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[0:13] The Tarot Card "The Chariot" and Its Symbolism
Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic and 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. Welcome to Your Heart magic. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. And today we are continuing our archetypes of the Tarot series, and we are talking about card seven, the chariot and how to harness the power of the chariot and our lives. How we can understand this archetype and utilize it as inspiration for our own journeys.
So the chariot is a card that innately means victory, success, overcoming obstacles, in the tarot deck, it's often depicted as a literal chariot with somebody riding it. And they're sort of this sense of power and control. And again, harnessing energy harnessing forces, I think just the word itself chariot when you think about what the chariot was, as a vehicle makes you think about driving through something, and it is a card that feels very action oriented, very motivated, very strong in intention and and willpower, when the chariot is out of balance.
And that might come through in a Tarot reading, if it's upside down in the deck, or in the context perhaps of the questions you're asking. Sometimes it can indicate dominance or like a singular focus to the end of not being able to see everything else.
Sometimes it might mean being out of control, if it is in an upside down or in a missed place position. But typically, when we are looking at the positive attributes of the chariot, when it's in balance, it is a card that is really about victory and overcoming various obstacles in our life in order to meet and reach an end goal. Fun little story about the card the chariot. Several years ago, this is back in 2019. I did a really fun 78 Day terror challenge. And I got the idea from Alice grist, dirty and divine tarot, which is a book that she wrote where she goes through the whole deck. And my understanding is she'd been reading the cards for a long time.
But she was writing a book about the Tarot and decided to, day by day, have a card a day and look at how that card showed up in her life. And so that really gave me the idea to do the same thing. And I've been reading the cards and working with them for 567 years. At that point, it had been a while, but I love the idea of revisiting them. And one of my favorite things about working with archetype cards. Whether you work with the Tarot or you're just enjoying learning about archetypes and signs and symbols and thinking about how do they show up in my life is that there's a richness to the symbols and archetypes that we learn about there's a depth, there is a nuance, our relationship to various archetypes and symbols will continue to change.
And continue to add new layers of wisdom, new layers of knowing, as we change and as we move through our timelines and our relationship to ourself and our understanding of the world around us changes. So we can think we have a card all figured out and it can be an old friend. And it can take on a fun new meaning in our life or start to show up during a life transition or in relationship to something that we keep asking about and there is this new layer this new nuance or richness to whatever it is that whatever archetype from the deck that we're working with, so I did my seven eight day Tarot challenge and I decided to structure it in my own way.
[4:56] Using Tarot Cards for Reflection and Personal Growth
I decided to put my intention into the car cards at the beginning of my journey. And I didn't want to go through them in linear order, starting with the Major Arcana card zero and then working my way through the suites. Instead, I just put this intention into the deck and said, I am going to be pulling one of you every day for the next seven, eight days. And I'm going to ask the cards to arrange themselves in the pattern that will support whatever's coming for me on the journey.
And so every day, it felt a little bit like Christmas to me where it was like, Okay, what card will I pull today. And so I would shuffle the cards and lay them out, take the card that called to me after I divided them into a pile of three, I've got this method for how I do it. And then after I had worked with that card for the day, I would set it aside so it didn't get reshuffled back into the deck. So what happened is, over time, the cards I was shuffling, and the ones I had to choose from got fewer and fewer. And it was delightful to see what cards showed up when and what cards and images presented themselves to me. And I have so many stories from doing that really joyful experiment and experience with the cards where the certain cards would sink so perfectly to something that was going on in my life at that time.
But what was really fun is maybe when I got down to like the last 1510 or something like that. And I knew which ones were left, because I knew the deck really well. So it wasn't like I was totally surprised. Like I knew what Major Arcana cards I've been through. I knew what Minor Arcana cards for left. And I had a small handful of a few Major Arcana cards I hadn't yet pulled. And I remember on the last day of 2019, December 31, pulling I you know, maybe had like 10 cards left, I was really close to the end. And I pulled the card, the chariot. And I pulled the card the chariot, as a representation of what the year 2019 was about for me.
And 2019 was very much a year of overcoming obstacles and harnessing energy. I wrote a lot about that time in my life in my book revelations of the sky. And I was going through these really deep spiritual lessons of transformation, I bet on the island of Hawaii. Oh, goodness, just a few years. And I was really coming face to face with myself face to face with the choices I'd made to just release the life as I know in it and Alaska and come to this island and opened myself up to my spiritual journey.
And you know, kind of put myself out there to spirit and said, Okay, I'm here I follow this soul calling. I know something's waiting for me here like show me the way. And I've talked about this and written about it quite a bit. Of course, nothing went the way that I thought it was going to. And that was really the year where I stepped away from private practice and psychology other than just keeping a tiny toe in the door with a couple couple clients.
