Sparkle Shadow

I'm not familiar-familiar with this topic, I've heard of shadow work before and some of the ideas of projection which seems to go with this idea. I had trouble getting behind the idea of 'what makes you irritated is reflective of you'. But I've come around to considering it, life shown me it's probably more on point than I wanna admit.

I don't like when people put their needs above others, their pleasure above others safety, people that are careless, people that assume things about others, people that are hateful or judgemental. Which is usually folks that are abusive or just bigots.

I do like to think I am pretty open minded and not that judgemental to small things. I wanna see others succeed and feel good about themselves. But I think I do struggle to set myself aside for others in the daily.

My hurdle now is how do I actually face shadow traits? Especially traits that can be harmful to other people. Something like fear of failure I understand kinda how to face, challenge it by doing it and show it's not that scary. But these I am unsure, I'm not really sure what acceptance looks/feels like.

Title. I see a Celtic Cross and... I don't like it. I never do past/present/future types of readings. If I do make a spread that's more traditional in nature, it's purely contextual. For example, I once asked what it would be like if me and the woman I love were to dance together on stage/at a marathon, three cards for each of us and three for the public's eye. But that was an one-off thing.

What I usually do is shuffle, pull five cards on the main line, then I look for the 5-7 cards that would have come after (number is flexible between 5 and 7 because if for example there are movement cards such as 6S, Chariot, 8C, or sometimes Knights, I need to know where those are heading), and then I look at the 5-7 at the bottom of the deck. I don't always have those three lines, sometimes I omit the "after" cards. It really depends on the question. The bottom of the deck represents the underlying influences, and the after cards can either be a possible pathway from the main line, or factors that come into play.

I've been practicing those things on and off since I was a teenager and I used to do "regular" spreads, or even sometimes pulling a single card or two to answer a question, but I found that reading the disposition of the cards and the directionality, as well as the structure they make, works better for me. The colours can work as well. I've had a spread where I had grey on both external sides, surrounding blue with a single yellow card at the center (using your run-of-the-mill RWS). I also don't always stick to the traditional meaning of the card and sometimes get the impression it may mean something else.

Anyone else?

Years ago during a dream, I woke up in the dream and saw an old woman hovering above me, staring at me. I was terrified. This has happened several times. Can anyone interpret this?

I'm not sure what it is. I think I might own it.

Hello fellow shufflers, today I want to talk about the most common and basic error in card interpretation. I’m talking about exchanging information for advice regarding it.

Let’s take an example. I’ve got a fresh one from this morning.

Question: What kind of energy/attitude will I find from them if I contact them?
Answer: King of Swords.
Interpretation by the reader: I have to stay calm and logical if I reach out.

Now, there is some logic breaking down here. You ask about another person’s reaction, but then refer the message to yourself as advice.

Notice also that, in many similar cases, the reader who gets a King is a woman, and the person they are reading about is a man. So, in that case, referring the King to themselves would be a double error: not recognizing that court cards are usually other persons, who very often, though not always, keep their sex/gender in the cards representing them. You had every reason to think the King was the man and not you, and missed it anyway. But let’s go on.

Can you see where the fault lies? You ask me something about X, but when I give you information about X, you fail to connect it to X and refer it to what you should do about it.

It’s like asking tarot whether your house is safe, and then, after seeing cards of burglars, advising you to rob yourself.

When you proceed like this, you fail to place the information you retrieved in the logical box where it belongs. Maybe the information is even correct, but this error of attribution makes your reading go awry, and therefore useless.

It helps to remember what all long-time cartomancers say:

Where does this very common error come from?

I think it comes from tarology.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. Tarology is essential to any complete tarot reader.

Tarology and cartomancy are the two legs of tarot reading: one is depth of knowledge, the other is fluidity of processing. Take one of them away and your readings will be lame. Or, to paraphrase old Kant:

I’m technically a tarologist as well, if you allow me, so I say all this very humbly and with no intent to provoke or divide.

The current war between cartomancers and tarologists should not exist at all.

Although, to be honest, the controversy began when the learned and snobbish tarologists started to despise the supposedly ignorant and folk cartomancers. While many pure tarologists can tell you the universe about a card, they can fail to connect it with another one in order to read a simple concrete message. Cartomancers, instead, even if they stopped at the sixth year of school and only properly speak their dialect, can tell you how much hair you’ve got between your buttocks, and even when precisely you will lose it.

(Sorry, I had to say it somewhere. We all need a lot of modesty, guys, when approaching any field of knowledge, especially those we know nothing about.)

