luck – Just the Tarot

What To Do When Our Lives Turn Into Crap – Wheel of Fortune Reversed

How to deal with it when you hit a period of bad luck

I recently got The Wheel of Fortune reversed in one of my personal readings and we all know where that’s at: a period of bad luck coming. Get ready, because things are NOT going to go the way that you want them to, at least not for a while.

And, since I’m an intuitive, I started thinking about exactly what, “luck,” is. When we say we’re lucky or we’re unlucky, just what exactly are we talking about?

KARMA

Some of it can be karma, of course. We’ve all met those people who seem to be blessed with nothing but good fortune. They were born into families that loved and nurtured them, they were the beauty queens and football heroes in their high schools, and they went on to have wonderful careers, lots of money, and 2.5 semi-perfect children. Into every life a little rain must fall, but they seem to live under giant umbrellas.

And then there are people who just can’t buy a fucking break. No matter how hard they try, no matter how they struggle and strive, nothing goes right for them. They’re always at the right place at the wrong time and money and love evade them like a bunny rabbit on speed.

Many of the people who are blessed with Hallmark Card lives have done little to deserve those lives, and many of the people who are cursed with disastrous existences have done little to deserve THAT fate.

So all we can do is to shake our heads and say, “Well, it must be karma. They must have been very, very good or very, very bad in a previous incarnation and now they’re getting what they deserve.”

Because if we DON’T say that, there’s no real justice or balance in it. Then life becomes this sort of an insane lottery where it’s all just a matter of . . . luck.

TIME AND TIDE

Another approach to dealing with bad luck is the Principle of Rhythm that’s discussed in books like The Kybalion. The idea here is that there’s a natural rhythm to life where sometimes everything’s coming up rainbows and sometimes it all turns to shit.

The way that the Kybalion explains it is that life is very much like the pendulum of a clock. It swings first in one direction and then in the opposite direction and each swing is equal to the other. We may have a period of great good fortune but it will be followed by a period of bad luck and vice versa.

They reinforced that idea by looking at nature. The moon waxes and then wanes. The tides rise and then fall. People are born, spring into maturity and then die. Our emotions may be ecstatic one day and really depressed the next.

There seems to be a natural rhythm where we swing from one extreme to the next on a regular basis but spend most of our time somewhere in the middle.

Of course, the problem with that theory is that it ends up being one-step-forward and one-step-back. If our bad luck is always equal to our good luck, then we ain’t got no luck at all, brothers and sisters.

The way that they solved it was to say that life TENDS toward the positive. That even if we have swings between good and bad luck, we have a little more good luck than bad. So we’re actually making progress even if it feels like our feet are stuck in concrete.

And, yes, they turned to reincarnation to explain why some people have nothing but good luck and some people have nothing but bad luck. Even if it seems like the clock’’s pendulum got permanently stuck on one side, it’s really just swinging very slowly because we can’t remember our past lives.

Okay . . .

WHO THE HELL KNOWS?

Humans have been trying to explain luck since the beginning of time. There are a million different theories and formulas about it and they really just boil down to, “How do I get me some of that GOOD luck?” Or, “How do I avoid that BAD ju-ju?”

A lot of the advice has involved figuring out ways to bribe the crazy gods that we’ve invented. The Old Testament tells us to burn a fatted calf, because god likes a good barbecue. The Taoist religions burn fake money because apparently that’s a way of making a deposit in their god’s bank accounts (yes, even gods need a little pocket change.). And, of course, many modern day Christians go to church every Sunday to sort of hedge their bets. “Hey, Lord, I just put a twenty in the collection plate, and I could use a really lucky week.”

All we really know is that there seems to be something out there that we call, “luck.” It’s some sort of a force or energy that brings good fortunes into the lives of some people. Its absence brings bad fortunes into the lives of others. No matter how much we may want to, we can’t buy it or cajole it into our lives or pay a priest or pastor to make it go away when it turns bad.

