Category: Tarot Story Exchanges

Posted in Matilda's, Tarot Story Exchanges, Women's Health, Women's Stories

Waltz with a Tarot4Health ‘Tilda

Posted on by Heather Blakey

Julia Rajagopalan is a certified nutritionist, yoga teacher, writer, and witch. She has been reading tarot for over 20 years.

Why Tarot for Health

On the surface, tarot and witchcraft don’t seem to have much to do with health and wellness. I don’t need tarot cards to predict a Friday night pizza binge, and I can’t brew a magic potion to lose 40 pounds.

So, why use Tarot and spell work in the wellness world?

A few years ago, I worked at a wellness company that coached people on their nutrition and eating habits. The vast majority of clients were there to lose weight. To help them reach their goals, coaches educated clients on nutrition and healthy behaviors. What I found, however, was that clients already knew what they should do to get healthy. The clients knew they should eat less sugar and more lean protein. They knew they should move more and sit less.

But they weren’t doing it.

The disconnect came when applying that knowledge to everyday habits. As I researched the science of motivation and habit formation, I started hearing words like mindfulness, intuition, awareness, and intention. As a practicing witch, these were terms very familiar. I’ve been reading tarot for twenty years and dabbled in witchcraft for almost as long.

The first thing a witch does when they start a spell is set an intention. Deciding what you want the spell to do is just as important as doing the spell itself. This is similar to finding your WHY for health changes. Finding your WHY allows you to get clear about your goals and motivation. If you’re clear about your WHY, you’re more likely to act.

In 2014, I left my job in the education industry and moved with my husband to New Delhi, India. My husband, who grew up in India, was transferred there for work. While in India, I studied Vinyasa and Yin Yoga, as well as Ayurveda. Before India, my yoga practice had been purely for exercise, but after studying the Vedic philosophies, I realized there’s so much more to it.

Tarot is also more complex than people realize. Many think the tarot is just a tool for predicting the future. However, Tarot is most impactful when used to understand the self. Tarot allows us to access our subconscious mind, to understand our true desires. It helps us process the massive amount of information in our brains to extract insights that impact our lives. Tarot tells us things we already know but don’t understand.

This can be invaluable when identifying health habits that don’t serve us. Why do I plop on the couch every night instead of going for a walk? Why do I skip Friday yoga, even though I love doing it? Why do I automatically reach for that glass of wine after a phone call with my mother? Tarot cards are archetypal thought prompts to help us identify things hidden in our subconscious.

Soon after we returned to the United States, the pandemic hit. During the pandemic, something became abundantly clear. I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. I’ve been sober for over two and a half years now, and I attribute my sobriety to wonderful organizations like Secular AA, Recovery Dharma, and Y12SR. I also believe tools like tarot and witchcraft helped me in my recovery.

For me, dealing with cravings means delaying and distracting. When feeling a craving, I often read tarot, do yoga, or create a spell. Tarot and witchcraft are excellent distractions that encourage mindfulness and intuition. I believe these practices can help others make healthier choices, too.

Why do I know using tarot and witchcraft for health works? I was 225 pounds at my heaviest, and I was able to use tarot and witchcraft, along with yoga and mindful eating, to get healthy and lose nearly 40 pounds. I’m still a work in progress, but by using these practices, I’ve found lasting success.

Yoga, tarot, and witchcraft offer alternative approaches that empower people to take control of their health journeys in a way that feels authentic and meaningful. Most of us will never become powerlifters, and not everyone wants to throw giant tires around as exercise. People don’t want to eat only grilled chicken breast for the rest of their lives. That’s not a welcoming world, and it’s not even effective in making sustainable health changes. The wellness world should be welcoming to everyone, and I want all people to feel safe and heard in their journeys to health and well-being.

I recently created a Udemy course that uses tarot and witchcraft to get healthy and achieve lasting wellness. I am also completing a grimoire workbook to help people on their health journeys. Check out the course on Udemy.

Tarot4Health on Instagram

Follow Julia on Instagram @tarot4health to benefit from spreads like these.