But I released all insurance contracts, I was really trying to grow. Speaking to grow my spiritual work, I was really trying to grow as a writer, I was really trying to do new things like teach classes and teach workshops and kind of find a more creative voice for myself. And I was floundering that year, I was having a hard time doing and I was having a hard time figuring out my path. And I had so many moments in 2019, where I felt really discouraged. I went through a couple little bouts of a depression during that time of just feeling really dark on the journey of really coming to this dark night of the soul and saying like, Oh my gosh, did I throw away this great life that I created for myself to follow this spiritual path and like nothing's happening the way that I think it should, did I mess up.
And I really learned in 2019 How to keep coming back into my heart and my spiritual connection and trusting what I felt inside. And so this whole year was really exemplified by this energy of overcoming of working with opposites of trying to find balance of wanting to give up because an obstacle was on a path and then figuring out how to plow through it or go around it. And I remember that was my one of a little grace gift, we'll call it at the end of that that year was pulling that card. And it really resonated with me it really spoke to me and I really felt like it embody the essence of the chariot and what it is to overcome and what it is to I find some sort of victory and victory can be defined by many things.
But for me, at the end of 2019, I was ending the year in a better place than I started it, I had some nice things that I had lined up right before COVID was gonna come and change everything, but I didn't know it at the time. And I had really learned that sometimes, in order to stay with ourselves, we have to tap into the energy of this extreme determination and perseverance. And that's really what the chariot is all about.
So looking at how we can tap into this card and understand it in a way that helps us feel empowered to see how the chariot is already showing up in our lives. I have a few points and ideas that I wanted to share about how we can do that.
[10:56} The Chariot as An Invitation to Focus on Our Goals
And the first one is that the chariot is really an invitation to focus on our goals. And to set our intentions. This card is not about going with the flow, this is a card that has very active energy, it's a very intentional card, the person in the chariot is not kicking back, eating a snack while the horses pulling the chariot, do all the work, and they're just gonna get there when they get there. And it's no big deal.
This is really a card of effort and determination. And there is a place for that. It's interesting, because a lot of what your heart magic focuses on is really more about learning to work with what I would call more receptive energies, and learning to be in flow, I actually think that there is this lack of balance to especially Western culture, where there is this over emphasis on productivity and on goals. And I'm doing and so sometimes we feel like if we're not producing or like if we don't have a goal that somehow we're doing life wrong.
And that's not what this episode today is about. If this makes you feel pressured at all, then it's not the right time to like set some giant goal list for yourself. One of the best things I ever learned is, if it feels like a should on our spiritual journey, it's probably a shouldn't, if we feel like we have to do something in order to maximize being a human being. And somehow we're failing at humanity, if we're not doing it. I think there's a spiritual Miss truth in there that we're really invited to work through. So that we can come to a gentler place of wanting to set goals and wanting to set intentions from a more joyful place from a lighter place.
Maybe from a place of just feeling that Yep, I'm gonna have to do some hard work on this. But this feels really aligned with where I'm at right now. So I want to, I don't necessarily think it needs to come from a place where we feel like we're like constantly in a battle. And so the chariot really encourages us to not only set goals and set intentions, but I suppose it encourages us to kind of choose our battles. If you want to do something, something goal oriented, write a book, run a race, go somewhere for travel, then there might be some obstacles and things that you have to overcome in order to make that happen. But you might say, that's absolutely worth it for me because I really want that high fruit on the tree.
And so I am willing to climb that tree and figure out my way, all the way to the top because I really want to reap the rewards when I get there. But I think that oftentimes there are many things in life where we can be distracted. There are many times that we are striving for something and it might not feel meaningful for us it might not feel personally significant. And your heart magic is about learning to listen to our hearts and learning to align with the things that feel significant to our hearts.
So if you are working on your spiritual growth this month, then perhaps the chariot for you is like how can I set an intention around what I might do to support my growth and how can I set a goal and that maybe you're really inspired by this idea of doing the seven eight day Tarot challenge? I'll leave a link to Alice's book, dirty and divine taro in the write up section of this.
Maybe you're inspired to I seek out some sort of a meditation class or some sort of maybe an app or something that has like a card reading a day that you want to do or tap into, maybe you just want to make sure that you take a little bit of time in the morning and set an intention for the day before you get lost in the shuffle, and get lost in the stream of daily life. If you have a spiritual goal like that, then setting an intention to say I'd like this month to be a month of growth for me, and figuring out like, what's the goal that I'm working on is a wonderful way to harness the energy of the chariot.
