The Hanged Man is one of the Major Arcana cards I find is most easily misunderstood. Many think it presages that they will suffer martyrdom of some kind (hopefully they don't think literal martyrdom is in their future when this card pops up!). That's not how I read this card.
Perhaps there was a time when martyrdom was commonplace enough that the image of a man hanging upside down from a tree would conjure such doom and gloom. But this is not how I view the card. Rather, I see The Hanged Man as a call for a change in perspective and the patience that this requires.
As a tarot reader, I give people the gift of perspective. I also regularly enlist my fellow readers to pull cards and give me readings because I too need that gift from others. None of us can see our own forests when we're dancing through our own trees.
What An Outside View Can Do For You
When I'm not reading cards for visitors to Tea & Tarot, I offer book coaching. I work for a company that trains book coaches. I write. My whole life shapes itself around helping others gain new perspective.
An outside perspective can help us realize what we already know about ourselves. I can't tell you (because I haven't counted) how many times I've sat in the tarot nook with someone, pulling cards and talking with them, that they say they've known the truths we're discussing to be true, but they weren't ready to admit them to themselves. To face them.
Facing the truths we don't want to face can help us level up. I'll get to this more later in this post. Doing so can also help clear pathways for us to take forward. It can make us feel seen, heard, and loved--even if "just" from ourselves.
This is the same sort of objective but compassionate perspective I seek to offer in all walks of my life. I'm so fortunate that I get to do this work at Tea & Tarot, a place where I get that same perspective from our stable of readers. I've had tarot cards pulled by Heather, Eden, Anastasia, and Klaudia, past life readings from Jess, mediumship readings with Stephanie, and more. I try to get perspective from all of our readers because it helps me on my life path (and they're all lovely people, too!). I read for them, too. Because we all know that what these readings provide is clarity and truth.
From clarity and truth, love is possible.
Reading Cards Is A Calling
I'm in this life to teach others how to be more loving toward themselves and others. How to turn fear into understanding love. I'm here to teach others this through readings and course work. I've continued learning about myself and my purpose, and know I am a Starseed, and my purpose here, as much as I sometimes feel out of place in this world, is to help people level up through finding new perspectives that lead to love.
Maybe this sounds like something that's familiar to you or not--but I know for certain that reading for people is a calling. Helping people transform through new perspectives, through the energy of The Hanged Man for example, is the reason I came into this life on this Earth.
I'm here to help people find their voices, feel seen & heard, find ways to love and appreciate the magick that we all have, and use all of this to live a life with more love.
Everything Comes Down To 2 Emotions
All emotions and experiences come from and feed into fear and love. These two experiences are like the parents of all other emotions and energies (and I like to say that energy is the currency of the Universe, and emotion its language). We come into life to experience both so that we may better understand love.
When we exist as a spirit only, whether part of the whole or not, we feel love. But we increase our understanding and appreciation of love when we also know fear. It's the same way we understand day because we have night. (This is not a call to shore up all binaries, for I do believe most are constructs and generate more fear than love.)
Joy, anger, amusement, despondency... it doesn't matter what we call the emotion, but they stem from fear or love. My job as a tarot reader is to help provide the perspective needed to take what we fear and transform it into an understanding or expression of love. This is what I do in my readings, and what I get from all other readings I've ever experienced.
This Is Personal Alchemy
This change is what many have come to call personal alchemy, which is just a fun way of saying transformation. I don't use cards to tell seekers what their future will be; that is up to them. No future is set in stone.
But as I can take a story and tell the writer "the reader/market will likely react this way to this craft choice," so too can I take tarot cards and tell a seeker, "you are likely to experience more fear/love if you make this decision and follow this path".
By providing perspective to shine light on truth, I can give people clarity and help them better understand how to work with fear to create more love. This is the alchemy I chose to perform in this life--and we all have alchemy to perform. Without transformation, we would stagnate and get bored.
Closing Thoughts
If you're ready to level up, if you're ready to alchemize your experience, if you're ready for clarity and truth, if you're ready to understand your choices in a new light and see the forest and the trees at the same time, if you're ready to embrace the meaning of The Hanged Man instead of shying away from the work of being alive, then book a reading with one of us.
We all have our own approaches, our own styles, our own way of expressing our calling. We all have our own ways of helping those who climb the stairs into this hundreds-year-old home. Come in for a spot of tea and transformation that can elevate how you see not only your life, but life in general and find the ways to transform fear into love.