Posted in Matilda's, Memoir Writing, Narrative Therapy, Tarot Story Exchanges, Women's Health, Women's Stories

Meet Jenn Congilaro – Not So Mystical Tarot

Posted on by Heather Blakey

When people are asked to name their favourite tarot card, the Queen of Swords often comes up. Why? Much of her appeal has to do with the fact that this is a strong, powerful person who has been through a lot. So many people relate to this queen’s story. Here we have a person of tenacity and courage.

When asked to identify a card that really speaks to who she is as a creative, Jenn (JenniferAnn) Congilaro, who so many know as the creator of the Not So Mystical Tarot deck, chose the indefatigable Queen of Swords.

Take the time to check out this tilda’s profile here at Waltzing with a Matilda and learn more about her connection to the Queen of Swords.

Posted in Matilda's, Memoir Writing, Narrative Therapy, Tarot Story Exchanges, Women's Health, Women's Stories

How Would You Waltz With A Matilda?

Posted on by Heather Blakey

As the host of this interactive site I am endeavouring to redress the Matilda Effect by waltzing with Australian women, identifying Tarot cards that help tell their stories. However, there is no set way to Waltz with a Matilda. The main object is to redress the Matilda Effect and bring the achievements of diverse women out of the shadows.

 Christina Macpherson’s story is just one example of the Matilda Effect as it applies in a more general sense. Her contribution to the iconic Australian ballad, Waltzing Matilda, was relegated to the shadows. It was Banjo Patterson who got to be immortalised and bask in the associated glory.

Despite the reference to the iconic, unofficial Australian anthem, you do not have to be Australian or profile an Australian woman to engage with this project. There is no requirement to use a Tarot deck if its not your thing. You are simply provided with an opportunity to redress the Matilda Effect by bringing the women’s stories out of the shadows in any way you deem appropriate

If you decide to engage I will link to your work and or feature your profiles on this site.

How will you fight the Matilda Effect and cast a spotlight on extraordinary women? Will you take the opportunity to devise your own dance and be featured here?

Waltzing with Matilda’s

  • The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago is an important icon of 1970s feminist art and a milestone in twentieth-century art. This installation comprises a massive ceremonial banquet, arranged on a triangular table with a total of thirty-nine place settings, each commemorating an important woman from history.
  • It is no secret that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are placed well down on the scale of relevance and importance in Australia. They are invariably the last to be recognised. Perhaps this is because of their tireless pursuit of rights and betterment for their people. This may explain why individual achievements are rarely important and why they are often overlooked and don’t receive credit where credit is due. This Listening Circle provides fourteen places to seat influential First Nations Australian women. This offers an opportunity for deep listening and to redress this lack of acknowledgement.
  • Christine de Pizan (c.1364-1430), France’s first professional woman of letters, confronted the misogynist view that view that female nature is wholly given up to vice.head-on in her seminal work, the City of Ladies. 
  • Waltzing with a Tarot Deck – Heather Blakey, a devotee of the Tarot, waltzes with Tarot decks and matches cards with a life experience or situation faced by an Australian woman. She is also the creator of this site!
  • Follow in the Conversations footsteps. Perhaps, like an archeologist, you will undertake a dig and unearth previously hidden stories about women. You might be inspired to write up a profile and have it published here.
  • Honour Maternal Ancestors: We all have heroines in our own family. They are our mothers, grandmothers, aunts and cousins. They are the women who survived all life’s challenges against all odds to provide for the family or the role models who showed us that family and hard work go hand in hand. Add to the honour role here. Share either a Tarot Profile or do feel free to your own thing.
  • Pacific Matildas: Finding the women in the history of Pacific archaeology, responds to the Matilda Effect. The project aims to investigate the scientific lives of the first women who conducted archaeological work in Oceania from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, and document their hidden contributions to the development of Pacific archaeology, to ensure their stories and legacies become part of broader narratives in the history of science. 
  • Sheila: A Foundation for Women in Visual Art. Known simply as ‘Sheila’, this foundation, honouring the contribution of Lady Sheila Cruthers, was launched in May 2019 and aims “to overturn decades of gender bias by writing Australian women artists back into our art history and ensuring equality for today’s women artists.”
  • More Ways to Waltz with a A Matilda
Posted in Matilda's, Memoir Writing, Tarot Story Exchanges, Women's Health, Women's Stories

