He was feeling stuck.
Truly stuck.
And so was I.
None of my questions seemed to help, he kept going round in circles, not able to see any other possibilities.
I looked around the meadow I was sitting in, waiting for inspiration to hit, when my eye fell on my backpack. I had taken up learning the tarot shortly before and had started bringing one of my decks with me to flip through if I had some spare time.
Could I?
Before I could talk myself out of it, I asked him if he was willing to try something completely different.
He agreed.
“I have one of my tarot decks here with me”, I said. “What if we pulled a card for you?
A bit nervous, I waited for his reaction.
“Tarot cards?”, he asked hesitantly. “To predict the future, you mean?”
“Nothing like that”, I answered. “Just to see if it might give us some new ideas.”
“Hmm…. Okay, I guess…”
He still sounded doubtful, which didn’t surprise me. He was a finance guy, focused on numbers and accounting and formulas and spreadsheets, not into woo-woo stuff like me.
Still, we had reached an impasse, and I knew I needed to try something very different to shake up his logical thinking.
I shuffled the cards and asked him to tell me when to stop.
“Stop.”
I turned over the top card, and for a moment my heart sank.
The devil.
Really? The devil?
He’d been doubtful to begin with, and I feared getting the devil card wasn’t going to help with that.
Even though there are no bad cards in tarot, I wanted to pick another card, any other card.
Instead, I took a picture of it and sent it to him.
A few seconds later he had it on his screen.
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“The devil?” He laughed incredulously. “What does that mean?”
“What do you see?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about tarot!” He laughed again, uncomfortably.
“That’s okay, you don’t need to know anything about tarot. What do you see on the card? Just describe it to me.”
“Okay. I see a devil on the card, I guess. A fat guy with horns. And wings, like a bat.”
“Very good. What else do you see?”
“Two naked people, a man and a woman. They’re prisoners of the devil, they’re chained to that block thing he’s sitting on.”
“What else?”
“…. He, the devil I mean, is holding a burning torch. Is he setting fire to the naked guy? … Huh, they both have a tail, and they both seem to have small horns too. I hadn’t noticed that before…. What’s that on the woman’s tail? Grapes? This doesn’t make any sense!”
“I know, that’s okay. Just keep going. What else are you noticing that you hadn’t noticed before?”
“Um, well, the devil has this upside down star on his brow. No idea what that means though. And the image is very dark, the background is completely black… Oh, and the devil himself is kind of orange-brownish, not red, like in Lucifer.”
“Cool. Anything else?”
“I don’t think so….”
He was quiet, studying the card.
“I’m looking at the prisoners again, and their chains. They’re chained to that box the devil is sitting on, but the chains around their neck are quite large, aren’t they? I mean, it seems like they could just lift them over their head and take them off…”
“Hmm. Sounds like they might not be as stuck as they seem to think they are, maybe?”
“Yeah….”
“Any way you see this could be true in your current situation too?”
He thought for a moment.
“Yeah… Yeah!”
He spoke to what the devil and the chain represented in his situation and how that made him feel stuck.
“But I’m not actually stuck, am I? I just thought I was. I could lift that chain over my head and walk away…”
He paused.
“Ha! I can’t believe it! I felt so stuck, but really, I’m free to do whatever I want with this!”
No longer feeling stuck, ideas of what he could do instead started flowing out of him.
Since that first time, whenever we reach a point in our conversations where he feels stuck, he asks if we can pull a card.