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Six Dimensions of a 1-Card Reading

I love my Tarot students! They are always asking great questions and nudging me to share the deeper aspects of my unique reading style.

In our recent Professional Tarot Consulting (PTC), Level III live session, the special topic was on how to bring Transformative Tarot Counseling™ elements into a 1-Card Reading. In other words, what are the key elements that lead to a profound experience working with the cards? As a disclaimer, I don’t recommend using only one card when reading for querents and mostly see this as a practice exercise for students learning to develop more objectivity in their awareness by reading for themselves, and each other.

My book, An Introduction to Transformative Tarot Counseling (TTC), breaks down the four magical steps to transformation while highlighting the alchemical process laid out by Swiss analyst, Carl Jung. To give you an oversimplified idea of the three most important stages of magic, according to Israel Regardie‘s writings, inspired by his work with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and later, influenced by his Jungian studies, they are:

  1. Divination – accessing intuition
  2. Evocation & Vision – evoking “spirits”
  3. Invocation – integrating the essence

In a Tarot (or other oracle) reading, this First Dimension would then be our openness to intuitive, non-cognitive impressions, associations, memories, feelings, etc., where focus is centered on the very first impression of the card, the ignis or spark that captures our attention, then encouraged to “cook” by amplifying the essence, or spirit of that connection to allow it to be more present, more subjectively personal (the Forth Dimension).

Second Dimension is how we dance between our old and our new potential Self in the reading, by teasing out the core duality, opposition, or contrast that appears…sometimes called the “I” and the “Not I” (Arnold Mindell, Process Work Psychology). The Not I is the difficult part, the Shadow, something we may project upon others or the world, or Jung’s idea of Psyche, calling us to embrace in some way its essence, the core energy of its true message, how we experience it.

This prepares us for the Third Dimension, welcoming and identifying with this new essence of being, the beautiful/ugly relationship between the I and the Not I. Jung’s work points to the alchemical idea of “Integration”, a reclaiming of disparate parts that have been lost, forbidden, buried, or just unknown, now able to reunite in a wholistic way.

As we look at the next three dimensions of this reading style, there is a continuum of areas of awareness that can be viewed as at least three levels: Personal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal. Keep in mind, they are all subjective for the querent, yet the spotlight in any given moment tends to be on only one.

For example, the reading may be about a relationship issue (Fifth Dimension – Interpersonal), yet the solution is to do inner work, to take the focus off of “other” and look more deeply at Self (Forth Dimension).

Another example, once the querent has been able to reach a wholistic moment in the reading (Third Dimension), to ground the reading it helps to take the awareness into the world channel (Sixth Dimension – Transpersonal), in other words, how can they bring this out more consciously, or congruently, into the world? How does the world need this energy or essence from them?

Please remember, these are very basic ideas that represent the bare structure behind what I teach as comprehensive courses, especially in the PTC series, and describe in more detail in my TTC book…link here.

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