Tag: the lovers

Life Coach Question: How do I Integrate My Shadow Side?

So we've been discussing the concept of a "shadow" side as the part of us we've kept hidden or submerged beneath the persona we let people see. Usually we've repressed these aspects since childhood, whether because we wanted to please other people, wanted to fit in better, or because we simply needed to survive.

In order to become whole  we need to integrate all the parts of us--but how can we do this? If it was easy, we would have done it already, right? And what if it's too late, or we're afraid of what we might find?​

It's never

Tarot for Teddy: A Bridging Spread

In life coaching, the goal is to help you work through your shit. This isn't always fun, and sometimes problems prove to be so intractable that no matter how much we go at them, we don't seem to get anywhere. 

This is when working with metaphor can really help. Metaphors are something that stand in for something else, that represent it in an often fantastical, creative way. Then we can play with the problem (note the word "play") in a way that's much less serious than before. We can either try to solve the problem in the land of metaphor

The Lovers

The Lovers is the sixth card of the Major Arcana. Again, if you're using the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, it's two nudes under an angel in the Garden of Eden. Snakes. Phallic symbols. Meh.

The Lovers card from the Animal Totem Tarot, that we saw in a previous post, gets the point across a lot better.​

 Maybe your lover is the opposite of you, in whatever respect matters. Maybe the other swan is you, and you're finally meeting yourself with an open heart. Maybe you look the same, like the lizards, and you could both use some skin cream in your personal

Loving Ourselves, Loving Others

The theme of this month is Love which, in true tribute to its complexity, isn't really what you think it is. Or, more precisely, "The Lovers," whereby the focus is put on the people rather than the act, because this is not that kind of self-help blog. And by "lovers," this is not going to be like a Cosmo "15 Orgasmo-tronic Sex tips from Hyper-erotic Penguins" type of thing--more like the totally unhot Jesus kind of love.

But what is that? And why are we talking about that now?

The Fool's Journey of the Tarot, and life in general, is