SO WHAT DO WE DO?

So what do we do when we’re going through a patch of really bad luck? When we flip over the card and it’s The Wheel of Fortune reversed?

One solution is to just hunker down and ride it out. Bad luck can feel like a huge storm that’s raging through our lives and we just need to get into the tornado shelter. Try to turn off our emotions, grit our teeth, and wait for it to pass.

The Kybalion suggests trying to, “rise above it.” In other words, there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about that clock pendulum swinging, but we can try to raise our vibrations to a point where it affects us less than it would otherwise. Eventually the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. If we stay calm, try to stay positive, and remember that this too shall pass, it will lessen the effects.

BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME

Of course, if we ARE one of those people who seem to have been born under a bad moon, that’s a different kettle of fish. If there’s been nothing but bad luck for a very long time, then we need to learn to adjust to that, too.

And the only solutions I can come up with there are to try a little harder than the Hallmark Card people and build in the fact that we’re not luck magnets. We actually need to take the time to write the affirmations, do the visualizations, make the vision boards, and feng shui our houses until they shine like newly minted dimes. Because it’s NOT going to come naturally to us.

Maybe we were terrible people in a past life. Maybe our clock pendulums broke when we were born. Who knows? What we do know is that we’ve got to put in a little more effort.

Ultimately, good luck or bad luck, we make our own lives.

“Just the Tarot,” by Dan Adair – a kindle ebook available on Amazon

Blasted Towers, Bad Ju-Ju, and the Unluckiest Card in the Tarot

A look at the five unluckiest cards in the Tarot deck.

I recently received an email from a reader who asked, “What’s the unluckiest Tarot card?” I had to scratch my head about that one because the whole concept of good luck versus bad luck can get pretty complex. Nonetheless, there are some Tarot cards that can always be considered harbingers of bad luck

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE, REVERSED

The Wheel of Fortune, Reversed, is the most obvious choice for a, “bad luck,” card. We actually talk about luck in terms of good fortune and bad fortune and that’s what this card is all about. It depicts life as a wheel, where sometimes our luck is ascending and expanding and sometimes it’s descending and decreasing. When The Wheel of Fortune, Reversed, shows up in a reading it indicates that we’re in for a patch of bad luck.

The Kybalion, which is a book about Hermetic Magic, compared it to the pendulum of a clock. The pendulum swings first in one direction and then back in the other. Life can be seen in much the same way: sometimes we’re swinging into really good luck and then we swing back into a period of bad luck.

The obvious underlying message is to just hang on, because things will inevitably change. When we can stand back and look at good luck/bad luck as a rhythmic cycle, then periods of ill fortune will affect us much less severely. We just need to stay centered and calm and wait for the cycle to reverse itself.

THE TOWER

Also known as, “the lightning struck tower,” and, “the blasted tower,” The Tower would probably be my pick as THE unluckiest card in the deck.

“Just the Tarot,” by Dan Adair – complete definitions, layouts, and instructions for reading Tarot cards, available on Amazon.

At it’s most severe level, it can indicate that everything that you’ve loved and invested in is about to be blasted right down to the ground. The last time that I had it showing up in my personal readings, my life partner died, I lost my house, and I was involved in a horrible law suit over the probate of the estate. It can be that bad, depending on the other cards in the reading, but it usually isn’t.

On a mundane level, The Tower is usually just a powerful warning that we’ve gone down the wrong path and the Universe is about to provide a course correction. Perhaps we’ve been treating our fellow employees badly and – Shazam – we’re suddenly fired or demoted. Or perhaps we’ve been emotionally abusive or neglectful of our lover and they leave us for someone else.

In my experience, there’s always a level of hubris involved with this card. We’re not only taking things for granted, but we’re also being arrogant. We’re assuming that everything is under our control and the Universe is going to show us that we’re not.

