The Healer’s Tarot, What Is It?

The Healer’s Tarot Deck is designed by Jennifer J. Lehr, LMFT. It helps healers assist in accessing aspects of themselves and their clients. It facilitates movement deeper into parts of the psyche that are fragmented or causing issues in their lives.

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Working with traditional tarot decks taught me a lot about intuition and states of being. Using Tarot cards helped me finetune my intuition. It helped me receive images, stories, and psychological insights I can then use with whomever I am doing a reading for.

Although tarot has traditionally been used for divination (prediction), I have found that tarot cards are a great way to explore and process, essentially as one would apply art therapy. The shift from divination to process moves us from the less empowered position of wondering what will happen in our lives to the more empowered position of how I can co-create my life.

After working with tarot cards for years, both on myself and with others, I realized that I needed a different language than the decks I had been using. I needed to reach deeper into the psyche, find deeper dynamics, convey how various parts took over and caused disruption or harmony in the self. So, I began to develop a deck that I call The Healer’s Tarot.

We Are All Made of Parts

We are all made up of “parts” that may or may not be integrated. Our parts have agendas and purposes. One moment we might feel great. The next moment we are in a completely different psychological space. Our different ways of being may have been helpful when we were younger and trying to survive a suboptimal situation, but now cause problems in our lives.

Having parts is not the same as dissociative identity disorder. We have a central consciousness that is aware of all of us. We don’t “blank out” and not remember the actions of a part as we would in DID.

When you think of how you shift and change – your behavior, feelings, and thoughts, you will probably become aware of different parts of yourself. For example, imagine you became anxious when you were a child and felt insecure. But as you grew older, you developed more confidence and felt able to engage in your life. Sometimes, however, even as an adult, the anxious part of you gets triggered, and you find yourself in that old and familiar state of anxiety.

Resources

In addition to the Healer’s Tarot, there are books and therapeutic systems that can help us understand, communicate with and transform our parts.

Many of Lucia Capacchione’s books deal with parts, often inner child parts.
Hal Stone, Ph.D. and Sidra Stone Ph.D.’s book Embracing Our Selves, The Voice Dialogue Manual deals with parts.
The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit by Donald Kalsched, Ph.D., a Jungian Analyst, also deals with parts, especially parts that developed during trauma.
Internal Family Systems developed by Dr. Robert Schwartz is a therapeutic modality that works with parts.
SoulCollage® works with parts as well, specifically by finding the “I am the one who…” voice of the cards.

My Parts Work

In 1991, early in my healing process, I had a session with a healer who introduced me to the concept of parts. She gave me the task of naming as many parts of me as I could find. I identified seventeen unique inner parts of myself. For each part, I answered the questions below and many other questions. As I wrote about each part, I began to get a clearer understanding of my psyche, how I was constructed, what worked and did not work in my inner world, and how this affected my functioning in the outer world. I began to understand how certain parts ruled me even when I wanted to be different. These parts were more potent than my will. They had a will of their own and were outside of my control.

For example, I had a starving part that would not stand up for myself because this part wanted to be loved so badly it could not risk losing that. Because of that, I put up with unacceptable situations in my earlier relationships.

Instead of trying to overpower our parts, we must learn to speak to them, understand them, help them see a better way of being.

Possible Parts

There are probably an infinite variety of inner parts. Some are more common than others. Here are a few possibilities from the Healer’s Tarot.

The Gatekeeper
Lost in the Crowd
Full Heart
Bringing Up the Past
Shattered
The Intuitive Self
Depression
Daydream
Cut Off
Resentment
Terror

The Questions

When working with parts, ask yourself:

What is the purpose of this part?
How does it protect me?
When and why did it develop or split off from me?
Does it have a relationship with other parts?
How does it hurt me, my life, or others?
Do I still need this part as it is, or do I need to help it integrate or develop?

Moving Deeper

As a therapist and SoulCollage® facilitator, I found working with parts incredibly helpful at times. We often need help moving deeper into ourselves. Images are a perfect way to do so. They take us straight into the heart of feeling. Instead of wondering what we might make for dinner, we begin wondering why we are as we are. We start learning about the universe inside.

How to Use the Healer’s Tarot

When we work with the Healer’s Tarot or any type of oracle deck, we trust that the cards we pull came up for a reason, and we work to understand what the card or cards are saying to us. Drawing a card from the deck, you can ask yourself, why did this card show up? What does it want to tell me? What does it want me to look at or process?

Or you can simply look at the cards that call to you. Why are you drawn to or repulsed by this card? What resonates? How do you relate to it?

The Healer’s Tarot is still being developed. Until it is available for purchase, simply look at the images and allow one to choose you. Then, sit with it and see what comes up for you.

If you would like to be notified when The Healer’s Tarot Deck is released, you can sign up here.

Visit the SoulCollage Image Gallery here.

Read my blog posts here.

For relational help, check out WeConcile’s Blog here.