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Hosted by tarotist and musician Mari Aweidah, Into the Woods is a journey into the heart of tarot as a tool for reflection and self-discovery. Through real-life stories, pop culture, and creative spreads, each episode explores the cards from a grounded, non-predictive perspective.
Welcome to Into the Woods, a journey with the Tarot. Here, we wander together into the woods to explore ourselves, the world around us, and the mysteries and joys of life through the Tarot. I'm your host, Mari, a professional tarot reader and a musician. Grab your deck and off we go. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Into the Woods.
Mari:Today is an exciting day. We're gonna talk all about the Tower card, one of the most feared cards in the deck, but also weirdly one of my favorites. And before we dive in, I just wanna thank you all again for listening to the podcast and sending me some really nice messages about it. This has been such a fun and exciting passion project for me and has really helped spark my creativity again. And, yeah, I've just been having so much fun with the podcast.
Mari:If you've been enjoying it, remember you can easily support by dropping a five star review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or subscribing to the YouTube channel. If you didn't listen to last week's episode, it was my first interview with Melissa Anderson, a lovely tarot reader and therapist. And I did actually record video for that one. So you can watch the whole video over on YouTube. We had a really amazing discussion, and I hope to do some more interviews in the future.
Mari:I'm gonna be looking out for some special guests. So, yeah, keep on listening and sharing this podcast with your friends and your family and, help me keep it going. So without further ado, bum bum bum, the tower. In her book, 78 Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollock writes, the person who lives only to satisfy the ego demands wealth, fame, and physical pleasure, ignoring both introspection and the spiritual beauty of the universe, raises a prison around himself. I love that quote, and I think it's very accurate.
Mari:But I do think that many of us don't feel like we are only living to satisfy our ego, especially, like, if you're listening to this podcast, you maybe have a spiritual practice and are, you know, trying to be connected to your body, the earth, and just being a good person. So I feel like she makes it sound pretty extreme like this. You're only living for your ego, demanding wealth and fame. Like, many of us probably don't feel like we're that extreme in our, you know, ignorance of, yeah, the spiritual beauty of the universe as she says. But we still experienced our moments even if we're not, like, this sort of cold blooded villain type person.
Mari:Right? So it's an experience we all have. And it doesn't just come from being a selfish person who wants money and fame. I believe the tower is an experience that comes when we've so completely denied our inner truth that the universe must step in to course correct us. And that doesn't always mean that we're just out there being a bad person or out there being a selfish person.
Mari:It a lot of times just means we've somehow lost connection to our heart's desires and to who we really are. And what the tower does is it creates a rock bottom so deep that somehow it's a relief because deep down, we've known all along that the ground beneath our tower was unstable. And we were deeply longing for change and that might be unconscious. Maybe we don't know it. But a lot of times when the tower comes, it sort of feels like a relief, and I'll I'll talk about that later.
Mari:The tower is a greatly feared card in the Tarot, and rightly so. It's an unpleasant experience to say the least, but we also can't deny the immense benefits that come after the tower moments in life. Thank gods the universe won't let us stay in towers that we imprison ourselves in. It will find a way to force us to change, often giving us no other option. As Rachel Pollock also says, it is spiritual force which destroys our psychic prisons.
Mari:So in case you're not looking at the card and you need a reminder, in this card, we see a lightning bolt striking a tower. The tower is up on a mountain. There's no door. There's a couple windows. There's fire coming out of the windows.
Mari:There's two people flying out of the tower, you know, to maybe their death below. There's also a crown that was on the tower and the lightning bolt has knocked it off, so the crown is flying off the tower as well. So it is a scene of panic, of sudden destruction, of absolute chaos. Right? Does not look fun.
Mari:It's card number 16 in the Major Arcana. In numerology, we can reduce the number to seven just by adding the one and the six together and classify it as a seven card in a way. So seven is a number of paradox. It's both lucky and evil. It's spiritual and holy and sinful.
Mari:It's the number three, which is cycles, motion, synthesis, combined with the number four, which is stasis and containment. Right? They're kind of opposites. So I I like how this translates to the tower because it's both horrible and beautiful. It's terrible, but necessary.
Mari:We dread it, and yet we crave it. It's we we you know, we're dreading it, but it's a relief. Like, how do those things go together? It really is a paradox. And I love how that's expressed in the numerology in the number seven.
Mari:We see those types of paradoxes in the other sevens in the deck too, in the sneakiness and self betrayal of the seven of swords, in the utter confusion, in the seven of cups, and and so on. So in life, the tower may manifest as a sudden job loss, a broken foot, a stay in the hospital, a tree falling on your home, or even the loss of a loved one. In the moment, it is awful, and we often don't know why it's happening to us. It it may feel like a horrible stroke of luck, the one in a million chance that lightning strikes you. But typically in hindsight, often it's years later, we are usually grateful for the experience and understand how it directed us to something greater, more alignment, more truth, more peace, greater understanding of, you know, the world and and life.