Gina Chick – Three of Swords

Posted on by Heather Blakey

One of the most iconic images in the tarot, the Three of Swords displays a floating heart that is pierced by three swords. Above it, there are heavy clouds. There is also a heavy downpour in the background. The symbolism is pretty opaque, and the emotional effect that it has is immediate. The heart is the seat of warmth, affection and spirit, and the three swords indicate the power to harm, cause pain, and create suffering to what it pierces. This is an image of grief, loss and literally heartbreak. The clouds and rain depict the surrounding grimness of the situation. All these symbols point to the Three of Swords showing a low point in one’s life.
source: Labyrinthos

From the Fyodor Pavlov Tarot

Gina Chick, a rewilding facilitator, was the first woman to win Alone Australia, the survival show in which contestants compete for a big cash prize after being dropped in remote wilderness to survive (alone) for as long as they can. 

While her journey in the wild was inspiring it was her vunerability, her willingness to share her dance with traumatic loss and grief and the loss of her infant daughter to cancer which captured the imagination of Australians.

Processing Loss and Grief

Let us be clear! There is no set way of processing loss and grief and there are no timelines that one can observe. The ideas presented here are just ideas, processes that have helped some, but not all.

Use a spread to open a fresh window of perspective.

If you are a devotee of Tarot and Oracle cards you can lay down the Three of Swords in the centre and pull four cards. There is no magic involved. It is a simple reality that when you look at the images in the cards nuances and points of reference may rise up that help clarify the matter.

Make a Battle/Scar Cloak

In her book Women Who Run With The Wolves in Chapter 13, Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes about Battle Scars and describes a process she uses in workshops. She shows women how to make a full length scapecoat from cloth or other material. This coat details in painting and writing and with all manner of things pinned and stitched to it, all the name calling a woman has endured, all the slurs, all the traumas, all the wounds, all the scars.

Of course this coat may become so heavy that you need a chorus of Muses to carry and sing over it but I think you get the idea! It helps heal!

Posted in Matilda's, Memoir Writing, Narrative Therapy, Tarot Story Exchanges, Women's Stories

Six of Pentacles – Ruby Hunter

Posted on by Heather Blakey

generosity, charity, community, material help, support, sharing, giving and receiving, gratitude

From The Tarot of the Abyss

It is no news to those who love Tarot that the cards can help us talk about the good, the bad and the ugly things that we all face on this planet. These images can help us to find the words to describe how we are feeling and they also have the capacity to draw out long buried memories.

The Five and Six of Pentacles can describe the almost cliche rags to riches story and equally can help us celebrate triumph in the face of adversity.

Ruby Hunter (1955-2010), singer/songwriter, was a Ngarrindjeri/ Kukatha/ Pitjantjatjara woman from South Australia. At the age of eight she and her four siblings and herself were taken from their family. She was placed in the Seaforth Children’s Home. Ruby remembered that the Government Authorities simply arrived one day in a big car, promising their grandmother that they were taking the children to the circus. At the time they were living with their grandmother on the Coorong at Meningie.

Ruby believed that the achievement of which she was most proud was keeping her family – Roach, their two children and three foster children – together as a stable unit.

While homeless Ruby met Archie Roach, also a member of the Stolen Generations, who had drifted to Adelaide from Mildura across the Victorian border. They met at a Salvation Army drop in centre as they were both living on the street. Forming a unique friendship during their time together on the streets of Adelaide, they formed an enduring bond that would last for the rest of Ruby’s life. They were inseparable partners.

During her life Ruby worked tirelessly to support and encourage young Aboriginal people, running an open house for teenagers. Ruby and Archie together cared for 14 children in a family house group home run by the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency. Later they made their own home a welcoming haven for homeless and disadvantaged young people.

