Beginners Series: Strength

This tarot card gets a bit of a bad rap. Like all the major arcana though it offers enlightement and self development.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
To hold me down, so I became a soldier nasty beating.
Oh Lord, but if it doesn't make me live, that

(00:25):
makes you list to the Lord. I feel another flames
going to show you on a.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
Welcome everyone to Tara Crazy. I'm Dorothy and this is
our Beginner's series tonight. We're talking about the strength card
as mentioned before, I have got right away to mystified
h and I've got Tara Explain, which have all of
the majors and minor acuna on through. So the beginner

(01:01):
series is laying it out for you if you like,
as a foundational understanding of a card. The cards don't
have a meaning. They have directions which you follow nuance,
which is why the books and why chatbt can't help
you when you're trying to stretch a card into a
situation or a circumstance, or even understand it as self

(01:22):
guidance as a model. The more narrow your framework, the
more set your framework, the harder it is to read
cards as a story, which is how they're meant to
be read. I've quite a few times seen really odd
commentaries on read it and quorra about cards are meant
to be read, not intuitive and then they're not meant

(01:45):
to be this. They were always divination. They're a divination tool.
They are meant to divine. Divination is the ability to
factor in or understand concepts, whether they're in the future,
going from the present, whether in the past, the present,
toward the future. I do not like past present future layouts,

(02:05):
by the way, mostly two of the cards get dismissed,
and even if they didn't, the past card is kind
of an anomaly to me. There are past expects that
you are living in today. So in a Celtic Cross,
you have a foundation card at the bottom. This is
why it's worth learning with larger cards, larger layouts, because

(02:27):
you are getting to look at more cards in relation
to an aspect, as opposed to trying to answer a
use or no question, which never works. I've never seen
it work very well at all. It's like a broken clock.
It can be right twice a day. And yes, I
did make that clearly phallic mistake. So one of the
important aspects when you are playing around with your cards

(02:50):
and you're learning your cards is probably not to do
daily draws. And anytime I see somebody suggesting that, I
know that they are novice themselves, and I know they've
never been trained, and I know they've never spent a
lot of time with herrow. And when you find yourself
narrowing down these concepts, the only reason a single card
draw will ever work for anyone is if you're doing

(03:10):
a bibliomensi style draw, which is where you draw a
card you look up a meaning that can have merit
as a message, but it has very little merit of
any as divination, so the cards are meant to be divination.
There are older style oracle decks, there are cats and
theme decks, and yes I am dismissive about them, but

(03:32):
if you want good information, understanding your cards is about
understanding the imagery. And if you don't understand the symbology,
you can look at your card and get a direction
based on how it makes you feel. Now, there are
a lot of more modern concept cards out there. I
recommend anybody that's learning to go and get cards with

(03:52):
really complex imagery that evoke a thought or a feeling,
because that is going to combine and in up being
a great reading. You can read a single card, and
I've done it many times. I'm just trying to point
out that that's not optimum and it's certainly not how
to learn. So when you are looking at the strength card,

(04:13):
again we have a major arcana and you're going to
get tired of hearing it. But they are higher concepts.
As soon as they appear in a layout, they matter
just as much, if not more, than all the other
cards combined. There's a little lesson in there, there's a
little development in there within the space or constraints. So
if say, for example, you're doing a Celtic Cross and
it comes out as a future position card, then it

(04:36):
says you're going to be that's going to be challenged
in you at some point in the future. And they
are challenge cards. They are attainments. That's something we want
to attain. Therefore, when they show up, they're showing up
to say, this is what you need to attain, this
is what you need to develop, this is what you
need to practice at some point. Whether it's current or otherwise.

