This comprehensive overview of the concept of the shadow and shadow work, is meant to serve as a complement to the 30-day immersive we have also developed. You can keep reading this primer, if you haven’t already, and when you’re ready, you may begin your own journey into the deep.

During a recent mentoring session, we found ourselves on the topic of elements. This obviously isn’t an uncommon place to travel when discussing the cards, however, after the session ended, the conversation continued. Through that, we began to think of the elements not just as reference points to understanding the cards, but as a framework to becoming more proficient with them.

In other words, what can the elements teach us about becoming effective tarot card readers? How can we use these basic concepts to enhance our practice and ensure we’re approaching things in a balanced and whole way?

We’re back with another installment of our new Bookshelf series. In this post, we’re sharing some of our November reads, providing a quick snapshot of its contents, our reflections and a link to purchase or learn more if one happens to catch your eye.

We hope you find this series interesting and maybe even useful. Please let us know if you’ve read anything we’ve listed, have taken recommendations from these posts or have any suggestions for us! We’d love to hear it!

We do a lot of reading around here and it is as much entertainment to us as it is skill building and personal development. Given this, we thought it may be fun to do a roundup at the end of each month to discuss the books that crossed out paths - the ones we loved, the ones we begrudgingly persevered through and anything in between.

We hope you find it useful and please let us know if you’ve read anything we’ve listed, have taken recommendations from these posts or have any suggestions for us! We’d love to hear it!

In Tarot, there are inevitably cards that challenge us more than others. These cards often do so because they are misunderstood, triggering on some level, are visually off-putting, or have some negative attribution(s) applied to them.

Last month, after taking a poll online, we wrote a post Challenging The Hierophant. In that piece, we explored some of the conceptions surrounding the card, what is known of its origin, and then offered ways to integrate and make peace with its energy. Following that, we asked what other cards were difficult to make sense of, and Judgement came out on top.

For those who have been keeping up with the work we’ve been doing around here, you’ll be familiar with our Musickal Meditation series, now available on YouTube. This set of meditations is designed to get you in touch with each of the 22 Major Arcana - as a way to connect, integrate and ritualize those archetypes. However, now that we’re a few in we thought it would be interesting, for further study, to add a short list of Qabalistic correspondences to each. We feel that this will offer the practitioner a chance to explore each card in a number of additional ways as listed below:

• It allows us to observe the interrelationship between the cards, the elements, the signs, the planets, and other important esoteric symbols and concepts, so we can absorb and integrate their properties as we construct our own personal image of the Tree of Life in our psyche.

• Each individual piece of information provides a window into the deeper meanings of the cards, and can thus be used as an aid for meditation or contemplation along with its corresponding musickal composition.

• The Hebrew letters in particular can either be visualized or used as mantras. (We have included phonetic pronunciation guides beside each letter name to eliminate any guesswork.)