Ruby was also a strong advocate against domestic violence, and a voice for the stolen generations, and between them Ruby and Archie raised many foster children with their own two boys. Ruby believed that the achievement of which she was most proud was keeping her family – Roach, their two children and three foster children – together as a stable unit. She died of a heart attack at the age of 55.

Archie, unlike those who claimed work that had been written by their women, proudly tells the story of how his wife, Ruby, wrote Down City Streets.

Philanthropic Energy

Caroline Chisholm

Posted in Matilda's, Memoir Writing, Narrative Therapy, Tarot Story Exchanges, Women's Health, Women's Stories

Infused with Queen of Wands Energy

Posted on by Heather Blakey

Irene Torres, the Spanish artisan responsible for the Swiss Marseille Tarot and other Playing Cards, is currently the only female restorer of old decks of cards who redraws the images, creates the missing ones and fills them with vibrant colors, giving them a new life.

I was delighted when she accepted my invitation to, not only provide insight into how she works, but to talk about the Tarot card which best describes her as an artisan.
Learn about how the Queen of Wands defines and informs her work.

“Like the Queen of Wands, I am a visionary who doesn’t follow paths already laid out by other people, since my skeptical and inquisitive nature prevents me from taking everything as good, without first passing it through my own filters. I love approaching tarot in my own way, because there are already other people who can do the same thing as always. That’s why I choose such special tarot decks or card decks to restore. Therefore, when I create a deck, the result is something totally personal and intimate, where I put part of my own essence, of my own being”.

Irene Torres
Posted in Matilda's, Memoir Writing, Tarot Story Exchanges, Women's Stories

Eliza Donnithorne – Five of Pentacles

Posted on by Heather Blakey

The Five of Coins, or the Five of Pentacles is a card when upright means to lose all faith, losing resources, losing a lover (mostly shows up when you’ve had a breakup), and losing security whether financially or emotionally (or both).

In 1889, the Illustrated Sydney News published an article about her being left at the altar, leaving her “completely prostrated.”

Did Sydney’s reclusive Eliza Donnithorne inspire Charles Dickens when he wrote Great Expectations or was it someone else?

When Pip meets the jilted Miss Havisham in Great Expectations she is dressed in her decaying wedding attire, presenting a terrifying blend of waxwork figure and living skeleton.

Born in South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope in 1821, Eliza was the youngest child of James Donnithorne, a judge and merchant in the famous East India Company, and grew up in Calcutta. Tragedy struck in 1832, when Eliza’s mother and two teenage sisters died during the city’s cholera epidemic. At age 63, Judge Donnithorne retired to Australia, arriving in Sydney on September 10, 1838.

Donnithorne moved to Australia during the 1840s to be with her father, who had been also been an official of the East India Company. Eliza had formed an attachment to a young man of whom her father disapproved, and after resisting his attempts to split them up, the couple set a date for the wedding. Mr. Donnithorne was such an important official that a great deal of interest was held in the wedding, and crowds are said to have lined the streets to catch a glimpse of the bride. Eliza Donnithorne, dressed in her finery, waited excitedly at the altar for her lover.

He didn’t show.

In 1889, the Illustrated Sydney News published an article about her being left at the altar, leaving her “completely prostrated.”

After waiting hours, it’s said Eliza farewelled her guests and abandoned the wedding breakfast to insects and dust. She kept her bridal gown on and left the front door ajar in case Cuthbertson came at last. Some said Cuthbertson already had a wife in England and feared exposure, but he left not a word of explanation and was never heard from again.

Heartbroken but headstrong, Miss Donnithorne demanded that the banquet and the house remain ready for his arrival. The table stayed set for a party, the door remained opened, and for three decades she waited.

Eliza died in the house on 20 May 1886 and was buried in the same grave as her father at Camperdown cemetery where a headstone was later placed in his memory. Eliza’s estate, including land and houses in Sydney, Melbourne and Britain, was valued at £12,000. The chief beneficiary was her housekeeper, Sarah Ann Bailey.

