YouandTheTarot

  Spirituality, prayer, even psychotherapy. Often that's too abstract and too isolating for those in pain.  That's why some of us tarot readers have been writing "social prescriptions." Those are very concrete social approaches to transcend suffering.  "A social prescription is officially defined as a nonmedical resource or activity that aims to improve a person's health and strengthen their community connections." That's what Julia Hotz writes in her 2024 book "The Connection Cure: The Prescriptive Power of Movement, Nature, Service and Belonging." And the prescription is nothing new.  For decades psychiatrists, ministers and community "shamans" have been recommending to widows in grief to get a job in a crafts store or animal shelter. When there were book stores the number-one suggestion was there. For the depressed join a gym. No, don't purchase equipment to use at home. For those who had lost that big job help with the re

The Roman Catholic Church, William Shakespeare, Carl Jung and the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous all made it clear: We humans have a dark side.  The art world has run with that.  Novelist Ian McEwan, for example, published "Atonement" which was made into a film. There  has been the recent streamer on Paramount "The Whale." The central characters in both had done acts they deeply regretted. All that eats at them. Charlie in "The Whale," who ditched his family for a male lover, literally eats himself to death.  Of course, this deep shame about behavior comes up during Tarot readings. That includes a resistance against self-forgiveness. That wrench in the works is the assumption that what they did is so awful that they don't "deserve" forgiveness. Yet that's reverse narcissism: the total preoccupation with the self, the shutting out of the realities of what it means to be human.  A central Zen belief is that to be a human is to be prof