And I've always found that when we talk about goal setting, that when we set small, measurable goals, that is usually the best way to help move us in a direction of growth.
[15:51] Setting Achievable Goals for Personal Growth
So often, we shut ourselves down because something feels too big. Or we say I want to do this big thing. But then it feels kind of insurmountable. And all we see are the obstacles or we feel like we decide to let's say you said kind of set a goal around I want, I really want to work on my spiritual growth right now. And you're not specific. That's just kind of how it goes out there.
And then maybe you say, I'm going to meditate more. But again, it's not small or measurable, it's just this, I'm gonna meditate more. And look at those master meditators who say they do it for 30 minutes, I really want to be like that. So you try once or twice to meditate for 30 minutes. And let's say it goes very poorly, and you can't focus and keep getting interrupted, or you're trying to meditate and you like look at your phone and find that you're scrolling something and, you know, checking something like that, and you are like, Oh, my gosh, I totally failed with this.
And that goal goes right out the window, I would encourage anybody to break it down into something much smaller. If you have a goal around anything, personal development, doing something creating something, don't just think that the big thing of somebody who inspires you, or what the inspired dream is, but think of something that might be achievable within 30 days, or within a moon cycle. Think of something much smaller, where you can say, Okay, well, I'm just going to start with twice a week doing a five minute meditation.
And then maybe you'd say, well, how am I going to do that. And so you download an app or find something on YouTube or something like that, that you can listen to, and make it measurable. Because when we do that we're more likely to follow through. And when we follow through, we start to have a sense of success. And we have a sense of feeling like we're actually making measurable changes in our life, and we are finding achievement towards our goals. There's nothing out there that says what a goal has to be or what an intention has to be.
And when we talk about learning to do things in a way that is more aligned with our heart, that's where there's a lot of room to declutter this old junk of what success really is, what achievement really is, what accomplishing something really is, and to truly figure out values, and goals that work for us that feel in alignment with our heart that feel like they honor our pace and our energy and our understanding of our purpose. And then we take those those heart aligned goals and intentions. And that's where we bring the chariot in and say, Alright, then how do I want to accomplish this? How can I feel successful at this? How can I feel more in alignment with succeeding at these visions and intentions and my heart?
Something else that the chariot invites us to do is to balance energies and to overcome obstacles. The chariot is very much a card about learning to harness power. It is a card that often represents harnessing the tension between the spiritual and the physical, the heavens and the earth, the masculine and the feminine emotion and logic and calculated action. I've seen it depicted in many ways and various stacks. But there's often this theme of harnessing energies that can sometimes be in opposition. So if our head says go this way, and our heart says go in a different direction entirely. How do we listen to both of those how Do we choose and decide which one to honor?
Can we somehow bring them into harmony? Can we learn to bring balance to those two tensions? Can we learn to follow the logic for a while until we start to feel maybe a little bit stale or uninspired, and then listen to our heart and follow that. So we get all this fresh inspiration. And then follow the logic a little bit more after that and take some calculated strategic tech steps.
Like can we find a way where we kind of go right, and then we swerve left and then we go right, and then we serve left. And maybe after a while, we figure out that we're not really moving in opposition, we are taking two conflicting energies and weaving them together to support us in a very grounded approach that helps us move in an aligned direction of our heart. And yet, do it intelligently so that we feel that we are not wasting our efforts or wasting energy.
[21:03] Balancing Opposing Energies and Overcoming Obstacles
And so the chariot really asks us to consider what tensions are we balancing in our life? What things are in opposition that you might be juggling right now,
when I pulled that card, and 2019 One of the things that was a big theme of that year for me is kind of like what do things look like on paper, and what they look like on paper weren't, they weren't great, like, I didn't feel like I was seeing my professional goals, and which very much are kind of tied into my spiritual purpose.
And my understanding of that, I didn't really feel like I was seeing the growth that I wanted to see, that helped me feel like I was successful or moving in the right direction. At the same time, my heart said, like, don't give up on this, there's something for you here, like stay with yourself, not you haven't messed anything up. This is just a rough patch, it is perhaps a testing, it is a time to really go through shaking off of old self and loosening this old identity, so that you can move a little bit further and to trusting your spiritual path. And so I had these oppositional energies, where I really couldn't figure out what's my path here. And when I listened to my heart, it felt like everything was still moving me in the right direction.
