about, like the four of wands right, you might think about momentum and structure and intentionality, as well as dreaming really big and feeling really well-resourced, and then you might decide that you want to work with the magician or with the four of wands, or with strength, perhaps right, you could journal with those cards, you could meditate with those cards, you could really think about what those cards might have to offer to you as advice and medicine in this particular moment. So I find this to be a really supportive exercise when readings feel like too much, but I still want to work with my cards in a really tangible way.

Speaker 1: 17:59

The last thing that I just have to mention, because of who I am as a person, is journaling. I know I'm a broken record about journaling, but there are just so many ways to use this technique and so many ways that it can be useful. Especially when emotions are heavy. Journaling does not have to be complete sentences or beautiful words. It doesn't have to be something that anyone else sees. It doesn't even have to make sense to you or to anyone else. All journaling has to be, I think, is, honest. I would encourage you to try writing down keywords or bullet points or sentence fragments, making space for doodles, writing down song lyrics or pieces of poetry or movie quotes literally whatever. Sometimes just giving yourself space to put your feelings down on a page, whether that's connected with tarot or not, can just be really therapeutic and helpful. It can be nice to just have it live somewhere that's not in your body.

Speaker 1: 18:50

If you want to use tarot for this, there's a lot of different ways to do tarot journaling, but, particularly when emotions are heavy, I like to go through the archetypes, both the major arcana, like Trump archetypes, as well as the minor arcana archetypes, which are what I consider the court cards, and find one that really represents the kind of energy that I want to have. Right, if I'm feeling like my creativity is really flailing or floundering. If I feel like I can't look at something and have a million ideas, I might pick a card from the suit of wands. Right, or, again, the magician, if I'm feeling like I'm really struggling to trust myself or know who I am, I'm definitely going to pull out the priestess or the king of cups, right. And if I just want to be brave and do something really badass, I might pick one of the knights, right. They're really courageous to me, they feel like they are really willing to take some risks and make some bold moves. And then I like to journal about that, about what it might look like for me to really embody that energy, how I could practically step into that energy or embrace that energy in my life. In other words, what it would look like if that archetype was me for a day, what they might do in my shoes, and then that gives me some action items and some feelings to sort through. That for me feel really helpful.

Speaker 1: 20:05

But you can also pair journaling with basically anything else, right. You can journal about a tarot reading that you've done, about that medicine exercise that I just shared, about a card that perhaps keeps coming up for you, literally whatever you like and whatever is going to feel good. This episode is going a little bit long, but I want to share some additional resources with you before I go, because I have a lot of resources, specifically on grief as well as on hope. Again, I'm going to put everything into the show notes here, but I do have a brand new journaling workbook. I've just released it and it's already really getting beautiful, lovely reviews from the people who purchased it right away. So I highly recommend that if you want to use tarot and journaling, or if you feel overwhelmed and you want some support. You want a framework that you can follow, a workbook that you can just move your way through.

Speaker 1: 20:50

I also have an upcoming archetype medicine lecture that is going to talk you through more in-depth ways of working with different archetypes and using them to support yourself through challenging times. I am running an imagination based course on the magician, which is really all about learning to expand your imagination, to get more creative with your problem solving and to really activate a sense of hope within yourself. And I'm also open for readings again, which means that you can work with me one-on-one if you'd like, for a terror reading about finding hope in the dark, for working with a particular archetype, or I do custom readings, and we can talk about anything you like. Please, if you're struggling, check out some of these resources. I have things at a lot of different price points to try and give you the support that you need.

Speaker 1: 21:34

This episode is already filled with tips and tricks, so instead of ending with another one, I just want to say I know that things are impossibly hard and dark and scary right now. I'm feeling it. I'm sure you're feeling it too. I really want to encourage you not to deny your grief, but to also remind you that you don't have to lose yourself in it either. There are absolutely ways to sit in that threshold of grief and hope and hold space for both simultaneously.

Speaker 1: 22:02

Seeking out hope, activating your imagination, finding ways to take care of yourself doesn't mean you're not grieving, but rest and pleasure and comfort are necessary for you to be able to keep fighting. Okay, please, don't feel guilty for trying to take care of yourself in these impossible times. Don't stop fighting, but don't deny yourself the things that you need to survive as a human being either. Again, I do think that tarot can be a really powerful companion tool for these practices, but I also just really want to encourage you to find outlets for your emotions, to share your feelings with others and be in community with people who share your values, and also to use whatever tools you have at your disposal to take care of yourself and the people that you love. That is all I have for you today, but, as always, thank you so much for spending this time with me, sending you a lot of love and safety, and I'll be back again soon with more Card Talk.

Speaker 1: 22:58

Card Talk episodes are always free for everyone to enjoy, so if you love what you hear, please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing, recommending Card Talk to a friend or donating to help with production costs. You can find episode transcripts. Learn more about me production costs. You can find episode transcripts. Learn more about me and join my signature Tarot Conservatory membership program through my website, 3amtarotcom. Thanks for listening and see you next time.