(04:57):
When it shows up as an influence can be say
it's a strength card, it can be something that's challenging
you repeatedly, and if you don't read it that way,
or it's been challenging you for a while, then if
you don't read it that way. You're going to miss
the message if you try to make it a situation.
Major arcana are never situations. They're never a circumstance. They

(05:17):
can't be, they're not meant to be, and so a
single card draw leaves that problem as well, even small draws.
I do see some merrits in three and five card draws,
and I've placed them on the terot bytes on the
website so that you know understanding how and when to
perform them. But desperate draws are the ones where people

(05:38):
are drawing every day in asking questions every day they're
desperate or they get increasingly ridiculous seeing a person asking
about how many how many times are they going to
have sex this week and stuff like that. It's not
learning the cards because you're just playing. They've got no
merit in that moment. So think about the value of

(05:59):
the draw and you'll find that you get better draws,
you get better layouts, and so quite often for most
people that means doing a larger draw less often and
then exploring that draw. That's where decable could come in handy,
because you've got a journal there that as soon as
you hit it, the actual draw comes up even a
week later, a month later, a year later, the actual

(06:19):
draw comes up. You get to see it visually. Again,
it's not just a journal, but you can definitely and
I would advise that you keep notes, and they can
be verbal notes, that is to say, as you talk
at types, and you can get a very holistic look
in a month's time at what you did in that
culture cross a months earlier. When I was training, we
literally did that physically. Every week. We did these draws

(06:41):
for other people, for our instructor, for each other in
the group, and there were quite a few, and we
were doing that weekly, and so we would get to
come back after a period of time and see what
went right and wrong. And why does that matter? Because
feedback matters, and you can't give yourself feedback for accuracy.
You can only get feedback when you look back on
a reading that you have fully interpreted, not one where

(07:05):
you wait to the end of the day to see
if that card had relevance. Retrospective readings isn't learning how
to read tarrow. So we get back to the strengths card.
It's often read as a card of ego, and it's
definitely in there, but it's not really about ego at all.
It's really about managing yourself. It's a card that suggests
that you manage your tendencies that don't work well for you.

(07:29):
It's easy to say on an angry person is an
egotistical person, but we know that's not true. There can
be a person in pain, right, That can be a
person who's got trauma. It can represent that we need
to look at a behavior that isn't really working very well.
And when I say it isn't working very well, it's
not eliciting results. It's not deepening bonds with other people,

(07:50):
work or otherwise, it's not improving financial situations. So if
your query, say it was a general query about finances,
which is the way to do any larger spread. Really,
if you're going to ask any question at all outside
of the next timeframe, that's something also I want to say.
I see people drawing one card and saying, what's the

(08:10):
rest of my year going to be? Like, it's never
going to happen that way. It's like, well, it can
only give you the next little moment or a moment
over that period of time. There's a build up of
not a theme so much, but there's a build up
of characteristics, if you like, over a period of time,
when you've got a larger reading, I want to tell

(08:31):
you about my timing. By the way before as soon
as I've laid it out, look at the last card
and a ten card spread. When I've laid that out,
I get an idea of this is going to be
over the next two months, or this is going to
be over the next eight months. If somebody says I
want the reading within a month, it's really hard to
narrow that down. And that's clearvoyantly and reading auras, I'll

(08:52):
have people asking that I've got a person who literally
gets reading every month for the month ahead and in
advance of that. And over the years they've been interested
to note where the timeline slides, because I can't find
any value in reading day to day events that have
no import In fact, nobody will want that. So they're

(09:14):
looking for specific things. When it comes to work or career,
that's actually worked very accurately as a time frame, because
you're looking for standard stuff that's most likely to happen anyway.
But also when it comes to relationships and emotions, there's
another person's time frames involved. They're not on your timeline,
and so things get a little bit sketterish the more

(09:37):
you try to narrow them down. Now it's tempting to
ask about relationships. This is the strength card too. It's
tempting to ask about relationships and the idea that I
want to know what's happening in the next month because
I want something to happen. That's the strength card. I
want this, therefore other things should fit into it. And
it doesn't work that way. And so if I'm not

(09:58):
left the room to look at when a new relationship
will come forward, if somebody says in the next month,
they're going to get a negative, if it's not there,
it doesn't matter if I can see it up in
the future. That's not the question that asked me, Especially
when I've got quickie questions, which is single email where
you have a single question that you email me and
I email you a detailed response. The problem there becomes