But when I listened to like, where logic was that, in my mind was that I had all these doubts, and all these worries, and all these questions, and how did I bring those into harmony? How could I bring those into harmony? How can I learn when to listen to my heart, when to listen to my head, how to get them to work together? Those were some of the big lessons that year, it was to really trust the vision and my heart. And yet at the same time, something that came from that time in my life was learning creatively, as an entrepreneur, how to think more out of the box, how to see myself as like this one woman CEO of my own little tiny company. And like really kind of step my game up and do things that put me out of my comfort zone.
And that's what kind of eventually segwayed me into doing more speaking. And starting to gain confidence in my voice, I had to go create those opportunities and really start to seek them out and put myself out there in new ways. And I did those things because my heart said, this is the right direction to move in. And when I finally got my mind balanced with my heart, my mind said, but you're gonna have to be smart about it, it might not just fall in your lap, you might have to create it.
So whatever those opposing energies are for you, how can you bring balance to them in your life, and the chariot is the opportunity and the invitation to consider those things. And the overcoming obstacle part. What's interesting is sometimes an obstacle is external. Sometimes it is something that is put there in our path by a circumstance by a system in the world of this is just how it works. And so if you have to move through this system, you have to figure out the rules of it or figure out how to go around it.
Sometimes the obstacle has something to do with location or timing, or monetary reasons. There's many things that can feel like barriers and obstacles, where sometimes we have to get really creative and either figure out a way around them. Or figure out another way if a traditional way isn't working. If you want to publish a book and you feel like you don't have access to that. Do you have access to something like if you have access to the internet You know, can you hop on Canva, where you can create a little book for free with a free profile, they're using their graphics and some of their layouts, and put together a small book and publish that as a little ebook, or something that you do in PDF form, you know, if your big goal is some sort of giant publishing contract, but that feels really far away, and you haven't even written a book yet.
Can you publish something small? Can you self publish something? How could you figure out a way to overcome that obstacle and create a success experience for you, even if it's not your total end goal. And sometimes the obstacle is inward. Sometimes it is us, it is something inside of ourselves, where we are the ones who are getting in our own way. And we if we would just get out of our own way, then we'd realize there's actually not that many obstacles there at all.
And what's interesting about this is how often we perceive obstacles where there might not be one, we don't really know until we try. So if you've tried something like 20 times and said, No, no, I really have been trying this and nothing I've done is worked. There might be some legitimate external obstacles in your path.
[26:18] Overcoming Self-Imposed Limitation, Redefining Success
But a lot of times, we're the ones who talk ourselves out of it, we say, Well, somebody's already done what I want to do. So it must not be worth creating. Or we convince ourselves that it's somebody else's dream to enact some thing that we have dreamed inside of ourselves, while somebody else has already done it better, or who am I to do this thing? Or who am I to create this, or I could never do that, because it's just not who I am. Except we secretly want to, we have some really interesting stuff that we are all transmuting.
And a lot of times our stuff is this like giant lump of preconceived doubts, and judgments and fears. And these accepted notions of, well, this is just how it is. And oftentimes, until we begin to challenge those and ask ourselves, who taught me that? Where did I learn that? Do they learn that from my family of origin? Did I learn that in school? Do they learn that from society? Is that a reflection of some wound in me? Where did that come from?
Maybe it came from all of the above our wounds, and the patterns inside of us that we work on shifting and healing, tend to be based on all sorts of things, from family stuff, to ancestral wounds, to sometimes karmic stuff that are our collective karmic stuff, that we're all shifting. Sometimes it's self imposed stuff that we were encouraged, and we came up with it anyways, and developed a real strong voice of criticism inside of ourselves based on some aspect of our personality. There's many things that can create those self imposed limitations inside of us.
So sometimes the chariot, even though it's a card that is about external victory, and it's kind of this external overcoming card, I actually think how this archetype applies to living heart centered, is learning to overcome the things the voices of the mind, maybe the old stories inside of us, that keep us from believing what's in our heart, and believing the things that we might feel called to do or to create, or to experience in this world. We are often the ones who have to learn to get out of the way of ourself and stop being our own obstacle, so that we can become a bigger expression.
So we can become a more expanded person than we are giving ourselves credit for being. So the chariot is an invitation to work on shifting that. And the last thing that I want to share about the chariot today is that I think that it is also an invitation to reimagine our relationship with the word victory, and really redefine that word for us. Now, on a surface level, if you're doing a reading, where you've set a goal for yourself, and you asked about maybe a new career path, or a creative project or some personal development stuff, and you pull the chariot and the reading, usually that's a card of you will be successful at this, you're going to have some sort of victory at this. It's usually a really positive card.
