Below is a transcript of the episode as generated by Otter.ai. (*please note, this transcript has only been edited to put in line breaks for easier readability and may contain errors where a word or phrase got lost in transcription.)
[0:13] The Tarot card "The Tower" and its various meanings, including sudden change and unexpected events.
Music, Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic, an illuminating space where psychology, spirituality and heart wisdom. Meet. Here's your host, Dr bethanne kapansky Wright, the clinical psychologist with a mystic mind.
Aloha, everybody. This is Dr bethanne kapansky Wright, and welcome to Your Heart magic. We are continuing our archetypes of the Tarot series today, and we are moving on to card 16, the tower, everybody's favorite card.
If you're familiar with the Tarot, then you know what I'm talking about, and you are maybe laughing. If you're not familiar with the Tarot, let's talk a little bit about what the tower means. So historically, in the traditional Tarot Deck, the tower is a card that has a picture of a tower on it, and there's like some sort of calamity happening in the tower.
Sometimes it will show a lightning bolt hitting it, and there's fires that have popped up, and you see people falling out the windows and screaming for help. It's a terrifying card, and so it's no wonder that it has a bad rap in the tarot. It's a card that, throughout the years, when people see it, it immediately incites fear or distress, because it's a card where it looks like distress is going on.
And this is an historic Tarot as you know, as we've been working through our archetype of the Tarot series, I appreciate taking a more modern twist on some of these historical, traditional archetypes and flipping it from something that feels fear based to something that feels like an invitation, which is exactly what we did in our last episode the devil, where we looked at how that card is less of a card about getting in trouble for doing something wrong, and more of an invitation to find the ways that we might keep ourselves trapped in something and find a way to liberate ourselves and free ourselves.
So in that same paradigm, the tower is a card that comes with a lot of potential, despite its rather seemingly catastrophic origins. Traditionally, the tower does mean some form of a crisis. It has lots of meanings that can fall under the umbrella of sudden and unexpected change. It can mean calamity, danger, destruction.
Again, these are older school interpretations. There are still some decks that will have that. But it also can be about a disruption in life, big life changes, some kind of a surprise, some kind of unexpected, something that happens, where the winds of fate come in, and maybe we didn't see it coming, and the next thing we know, it feels like everything is crumbling.
[3:26] Embracing change and growth through unexpected events.
I always appreciate the interpretations in the good tarot deck by Colette Baron Reed. I always appreciate her take on each of the cards. And something this deck does so beautifully is it works with it's the good Tarot. It is about seeing the cards as an invitation into something less about fear, more about the love and more about the growth.
And in the good tarot card 16 the tower, is surprises, and the affirmation in the deck says things happen really fast when this card shows up in a reading its appearance could portend a total paradigm shift, or a sudden upheaval that takes something away in order for something better to take its place. It could be that I've had an epiphany.
Whatever it is, this card tells me unexpected events will be very interesting and offer opportunities for positive transformation, if I remain present with my eyes open, that final bit about positive transformation, opportunities for positive transformation and the idea that when sudden change comes along, even if we don't see it coming and we don't know what to do with it, it does afford us the opportunity to work with that change to constructively find ways to go through a transformation process, and it is moving us. Towards our highest good, it is moving us onto a path that's perhaps even better than what we had planned.
And since we live in such a beautiful, creative, loving universe, I think that even when something comes along that seems catastrophic in a negative way, and we say, this is horrible and I can't believe this is happening to me. How can any kind of positive transformation come from this? We don't have to have that piece figured out in the moment.
We're not going to be able to see it. But I think our beautiful, creative universe is big enough to take even something that seems horrible and help us reconstruct something even more beautiful. And so the tower is an invitation into the sudden changes in our life that we find ourselves dealing with. It is our choice how much we resist those or embrace those, and what we do when those changes come. But it lets us know a shakeup is happening, and ultimately that we are being shook in order to realign or to awaken to something more than we were before. So some of the ways that we can work with the archetype of the tower is that one, it invites us to work constructively with disruptions and consciousness.
[6:22] The Tower brings us surprises, challenges, and growth.
And a disruption in consciousness is what happens when we are kind of bopping along in the stream of our life. We are in our day to day routine. We're looking at the world a certain way. We have a fixed lens. That doesn't mean we're rigid. It just means that we have a sense of what the predictables are, and then this unexpected change or challenge shows up, and it jolts us. Sometimes it swings into us, and we are knocked entirely into a different feeling state, a different state of consciousness, a different state of being.
We are forced to look at the world through a different lens. We find our perspectives being challenged. Everything that we thought was going to happen went the opposite way. And what do we do that is a disruption of consciousness. When I had been through major disruptions of consciousness in my life, I can think of the loss of my brother. I can think about any time that I have made a big move, moving from Alaska to Kauai, that was a change that I chose.