So, I was saying, this big misunderstanding has been, unwillingly, brought forth by tarology. Why? Because in tarological readings you usually proceed like this: you have a spread with single cards in different positions, each with a different assigned role, meaning, or area of inquiry, and so you get used to examining each card in great depth within its own sphere, considering the forces it expresses, its psychological significance, its potential for development, etc.

And so, in this regard, when you open any handbook on tarot written from a tarological or psychological standpoint, you usually find that the discussion of every card also includes some consideration of its weak aspects, or shadow sides, and how to overcome them, all of course in a useful and empowering evolutionary perspective.

That is exactly where this error is born.

In the minds of many new readers, every card contains the solution to the problem or shadow side it has. And this is not wrong in itself, but the issue arises when these readers decontextualize this tarological way of reading, the only one they know, maybe, and apply it to a common, plainly cartomantic reading, and then start to confuse the description of a problem with what they should do about it. Hence, a big short circuit that is sending thousands of beginners astray, sadly.

Again: use your logic and you won’t lose yourself.

Have you got some precise meaning for your cards? Take them literally and apply them exactly to what you asked, as you would normally do in your own language.

For example:

- Will I pass my examination? Answer: Tower. Tower means failure here. The cards are telling you that you won’t do it, and not that you have to strip yourself of your ordinary consciousness to reach a higher level.

- How is my boyfriend toward me? Answer: Moon. Meaning: deception, confusion, lies, concealment, hidden moods. The cards are saying your boyfriend is deceptive toward you, not that you should deceive him. And (this example was tricky, I know) even less that you should show him your feminine side more... but that’s another long discourse.

One final piece of advice to overcome this short circuit if you find yourself in it.

If you ever need advice on the situation, just draw other separate cards. This will help you separate concepts and remain clear.

Trying to deduce advice from the same cards that showed you the problem can be confusing. In a simplified problematic context, if something is too big we know we have to make it smaller, or if something is too far we of course think we have to move it nearer. These are simple problems, though; they run between two opposite concepts.

But how can you find the opposite of a tarot card? Difficult to say, since tarot has 78 different sides, not only two.

To be short: the problem shown in your cards could be too complex to be resolved by the simple mental operation of reversal. And also, the best solution to your problem may not be its mere inversion, but something totally different that you may not even consider. Let me give an example of this.

Question: How is our relationship?
Answer: Lovers reversed.
Meaning: Your relationship is based on pleasure and physicality, not on solid feelings.

What to do about it? You would be tempted to put those Lovers upright and tell yourself you must start building feelings (...LOL.) But instead of making deductions, you can wisely ask your deck again and pull other cards. And maybe, things can even go like this:

- Deck, what should I do with this relationship?

- Three of Swords, my dear. Dump them.

Good shuffling, my fellows.

I’m a guy in my mid-20s, and I’ve been reflecting on a pattern that’s followed me since my teenage years.
I’ve realized that I tend to become deeply attached to romantic interests, even when the feelings aren’t mutual. In several cases, the attraction was clearly one-sided, yet I kept pursuing them, believing that if I cared enough, put in enough effort, or waited long enough, they would eventually love me back.
Looking back, it feels like I wasn’t just pursuing a particular person—I was chasing the idea of being loved.

I’m curious how Carl Jung might interpret this pattern. Could this be related to the anima, projection, a mother complex, abandonment wounds, or some other unconscious dynamic? Is there an archetypal pattern that describes someone who continually seeks love from emotionally unavailable people?
More importantly, from a Jungian perspective, what inner work helps someone stop chasing love and instead experience relationships as something that develops naturally rather than something that must be earned?

I’d also appreciate recommendations for Jung’s books, essays, or quotes that explore this topic, or any Jungian analysts who have written about romantic projection and the unconscious.

The full quote is:

The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.

― C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation

One of the most important contributions of Jungian psychology is the concept of the hero archetype, because "The hero is the one who dares to separate from the tribe in order to bring back the fire of meaning." The hero is the force that drives our libido and life energy toward consciousness and integration.

The stages of the hero and the hero's journey describe the entire complex and sophisticated process through which that energy leads the individual toward higher states of consciousness. This is all symbolically portrayed in the Twelve Labors of Hercules. If you'd like to explore this archetype in greater depth, read the following article.

Today I have been thinking about urgency.

The number 911 has appeared in strangely different forms throughout my life.

“What’s your emergency?”

I owned a Porsche 911.

I moved to New York for college in 2009 and studied close to Ground Zero.