(10:19):
as soon as somebody says, is this going to happen
in the next three months? Is this going to happen
that month? If it's going to happen, sure, but if
it's not, I'm not left with any tools to provide
an answer. As a reader, and I would like to
say that's frustrating, but at the same time, it's not
something I can do anything about. If I'm on social media,
I will modify a question. If a person's asked a

(10:41):
question that's too restrictive and I'm already picking up information
beyond that or outside of that, then I will modify it.
And I will say I'm modifying this because I'm changing
this too, because and I explain why, and I don't
care if they like that or not, because I'm not
into just dishing out negatives consistently or you know, bashing

(11:01):
people as it were, with difficult circumstances because they haven't
opened their mind enough to think the timeframes may not
fit into what their desires are. Back to the strength card.
If they get angry about that, if they get upset
about that, if they delete their responses because they don't
like them, that is the strength card in play. That's
the tendency to avoid. Perhaps in that strength card, the

(11:24):
tendency to not want to know and cut off anything
that shows information in a way, or they could be
providing an image to others. They could be showing others
an image that they don't want them to see. That
they're going to other psychics. I've always read for sidekicks
right from the start. I got conned horribly back in

(11:45):
the day a woman. We were working these shows and
I was doing oral reading, and she'd come around to
me right at the early stage and she'd say, look,
you know, things don't wind up for a little bit.
How about you come over to my site and give
me a reading because I've got my valuables there. Of course,
I had valuables in my site as well, so I
think I just sort of thought, oh, yeah, okay, no problem.

(12:06):
And then she would do that every month that we
did this show, and then I realized, oh, she was
making it look like I was getting the reading because
I was sitting in her site. So I put a
paide to that and I said, sorry, no, I'm staying
in my side. If you want a reading, you need
to come to me. Now she was paying me, but
the point was still an image thing. I don't want
people to see that I'm getting a reading. And she

(12:27):
did it every month with me, which meant that she
was appreciating the information, but it was a manipulation at
the bottom line. So think a little bit about that
with a strength card. That was an image related situation.
You could call it ego, but I think that's an
all encompassing thing. Everybody needs ego. Without ego, we don't dress,

(12:47):
we don't care what we look like, we don't wash ourselves.
Without ego, we have a non event as an individual.
So I think it's important to understand that ego's not
a dirty word. Or we don't wants to be egotistical,
or we don't want to be ego centric, and those
are like anything. We don't want to be prideful, which

(13:07):
is ego centric, okay. We don't want to be manipulative,
which can be ego avoiding rejection. So there was the
avoidance aspect of things in the Strength card. Probably the
ny Serrrihich I'd still like. And it's very simple because
he only did drawings. There were no colors. Was a
lifelessly VI, which of course has been borrowed by after

(13:30):
Way who translated his books into English, where it's a
gentle movement. In my own Victorian tero, I've used a
woman lion handler, I don't want to call her a
tamer back in the eighteen hundreds, and she would go
in with her lines and sit in their cage and

(13:50):
they would take photos of it. She wore beautiful dresses
with her lions, and she never wore a gun on
a hip, where all the male trainers wore a gun
on the and so you can see this dominant factor
with the gun on the hip and the ability to
kill the lions, and they'd have a whip. She didn't
use a whip. She did guide, but she would stand
right there, she would sit with them. She became part

(14:12):
of their family. And so essentially what she did was
with kindness and caring and love, she developed a rapport
and a position of respect within her lion community. I
think there were three or four of them that she had,
and so we're talking adult lions here and the eighteen hundreds,
so quite a fascinating thing. So I've used her and

(14:33):
her lions, which performed in circuses at the time and
other venues. She was quite the thing. So when we
are thinking about that and listening to that story, part
of the understanding about her was that she did it
with kindness. So anytime yourself critical, the strength card could
come and play, because you are criticizing something about yourself

(14:56):
that is going to keep coming at you. It's going
to still feel bad. It's still going to be a
problem because by criticizing it, you haven't agreed to modify
it or develop it. Here's an example of that. You
think about a trait that you've got that you don't
quite like. Our toxic trait is some where you see
other people up to fail. Also within the strength card,

