Parallels in Tarot and Self-Portraits
Finding satori in the tarot and self-portraits
In the last post I talked about setting up and taking self-portraits as an emotional release. The other interesting benefit of these self-portraits is in having an album to catalog your broad range of emotions over the year similar to your own personal tarot deck.
Activating the right brain hemisphere
A few years ago I dove into the art of tarot reading.
It was during a point in my life when I was working with THE MOST intelligent people I have ever worked with. Going from meeting to meeting where we discussed the technical details of sucking air out of a tube a propelling people down a magnetic levitation track at upwards of 500mph to create the world’s first hyperloop.
At the time I was managing the user experience for this future travel system and I was finding it difficult to realign and empathize with our customers to design an experience just for them.
What I discovered was happening to me was that I was spending a majority of my time at work living in the left hemisphere of my brain. The one that deals with logic, numbers, engineering. I was going from meeting to meeting discussing deep technical details, but then once the meeting ended I had to go back and take new system updates and incorporate them into our user experience design. Requiring a rapid shift into the right hemisphere that deals with empathy, creativity, and emotional awareness.
What I found was that simple escapes to a coffee shop as a decompress wasn’t cutting it. I needed some more assistance.
Understanding Tarot
I had an idea to try to use tarot reading as a way to help clear my own emotional state quickly and be able to pivot from deep dive technical meetings into an empathetic creative space for future hyperloop riders.
I started a search for a tarot deck, hoping one would resonate with me and assist me in clearing my mind and understanding myself a bit more.
Eventually I settled into using the Labyrinthos Tarot deck. This is a deck that was designed by another user experience designer and I immediately felt a shared experience in who was creating the cards and descriptions and what I was seeking.
What REALLY stuck with me though was the way the author of the deck described using tarot
Tarot is a language whose vocabulary is our universal experiences as humans, and if you learn to interpret it, it becomes a great tool that helps you develop your own narrative. What you read and interpret is a reflection of your own inner world. Exploring that is so important to self-development.
That was my missing piece that gave me a new way to read tarot for myself.
Emotional Tarot Reading
I would take a quick 30 minute break. Escape to a nearby coffee shop and sit with my own emotions for a moment before a reading. I was curious what I was feeling inside of me and more importantly giving myself permission to just sit with my current feeling rather than trying to rapidly pivot it to something else.
If I just came out of a meeting where my ideas where trampled over, I wanted to sit in that emotion for a bit longer to process it.
If I felt a high of a new technical/experiential discovery, I wanted to enjoy that moment a bit longer.
So I would sit there. Coffee in hand and just ask myself how I felt right there in the moment. Happy? Sad? Angry? Mad?
Then I would unpack the details of that feeling. Did it resonate anywhere in particular in my body? How did I feel about approaching tasks in the future with this emotional energy?
Then I would do a 3 card spread to see how this emotional state might adjust subtly over time in the past/present/future.
Years later I still heavily rely on this reading method for myself as well as for others stepping into the photography studio.
Changing My Narrative
What this experience gave me was the ability to more easily bounce between the macro and micro of each moment I was in. It was a tool to jump out of repeated thought patterns to see the situation from a different perspective.
If I had a bad meeting, I now had a new way to process my current emotions and feelings around that experience rather than haphazardly carrying reactions into future situations.
Long term, this gave me an appreciation for the wide spectrum of emotions I could feel and embody rather than feeling contempt for anger or disappointment in not achieving happiness in the moment.
When I started to dive into photography and began to shoot self-portraits, I quickly realized I was performing the same steps but with more active creativity and play.
Tarot in Self-Portraits
I came to realization that a self-portrait photo session was hitting the same emotional marks as a tarot reading in creating a reflection of my inner world.
But more powerfully than a tarot reading, I had images of my actual face and emotions right there staring at me to deconstruct and understand. My authenticity was unavoidable, often in rather confronting ways.
If I was feeling upset at the time of shooting photos, it was guaranteed to show up on camera. It forced me to give myself greater empathy for myself and ALL the feelings I might feel in a moment.
More importantly, it also gave me the flexibility to flow between emotions. If I started a session feeling upset, but then began to have a laugh at myself dancing in-front of a camera I found I could loosen my grip on my anger and give myself permission to feel happy for that moment. Not dragging the past experiences so closely into the present.
Satori in Adjusting Narrative
This is the part that’s kept me interested in shooting self-portraits for over a year now. The ability to give myself permission to tap into my own emotions in the moment and embody them fully for that moment, regardless of what just took place or where I planned on going.
By having a sandbox to play in with my own emotions independent of anyone else I’ve grown additional appreciation for who I am, who I was, and whoever I might be becoming. It loosened my grip on the narratives I was holding onto tightly and it gave me a way to love and cherish different emotional states that I might have otherwise been discouraged to take out into public.
As an example here’s one of my favorite stills from a recent self-portrait shoot.
And here’s a link to a video showing the rest of the shoot and the wide range of emotions and experiences that had to take place before that singular moment could appear.
So what are ways that you consciously or unconsciously carry your emotions and narratives in life?
If you’ve gone down a path of shooting self-portraits, what did you uncover and learn about yourself?
What’s a part of you that you found new appreciation for?
Update: I initially wrote this piece before the insurrection in the nation’s capitol, but the techniques here have been extremely helpful for me in processing the events that took place and the emotional trauma in reaction to it.
In healing from traumatic events it is often good to start with the reminder that trauma isn’t due to the event itself, but instead it is the result of our reaction to it.
For me, watching the events on TV immediately drew parallels in my mind to the months of protesting as the Black Lives Matter movement grew. Watching how far the president, senators, and representatives were allowed to go in an attempt to disenfranchise voters and insight a violent attempt at takeover of the government put me in a brief state of victimhood and survival.
However, using some of the tools mentioned above it gave me the opportunity to properly process the the emotions running through my body in a healthy way. Watching live breaking news on repeat and force our minds into a repetitive pattern, it is good to give ourselves a moment to stretch our emotions and get back to a state of flexibility. If an unexpected turn of events appears around the corner to bring a lot of happiness you wouldn’t want to miss it from staying in a state of trauma.