And so in a very superficial way, we can always understand it as this kind of linear you'll be successful at whatever it is that you're are shooting for and that you're hoping to accomplish. But I like to go a little bit deeper with all of these archetypes. And as I was sitting here today thinking about the talking points to share, it occurred to me that why not take this opportunity to keep challenging our notion of what is success? And what is victory? And what is achievement? And what do those words mean to us.
Because I think often, this is where a lot of people can get really tripped up, because they feel like they're not somehow meeting achievement, success or victory, unless they are again, producing or having something really tangible to show. And I do think that there are absolutely times where we work really hard at something and we get a tangible result. I love that feeling. It's a fantastic feeling to have something, whether it's an award or a promotion, or you finished a project and got good feedback.
It's a wonderful feeling to have that.
[31:06] Personal Growth and Spirituality Through Heart-Centered Approach
But we don't always have that. Sometimes we're working on things like relationship healing, how do you measure success? And not? Maybe you have been working on trauma, and shifting some like very deep emotional wounds around trauma or trauma and a family system? Like how do you measure success?
And that, you know, I guess, in theory, we can always make small measurable goals and say, am I feeling less triggered by this? Am I better able to emotionally regulate, I don't know, you know, I could come up with like a treatment objective list, as a psychologist for how somebody might look at trauma. But that feels like so linear and like we're trying to quantify something that is really more about embodying a quality. And that can be really hard to capture in any kind of a number, our you no benchmark or something like that. There's so many things that so many of us are putting work into.
And we are really embodying that chariot energy of working on personal healing, relationship, healing, being a good prayer warrior for the world, being a light worker in this world, working on kindness, and spreading the energy of kindness, maybe you're learning to increase your relationship with nature and to be more peaceful, because you know that if you're more peaceful, you will bring that energy into the spaces you embody. And it can't hurt to be a peaceful contribution. As you move about your community, we need more peaceful contributors. We need more creatives, we need more artists, we need more voices that look at things from a more radical view of love and spiritual perspective. And so how do we measure those things? Where's the victory or success in that?
And so I think that's where the chariot is really this invitation to think about all of these questions from the perspective of the heart. What does your heart tell you about success in your life? What does your heart tell you about how you're already victorious? What does your heart tell you about what you have achieved or accomplished so far in the year 2023? What does your heart tell you about all of these things?
That is really where your guidance and your value system and your reinvention of these concepts is going to come from, like we talked about at the beginning, when we are listening to our hearts, and we are following the vision in our hearts and following the guidance that our heart gives us. That's when we take goals and that direction. That's when we set intentions around that. Maybe healing for you is saying I feel like I'm in a really negative mood every day. And I just want to work on gratitude, and being more positive. And there's all this stuff in my life and the world right now that feels unsolvable. And I spend a lot of time feeling overwhelmed. And I would just like to feel more peaceful inside.
And so when I listen to my heart, my heart says, Stay close to what's real. Spend time in nature, and work on appreciation. And so maybe you decide then I'm going to make a short gratitude list and I'm going to try and take more walks or get outside more or do something where you're working with nature. Could that be successful? If you followed through on that? You know, can we say that you are setting an intention.
You are taking small measures You're both steps, and that you are having victory over an aspect of yourself that is feeling really kind of knocked off course by the chaos in the world. And the victory being that you are bringing yourself back into this more thoughtful space in your heart, this space of light and your heart, that is helping you stay connected to your spiritual connection to your heart was through nature, through gratitude, and through the simple steps of authenticity.
So I really think that when we look at this card, if we can kind of twist it in a really fun way, and redefine it from the perspective of the heart, and kind of understand the chariot on two levels, what's the superficial level of this, it's all the victory, determination, perseverance, all those good things, and we need those things, there's lots of value in those things. And many of us are already using those energies and our life.
But I also think we can go a little bit deeper and look at it from the perspective of the heart, and really kind of shake these concepts up in a way that sinks a little bit more with their heart wisdom, and a little bit more with the energy of the heart and the language of the heart. And that is a beautiful way to harness the energy of the chariot.
[36:26] Coming up Next Week
All right. With that, we will wrap up here for today, and turn our attention to next week, where we are going to be talking about the three G's, Grace, growth and gratitude, and looking at just some fun inspiration for each of those qualities.
How might they support us on the spiritual path? How does giving ourselves grace and being in a space of gratitude actually support our growth, and really looking at the relationship between all of those also, it's the month of November.
And for many, they might celebrate, like the beginning of the holy day season. And so I always think that turning our attention to gratitude this time of year is a beautiful way to begin to start to close out the end of the year during these last two months.
So I'm looking forward to whatever comes through to share with everybody next week on the podcast. And 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 life.