The most positive message in this card – which we usually fail to appreciate at the time – is that we get to completely start over. It’s like that line from, Me and Bobby McGee: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” When our lives (or our projects or relationships, etc.) have been blasted right down to the foundations, we have the freedom to consciously design something new and better.

DEATH

Even if it isn’t the unluckiest card in the deck, Death definitely wins the award for the creepiest card in the Tarot. In her wonderful book, “Fortune Telling by Tarot Cards,” Sasha Fenton puts it in this perfectly understated, British way: “This card usually puts the wind up people when it appears . . .”

Yes.

Now, first of all, I have never seen the Death card appear before someone’s death. It will pop up after someone has died, but it’s usually just a comment on what’s happened. It’s more like, “Well, you’ve lost someone you loved, so you’re dealing with death and grief.”

What it can indicate, though, is that there’s going to be a radical, life changing turn in events in a person’s life. The querent is suddenly going to find herself going in a completely different direction than she has in the past. In an emotional and spiritual sense, it really is as if their previous life has died and they’re off in a completely new direction.

I knew a woman who had been happily married for 15 years, had a home, a loving husband, and 2 kids. She woke up one morning with this thought ringing in her head: “Shit, I’m not in love with him anymore and I hate my life.” Within six months she’d obtained a divorce, turned custody of her children over to her ex-husband and was working as a river guide in West Texas. That’s the kind of radical change that we’re talking about here.

Whether that kind of change is good luck or bad luck is just a matter of interpretation. If it’s something that we consciously plan, we usually view it as good fortune. If it was something that was forced on us by circumstance, we may think it was bad fortune.

JUSTICE, REVERSED

I’m a little hesitant to include the Justice card in this list because it has more to do with people and circumstances than luck per se. Nonetheless, it’s frequently seen as bad luck so I’ll stick it in here.

Classically, as you might guess from the image, Justice has to do with the legal system. If we’re involved in some sort of litigation and Justice is upright, it can mean that we’ll prevail. If it’s reversed, it can mean that we’ll lose.

On a personal level, it can mean that the people around you – your family, co-workers, boss, etc. – are making judgements about you and they’re not good if the card is reversed.

Losing a court case can obviously be seen as bad luck. Or it can be seen as a sign that we have a bad case, a bad lawyer, or a bad judge. In the same way, having people we care about judging us harshly can be seen as being treated unfairly. Or it might be that we’re being jerks and we need to clean up our acts.

Justice, Reversed, can be a sign of a bad luck to come, but it also serves as a warning. It’s saying, “You’re about to have some bad luck, so you need to take a careful look at your own actions before that happens.”

TEN OF SWORDS

It doesn’t take but a glance at the Ten of Swords to realize that there’s some serious bad ju-ju happening here. If we’re lying face down stuck full of swords like a human pin cushion, something’s a little wrong. This card can indicate treachery, deceit or a very, very bad ending to a relationship or a job.

The suit of Swords symbolizes our personal power. That’s the way that we project ourselves out into the world. There’s nothing innately wrong with that. Whether it’s standing up to a school yard bully when we were kids or pushing hard for a project we really believe in at work, there are always times when we have to be a bit aggressive.

But . . . when we’re overly and chronically aggressive, that puts us into a power cycle. We’re trying to dominate other people and run over their emotions and desires. We become the school yard bully instead of the person standing up to the bully. We see this mentality frequently with primitive men who brag about being the, “alpha dog.” It’s dominance for the sake of dominance, rather than for the sake of getting anything done.

The message of this card is the old cliche’: live by the sword, die by the sword. If we’ve been treating other people harshly, if we’ve been abusive in our love relationships, or domineering in work relationships, we’ve got some bad karma heading our way.

So those are the top five, “bad luck,” cards in the Tarot deck. There are, of course, other cards that may indicate bad fortune in one aspect or another of our lives, but these are the red flags. And, of course, we should always remember that a Tarot reading is just a snap shot in time. It tells us what’s likely to happen, but we have the free will to change it.