Origin Story
Why I started using the symbolism of tarot in my nutrition counseling and functional medicine health coaching practice
You might be wondering what a holistic nutritionist is doing playing with tarot cards and pulling out crystals in sessions with my clients.
I’ll tell you a little secret: It’s never just about food.
After a few years of private practice, I began feeling very disillusioned with my ability to help people see the connections between their emotional wellbeing and their physical health using my limited toolkit of personalized meal plans and therapeutic diet protocols.
Nutrition is clearly an important part of any healing process, but it works synergistically with other important aspects of our health. As Jeffrey Bland with the Institute for Functional Medicine said recently, relationships can be considered the most important element of our daily lifestyle.
That’s significant, considering that sleep, exercise, and nutrition are among these primary lifestyle factors that shape the trajectory and quality of our life across a lifespan.
Why are relationships so important for our health?
Many of us don’t know how to deal with our emotions — they’re too painful to examine, buried deep inside of us, living in organs and creating havoc in the form of chronic stress, hormonal imbalance, digestive issues, autoimmune disease, cancer, cognitive decline, and more.
Our relations to one another teach us how to experience and manage our emotions. They are also mirrors of the parts of ourselves that don’t want to see. We project our needs and our shadow onto others every day and in every person we meet. It is said that every relationship embodies the one that we share with our mother and father. We are always relating from this place of our inner child that longs to be loved. We feel unseen, and unheard, and we are filled with disappointment because our expectations of how we should be treated are unfulfilled.
A foundational teaching of Buddhism is that our attachments create suffering. We can have attachments to belongings, to people, and to expectations. The release of these attachments ignites the inner fire and the embodiment of unconditional love. We live our lives wounded from that space of unmet needs and can only evolve and grow when we recognize this and consciously decide to move on to find our own inner source of light and unconditional love, for ourselves and for others. We learn that this love we seek can be grown and nurtured from within.
We don’t get rid of our wounds, but we can heal them by taking care of our bodies and seeking opportunities to connect with a greater source, whatever that may be for you.
How do relationships and emotions impact our physical health?
Most of us struggle to see each other clearly, to accept who we are, and to appreciate the beauty of the human condition, as painful and as miraculous as life can be. This creates a brew of inner turmoil and cognitive dissonance about who we present ourselves to be. So we believe that the only to manage this discord is to withhold and hide those parts of us that don’t feel safe to reveal for fear of rejection and ridicule.
We know that certain early life experiences and unresolved emotions are directly correlated to specific health conditions and diseases. This inner world of complicated and layered emotions as a result of these experiences behave as a navigational tool throughout our daily lives, and within every act and interaction. It leaves an imprint on our physiology and pathologized as collections of conditions, such as anxiety and depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune disease, and cancer.
The neuroendocrine system is intricately connected to our emotions, and particularly, our stress response. How we interact and respond to the daily events of our lives — from traffic jams on the way to work to a difficult conversation with a friend or spouse — creates a chemical response in our bodies with a cascading affect on our vagus nerve communication pathway and our heart. The stress of the situation alters the microbes in our gut, which affects our digestion; it impacts neurotransmitter production, leading to decreased production of important ones like serotonin and dopamine, which impacts melatonin production and leads to poor sleep quality. It increases our blood pressure, putting strain on our blood vessels and our body’s ability to deliver nutrients and oxygen. It alters the composition of harmless cells doing their daily jobs until they can’t take it anymore and revolt against us.
These are just a few of the ways that stress impacts physiological function.
When we wake up in the morning to the same stressful environment day after day, we create a chronic stress response that depletes our body’s natural ability to replenish and repair itself.
It impacts our ability to not just survive, but thrive. If we are surrounded by unhealthy relationships, or we don’t have the resources to navigate our own challenges with relations to others in a healthy manner, it makes it difficult for us to see beyond the dark cloud of depression, anxiety, disappointment, and anger that shadows our lives every day.
