Self-Care Archives - Energetic Tarot

How To Create a Daily Tarot Reading Practice | FREE Workshop

Oct 26, 2023 | Journaling, Learn Tarot

How do you create a daily Tarot practice?

A daily Tarot practice doesn’t have to be time-consuming, it can be as quick as you need it to be. How is that possible? Let me show you…

Creating a daily Tarot reading practice can benefit you in a mountain of different ways, including:

Feeling more confident in your capabilities
Feeling more grounded and present in your daily life
Feeling more self-assured about what you want to achieve
Feeling more secure in uncertain or turbulent times
Feeling less out of control of your own life

And this is just the tip of the iceberg, the surface-level benefits that you’ll start to see and experience day to day. Long-term daily Tarot can even help completely shift the way you see the world, transform how you see yourself or even how successful you are in your endeavours.

This guide will show you how you can make a start by creating a daily Tarot practice.

Don’t be fooled by the name though, these ideas are transferable to other divination cards such as Oracle cards, it’s up to you and your personal preference on which type of deck you use.

“These things will help you understand the ‘how’ of your daily tarot readings.”

Creating a daily Tarot practice with intention and purpose

First things first, create a routine with intention and purpose. The key to this is knowing exactly what you need from your daily Tarot practice. Everybody is different so one routine may work for one person and be a terrible fit for another.

In order to decide what you want your Tarot practice to bring to the table, ask yourselves these three simple questions:

What am I lacking in my current self-care practice?

What do I often lose sight of or forget about?

How much time in my schedule am I able to make for this daily practice?

What am I lacking in my current self-care practice?

This question aims to show you what you might be overlooking in your current self-care practice. Maybe you don’t even have one to begin with!

When answering this question, think about what you give to others that you don’t give to yourself. Maybe even what you give to things like work, hobbies etc.

For example, you may find that all of your mental energy goes into thinking about work, in which case you would note ‘mental energy’ as something you are currently lacking and need to divert into your self-care routines.

Once you’ve got an answer to this – or answers plural – write them down in a notebook or journal. These things will help you understand the ‘how’ of your daily tarot readings. This means that you can create spreads or conduct readings that focus on those specific parts of your life or even day.

For example, if I identified that I was lacking mental energy in my self-care routine, I may choose to use my cards as a meditative tool, picking a card and meditating on its messages.

If you find that you are lacking more emotional energy, then you may choose to journal about the emotions that come up when you pull a card or use your cards to inspire a creative outlet like painting or creative writing.

What do I often lose sight of or forget about?

These things are often the things our subconscious wants to protect us from or hide from us. We might not consciously realise we’re avoiding something or we may be choosing to ignore it. Either way, these things are often what need our attention the most.

“We might not consciously realise we’re avoiding something or we may be choosing to ignore it. Either way, these things are often what need our attention the most. ”

When creating a daily tarot routine, these things need to form the ‘why’. Whatever answers you uncover from asking yourself this question will be why you need to create this daily practice.

Maybe you often lose sight of what you already have in favour of coveting what you don’t. In which case your ‘why’ would be gratitude. Your practice is needed because you need to bring more gratitude and self-awareness into your daily life.

How much time in my schedule am I able to make for this daily practice?

Time, we all seem to need more of it, or do we? Just some small shifts and readjustments could give us an extra 5 minutes here or another 15 there.

It’s important your daily Tarot routine can fit in with the things that take priority. Understanding how much time you have to spend will give you a clear answer to when you can do this daily routine.

The best way to figure this bit out is to keep a daily diary for a few days.

Make a note of how long you spend on certain tasks and see if there is anywhere that you could speed up or use your time more efficiently.

Do not slip into the glorification of busyness. Being ‘busy’ is often seen as an indicator of importance, the busier you are the more important you are.

This is not true.

Be 100% honest with yourself and your time expenditure, you’re not trying to prove anything to anyone, you’re simply mapping out your days to see where you could fit your daily tarot readings.

It’s important your daily Tarot routine can fit in with the things that take priority.

Making the routine stick

Consistency is key in making any routine stick. It’s believed that it can take around 21 days to form a habit, so use this as a rule of thumb when getting started with any new daily practice.

