Action Eases Anxiety Tarot: Alliance

Sometimes just having some sort of an action plan can help ease worry. Even small, imperceptible actions like focusing on your breathing, or looking at artwork on Tarot cards can help. That is what this two card layout is designed to do: Help to understand a little bit about current energies that might be a source of worry and suggest a small something to do about it.

Sometimes its fun being a little bit clairaudient when music is involved.

What it is: The Corpse

When I saw the corpse card, my first thought wasn’t dead, smelly and gross. It was the Gizmodrome (I’m a Police / Stewart Copeland fan) song “Zombies Are In The Mall” I really like that song and have proceeded to earworm it off and on since filming the card draw. If you prefer Michael Jackson, think “Thriller,” It fits – Pittsburgh has a connection with zombies. My first apartment was a 20 minute shamble from where Night of the Living Dead was filmed. The card has an important message, but it is wrapped in a little pop culture and humor. Pure brain candy vibe on the order of 1989 movie, Weekend at Bernie’s

The sense is of something that maybe isn’t actively harmful, but more along the lines of something that has far outlived its usefulness but just keeps rolling along in your life out of sheer habit and pure inertia. Think dead weight. Think 10 of wands. Think that old pair of underwear with holes and stretched out elastic that keeps being put back in your drawer wash after wash.

Let. It. Go.

This doesn’t warrant rolling out the Kylo Ren quote but it is a reminder to look out for any metaphoric zombies that have been following you around lately.

It could be anything. Things, habits, thoughts, beliefs. Here the Death card joins the chat with its connection to change. Again the phrase “outlived their usefulness” hinting at a gradual change. That outliving doesn’t happen all at once. It’s a gradual decay. We change, we grow, and old parts of us wither up and usually fall away like shedding skin cells or the papery outer layers of an onion.

Seriously, this could be as minimal as a cue to go ahead and try that new exfoliant face treatment or indulge in that spa sugar scrub. Or it could be a cue to let go of that now dead part of you that you worked so hard to deconstruct.

Change isn’t always easy, even when it is change for the better. Changes both big and small, gradual and fast, can leave us feeling a little anxious and unmoored.

What to do: The Familiar

There is nothing wrong with comfort food. Or a comfort watch on TV. Or wearing your favorite emotional support hoodie. If that is the meaning of the word familiar that this this card evokes for you, by all means follow that.

I feel drawn to the cards author-intended meaning of alliance.

Familiar in this sense is like a witch’s familiar, a helpful entity that takes the form of an animal. In traditional lore, the witch / familiar relationship is a master / servant one. I think this card is giving something far more nuanced, and far more powerful: symbiosis. This has a feeling of mutually beneficial cooperation, of teamwork.

When you discover the old parts of you are dead and gone, when you finally recognize the zombies that are following you around, let them go. Lop the heads off if you have to. But nature really does abhor a vacuum. Find your tribe. Find your allies. Find friendly energies to take their place. The Familiar card is reassurance that they are indeed like minded people out there if we allow ourselves to go out in the world and find them.