This is where Carl Jung’s work with our own shadow is so powerful. It can be scary to find ourselves in the dark night of the soul without any guide to help us. Even though we feel something bigger than ourselves calling to us, instead we numb ourselves with distractions like food, drugs, alcohol, and the beckoning facade of social media.
How I Turned My Health Around for Good
In my own healing journey, I ignored the emotional the spiritual component for a long time too. Nutritional therapy was a great tool that got me back to living life with more energy, but there was still something missing. There was a longing for a greater connection within myself, and in turn, with others. I had lost my zest for life, and I missed seeing the magic in everything as I did when I was a child.
This longing for authenticity and greater purpose can embody a whole host of emotional symptoms like anxiety, depression, and irritability. From a holistic perspective on my own healing journey, my inability to communicate my needs throughout most of my life blocked my throat chakra and contributed to my diagnosis of autoimmune thyroid disease.
I had always lived and breathed in metaphor in symbolism, but I never knew how to explain to others the intricate connections that I would make with my mind between various events in my life. So I compartmentalized this part of myself and hid it away. (If you know me well, you’ll know that Halloween is my favorite holiday. That’s because it was the one season of the year that I felt safe to pull out my crystals and tarot cards!)
I started seeing how powerful it became for me to do daily tarot readings for myself. I’d finally found a tool that spoke the metaphorical language I’d intuitively understood throughout my life but didn’t know how to talk about. It allowed me to analyze my inner world from a place of story and symbolism inspired by the fool’s journey in the tarot. I could suddenly see why I struggled to stay grounded in work and mundane daily tasks of life. I had found the little girl in me that was never allowed to be a kid, to play, and to have fun. This esoteric world was fun!
The layers and moving parts of the archetypal patterns and personal myths I could see playing before me in every friend, relative, and client I knew distracted me from staying present. I couldn’t pretend to be ignorant and play the game anymore. I felt a burning feeling inside of me that it was time to share what I could see:
We create our own reality.
I finally understood why my health suffered as it did. Releasing the emotions from these places throughout my body that had harbored so much pain for so long was a turning point. I could see how I could use nutrition as the gateway to helping my clients heal themselves from the inside out.
How I Help My Clients Help Themselves
I feel honored to assist my clients create their own toolkit of resources and ways that connects them to their own intuition and creative power. We use many tools beyond tarot. I help female clients understand moon cycles to reconnect with their bodies and their hormonal cycles. This helps them honor the seasons of life that women experience, and to know that we change throughout the month as well. There is beauty in appreciating ourselves as we age, as we collect wisdom and learn how to nurture and share what we’ve learned with other women struggling just like we did.
We use crystals and essential oils to help clients find ways to incorporate important self care rituals throughout their day that reminds them to breathe and connect with the greater perspective of their lives. All things pass with time. Staying present with our feelings, and noticing where they live in our bodies is crucial for transcending the power we give to physiological conditions and diseases that feel so foreign and disruptive. Our bodies are not our enemy. We can use the warning signs it gives us as a blessing to get back in alignment with healthy living. Essential oils and crystals are powerful symbolic reminders of what my clients are trying to manifest in their lives. For some, it helps them deepen their spiritual practices and connect to their own relationship with the divine.
Finally, I use tarot and oracle cards to help clients find a different perspective to challenges in their lives. The cards offer a chance to step out of our routine and comfort of the stories that we live within and have grown so accustomed to. In this comfort of routine, we forget that we always have a choice. Tarot is filled with incredible symbolism and metaphor that transcends the earthly realm and connects us a universal consciousness where this metaphorical language speaks to us across cultures and time. We can tap into this symbolism to remind ourselves that we are not alone. Tarot helps us to rely on our own intuition as our guide as we create our daily experiences and write the unique story of our lives.
Tarot is a game of probabilities. For some, it is their direct contact to their inner realm of personal truth.
If you’re interested in learning more about my process, please send me an email to mindlife.academy@gmail.com to learn more.