(15:17):
if you're asking about a circumstance where a person is
not necessarily working very well with you in some way.
But we always need to understand that if the major
card shows up, we are the ones being assessed, even
if we're asking about someone else. You can't really do
a major when you're drawing the cards for yourself in

(15:38):
relation to another person. Assessing their archetype needs to be
a specific question within a situation, and that's really important,
and it can be any of the cards. It doesn't
have to be a major. But say this card came
up as an archetypal reference to a problem you're having
with a supervisor. We'll pop it in that context, and

(15:59):
so you draw the archetypal references the strength card. Well,
it suggests then that you may both have an issue
straight away, because you're the one drawing the card, and
that's the issue they are having with you, not what
their problem is. So the problem with you could be attitude,
which could be superior with the Strength card. An attitude

(16:21):
can be very much entitlement by the way, it can
be dismissive. It can be you know, if you roll
your eyes those cues other people see and you don't
think anything of it, but they don't like you when
you do it. I'm promising you that, and they don't
forget that you do it. If you do it more
than once, they don't forget it at all, because it
immediately is telling them that imbeciles. That's why we roll

(16:43):
our eyes, right, We roll our eyes because we see
something is ridiculous or stupid. So as soon as you
use those kind of mannerisms, you're expressing an attitude, not
just rolling your eyes that another person picks up on.
So pretty important stuff with the Strength card, when we
move to the necessity to work out for ourselves and

(17:06):
within ourselves, what aspects of our being can we evolve?
And so this is an evolutionary card if you want
to use it like that, but it can also be undercurrents.
So what leads to a situation, what takes you into
certain scenarios if you're asking about patterns, or if a
pattern is researched for you. Even if you're not deliberately

(17:28):
asking about patterns, it comes up. And it can be
that you have got a temper, or you do get
angry and dismissive, or you are critical. All of those
things are within the remit of the strength card. But
as a dynamic it says under that there could be
a battle of wills. Okay, that does take two. You
don't have a battle of wills with just one person.

(17:49):
It can't be just the other person. And then it
becomes a question of what do I need to overcome?
And that's what the strength card's about. Strength over yourself,
are coming over your base tender. It's probably the most
foundational meaning for this or not meaning, but directive of
the strength card is to overcome yourself in some way?
What do I need to overcome in myself? If there's

(18:11):
anything about yourself that afterwards you're saying, I wish I
didn't do that. I wish I didn't say that. I
wish it wasn't like that. This isn't me, it is you,
all of it, and you did do it. All of it,
and the strength card is a reminder that it's a
call to order. There's something there to overcome within yourself.
What's the tendency, what causes the outburst, what causes the resentment,
what causes something to happen? And when you understand the

(18:35):
cause within yourself, the cause to why am I reacting
to that? Why am I jealous? All of those things
are the questions to ask when the strength card comes
into play. If you are asking about finances, then it
becomes a question of, well, if you've got issues with finances,
where does your problem start? And why does it continue?
And why haven't you overcome it? If it's overspending, for example,

(18:57):
that can be imaged or it can be denied. Well,
I don't want to admit that I'm on, you know,
on the breed line. I don't want to admit that
I don't have enough money. Therefore, when I spend, I
feel like I have an abundance, but there's nothing to
back it up, and so it can become egocentric, it
can become prideful, or it can be avoiding the reality

(19:18):
of needing to knuckle down. All of these are base
tendencies to follow. A temptation to give an impression, to
give an image that isn't really real. You could be
quite calm and in control in a work environment and
go home and beat down on your partners or your kids,
or be a real angry person at home. One is

(19:40):
image and the other one is those people paying for it.
Because you couldn't express those things that work, it doesn't
mean you should. You need to overcome. The need to
is where the strength card comes in to that. Then
we move slightly further along with the strength card and
go a little bit deeper, if you like, because we're
stroking something into being, bringing something to it, to call it,

