A lot of the patients I see (as a practising shaman) have severe mental health issues. Over the years quite a few of them – many being pagan, also read the cards – mostly Oracles but also Tarot.
These are some insights I gained about working with them:
Most people in the mids of clinical depression are so blocked , frozen, in their affect and with their emotions, so much so, that they can and will not read the cards. They may look at an image and know, they should sense, feel, intuit something – but all that comes up is hollow emptiness, which feels deeply frustrating to them. Many can at that stage not even adequately express this frustration. More than once I heard : “I feel like I am in a glass bubble filed with stale air and I can only perceive the world through its milky grey glass.....”
Drawing 1 Oracle card and looking at it through that barrier is hard.
Other people with depression struggle with the side effects of all their meds that distort feelings and intuition and struggle through readings that all too often are seen by them as sad and depressing or as fairytale world that will not become their reality any time soon.
When the depression subsides and they again look at specific readings in their notes they get quite a different answer/ sense of the reading.
Some bring in their readings and ask me to help them make sense of them......
I also have clients with problems, that the allopathic medicine describes as shizophrenia. One of them always brings his Thoth cards and endlessly describes in great detail, what his extraterrestrial “advisers” transmit for him and his family via the cards.....
Another client with severe anxiety was an obsessive “asker” laying out spread after spread asking about the outcome about the smallest things and since the MD in town could not help her, he send her to me.
We since managed to put the cards aside........ (found the reason for the Anxiety and how to balance her out.......)
another patient with bd OCD and anxieties and.......
was/ is a very accomplished Tarot reader. She knows EVERYTHING A. Crowley wrote as to how any card should be correctly read and interpreted. She is VERY smart. But she has almost no empathy, no sense of “sinking into the situation” of a sitter and relating all her book knowledge to another person.... She struggles with the very thought of not being perfect and therefore always right and that she might have a blind spot there.
Quite a few others, cards in hand, bravely strugggggle through depression,manic episodes, delusions, weeks in hospital, meds, sleeplessness – or sleeping almost all day, dark thoughts, voices, doubts, fears, loneliness, stigma and anger and put the cards aside, when times get better.
I pray for all of them!
