Анна Шиман
Draft translation. This text was translated automatically and has not been proofread yet — if something reads oddly, it does.
Self-knowledge with Tarot as a process of meeting yourself.
In September 2022 the long-awaited online course on the Major Arcana of Tarot began, and I am very glad that interest in this subject is growing — and with it, interest in the value of the knowledge I share with you.
Exploring the hidden is an amazing, absorbing process that turns life into a great voyage across the waters of the unconscious. As a practitioner, I set myself certain goals, and they are built into the course for those who take part in it.
A Tarot course is not simply watching the metamorphoses, illusions, images and fantasies of the world of ideal forms.
A Tarot course is a search for connection with the colossal forces of the unconscious, with the chance to learn to steer this process.
But is it possible to learn to manage something or someone without first learning to manage yourself?
Many people strive for exactly this, but the outcome is the same every time: their strength runs out, and the habit of control demands more and more repressing and suppressing of whatever worries, unsettles, aches, fears or hurts somewhere inside. In the end a crisis comes, and it cannot always be overcome on your own.
Depression and apathy are by-products of excessive control and of being too intensely caught up in external tasks. They are a life lived far from yourself and your true nature. They are an attempt to avoid meeting what has long been building up and lives like a leviathan in the depths of your subconscious. From time to time these clots of psychic energy give signs and try to come out to meet consciousness, and they throw you off balance through inner states: fear, helplessness, anxiety, panic attacks and so on. And if that is not enough and the person pays no attention, other people or events begin to come into their life. Sometimes catastrophic ones in their very nature. These are addictions, toxic people, relationships in which the will is crushed and physical force is used. These are situations of loss, accidents, injuries, fires, illnesses that suddenly come to light.
Need I say that all of this is a consequence?
The cause always lies within the person, and their unconscious is always stronger and always leads them to the experience needed for the awareness and transformation of the inner world, for the lessons of the soul and spirit.
This is the view of reality I try to teach you in my courses and in individual work, where, step by step coming to understand the processes hidden deep within you, we move together towards being able to build tools for managing the quality of your life.
The cause of what happens always lies within you; but if you have just drawn a breath and got ready to object, pause and read on.
The world is diverse and exists on three levels of being: thoughts, feelings, situations (circumstances).
It’s no secret that thought can change reality (and this isn’t magic at all, it’s pure psychology). I talk about this in our online psychology courses.
Once you take control of your thoughts, you become the full master of your world and the situations in it, and the hundred-per-cent source of the events that happen. Controlling thoughts is hard, because you have to begin by analysing behaviour and developing awareness.
For an emotion to arise, we need to interact with something that is not us, something that goes beyond our idea of reality. And here we meet other people or objects of the world around us. At the moment of meeting a reaction arises in us, which is our attitude to the object and which comes with emotions. Here we already depend on what or whom we have met in the outer world, and our reactions become conditioned by the other side. But we still keep the right to change our key thoughts and become the full master of the situation — for example, by changing our attitude or behaviour.
Do you remember that the only thing we can change is ourselves: our thoughts and attitudes?
We cannot change another person or the outer world. Yes, here too you can let out the breath of indignation and disagreement you drew in, because that is how the world works and nothing can be done about it.
Having reached this level, a person begins to step back from squabbles with family and the people around them, from attempts to inflict good on them, to re-educate adult partners, to earn their parents’ love and approval.
On the third level we find ourselves in situations where events simply happen and we cannot change them (terrible, isn’t it?)
It’s already raining when you were about to go to the beach.
Your ex has already married, though you are still living in the illusion that you are a couple.
This shop has already run out of sugar, though you are still hoping for a miracle and are angry, unwilling to accept the situation.
Your mother is not going to change any more, and your father will not become young again or bring you up differently.
Your children will not become little again, and you will not replay your life.
You will have to learn to meet a reality that does not depend on you, but in which you have the chance to gain experience, learn a lesson and come closer to your true self.
A person’s strongest fear is the fear of making a fateful, fatal mistake (and really, of meeting helplessness and powerlessness in the face of a situation and circumstances). This fear is nothing other than infantile narcissism stuck somewhere in the unconscious, which creates the subjective feeling that you are the centre of this world and that it revolves around you. And therefore it must fulfil your wishes and demands and, in general, be the way you imagine it. What for? So as not to change, not to meet your shortcomings (or your strengths, for that matter). And this fear is the fear of losing the illusion of power over the world, and therefore the fear of meeting your own powerlessness and insignificant smallness before the vast, unknown world around you. Many people just stay sitting on their “childhood” throne, unable to meet reality, blocking their own development and growth.
And this level — the level of action, the level of physical reality — is, for exactly these reasons, often out of reach for a consciousness taken up with ideal notions of itself and of life.
That is why many people still live not their own life but someone else’s, following other people’s meanings, values and goals. They hand their will and responsibility over to others, accumulating excess potentials of psychic energy that show up as frightening states, anxieties, fears, illnesses and a destructive way of life.
If you want to know the world, start with yourself and with the Tarot cards on our course “Tarot Without Fortune-Telling. A Journey to the Self”!
You are welcome to join! With us, this process is engaging and deep!
Anna Oleksandrivna Shyman,
teacher at the PSYVISION centre