Now that you’ve answered those questions from earlier, you should know why you are creating a daily tarot reading routine, how that routine should look and when to sit down and do the routine from start to finish.

Write down your routine step by step, and make it simple and easy to follow so anyone can do it. This makes it super easy to get into a rhythm and ensures a greater level of success in making it stick.

Try and aim for the same time every day if you can. Again, this just helps to tell the conscious and subconscious mind when it’s time to press pause and focus on your reading.

It can take up to 28 days to form a habit and even longer to make it stick, so if you fall off the wagon one or two days here and there, don’t beat yourself up about it.

The best way to ensure you stick to your daily tarot practice is by making sure you see results.

Tracking your daily Tarot’s benefits

Any routine is only valuable if it benefits you in some way, otherwise, why else would you continue to do it?

Before you start your routine, take a second to just centre yourself. Think about how your body feels, what’s happening inside your mind, whether your mood is low or whether you’re stressing about anything in particular. I recommend jotting down a couple of bullet points just to get it out into the open, the Energetic Tarot Journal is great for this.

Once you’re finished with your routine, go back and do the same checks again. Make a mental or physical note of what’s changed, whether you feel better or whether you feel worse.

One thing I will say is remember that you are ever-changing. Your goals will change, your priorities will change and all of these changes can affect your why. Remember that ‘why’ you discovered earlier? That won’t be your why forever and that’s ok.

Make sure to set time aside every few months to do a quick check to see if your intention and purpose behind your daily practice is still aligned. If not, how could you recalibrate your routine to better suit who you are now?

Start To Build a Self-Care Tarot Practice | Free Workshop

Breaking the need for control with The Emperor

Nov 26, 2021 | Journaling, Learn Tarot, Soul Purpose

I’m only 31 years old at the time of writing this blog and even I remember a time before our lives were ruled by technology and information was not available to us at the click of a button.

It’s only in the last 20 years, which is a fairly short amount of time, that technology has completely altered our way of life and the lens through which we see the world. Everything is instant now. Next day delivery, instant answers to our questions through Google and an expectation of instant responses from those we contact.

In a lot of ways it has made our lives easier and I’m not bashing technology, my entire career is based on the digital world, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that it has created a society of control freaks. I include myself in this. We have control of so much now, everything is customisable and when that control is taken away or not available to us, we can panic or feel the anxiety building.

Identifying our issues with control

I am someone who needs to be in control of everything, of my time, where my focus is, who gets to contact me, outcomes, you name it I need to control it. It’s only since taking on a more spiritual and witchy way of life that I’ve started to work on this and try my hardest to ease off the gas a little.

However, that need for control is usually a very subconscious problem that can be a little slippery to manage. Often we don’t even realise that it’s bubbling to the surface until we’re huddled in a corner rocking back and forth because our parcel didn’t arrive when the app said it would.

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“The illusion of control makes the helplessness seem more palatable. And when that illusion is taken away, I panic.”

— Allie Brosh – Hyperbole and a Half

This is where we can introduce The Emperor. A card that is filled with divine masculine energy, the need for control and have authority over everything. I notice this card a lot when I work with clients who own their own businesses. They often crumble in the face of the unknown because they have become so used to spinning all the plates at once. They struggle to release some of that control, even if it’s in their own best interest because attached to that need for control is a fear, a fear of everything breaking if they don’t always have their hands on the wheel.

Using The Emperor card to battle our inability to relinquish personal power

It’s a tricky subject ‘control’ because people tend to have different relationships with it based on their own personal experiences. It may be that there is some childhood trauma that is at the root of your need for control, it may be more recent trauma or it could be a learned response.

The need for control, if we use The Emperor correspondences to guide us, is an imbalance of the fire element, a big dollop of fiery Aries energy that is in full control of our actions, thoughts and feelings. More than anything though, our need for control comes from our basic human need for safety. If we are in control, then we can make sure we are safe, that everything is going to plan and nothing scary or unexpected will happen to us.

What The Emperor can do, is help us to find a way to feel safe, but understand and most importantly, accept the things we can and can’t control. He can help us do this by turning our attention to the stable things we have in our life instead of focusing on the things that are crumbling or cracking.

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“May you find the strength of will and the grace of endurance to overcome every challenge.”

— Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great!