So it wasn't a total unexpected surprise, but it still came with that tower energy of things being shook up and having things feel disrupted. And of course, it came with surprises along the way, even if I thought I knew what I was choosing, whenever we choose our own adventure in life, it's still going to come with surprises, even if we pointed ourselves in that direction.
Going through my divorce years ago, that was a probably the biggest disruption in consciousness that I can think of, or at least the one that I have talked about on the podcast before, that precipitated going through this massive spiritual awakening and death of old self and reinvention and resurrection of a new self.
And all of those were times that there was a sense of being taken out of my normal viewpoints and thought streams and daily routines, the pattern that I had set my life up and was completely rearranged, and now I'm having to navigate things and learn new skills and challenge perspectives and find bigger beliefs and challenge Who I Am That is an example of what tower energy can look like in our life.
Sometimes the world has tower energy happening. I actually think we have had a lot of tower energy since the pandemic, since covid. We are still seeing the shakeups, and since tower energy isn't a one time thing, and our experiences can overlap, there's also been a lot of beauty and growth and things that have been happening these last few years.
But I often take a step back, and if I just look at where global events are going, and the kinds of changes going on in our world, and things that are shifting so quickly, and the surprises that are showing up, I will think like, wow, the world itself right now is going through tower energy, and again, how we choose to deal with that, how we choose to deal with this disruption in consciousness.
[9:42] Embracing surprise and trusting life's support during disruptive times.
That is the choice that we have. We might not be able to choose the things that show up in our life. That's the idea of the tower. It just happens. Whether we think of that as destiny or free will or some outside force that has come in. We. We oftentimes don't see it coming, or maybe we have an inkling that change is about to come, and so we prepare ourselves, but it hits anyways.
And so we get to choose what we do with that space. And so when we find ourselves in a disruption of consciousness, it is an excellent opportunity to really began to sift through our belief systems, to allow our perspectives to be challenged, to allow how we looked at the world to be shaken up a little bit, and to remember that perspectives are just their viewpoints, their perspectives.
We sometimes have this attachment that the way we see things or think about things it's the right way. And people get very attached to being right. We like to have a sense of certainty and like somehow we have it figured out. And we don't like it when life shows it something differently, or we thought we had a firm footing on something, and all of a sudden we're forced to say, Well, what about this? This doesn't fit in with this ideal or philosophy or theory or way of seeing myself, or this relationship or the idea of something. So what do I do with what just showed up? And in that space of sifting and evaluating, there is room for growth there.
There is room to bring in bigger perspective. There is room to challenge ourselves and to think about how we were looking at life. Are those attitudes, values and beliefs still serving us? There can be room to evaluate our relationships, the objects that we filled our life with, the things that we filled our life with, anything is fair game when tower energy comes in and we're going through a disruption in consciousness and the ways that translates to us is going to be unique based on what we're going through.
But the general takeaway for all of this is that it allows us to constructively work with how it feels to have our daily stream of being disrupted and be brought into a new space where we have to look at things from a new perspective. Something else the tower invites us to do is to rework our relationship with surprise, and this is something that came through in the Akashic records during one of the monthly messages sometime back in 2023 I don't remember what month it was, but what I remember is that they said surprises are going to show up this month, and the guidance from the records is that humans have a unique relationship with surprise.
A lot of times we don't like it, or we only like it if it's something positive, where it's like, I have a surprise for you. We're going to go out to dinner someplace you love, but I'm not going to tell you where. That's a fun surprise for many people, unless they really, really don't like being caught off guard. But a lot of times, if we have, like, joyful anticipation that it's a positive surprise, we can feel okay about it, but the idea of surprise in general kind of freaks people out, because, again, it's an unpredictable and we like certainty.
Many times, being able to have a sense of certainty gives us the illusion of control. It gives us the illusion that I am the master of my own fate. I know the direction I'm going. I have a plan B and A Plan C and a plan B and A Plan C for My Plan B's and C's. It is this sense that somehow we've looked at every outcome. And so when we hear, oh no no, even if you've done all that, there's going to be a surprise. We don't like it. It challenges our notions of who's really in charge.
[13:41] Embrace the energy of surprise, stay open, curious, and have faith.
And I think many people struggle with the idea that, yes, life is a bigger force than us, and we're asked to yield to it so often, and that can be really hard for us. And the records talked about this collective wound around surprise that oftentimes we see it as a negative thing, and there is a sense of fear that comes up a surprise, and that really ties into the idea of the tower card. People get fear when they see it. To be fair, the artwork on the original card didn't really help with that.
So seeing people jumping out of a burning building does not usually soothe people. That is fear inducing. But the invitation from the records, not specifically for the tower card, but to surprise in general, is that we get to start to rework our relationship with that, because we are living in a time right now where there's many surprises.
