There are moments when the body hears what the mind cannot. A card is drawn. Nothing dramatic, just an image. A woman holding a sword. A tower mid-collapse. A hand offering a cup. And something in the body stirs. A sensation behind the heart. A slight turn in the stomach. A warmth in the throat that wasn’t there before.
These are not ideas. They are thresholds.
The image arrives as a whisper. Sometimes it takes days to settle in. Sometimes it lodges itself in the breath immediately. The body feels it before the words come. Long before meaning becomes clear.
In this way, divination is not about fortune. It is about listening. Not listening for instruction, but for intimacy. A sacred intimacy with what is trying to emerge from the unconscious. A mood, a message, a wound ready to become visible.
To approach a card with reverence is to honor the feminine movement of psyche. One must wait. One must receive. There is nothing to force. The image opens when it is ready, like the body in grief, like the body in love.
You may be given a card that repels you. A sharp sword. A figure bound. Ten rods weighing a back to the ground. The mind may flinch. The hand may reach for another card. But the image has already done its work. It has entered through the skin. It asks not for interpretation but for presence.
The sacred lives in these small moments. Where the breath catches. Where the belly sinks. Where the eyes widen and turn away. The sacred asks to be felt. It arrives through the body’s gate, not through the intellect’s need to explain.
In this work, the body becomes the vessel for meaning. Meaning is not delivered from above. It is born through lived tension. Through sitting with the uncomfortable. Through allowing what was frozen to begin to thaw.
To draw a card is to agree to be touched. By the archetype. By the complex. By the silence that surrounds the symbol.
Each image has a rhythm. Some are slow and thick. Others quick and sharp. Some ask to be placed on the womb or held to the chest. Others ask to be walked with, for days, without answers.
There is an invitation here. To soften. To let the defenses rest. To allow the card to do its quiet work. The work of loosening what has been clenched too long. The work of naming what the mouth could never say.
Sometimes the image brings shame. Or tenderness. Or the memory of something long buried. In those moments, the symbol becomes medicine. Not in curing. In deepening. In making room for the unlived life to take breath again.
You do not need to understand. You only need to stay with what is felt. The image will carry you. It knows the way through. It comes from a place older than language. Older than your name.
In the silence that follows the draw, you may notice a single tear, a shift in posture, a sudden stillness. These are not reactions. They are openings. Doorways through which the feminine enters. Not the feminine as softness or sweetness. The feminine as truth in the body.
When we live from this place, even a small card can carry the weight of the soul. The Two of Swords may become a prayer. The Eight of Cups a breath of release. The Queen of Pentacles a memory of your mother’s silence.
The deck is not a system. It is a living body of images, each one connected to the deep well of psyche. To touch one is to touch the whole. To feel one is to remember a part of yourself long disowned.
And in this remembering, something sacred begins to stir. Not loudly. Not all at once. But enough to open a space. Enough to let the symbol land. Enough to let the body speak its truth.
Rose – Soulful Nuggets Team
This blog is a reflection on the course ‘A Jungian Perspective on the Tarot‘
by Jungian Analyst Ken James on JungPlatform.com.
