on reflection work that doesn't suck

hello, friends. this essay marks the beginning of this year's five days of offerings series that i hope will help you find your footing, ground and breathe, and use your tarot cards to help you remember yourself. this world is so challenging, i know — and i fundamentally believe that tarot can help, no matter where you are.

whether you choose to buy anything or not, these essays are my gift to you, packed with insights, spreads, exercises, and suggestions for how to get through these impossible days. thank you for being here.

if you're just here for the discount, here you go: one of my most popular tools is priestess' prompts, a 21-day email series packed with questions that you can ask your cards (and daily tips for getting the most out of your readings). if you're interested in more consistent and intentional reflection work with your tarot cards but struggle to know what to ask, this is the series for you — and for the next 48 hours, you can get it for 30% off.

now, let's talk about what reflection really is, what it isn't, and why it kinda sucks sometimes.

this is a time of year when we are often told to slow down, reflect, and remember. and listen, those aren't necessarily bad pieces of advice — it's been a hell of a year, and most of us are navigating grief and trauma and fear on top of holiday pressure and weird families and financial stresses. but in a year this rough, this hard, this fucking sad, general calls for gratitude practices and reflection rituals and self-care might feel a little empty.

they might even really, really annoy you.

what's the point, after all? why bother writing down or otherwise expressing what you're thankful for? what is the purpose of naval-gazing when so many people are suffering, when our government is collapsing, when billionaires are becoming trillionaires? literally, why bother?

honestly, if you don't want to, you don't have to. i'm not here to pressure you into doing something that feels actively bad, not in this economy — and i'm definitely not going to tell you to start a gratitude practice (you know, unless you want to). but, if you're feeling weird, if this year bummed you the fuck out, if you're not sure how to even start reflecting on 2025, i have a few suggestions.

and yes, they involve tarot.

sometimes when i hear the spiritual girlies (gender neutral) talking about reflection as a practice, it has a very surface-level quality to it. the results of their reflection work can sound more like making excuses for behavior, justifying selfish choices, or trying to police other people and calling it "boundaries." i am very wary of so-called reflection tools that ultimately just tell people that they aren't doing anything wrong and shouldn't have to tolerate discomfort of any kind, or help people rationalize doing the thing that they wanted to do anyway.

(looking at you, chat gpt.)

but real reflection can be passive or active, internal or external, motivating or quieting. reflection can give us space to understand and analyze, to go deep or go wide or go long, to learn to see something from another viewpoint. there is truth in honest reflection, and power in that truth.

quiet personal moments of stillness are totally fine, but i really love that reflection itself can also be active: a deliberate choice to engage with something that requires our attention. it can be a step in a journey, a part of the process, that helps us synthesize our experiences and choose to adjust, double down, retreat, or transform. when we let reflection become an aspect of our own unfolding, a catalyst for necessary growth, it helps us carve out space for true understanding of self, of history, and of potential futures.

and what's great is that tarot is an excellent tool for this kind of work. whether simple or complex, whether straightforward or deeply layered, tarot readings and journaling and studies and conversations can open up all kinds of revelations, about both mundane and massive topics in your life.

if you find general reflection practices to be hard to access, or if reflection and gratitude feel like difficult ideas to embrace right now, tarot can be a powerful and potent thing to reach for. and even if you don't typically struggle to reflect on something within or around you, the tarot can still make this process a little easier.

for me, the hardest part of active reflection is the blind spots. we all have them: things about ourselves that we can't see clearly, behaviors or tendencies that might be so familiar that we don't even consider that they're things which could change, or even habits that we are so used to tolerating in others that we don't realize how much harm they're causing.

blind spots are tough to see, by design — our shadows, our faults, our excuses, our sharp edges or soft centers or fractured hidden places can reveal a lot, if we're brave enough to look. and i think that real reflection, effective reflection, requires at least trying to see them, rather than bypassing them entirely.

the cards can make this painful process a little easier — or at the very least, give you some frameworks and structures to get you started.

