(Shadowscapes) Enter the card meditation

triple_entendre

The booklet of the Shadowscapes provides instructions for a meditation: to pick one card, admire it, to "Look at it for so long that you can see it with your eyes closed. Then close your eyes, still seeing the card. Step into the image. Imagine how it feels, how it smells, how it sounds. Experience it. If you're feeling adventurous, interact with a figure in the image."

I read of a similar meditation in The Secret Language of Symbols: A Visual Key to Symbols Their Meanings by David Fontana, supplied with images from the Marseilles tarot. I had some powerful results with that-- but, in my opinion, the Shadowscapes tarot is perfect for this. Quite a few cards have such a skillful use of perspective that with just a glance I feel like I could fall right into it or get sucked in. My questions for those who do these meditations...


How do you choose which card to walk into? Is it a sequence, to go through them all? Intuition? Do you ever do this meditation twice for the same card?

How active is your deliberate imagination during this meditation? Do you let the events and the words of the characters surprise you? Or do you plan it out beforehand, giving you complete control of whatever happens?

Would you like to share any experiences?
 

GryffinSong

...How do you choose which card to walk into? Is it a sequence, to go through them all? Intuition? Do you ever do this meditation twice for the same card?

How active is your deliberate imagination during this meditation? Do you let the events and the words of the characters surprise you? Or do you plan it out beforehand, giving you complete control of whatever happens?

Would you like to share any experiences?

Although I haven't done it with the Shadowscapes, I love doing this.

To choose a card, I either shuffle and choose one at random, or glance through the deck and choose whichever one draws my interest.

I would never plan it out. To do so would be to smother any insight that your inner knowing or intuition could give you, which would defeat the purpose. I always let it flow. Let the character(s) have their own way with the process. It's always surprising and wonderful.
 

tarotcognito

Every evening when I crawl into bed, before I turn the lights out I grab my deck and go through the cards, let me eyes passively wander over the images and then single out the first card that catches my mind's eye. I look it over and try to pay attention to what thoughts go through my head while I'm looking at the image. I don't make this an active, conscious process. I just try to let whatever happen, happen.
 

frac_ture

I love this exercise. When I first started to nose around Tarot a few months ago with real curiosity about finally jumping in and actively studying it, I'd say it was this concept of meditating and entering a card that, more than any other single thing, made me take the leap.

I don't have the Shadowscapes deck, so I hope I'm not derailing this thread in uncool fashion by weighing in here! I've done this only a few times, too. Twice, I chose cards at random from the Tarot of Metamorphosis -- I was startled at how meaningful and organic the experience was, and I learned a lot. Once I used the Devil card from the Tarot of the Sweet Twilight: the Devil is my personal Shadow/Hidden Teacher Card, and I thought it might be instructive and illuminating to try entering that card and having a conversation (it was, too!). And finally -- so far! -- I did this with the Temperance Card from the Crystal Visions deck. Mary K. Greer writes about this same exercise in her book, "Tarot for Your Self," and suggests entreating the Temperance Angel-figure for healing energy when you or someone you know is ailing in some way. I tend to fall prey to flu bugs almost every winter, so when I felt one coming on a month or so ago, I tried this exercise...and it worked! I wasn't cured overnight, but I pulled out of the nosedive, and I didn't need to see the doctor or get antibiotics or anything like that. I also intend to continue to engage in this exercise every so often, sometimes with a certain intent and specific card, and sometimes with a random selection.

Bonnie Cehovet also described this exercise in an article here on Aeclectic that I read early on when I first got interested in Tarot (it's down toward the bottom of the page, under the heading, "Visualization"):

http://www.aeclectic.net/tarot/learn/learning_the_tarot.shtml

I never plan the thing out, aside from maybe formulating a question beforehand -- I wouldn't even know how to go about "controlling" it!

I do want to strengthen my visualization skills, though, to be honest, which I'm sure would add a lot to the experience. Right now, I feel like I'm pretty mediocre at that part of the deal...
 

donnalee

Every evening when I crawl into bed, before I turn the lights out I grab my deck and go through the cards, let me eyes passively wander over the images and then single out the first card that catches my mind's eye. I look it over and try to pay attention to what thoughts go through my head while I'm looking at the image. I don't make this an active, conscious process. I just try to let whatever happen, happen.


I do it more like this, or randomly shuffle and see what comes to hand. I don't find that overthinking it helps me personally, since it's just to get to know the card in my own experience, and would be as awkward as any other blind date if there were too many rigid structures, perhaps! The instructions in the book are clear on it, I think.