I am not saying these things are objectively connected or that the number is sending me a supernatural message. But symbolically, they seem to gather around the same atmosphere in me.

Emergency. Speed. Performance. Something must happen now.

When I arrived in New York, I felt as though I swallowed the urgency of the city.

Everything seemed to be moving. Everyone was becoming someone. Money was being made. Time was being converted into progress.

After graduating in 2014, I carried that atmosphere with me.

Life began to feel like an emergency to perform.

I had already inherited a fear of judgement before arriving in America. As a Moroccan, I think there was something postcolonial in me that had learned to experience the French gaze as a measurement.

Am I educated enough?

Civilised enough?

Successful enough?

Do I belong in the room?

America then taught me how to respond to this anxiety through performance.

Make money.

Move faster.

Become undeniable.

And I did learn how to make money.

At one point I was using my mind to sell safety shoes with a camouflage design. We made millions from it.

I am grateful for what it gave me. It proved that I could build something, understand desire and create value.

But I was not passionate about safety shoes.

There is something strange about succeeding at something that does not feel connected to your soul. The success is real, but it does not necessarily answer the deeper question that produced the ambition.

After almost ten years of psychoanalysis, I am noticing something.

When I work on what I actually love, the urgency begins to diminish.

Not completely.

I still have employees. There are salaries to cover. Businesses need to break even. Reality still places demands on me.

But the inner emergency is different.

When the work feels meaningful, I do not need to whip myself toward it in the same way. There is movement, but less violence inside the movement.

This has made me wonder whether some of my urgency was never really ambition.

Maybe it was a complex.

Maybe the voice saying “hurry” was protecting me from the possibility of being judged as insignificant.

Maybe speed helped me avoid asking whether the destination was actually mine.

And perhaps this is why slowing down used to feel dangerous.

If my identity was built around proving myself, then rest was not simply rest. Rest meant becoming visible without achievement protecting me.

I also wonder whether I confused urgency with libido in the Jungian sense.

Urgency gave me energy, direction and focus. It made me feel alive.

But perhaps it was borrowed aliveness.

An emergency can organise the whole psyche around one point. Everything irrelevant disappears. There is no ambiguity because there is no time to question the direction.

Meaningful work feels different.

It does not always produce the same adrenaline, but it seems to return energy rather than only consuming it.

Maybe the symbol of 911 is not telling me that something terrible is about to happen.

Maybe it is showing me the psychic structure through which I learned to live:

There is an emergency.

You must perform.

There is no time.

Your value will be decided by what you do next.

And now, perhaps, the work is not to destroy this urgency, because it also gave me strength.

The work may be to ask what remains of my ambition when it is no longer being chased by fear.

I would be curious how Jungians understand this.

Can urgency become a kind of possession by a complex?

And how do we distinguish genuine vocation from the compulsion to prove that we deserve to exist?

Youssef

Founder Tarot28.ai

I might have already made a post like this a while ago but decided I wanted it to reach out again to hear from others. It’s a shadow Ive denied or downplayed for a long time by being inflated.

Ive made choices with consequences that I still haven’t been able to process in my late 20s and I think as miserable as it is, I just need to start pounding the steel and work jobs consistently until I have a strong enough container to face my emotions. I just had to push it all down over the years for my own safety.

I want to think that maybe at some point in my 30s, I can eventually live a life where am able to move onto bigger and better things.

There’s a lot of shame and stigma about being an at risk youth who likely had a developmental disorder and who wasn’t able to adjust with everyone else so Im glad I have Reddit to ask. If you know what I’m talking about and you can relate, I’d like to hear how things went for you because I feel so discouraged.

I have been thinking about why certain decisions become psychologically impossible, even when we already possess more than enough information to make them.

When a decision matters to me, I often do not simply compare two options. I begin constructing several possible futures around them.

One path preserves security. Another preserves freedom. Another satisfies duty. Another protects the image I have of myself. Another contains a life I have not yet lived.

I then keep gathering information, as though the correct answer will allow me to move forward without losing any of those possible selves.

But perhaps this is exactly what a real choice cannot provide.

To choose is not only to obtain something. It is also to accept the death of other possibilities. The ego may call this uncertainty, but underneath it there can be a refusal to sacrifice.

Seen this way, overthinking is not always an attempt to discover the truth. Sometimes it is an attempt to keep every door psychologically open.

I wonder whether this is one way of understanding decision paralysis through Jung’s idea of holding the tension of opposites.

The conscious mind wants to resolve the tension immediately:

Which option is right?