(20:02):
to overcome something that we really usually don't like in ourselves.
When we are asking somebody to apologize. Sorry, if we're
apologizing to somebody for a particular behavior and we find
ourselves doing that on a number of occasions, we know
the strength card is in play. We have something we
need to overcome within ourselves that we need to take
control of, but we need to do it with caring

(20:24):
and kindness. We need to listen to ourselves. It's actually
quite a spiritual concept. We need to be able to say,
you know what, there's been an experience that maybe caused this,
that maybe brought this about. And I might have been
protecting myself when I was younger, but I don't need
to do it that way anymore. That's a kind way
to deal with toxicity. For example, manipulative people can be

(20:47):
in the strength card zone. Where I manipulate to get
my way suggests I'm insecure, right, That's where that starts from.
I can't handle rejection or I can't handle or don't
understand why I can't get my way even at the
exp of somebody else. That's the strengths card. When you
have any excessive feeling and it is overwhelming you, that's

(21:10):
the strength card. And it doesn't matter what that feeling is. Obviously,
if you're all joy and fun and having a good time,
none of these things matter. So it's going to be
the things that we're challenged within ourselves. As an example,
you might get angry every time your partner or your
kids do something wrong, or you might try to control
them without getting angry. There's the strength card. They aren't

(21:33):
here for you, they're here for their own purposes. If
they're your kids, yes you teach them, but you do
so with kindness. A tendency to try and control is
really the fundamental part of this card, isn't it where
you have if you're not careful. Some of the more
newer cards that have used and tried to plagiarize legally

(21:55):
or not, it's still plagiarism if you copy somebody else's artwork.
So they've tried to plagiarize somebody else's and they've turned
the lion into an angry thing, and the discipline of
the dominance of the human is notable within it, so
it becomes an interesting thing again. In the Victorian Taro
with the Strengths card, it's it's very much a card

(22:20):
where you've got a lion roaring and it's standing on
the Two lions are standing on a bin thing whatever
you want to call it, and one's roaring, and she's
perfectly passive. She's not trying to stop them being who
they are. She knows their lions, she knows their tendencies
and what they are, and she knows that part of

(22:42):
what they're doing is performance or it's their natural tendency,
because there's a whole pile of people out there looking
at them. But she's completely passive. I've put a lot
of flowers in the a lot of roses. The roses
are representative of the fruit of the soul. That means
they've made a connection on a deeper level. And even
if another person might be tempted to freak out or

(23:03):
cage them or bring a whip up to egg them
on in their raw for entertainment, or to shut them
down when they don't want that, she's perfectly passive in
the image on the Victorian Terro card. So it's that understanding,
how can I passively overcome something? How can I passively

(23:23):
learn to respond differently to certain what you might call
triggers or I call responses to things that are my habit.
Nobody's triggering you. It's your habit in the first place,
you're the one doing the triggering. So when it comes
down to this understanding for the strength card, you can
apply it to any situation because anytime there's a drawer

(23:45):
out of significant draw and it's involved, you get to
ask yourself questions, as in all the majors. And that's
why when you draw more than three majors over ten cards,
or especially if it's least if I was doing a
five card draw, which I don't but if I was
going to I had three majors, and I'd put that
back in the deck. There's just nothing to learn there.
It's just a bad draw. And guess what, it happens.

(24:07):
We're shuffling and cutting cards. The more you do that,
the easier it is, or there more obvious that your
mind might wander or that you haven't got a specific understanding,
or you just do a bad draw, bad shuffle, bad draw.
It happens. So we need to recognize that on a

(24:29):
number of occasions shuffled for too long over the years
and sat there and say, oh, hang on, where was
my mind? And I've had to bring it back because
I couldn't even tell you what I was thinking about.
And when you're doing that, it's telling you it's probably
trying to put the cards down for now and wander
off and do something else. But it's also something to

(24:50):
be understanding that there's a self discipline in the strength card,
and there's a self discipline in shuffling and drawing cards
to get that energetic connection that is real. Whether you
don't have to ask a question to get that, you
don't have to even think about somebody else to get that.
But if you are, so your mind wanders to the
hobby that you saw yesterday and you wonder, hmm, they
are pretty good, and suddenly your cards aren't going to