Spiritual Implications of the Five of Pentacles

The images of the Five of Pentacles often shows a person or people who are in an apparent state of crisis. Clothes in rags, out in the cold, overwhelmed or tired out, this is not a happy sight.

While the Five of Pentacles is associated with

  • Losing income
  • Falling on hard times
  • Struggling to make ends meet
  • Struggling with ill-health
  • Neglecting your physical needs
  • Being rejected
  • Standing alone
  • Being excluded
  • Taking an unpopular opinion

it may allude to hard times on a more spiritual and emotional level. This card can have a very real “us against the world” vibe attached to it.

Posted in Matilda's, Memoir Writing, Narrative Therapy, Tarot Story Exchanges, Women's Health

Simone Young – Emperor

Posted on by Heather Blakey

The Emperor is often read as the archetypal ‘Father’ (with the Empress as ‘Mother’), there are Freudian and Jungian explanations for this that are rooted in father-child (and mother-child) relationships. Beyond ‘Father’, though, the Emperor also represents social structures, norms and codes. The Emperor can represent the rule of law, decision-making by out-of-touch leaders, and so on. The Emperor typically prizes order, conformity, commercial success, strong hierarchical leadership.

The LeGrande Circus and Sideshow Tarot matches prominent figures from the Circus/Carnival world with the Major and Minor Arcana. It depicts the Ringmaster as the Emperor and there is no doubt about the power of this key figure. Like the Captain of a warship he reigns supreme and commands the entire performance. Nobody moves without his instruction.

Similarly, the conductor of an Orchestra holds the baton and controls every aspect of a performance. Simone Young is considered one of the most important conductors of our time. After completing her musical studies in her native Sydney, she began her career on the podium in Germany. This launched her international career, which has taken her to all important opera houses and symphony orchestras around the world. She is regarded as a trail blazer in a male dominated world.

Executive produced by Academy Award-winning actress Cate Blanchett, Knowing The Score gets up close and personal with this celebrated Australian conductor.

Feeling the Qualities of the Emperor

Whoever you are, sooner or later you will meet with the constrains of authority, discipline and power in yourself and in others. From an early age we are influenced by authority figures who have some control over our lives. The ultimate challenge is how we respond, how we balance and harness these qualities.

  • What is your understanding of the correct use of power, authority, control and discipline?
  • How do you utilise power in your life?
  • Consider, dispassionately and without judgement, how you are empowered or disempowered?
  • Be aware of what power means for you? How has controlling or being controlled impacted on your life?

“It’s a very hard thing to learn to know when to release control

Simone Young

More Emperors

This card is suggestive of stability and security in life. You are on top of things and everything in under your control. It is your hard work, discipline and self control that have bought you this far. It means that you are in charge of your life now setting up your own rules and boundaries.

Posted in Matilda's, Memoir Writing, Narrative Therapy, Tarot Story Exchanges, Women's Health, Women's Stories

Story Exchanges

Posted on by Heather Blakey

This Eight of Pentacles indicates a time when you have to work hard and hone you skills. It demands focusing entirely on your tasks. The task that you need to accomplish can be personal or professional.

From Murder of Crows Tarot

The Raven Scribe seen here is focused. She is busily working at her desk, documenting stories of the trials, challenges and celebrations of the flock who call her world of Crows home.

Her interest was piqued when she heard about Waltzes with Matildas and suggested that there could be a whole section featuring the stories of women who are actively contributing to the Tarot community in a myriad of fascinating ways.

A deck creator may well choose the Eight of Pentacles to write about the labour and devotion demanded. Another woman might choose the Four of Wands to help her talk about milestones she is celebrating and to spread the word of work she is doing.

Really the possibilities are endless. I wonder if anyone will come and play and exchange a story? There are no hidden costs and nothing to lose. Everyone who engages, no matter their nation, will potentially be a winner as they extend their reach.

Hit the contact section if you want to come and play!