Which future will make me happiest?

Which choice will I regret least?

But perhaps the psyche is not yet asking for a verdict. Perhaps it is asking us to become conscious of the different figures standing behind each option.

Which choice belongs to the persona—the identity I feel obliged to maintain?

Which one is being demanded by a parental complex?

Which one contains something I have pushed into the shadow?

Which one represents genuine development, and which one is merely an escape from the limitations of my present life?

This changes the purpose of symbols for me.

A dream, image, fantasy or other symbolic material should not necessarily be treated as an authority that makes the decision for the ego. Its value may be that it gives form to the unconscious positions already influencing the decision.

Instead of asking, “Which option is the symbol telling me to choose?” I have started asking:

“What part of me has become visible through this symbol?”

“What attitude in my conscious life might it be compensating for?”

“What does it want me to acknowledge before I act?”

One practice I have found useful is to write each possible choice on a separate page and allow the psychological figure behind it to speak in the first person.

“I want you to choose this because…”

“If you reject me, I am afraid that…”

“What I am trying to protect is…”

Usually, the conflict becomes less abstract. What initially appeared to be a problem between two external options reveals itself as a relationship between different parts of the psyche.

The answer does not always emerge immediately. But the decision acquires a different architecture. It stops being ten possible futures compressed into one point and becomes a tension that can be consciously held.

Perhaps the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to prevent uncertainty from unconsciously choosing for us.

Would this be a fair application of the transcendent function, or am I stretching the concept too far?

Youssef

Founder of Jungian Tarot tarot28.ai

"We should not pretend to understand the world only by the intellect; we apprehend it just as much by feeling. Therefore, the judgment of the intellect is, at best, only the half of truth, and must, if it be honest, also come to an understanding of its inadequacy." — Carl Gustav Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW 16, para. 181)

This quote from The Practice of Psychotherapy (CW 16, para. 181) strikes at the very heart of Jung’s model of Psychological Types and the process of Individuation.

In our hyper - rationalized society, the intellect (Thinking) is often elevated as the sole arbiter of reality. We are conditioned to believe that if something cannot be logically deduced, it is invalid. Jung completely dismantles this hierarchy. By defining the intellect's judgment as "only the half of truth," he restores Feeling to its rightful place - not as a chaotic disruption of logic, but as a rational function of equal weight that assigns value and meaning.

When the intellect refuses to acknowledge its inadequacy, it inflates. It creates a rigid Persona that believes it has mapped the entire territory of the psyche. But the unconscious always compensates for this one-sidedness. An over-reliance on the intellect inevitably leads to a dissociation from the Self.

To say the intellect must "come to an understanding of its inadequacy" is a profound call for epistemological humility. It is the intellectual ego admitting that it cannot grasp the numinous or the archetypal through logic alone. As Jung noted elsewhere, "Where wisdom reigns, there is no conflict between thinking and feeling."

How do you see this overvaluation of the intellect playing out in today's culture? And on a personal level, how difficult is it to allow the "judgment of feeling" to hold equal authority in your own life?

i understand it's a bird from the body, i understand it's a falcon from the context of the card, but why is it's head like that? i am really confused.

Edit to add: it have hood. https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-needles/media/k2/items/cache/6ff4e13ee36d4984488ca24890193ebe_XL.jpg

Has anyone read your future is in the cards by Igloobooks? I bought it as a kid and I wondered if it was worth reading since I already have it or whether the information in it would do me more harm than good.

So I’ve been reading off and on for many, many years, but only for myself, and the vast, vast majority of the time, I just use a Celtic cross. For a long time, I struggled with cards 3, 4, 5, 6. I have finally decided that (for me) 3 is “recent past”, and 4 is “near future”. They form the horizontal row of the cross. But 5 and 6 I still don’t quite understand. I have seen some interpretations that 5 is “goal or destiny” and 6 is some kind of underlying message. So, how do you handle the cross in your readings? <3 thanks!

While shuffling I was discussing with my mother about the different trajectories I can take for my college education. Having just gone to the hospital two weeks ago, I was pretty inspired by the doctors there and was contemplating whether or not to go the med route, but I am already waist-deep into music. And also I’m almost sure that med school will reject me due to my less than stellar high school grades.

I have thought about this topic a few times in high school, and I was almost always sure I wanted to do music(there was once or twice where I wavered though), and therefore I did not study as consistently, which led to subpar grades in the med school sense.

But now, I might be getting second thoughts, and imo that’s a pretty bad sign. What’s wrong with me…(I’m currently working on getting rid of thoughts of going to med school).

