by Tabitha Chamberlain

Terri and I have both loved taking over Tarot Reflections, we are always looking for ways to help improve or make it more interactive with you, our readers. We love hearing from you, with both positive and negative feedback.

I thought why not start a monthly journaling exercise? It gives us an opportunity to offer you something new each month while giving you the reader a chance to interact with us here at Tarot Reflections. This is no great promise of anything, just a chance to help give you ideas to help you start your own Tarot journal or maybe give you different ideas on journaling.

Each month Terri, Allan, or myself will write up a journaling exercise that you can do for that month.

What you're going to need for any of these journals exercise:

A journal--- either traditional paper and pen or computer file

Tarot deck---if you don't have a traditional deck, meh whatever. Use what ya got, this is supposed to be fun.

Pretty easy stuff. Let's start!!!

This month, I'm going to ask you to separate out your Major arcana from the Minor. Shuffle the Majors completely asking:

What is the MAJOR THEME playing out in my life this month?  

Pull out ONE Major card. Look it over, but don't get too personal with it. This is only the overview of your month.

Now the hard part, what do you need to develop or work on this month? Love, work, mental clarity, drive? Most of these things aren't simple or easily defined things, so pick TWO MINOR SUITS that apply to what you want to develop or work on.

If you decide that you want to work on your Work life, I would suggest using Wands and Pentacles. If you need specific project completed for work: Swords and Pentacles.

If you decide that you want to work on your Health, Pentacles and Wands would be fitting here. If you need to work on mental health:  Pentacles and Swords.

To the journaling aspect of this exercise: Take your MAJOR theme and once a day pull out one card of the MINOR SUITS you picked. You can shuffle the 28 cards and pull it that way. Or you can simply assign the Ace of the suit to the first of the month and work through that way. Once used place back in your deck.

Ask:

How can I apply this theme today?/How did I apply this theme today?

Given that it's February, for myself I choose: Wands and Cups as my Minor suits. After shuffling the Majors I pulled The Magician.

February 1st: Magician/Page of Wands:

While I'm hesitate to put myself out there, I need to let go of the control that I feel the need to hold on to. It's time to let the Page teach me to use her budding drive to develop certain things in my life. Patience is only going to get me so far, diving head first maybe the only way that I can get things started for me.

It doesn't need to be a long entry. Just let the cards talk to you. Mine makes perfect sense as I'm OCD and a perfectionist, but would like to develop a romantic liaison. Some entries will be several pages long, others may only be a sentence long. Don’t force anything, just write as long as you're receiving information for the cards.

If you're using an oracle, shuffle your deck picking the one card to be used as your Theme of the month. Use the rest of the oracle to see how you can apply it to your day this month.

We want and encourage you to add your journaling experience: your favorites, most in depth, or funniest one in the comments. Terri, Allan, and I will be reading through them, we will post our favorite one in the next month of Tarot Reflections.

If you have any suggestions for a journaling exercise please let us know by typing it up and submitting it to ATAsTarotReflections@gmail.com