How Tarot Helps When We are Suffering

Suffering is part of the human condition. Most spiritual thought and psychological study, is, in great part, an effort to understand and ease suffering. As a professional tarot reader, I often feel that my job is to help clients identify, understand and mitigate the things that cause them unnecessary suffering, and to help the manage the suffering that cannot be avoided.

While our current pandemic has sharpened everyone’s focus on the many problems we face, there were certainly problems before the pandemic, and there will be problems even once our current crisis is solved.

I have always been interested in the concept of suffering. I remember as a child asking my father, a Methodist minister, why God allowed people, or perhaps caused people, to suffer.

In college, I was fascinated with a book that was required reading in my psych 101 class, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. You are probably familiar with his premise, that we can tolerate a great deal of suffering, as long as we can find meaning in that suffering.

Often, I find that a purpose of tarot reading is to find meaning in difficulty. The process of divination with tarot lends itself well to discovering these sorts of insights.

When we study tarot, we realize that tarot study is not simply memorizing seventy-eight cards. Tarot study introduces us to the archetypes of tarot. That is, the characters, themes, lessons and experience that are common to all and understood by all.

As we learn these archetypes, and find that commonality of experience, we learn spiritual lessons to help us on our own journey through life. Over the past fifty years this process has come to be known as ‘The Fool’s Journey’.

Each Major Arcana card has a lesson to teach us about how to live life, find our balance, and journey toward our spiritual enlightenment. What is interesting is that none of these Major Arcana cards address suffering specifically, although all people suffer. While the Major Arcana cards address a host of issues, including things such as oppression, addiction, fairness, closure, patience, wisdom, compassion, mastery, responsibility, loneliness, self-awareness, education, meditation, and change, there is no Major Arcana card that is specifically and exclusively about suffering.

I think there is a lesson in that. Suffering is not the event, or the situation, but a reaction to the event or situation. The Hermit may speak of our loneliness, but whether we are suffering in our loneliness or handling it with patience is up to us. The Tower may reflect an uncomfortable occurrence, but how much we suffer with the Tower will depend largely on us.

In the Minor Arcana there are certainly cards that can speak of suffering. The Three, Eight, Nine and Ten of Swords, for example, or the Five of Pentacles or Nine of Wands, can all depict suffering.

Sometimes, in a reading, acknowledgement of our discomfort and misery is helpful. Sometimes holding space for our struggle is an important part of our healing.

We see that tarot divination can help us find meaning in our suffering, can help us find our place on our journey toward enlightenment, and can help us acknowledge our suffering. Divination can also help us find solutions for our suffering that are both practical and spiritual.

Tarot can also help us see the suffering of others.

I often think that the world divides itself into two types of people. There are those who have suffered and therefore want others to suffer as well. There are those who have suffered and want to help others avoid those same difficulties. The lessons of tarot that we learn in tarot study and find in tarot divination tend to steer us toward a path of compassion. In this way, tarot helps us heal ourselves, and each other.

Suffering is part of human existence. Tarot helps us understand our suffering, manage our suffering, heal our suffering, and learn from our suffering.

Tarot makes us aware of the suffering of others, and often holds us accountable to act with compassion toward others.

Suffering and Spirituality

So much modern spiritual practice suggests that our faith will bring us wonderful things during our lives. Many modern spiritual seekers are taught that here on Planet Earth we all deserve good things, and we all deserve the same good things. We all deserve to be healthy, and we all deserve to be wealthy.

If we do not have health or wealth we must have done something wrong, either in thought or action, to no longer deserve these things.

I think the word "deserve" needs to be thrown out the window. This is a word we use to judge each other. This is a word we use to justify greed. This is a word we use to overblow our importance on the planet.

Do we, as spiritual people, tell the person who just lost his legs in an accident that he didn't deserve legs? Do we believe some appallingly angry god didn’t want him to have legs? Should he believe that his own negative thoughts cost him his legs?

There are many spiritual teachers of many religions who teach exactly that.

Many people struggle with the concept that bad things sometimes happen to good people, and that good things sometimes happen for people who don't seem to "deserve them."

Social media is filled with memes about "karma," as if karma is some kind of hateful payback machine.

Some of these memes suggest that we should take delight in watching our enemies suffering and getting what they "deserve."

On the other end of the spiritual spectrum are religions whose beliefs include the need for self-inflicted suffering. There are Islamic sects that encourage even young children to celebrate certain holidays by slashing themselves with razor blades.

Research has revealed that Mother Teresa denied the children in her care pain-killers and hygiene because their suffering would bring them closer to Jesus.

Some traditions of modern Paganism practice scourging (ritual beating) to increase discipline and hasten enlightenment.

What do we learn from looking at these wildly divergent perspectives on suffering and spirituality?

Here's what I think.

If you live on Planet Earth you will suffer. Sometimes your suffering will be visible to others. Sometimes it will be something that no one else can see.

We can use that inevitable suffering to help us grow, learn and become stronger. Our suffering can increase our enlightenment and spiritual understanding, or our suffering can separate us from our Higher Power. It all depends on how we use our suffering, and how we find meaning in it.

Blessings and suffering are never about what we deserve. As soon as we start thinking in terms of what we, or what other people, deserve (good or bad) we have missed the point completely.

If we compare our scorecard of blessings vs. suffering to other people's scorecards we have also missed the point.

If we, as adults, chose ritual deprivation, scarification or mutilation to aid us spiritually, that's fine. If we choose it for our children we are not spiritual, we are abusive.

When we are suffering it is appropriate to think about how we have invited that into our lives, how we can heal from it and how we can learn from it. It is not appropriate to immediately assume that all suffering is subconsciously self-induced, or visited upon us as punishment from a Higher Power. Sometimes the Universe sets up challenges for us to bring us to a place of spiritual understanding. Sometimes we need to go through difficulty to get to something better.

When we see others suffer it is important for us to lend aid in whatever way we can. If we delight in the sufferings of others, even of those who have wronged us, we have again missed the point.

What is the point? Every spiritual text, every divination tool and everything in my being says that the point is love. The point is always love. The point is never vengeance. The point is never about balancing the scales to the satisfaction of the individual.

When we suffer, love is our salvation. When others suffer, we have the opportunity to grow in our service to them; in our understanding of love.

Neither great wealth nor great poverty can enhance our understanding of love. Neither great fortune nor great adversity can keep up from love. Nothing can shield us from a certain amount of suffering, either, and that's as it should be.