And so how can we better embrace the energy of surprise? How can we stay open? How can we stay curious? Better yet? How can we keep faith and know that even if life is going to tip over sideways and the tower energy that shows up does not feel good, and it's hard for us that we can trust we will be supported.
We can trust. That we will be held we can trust that we will be guided and shepherded through that is really the true nuts and bolts of reworking our relationship with surprise. It is on the surface level, doing what we can to shift our attitudes around it so we feel more open, we feel more positive, we work on releasing some of that fear around it, but ultimately, it's knowing that whatever happens, we will be okay. Life has us. Life will support us.
Our heart will help us find what we need to guide us through. We have invisible, energetic support. We have our own sound minds and resourceful cleverness, we will be okay. And so it's that idea that we can still find wellness, even if we're anticipating something unexpected, which feels a little bit paradoxical, because usually if it's unexpected, we don't see it coming and we don't anticipate it.
[16:00] Embracing change and growth through the lens of the Tower archetype.
Though, I am a believer that there's times, intuitively and on a soul level, that will start to have an inkling that something is coming, or that something's going to shift. I can honestly say that I never saw the loss of my brother coming. How could I that was unexpected? It was abrupt departure in my life, an abrupt grief journey that I've continued to live with that there's no way that I could have seen coming in and I wouldn't have wanted to some things were just meant to experience and live in our life. But what I can say is that I did feel like something was going to change, and I didn't have a sense of catastrophic change or tragedy, or anything like that, but I had felt something shifting in me on a soul level.
And when I look back on that period of time in my life, the month or two, precipitating his loss, his loss, and then what came after that, I really can see where the voice of my soul, my higher self, my inner being, was preparing me for the big change that was coming, and was preparing me to not only go through my grief journey and find a way to weather the change, but the seeds for bigger change in my life were being planted, and I've shared this many times on The podcast, but losing Brent became a catalyst for me to step into a bigger version of myself and ultimately leave Alaska for Kauai.
And that's all a whole other story, but I had the sense of my soul kind of whispering before it all happened. I just didn't know where it was leading. So sometimes I think we might have an intuition around it, but it's really pointless to try and guess where we're being led or what we're sensing. All we can do is stay open, stay curious, and trust that even if we feel like life has just gone in a horrible direction, that we are loved, we are supported, and that ultimately, the tower energy that shows up will be used to move us towards our highest good.
And I think that is really the idea of what the tower can gift us with when we choose to work with this archetype and when we choose to make friends with the tower archetype, it is learning a greater acceptance for change and uncertainty and transformation in our life. It is learning how to find a more radical detachment from what we expected things to look like, and instead show up and find more peace for what is there is so much space when tower energy shows up for us to really challenge the old preconceived notions of self and the expectations we had for our life.
And there's grief work involved in that. When I say challenge those part of challenging it is to do the work of grieving and to do the work of feeling the loss of ideals and learning how to be a good friend to ourself, to the part of ourself that just wants to hang on to how we thought things would be, and is really Struggling to let go and to gently work on helping that part of our self that wants to cling release the grasp, to have compassion for experience itself, to have compassion for the suffering that we will often feel when we're going through changes, when we can bring compassion into that space, it allows us to find more acceptance, and acceptance allows us to let go. It allows us to detach. It allows us to move. It allows us to begin to flow through and work with the energy instead of resisting it.
So just like the devil that came before it and the devil. Level is really about confronting what is in ourself that's holding us back. The tower card is about something external, showing up in our lives and being a game changer, but in that it allows us to free ourselves and step into a bigger version of ourselves. Whether or not we thought we needed it.
We still have the invitation to do so. So the tower is a hidden friend, right? A friend in disguise might be how we think about this card, that there are some things in life that when we look at with a straightforward gaze, we might not always be able to see the strange beauty in it, to see that there is something that is a light to it, and sometimes we have to look for the hidden beauty, the hidden lights, to learn to change our gaze so we can see something through a different lens.
And when we do that, we start to see that there's a hidden blessing that there is positive fortune disguised as misfortune. When we learn to stop seeing what the part of our mind that wants to attach and wants to create a story of calamity or victimhood or disaster and choose to move when the time is right through seeing through the eyes of our heart that help our mind open up and accept that no matter what happens, we are okay, and we can always use the changes that show up in our life to create more light On our individual paths.
Thank you so much for joining me in today's archetype of the Tarot series. We will be back next week with a mental health toolbox episode, and we're talking about radical self belief. So stay tuned for that coming out next Thursday. In the meantime, have a beautiful week and be well.
Be Love. Be you and be magic.
You've been listening to your heart magic with Dr bethanne kapansky Wright, tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light you.