i love tarot for reflection work because we have to choose it, constantly. you have to choose to keep going, to keep listening, to keep trying, every step of the way. you can pull cards, but if you don't actually interpret them, the work ends. and even if you do interpret them, you still have to choose to apply them, to make active change, to let that truth impact you. there is an ongoing need for you as a reader to show up to the work that i find really compelling and effective, especially when we're trying to get to the heart of something complicated or tender.

two of my favorite archetypes to work with when i'm trying to do this kind of deep reflection work are the priestess (intuition, inner wisdom, slowing down, observation, making choices, trusting our gut, mystery, magic) and our card of 2025, the hermit (service, transition, spirituality, contemplation, purpose, compassion, evolution). in different ways, these are each figures of solitude and reflection, of paying attention deeply, of recognizing what has been and what is and what could be.

i tend to look to the priestess when i'm reflecting on my own desires, fears, hopes, dreams, choices, and experiences, and the hermit when i'm reflecting on my relationships, challenges, ambitions, movements, and communities. these are archetypes that can teach us how to listen, how to be still, how to discover and question. but they are also archetypes that are great at pulling back and looking at the bigger picture, trying to be a little bit detached in that way that lets you be a little more objective, a little more discerning.

when we ask the priestess or the hermit what they think of our choices, our actions or inactions, our dreams, our reluctancies, or whatever else we're ruminating on, these are two archetypes that are going to be honest with us. and while sometimes that honesty might feel harsh or hurt our feelings a little, that honesty is also a really important piece of the reflection process.

what does this actually mean, to "work with" an archetype as part of reflections? it can look a lot of ways, but here are a few of my favorites:

-conversations: pulling the priestess or the hermit (or another archetype of your choice) out of your deck and talking to it, either literally out loud or via journaling. having a conversation, listening to hear what this figure might have to offer, can be a relatively simple starting place for working with an archetype.

-readings: grab your chosen archetype and ask them a question, using the cards to answer it via a reading. you can use a tarot spread like the one above for this (or write your own!) or keep the reading more open-ended, but direct your questions towards this archetype and allow the cards you pull to serve as their response.

-meditations: i'm not great at this one, but if you're someone who benefits from meditations, visualizations, or guided experiences, these can be great exercises to try with a specific archetype. imagine them accompanying you, guiding you, meeting you, or simply offering instructions for you to follow on your own, and consider what you might discover by creating space for whatever bubbles up.

-expansions: bringing an archetype into your life through various mediums. i love to choose an archetype and find songs that remind me of them, to make them a full playlist, to look for their facets and characteristics in favorite characters from media, to consider what movements might capture their energy, to develop or research correspondences with flavors or colors or scents or gemstones or flowers or herbs or whatever. find this archetype in your world, and engage with it through these aspects of your life.

of course, you don't have to use archetypes for reflection work. any time you pull cards with honesty, are willing to ask yourself challenging or direct questions, and are brave enough to sit in the answers (or the new questions) that your readings reveal, you are doing something really powerful. general tarot journaling, or finding cards that represent your challenges and working with them instead, can also be really useful ways to participate in active reflection.

truly the sky is the limit, and reflection can look many ways. but i think that the tarot has a way of breaking through our internal bullshit and helping us see past the smoke and mirrors, the illusions that we carry or the blind spots that we don't even realize are there.

as we prepare to move into this final month of the year, i want to invite you to figure out what reflection might look like for you, with the help of the tarot, in a way that actually feels supportive and useful. it's okay if your work doesn't look like anyone else's, if it's messy or weird or super simple — the point is where it brings you, and how it helps you clarify things, not how it looks to others.

what helps you to see clearly? what empowers you to understand yourself more fully? what encourages you to explore your own interiority? and what allows you to look bravely inward, in a way that gives you the courage to take external action?

i know your inbox is probably packed these days, so thank you for spending a few minutes of your day with me. keep an eye out for another essay, spread collection, and discounted offer tomorrow, and in the meantime, be well.