Metaphor as a Guide

Imagine chickens under a dove wing’s shadow and then a hawk wing’s shadow. How is their response different? How do humans respond similarly to symbols and how do they play on our instincts?

Through years of reading tarot, I have learned that stories and archetypes give us the objectivity to hear our own story with less anxiety and assumption. We can take a parable or a symbol on the chin easier than a direct communication. The art of adapting yourself into new patterns is easier to do through metaphor, since our subconscious reads beneath the obvious messages, to absorb and reflect on the subtle nudges that lead to true inner evolution.

The subconscious is where our actions derive from, and it is not a verbal communicator. If we want to stop eating the cupcakes, we must first dissolve the impulse to eat it. Telling yourself to stop has proven unhelpful to many. This urge sources from deep within our psyches, where language there is more mythic than logical. It seems that our subconscious shifts most easily via storytelling of dreams and visions.

Any essential life story can be told purely visually, as silent films and shadow plays and dance performances and animation show us. Story and symbols and parable and metaphor all relate to a pre-verbal place. While we use words for telling stories and explaining symbols, imaginative comprehension works on a non-verbal level.

By describing how a snake sheds it’s skin, we access self-growth and rejuvenation. This is far more powerful than discussing the abstract concept of growth, because there is a parallel that we automatically understand on a subconscious level. Our animal relates to an animal experience, and we can move forward with that totem in our periphery. It also allows for the divine to speak to the person after the cards are closed. When a snake crosses your path on a hike two weeks after your reading on shedding your skin, you might immediately reflect on how you are coming along in your own personal growth. You can access the sign as a message to go deeper into your current release.

Tarot cards offer the myriad of life experiences and possibilities in potential stories. The original 78 relate to keystones that we all can relate to, and the combinations of two or more cards formulate infinite more circumstances. As a reader, it is important to tap into the metaphors that are visually emerging from the cards. You find the overlap of symbols in the images, and the contrary meanings that spark friction of story dynamics. This alights in your own subconscious the magnet to pull in more irrational images, and these are the intuitive substance that will most likely surprise your querent with details that you could not know without channeling through this field.