If you can't beat 'em join 'em
Unpacking the Wheel of Fortune tarot card with Shannon Knight of The Tarot diagnosis
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to Shannon Knight, host of The Tarot Diagnosis, about one of the major arcana tarot cards, The Wheel of Fortune. We talk about what it can represent in terms of karma, life lessons, and recovery cycles - among other things.
The Tarot Diagnosis is a podcast that examines tarot from the lens of mental health and Western psychology, as Shannon is a Johns Hopkins-trained psychotherapist. I first spoke to Shannon when she came on The Side Woo and I got a chance to fan girl out. Here’s our conversation from this summer:
The inspiration for our second conversation came about a month ago. I messaged her after an aha moment while doing a tarot reading for myself. In the reading, I was asking for perspective about a specific interaction, and the Wheel of Fortune came up. Shit, I thought. Karma is in the mix.
As I said in our conversation, the way TWOF comes up for me as a sign of a greater life lesson and/or a karmic interaction in which whatever you send out will come right back around. I was using the Morgan Greer deck so you see the King and Queen celebrating at the top of the wheel and a Joker/loser getting booted off in the lower right-hand corner.
I had in the past thought that if I were to set good boundaries when faced with unprofessionalism and the like, I could find myself on the top of the wheel and the offending individual would be booted off. It was best practice to shut down situations in which I felt like I wasn’t being dealt with fairly, and the fallout would be the other person’s karma to deal with.
However, when I took that theory into practice, it often left a bad taste in my mouth, and not just because my inner people pleaser was uncomfortable. It felt isolating and disappointing, and it made me wonder if I could have been more empathetic to the other person’s perspective.
On this reading, something finally clicked. What if instead of trying to right a wrong by creating hard boundaries, I moved towards a win-win solution? I suddenly saw the King and Queen as two people celebrating after finding a way to work together. While it’s not always possible, maybe I could try harder to meet people in the middle? Their royal garb also signified to me a power dynamic that sometimes you can’t win, and that it might be best to follow the old adage “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”
This win-win approach allowed for acceptance of what is while acknowledging that I still had needs in the situation that might be partly met, if not entirely. It also had me rethinking karma, from my early understanding as a sort of punitive energy, you do something wrong then you will have something bad done to you, into something that is always moving in the direction of more love and understanding- even if that means you might have to go through a bad experience in order to get that new perspective.
I almost immediately messaged Shannon to tell her my revelation and to see if she wanted to get nerdy with me and talk about it. I don’t know so many people who want to sit and unpack one tarot card for an hour, so this was a real hot fudge sundae of a conversation for me. Please listen and let me know what you think.
If you do tarot, how do you view the Wheel of Fortune card?
Sort of related, and in preparation for an upcoming episode of The Side Woo with Delia Brown, I wanted to share this clip that a speaker played at a PRS talk recently. In it, this Pastor of a mushroom-centric church shared his experience of god from his psychedelic trips to a skeptical Fox News anchor.
This clip is hilarious because of the visuals of the two men in split screen next to one another, and the obvious difference of opinions around what constitutes a religion. But starting around 2:34, I loved what Pastor Dave Hodges said about god creating the universe so it could experience itself. I’m not sure what that means, maybe because I have never taken psychedelics, but I want to know. The idea of the experiential universe sounds much more centered in the physical world and the body than a lot of the religious beliefs I have heard, so it has me very curious.
Finally, some happenings:
The Side Woo @ ICA San Francisco: A Panel Talk on Unblocking Your Creativity November 5th, 3-5pm with guest artists Heesoo Kwon, Cate White and Rupy C. Tut. RSVP on Eventbrite
Two of my paintings will be going to NADA Art Fair in Miami with The Pit. Here’s one of them
I’m in a fun show with some really great artists at a new artist-run project space Sidebitch LA run by Sofie Ramos
Our latest episode of The Side Woo with Ranu Mukherjee