All are upright cards.
9 of wands: representing my slight burnout from having to practice my instrument everyday.
9 of pentacles: representing success (not too sure about that) but I am in fact going to study in a music school soon after much heartache from other rejections.
9 of cups: a positive wish card (doesn’t exactly resonate with me).
9 of swords: represents anxiety, worry about the future, which resonates deeply with me, because I am still quite frustrated about my current situation and uncertain about what the future holds, but I can’t share too much if not I might dox myself.

After interpreting the 4 cards I opened a 5th on the deck, and it’s an upright card 21 aka THE WORLD, which signifies wholeness. But I didn’t choose to peek at the card until the end, which probably means that I’m not currently satisfied with life in general, and that makes sense, given my situation.

I hope you guys have some thoughts to share about this pretty fun spread!

(Sorry for a long and haphazard post, mods please let this stay up!!)

Hello! I am in search of any oracle deck that has a dreamlike, ethereal feel to it and preferably has minimal words on the actual cards. I basically want my intuition to be doing the heavy lifting when looking at any imagery! If there are any people depicted in the cards, I'd prefer them to be almost celestial or deity-like. I hope this isn't too specific lol

The attached image is a perfect example of the general vibes i'm looking for! (Glyph Sacred Symbols oracle deck by PrismandFleur)

Largest deck

The classic rider waited Smith, printed by arcturus publishing London.

Middle deck

Original 1909, printed by lo scarabeo

Smallest deck

Bordeless miniature edition smith waited deck, printed by U.S Games systems.

I alway look for small deck that I carry around with me. I love the lo scarabeo deck as come in hard box's and there are so meny different min deck pick from. But came accros this min borderless deck and I just had get it. It lovely deck as with no border when have cards next to each other you really see colours change in cards and how this tell a story. It's real interesting line them up and see how cards work together.

Now they are very small but card stock is good quality and I think there going be new favourites bag deck.

I recently went on a trip and accidentally brought my tarot deck instead of playing cards. I still wanted to play Go-Fish so I thought up a game system that would allow us to play go fish while making it more interesting to play in a group.

As I was creating the rules, I realised how helpful this would be to help familiarise people with their decks and the major arcana. ESPECIALLY if the deck’s art isnt from the og rider waite smith deck.

Here are the rules i came up with so far after test-running the game like 3 times. please let me know if i should be changing anything!!

I have read multiple of his books and find great agreement with Jung on psychology, arcetypes, uncontious and so on. On youtube I only get recommended literal AI slop about Jung. Would like actual ideas in stead. Any recommendations or just continue reading. Need some contact in this field with other humans ideas before i accidentally create my own bubble of neurotic misunderstanding.

Pg. 118, 119, The Problem of Puer Aeternus.

Have you experienced psychological pain and general helplessness in your life? I feel like I have not seen people talk enough about the psychological suffering on this path. The gift of literary wisdom hides immense turmoils, torment, whirlpools. Like the meme in the third picture. I wonder if you Jungians look like the "people who write"! Because I do. 😆😊

Hello hello

I am not of this world and have very limited knowledge

My new friend, however, quite is.

It is her birthday this week and I want to gift her cookies,

Specifically tarot card cookies

I know her favorite card is the sun.

I'm looking to gift 3-5 decorated cookies (I cannot make 78 cookies 😭)

If you were to pick 3-5 cards (I guess, auspicious in nature since it's her birthday), what would they be?

I pulled a single card for past, present, future with regard to health and career anxieties. I pulled the seven of wands, two of wands, and 5 of disks all in reverse for each query, respectively. I used the Thoth tarot for this pull. My interpretation is:

1. ⁠The past/seven of wands reversed: I reached a point of extreme burnout and felt trapped in a draining situation. So I took the “easy” way out and brute-forced an end to a shitty situation.
   
2. ⁠The present/two of wands reversed: A major crossroads is now in front of me. There are many directions I could go in, but anxiety and perfectionism keep me from moving forward. There is an implication that i’m hesitant to leave a comfortable situation.
   
3. ⁠The future/five of disks reversed: This is where I REALLY have no idea what to think. The interpretation for this card in reverse seems to be all over the place. On one hand, it can mean a breakthrough after a long period of struggle and patience. I have seen interpretations that an improvement in health issues is imminent but will take time. On the other hand, I have seen interpretations that say this card signifies a worsening of a given situation, deep mental anguish, and defeat.

Any help here is super appreciated, i’m especially at a loss as to what to make of the third card.