An example of this would be if you’re facing the possibility of being let go from your job, you may automatically think about all the bills you’ll have to pay without an income, your mortgage, how you’ll put food on the table. What The Emperor does is swoop in and act as that voice of reason, that fire we have within us that keeps us alive. He shows us that we need to be more trusting of our own capabilities and trust that if the worst does happen, that scrappy, primal instinct to do whatever needs to be done to keep your head above water will kick in and keep everything afloat.

The Emperor in all of us

The Emperor card represents our basic instinct to stay alive. We all have him inside of us, it’s the same as a gazelle grazing in a field, one crack of a stick behind it and its Emperor instinct kicks in and away it goes. It’s the fight or flight energy and when we have too much Emperor in control, that’s when we can feel anxious and panicked.

What we have to do is learn to work with The Emperor, instead of trying to battle him into submission or simply lying down and allowing him full control. We have to understand why he is appearing, where his motivations are coming from and how we can work in tandem with him. We are using his energy to see that there is no one way to keep ourselves safe, that if one safe haven falls, we have the skills and ability to build or find a new one.

So, let’s see what we can come up with when we allow ourselves to dive into our own Emperor energy. Use these journal prompts to start using The Emperor to address your own control issues and needs, start to discover where they are coming from and how you could start to find a balance again.

What is it that I’m afraid to lose control of?
Why am I afraid of not having full control of these things? Why wouldn’t I feel safe if I didn’t have control of these things?
Are there any situations in my past where I did not have control of a situation and something bad happened? If so, how do you think this experience could be contributing to your current problems.
If you did release control of these things, what is the worst thing that could happen? Are these things realistically or statistically likely to happen?
List all the things that currently make you feel safe and secure. How many of things are in your control and how many rely on third parties or outside sources?
If you did release or lose control of your current situation, what would you do? What plans would you put into place? How would you navigate the situation?

Finding moderation as an entrepreneur

Feb 15, 2021 | Limiting Beliefs, Soul Purpose

We’ve all been brought up on films and TV shows with characters who fit into either the ‘love for life’ category or the ‘workaholic’ category. We never see a character that loves their job, works super hard but also makes sure to take time off and relax. They’re always on holiday and having to check their phone or being drawn away from their family time by a demanding boss or work emergency. But what if you could love your job and still have healthy boundaries for personal time?

As a society, we seem to have decided that we can either have a successful business, or we can have an exciting and fulfilling personal life, but not both. Well, that’s just bollocks. There is no rule that you have to sacrifice your health, your family, your friends or your personality for your business. So, how can we make sure that we have both? Is there anything we can do today that can start creating that healthy work/life balance we all crave?

*Blog recommendation: Is your business your life’s purpose?

Setting up boundaries early on

As soon as you even think about becoming an entrepreneur, you should be thinking about the boundaries you need to set. One of the first things I did was set clear working hours and times of the day when I was free to be contacted. These were non-negotiable, because as soon as you say ‘oh just this one time…’ you’ve opened flood gates that are very hard to close back up.

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“Balance is not better time management, but better boundary management. Balance means making choices and enjoying those choices.
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— Betsy Jacobson

Sometimes it may seem like you’re being unreasonable when you ignore a call from a client or customer because you’ve committed to taking a break or you’re working on another task, but your time is your own, you decide how you spend it. Time is the most valuable asset we have as entrepreneurs and if we’re not careful how we spend it, we can find ourselves always feeling like we have a lack of it, resulting in stress, panic and overworking.

Placing your value in the right places at the right times

This idea around time flows nicely into my next point. You need to be clear about what you value in your life as a whole. Just because you love your business and you want it to succeed more than anything, it doesn’t mean that you can’t value other aspects of your life.

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“Strive not be a success, but to be of value. ”

— Albert Einstein

Choosing where to place your value and when is another way to build those boundaries. During work hours, your value may be placed with the tasks you’ve got listed on your to-do list or the meeting you’ve got set up. Once you log off, where do you then place your value? Is it in your wellbeing? Is it with your family? This is another form of boundary setting, which will help you find more focus and intention in the present moment, instead of allowing your thoughts to roam all over the place and leave you feeling frazzled.