(25:12):
make sense if you're asking about your finances. It's simple, really,
So as that follows on through, we can say, oh, yeah,
but my intention was where your intention stopped being an
intention as soon as your mind wanted. It's a self discipline.
So there is self discipline within the strength card. So
if you overeat, if you overspend, anything that you do

(25:36):
to a point that you know it's not good for you,
that it's damaging for you or damaging for others, becomes
a question of self discipline. And often it's one of
those things that individuals really hate, that word self discipline,
but it's a foundation of any development. Anyway. When I
first started my spiritual development, it was a sort of

(25:57):
more of a healing thing, going back to Lao century
significantly back into laur sentry, and one of the things
that I did immediately once I started meditating, and I
started doing certain things, and I started hearing things and
seeing things which I wasn't seeking or going to classes
for it sort of spontaneously started for me. One of

(26:20):
the things that was notable about it was I got
this sudden urge to quit drinking coffee, I quit smoking cigarettes,
I quit smoking dope, I quit drinking alcohol, and I
quit eating meat all at once, those five things. And
I was a tyrant because of course I was going
through multiple withdrawals, right and I felt sorry for my

(26:41):
kids because they were pretty young back then. And then,
of course, a couple of years later, I reintroduced the coffee.
I reintroduced I never smoked again anything ever, because I
decided if I was going to go through that kind
of hell to give it all up, I wasn't going
to dive back into it to end up not wanting
to do it. And this is the part you're looking at.

(27:02):
If you don't want to do something that you're doing
that you know is damaging, and I'm not talking about,
you know, bowing down to other people's desires for a time,
that is a strength card. Self discipline needs to be overcome.
If I don't like something I am doing or saying
or being, then I am tasked with the spiritual attainment
of overcoming that thing. And so anyway, when I got

(27:25):
to the end of it and i'd reintroduced the coffee,
and i'd reintroduce the meat when I returned to New
Zealand and came back home, and I do drink, but
I wasn't drinking. Oh I was drinking terribly a lot,
a lot, a lot a lot back then. And so
it became just social, not by yourself, only when you
went out and had dinner, kind of normal stuff. So

(27:46):
that was okay. And it took me another few years
because I thought that's what you needed to do for spirituality,
that you needed to do something like that, because you know,
you should be a vegetarian. Oh, you should be this,
or you should be that. And then I realized, actually
I had been completely undisciplined most of my life. And
because I had been completely undisciplined, that whole boom moment

(28:07):
of quitting all of that stuff was to introduce self discipline.
I overate, I over drank, I overplayed, I over everything,
and I could not help but see, yeah, okay, So
I had brought moderation into my life through exercising that
self discipline for a few years. And by bringing moderation

(28:28):
into my life, it was it was then okay to
be able to do certain things. So you need moderation
and spending, moderation and how you live. And we hear
all of this, it's a strength card, and we hear
all of this, and we miss out on what moderation is.
We go anything in moderation. It's not anything in moderation.
It's those things that are right and appropriate still need

(28:50):
to be in moderation. That's it simple. If you have
anything you don't like about yourself, think about it now,
and I mean genuine, not being silly, not what you
say to others to get victim status or to get attention,
but being really genuine about it. If you think, you know,
what's the thing that I would that I don't like?
What are the things I don't like about myself? Then

(29:11):
those are the things that when the strength card shows
up in a reading, that may be what is being
asked of you. They are not cards to challenge you.
They are cards to say you are already being challenged
by this in some way, and this is the card
reminding you that there is an attainment that you can
overcome those things, that you can be kind in caring

(29:34):
to yourself, because engaging in any practices, behaviors, or attitudes
that you don't like. Isn't being kind or caring to yourself, Dorothy,
this is Tara Crazy beginner series show for now.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
Despite your despite trying to get away off my shot
Durst past I take again.

Speaker 2 (30:13):
I'm don't gonna Christy oh on causign

Speaker 1 (30:21):
Feel the number flames gonna show you