Finding Resilience in Times of Loss, Upheaval, and Grief
Dreams and Tarotpy help us to navigate the terrain of personal and collective loss and grief. These imaginal practices serve as our compass, guiding us towards resilience and equilibrium even amidst times of upheaval and heartbreak.
A Journey of Grief: Andrea's Story
Andrea, whose mother had just passed away, randomly selects an image of two women in black; the elder’s head has fallen to the ground, and replaced by a radiant light.
In our next session, Andrea randomly selects an image of a torso, the head has turned into a fleshy stump. The name of the card is “orphaned.” The image perfectly mirrors her intense grief and aloneness: her loved one’s passing is felt like the loss of an appendage.
Andrea has a dream: I am sitting in the living room with my family. It is bathed in bright light. I hear a knock on the door, traverse a dark passage and open the front door. I notice that the ancient stones on the threshold have been removed.
Andrea selects cards from several decks for further guidance on the dream. One particular card from the Wildwood deck comes upside down: a warrior stag standing on ancient stone.
Andrea senses intuitively that this is the guardian of the threshold between living and dying. With active imagination and automatic writing, Andrea communicates with the stag and feels she now has a protector while the threshold and her place in the world is under construction.
Although the client might randomly choose cards from a variety of decks, her layout portrays a cohesive narrative as if it were a carefully scripted storyboard. In our next session, Andrea selects four cards: she notices that in every card in the layout, there is a journey, a bridge, a crossing of some sort. In the second card from the left, a person walks through the passage surrounded by oozing ghoulish faces. Grief is clearly a passage.
Andrea also notices a white tiger pacing a stone wall. Another protector of the threshold has presented itself upside down.
A consistent theme emerges in the context of death and loss: when a loved one passes away, the boundary that separates life from death dissipates. During a certain period, we embark on a psychic journey alongside them into the ancestral realm or Ghostland.
The layouts serve as a map and reveal animal companions to aid Andrea as she navigates her way through the challenges of loss and grief.
As you can see in this next layout, imaginal practices grant us the ability to peer into a portal leading to another dimension (the SoulCard on the far left.) Following her journey into the realm of her ancestors, Andrea now perceives herself as an embodiment of her ancestral home. We reflect about the locks on the fence. She feels locked into certain painful family patterns, which cause conflict between the siblings. However, I offered another interpretation which felt equally valid to her: in Paris and other urban cities, you find locks hanging on the bridges to signify love. Despite family conflict, she feels an abiding love for her siblings. Andrea’s work with the imaginal realm has empowered her to be like a superhero (second card from the right.) She tenderly embraces her inner child while simultaneously riding on the back of the Great Mother (far right image.)
Imaginal practices such as dreamwork and Tarotpy help us establish a profound connection with the natural cycle of life, death, and renewal.