Paying attention to your energy

Every morning, take a second and think to yourself ‘What does my energy feel like today? What energy do I need more of?’ If you’re struggling to get motivated, or you know for a fact that the day isn’t going to productive, then adjust your day accordingly. Do tasks that are quick and don’t require you to focus for long periods of time. Do things that require you to be moving about a lot to keep your energy flowing. Set yourself an early finish time. Pay attention to how you feel throughout the day and keep adjusting to accommodate.

I know that if I’ve had insomnia the night before, I won’t be able to get a huge task list done, so I move things around so that I can still be productive, but in a way that takes my energy levels into consideration.

Flexibility with your working hours

This is one that has taken me a while to get used to coming from regular 9-5 jobs. I’m now a lot more flexible and forgiving with my working hours, pushing tasks back an hour or two, or starting later and finishing later. However, I always make sure I have time for myself, both in the morning and in the evening. What I physically can not fit into one working day, gets pushed back to the next day.

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“You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at once.”

— Oprah Winfrey

Having complete flexibility with your working hours is yet another perk of working for yourself, so don’t be afraid to indulge in it, especially when you’re feeling a bit rundown or in need of a slower working day.

Having moderation as an entrepreneur is completely unique to you, your needs, your values, your energy, so there is no one size fits all solution. A lot of what I’ve learned about moderation as a business owner has been through trial and error. If you put something into place that you think will make you more productive, but actually just leaves you feeling tired and stressed, scrap it and try something else. Nobody gets it right on the first go, so be kind to yourself and be mindful of your wellbeing.

Showing yourself some self-compassion

Feb 2, 2021 | Limiting Beliefs, Soul Purpose

We talk a lot about self-care, but self-compassion is a little different and one that often gets merged into the role of self-care. From my experience wandering around the internet, many people associate self-care with looking after their physical and mental wellbeing, but self-compassion goes a little deeper than that. I always imagine self-compassion to be more balanced, with an equal focus on the positive and the negative.

As humans, we inevitably do things that we see as a mistake, or we act out of a place of emotion and end up hurting someone else. Often, our minds will store this information and then when we least expect it, usually when you’re trying to get to sleep or you’re going about your day, your brain will chime in with a ‘hey remember when you did that thing and it was awful?’. It’s as if we’ve stored this information to punish ourselves at random. A sneak attack of shame if you will.

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“According to Buddhism, compassion is an aspiration, a state of mind, wanting others to be free from suffering. It’s not passive — it’s not empathy alone — but rather an empathetic altruism that actively strives to free others from suffering. Genuine compassion must have both wisdom and lovingkindness”

— The Importance of Compassion or Karuna in Buddhism

Being able to show yourself self-compassion means that you are able to see your failures, your mistakes and your pitfalls and be able to understand and accept, rather than punish and judge. We are our harshest critics, so when something goes wrong we always come down hard on ourselves. Somehow we think that if we do this, we’ll be less likely to make the same mistakes again, but what it really does is create a black spot on our emotional and spiritual selves. It chips away at our self-confidence and self-esteem. We essentially become our own bully.

This is why we have to actively teach ourselves self-compassion and be mindful of the compassion we show ourselves day-to-day. When we mess up, learn to take ownership and speak to yourself like you would if a friend made the same mistake.

Be mindful of internal narration

Being more mindful of your internal narration is a great start. Recognise the type of language you use when you speak to yourself or the way you form thoughts and beliefs. Being able to pull apart this inner dialogue can help us learn a lot about the subconscious and what’s going on down there. Plus, being able to actively identify when you’re being too hard or abusive to yourself is the first step in building a strong sense of self-compassion.

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“Lack of forgiveness causes almost all of our self-sabotaging behaviour.”

— Mark Victor

You may have heard people say before, that you should speak to yourself as if you were speaking to a loved one, and it really is a powerful way to completely change the way you feel about yourself. Being able to have an open conversation with yourself, where you feel comfortable being 100% truthful and honest, makes you a much stronger person as a whole. It can help you identify toxic behaviours, not just in yourself but in others as well. Building self-compassion in turn builds wisdom.

Is a lack of self-compassion causing your current problems?

You’d be surprised how many times self-compassion is the answer to our biggest problems. Think your products are good enough to sell? You need more self-compassion. Struggling to book new clients because you don’t think you have the balls to send that pitch email? You need more self-compassion. Really want to take on a new hobby but don’t see the point if you’re not going to be good at it? You need more self-compassion.

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“You’ve been criticising yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens. ”

— Louise L. Hay

If you struggle to see yourself from the outside, especially if you’re completely consumed by your current situation, then there are a couple of tricks you can use to make self-compassion a little easier to grab hold of.

Reflect your situation, belief or thought onto someone you know. Imagine a friend or family member coming to you and saying the same things you’re saying to yourself. How would you respond?
If doing that with a friend or family member is still a little too close to home, try it with your favourite celebrity or fictional character.
Pretend you are someone else and write a letter. If you struggle to grasp your own emotions and see them objectively, pretend you are a fictional character writing about these same issues in a letter and address it to the real you. Then, read it back as yourself. How do you see things now?
De-catastrophise your thoughts. Often we make our mistakes seem bigger than they really are, so think about what the worst outcome was of those mistakes, or if you are in the midst of the fallout, what is the very worst that could happen. Be realistic, think about the real-life odds!

10 journal prompts to prove can do anything

Dec 14, 2020 | Journaling, Soul Purpose

Journalling has become a pretty big part of the wellness and spiritual community of late, but that’s for a very good reason. Journaling or keeping a diary has been proven to help you sort through difficult emotions, unlock the subconscious and learn a whole lot more about yourself.

Journal prompts aim to give you a focus so you can set an intention for your journaling session. If you just sit down to write, you can often struggle to get started, so grabbing a few prompts from Pinterest or blogs can get the ball rolling for you. Of course, you could just think about the answers, but writing things down makes a thought tangible. Written words give our thoughts and feelings life in our external world, making them easier to comprehend and ultimately face head-on.

With our exercise today, we’re going to be using the power of journaling to prove to ourselves that we are incredible beings, capable of incredible things. We’re going to prove to ourselves that we have the ability to do anything that we feel called to do, so let’s take a look at some of the journal prompts waiting to be explored.

Write down 5 challenges you have overcome in the last 12-months

Exactly as it says on the tin. No matter how small, think about what challenges or obstacles you have had to face in the last 12-months. It could be something as huge as facing a job redundancy, or something smaller like having your phone stop working.

What did you learn from overcoming those obstacles?

Every challenge and obstacle teaches us something, even if we don’t realise it at the time. Think about who you were before the challenge came along and who you were after. Did your perspective shift during that time? Did you realise something about yourself? Did your priorities change due to the challenge?

If you could tell yourself anything at the start of the year, what would it be?

Imagine being sat in front of yourself at the beginning of this year. What would you want you to know? What words of wisdom would you give to yourself?

List 5 things you have achieved in your personal life over the last 12-months?

Again, these can be small things like running outdoors for the first time or big things like having a baby or getting married!

List 5 things you have achieved in your professional life over the last 12-months?

Just like above, only this time we’re going to be focusing on your job, career or business.

Did you achieve anything this year that you hadn’t planned for?

If you’re anything like me, you like to create goals and work until you reach them, but sometimes life throws things your way that requires a bit of spontaneity. Is there anything you’ve achieved that you never even thought you’d have to achieve? As an example, this year I started to learn to roller skate, not something I thought I’d be achieving this year, thanks lockdown!

List 5 ways you are different compared to the beginning of this year

How have you changed over these last 12-months? We are never the same year on year, things happen that change us, as well as age and experience of life in general. Compare the person you were at the start of this year to the person you are today. Are there any changes that you feel particularly happy about?

What were your priorities at the beginning of this year?

Think back to the start of this year and list what your key priorities and values were.

What are your priorities now?

What are your priorities and values now? How have they changed or shifted since the start of the year? Why have they changed?

If you were to describe your life now to yourself 3 years ago, what would past you say?

If you had the opportunity to talk to yourself 3-years ago and tell them about your life and everything that has happened in those 3 years, what do you think past you would say? Would they be surprised, happy, excited?

If you struggle with the task of journaling, try and break it down into small chunks. Instead of sitting down to go through all 10 prompts at once, choose to quickly do 1 a day. There’s no rush and approaching each prompt with a fresh mind may prove useful!

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