Mari:The crumbling of the tower after the lightning strikes may last a while, although it's often a sudden event that kicks it off. As I said, a job loss, a health crisis. The fear that this card brings up is not something to laugh at. It it's really challenging. And, like, often is injury, like, pain or some kind of physical problem with our body.
Mari:I've seen that so many times. I personally relate this card to the most awful and difficult times in my life, but there is a glimmer of relief and hope in the card as well. And we have to remember that when we're going through it if we can, that, you know, you have indeed hit rock bottom, and it can only go up from here. There's a knowing that it will somehow lead to greater peace, wisdom, joy, and appreciation for life. And, of course, that it doesn't last forever.
Mari:The tower moment will not last forever. So how do we get to a tower moment? Right? What leads us there? When I was considering what to do for this episode, I'd hadn't known I was gonna do a tower episode.
Mari:I sat down and did some meditation. I pulled two cards from my deck, and I got the tower and the page of pentacles. And, you know, I knew I had to do an episode about the tower. I started thinking about the relationship between the tower and the page of pentacles and felt like it was giving me a clue to why we end up in the tower. I I started thinking that when we lose sight of the pentacle, when we stop feeling our body, when we stop learning its language and the language of the earth around us, that's when we head for the tower.
Mari:Our body and our connection to our environment is our best tool for alignment. When we don't connect there, we often get lost in story and programming, right, thoughts, logic, all that. When we build our life, AKA the tower, around other people's ideas of who we should be, society's rules, belief systems that aren't ours, basically when we spend too much time in our heads and up in the air, that's the swords, we are building our tower without even knowing it. And honestly, we often don't realize that those beliefs aren't even ours, which is why it takes divine intervention to change. In those times, we truly believe that we're following, like, our own desires, that that's what we're supposed to be doing, that that's what we wanna do.
Mari:And it takes a big shake up to realize like, woah, maybe I never wanted this or believed in this path all along. So I wanna read a segment from Tarot and the Archetypal Journey by Sally Nichols. She says, Psychologically speaking, many of us live up in the air, imprisoned in ideological towers of our own making. For the tower can symbolize any mental construct, be it political, philosophical, theological, or psychological, which we human beings build brick by brick out of words and ideas. I'm pausing from the quote for a second.
Mari:So that building of the tower is really like a mental thing. It is very swords. It's ideas, it's beliefs, it's philosophies, things like that. Okay. Back into the quote.
Mari:Like their physical counterparts, such towers are useful for protection against chaos, for occasional retreat, and as a vantage point for taking our bearings in relation to the wider view. They are useful as long as we allow room for a little remodeling from time to time and keep the doors open so that we can come and go at will. But when we build a rigid system of any kind and crown it king, then we become its prisoners. We are no longer free to move and change with the moment to touch the vital earth and to be touched by its seasons. Something like this must have happened to the two tower dwellers in this picture for their edifice has no door whatever.
Mari:They have walled themselves in. In such cases, only an act of God can liberate them. This liberation can take the form of a severe physical or spiritual illness, a violent change of fortune, or another cataclysmic event which brings them suddenly down to earth, end quote. Yes. So the antidote to building the tower and, you know, sort of unsuccessfully trying to climb our way to heaven is to fall to the ground and reconnect with the earth.
Mari:I also want to point out that it's not the worst thing in the world to build some towers or to have some ideologies or buy into belief systems. Those things are necessary actually, but it's the rigidity that's the problem. It's building no door. It's having no escape. It's becoming too stuck there.
Mari:That's the problem. This brings to mind things like how we expected people to do the same job forever. Like, why? That's ridiculous. We need to have room for change, for becoming a new person, for developing new beliefs and ideologies and things we love.
Mari:It doesn't serve us to box ourselves into the tower with no way out. So I wanna tell you a little bit about one of my own tower moments. I graduated from college with a degree in music and was totally lost the second I graduated. I didn't know what to do with myself. I was doing small odd jobs like walking dogs and pet sitting and, you know, that kind of stuff you do when you're 20.
Mari:I knew that to be a real person contributing to the world, I needed some kind of real job. I also knew that musicians don't make money. So I decided I should work in some job adjacent to music, like managing an orchestra so I could still be near the thing that I loved. But, you know, in my head, I just knew, like, there was no way of making it work as a musician. I was also just living life at a crazy pace, working, partying, exercising like an insane person, just burning a candle at many ends.
Mari:I didn't know how to slow down and actually know myself or discover what I wanted to do next. All I knew were the ingrained beliefs and how to stay busy. Some of these beliefs were, I needed to be busy and productive to be worthy. Musicians don't make money. A graduate degree was needed to be taken seriously.
Mari:I had to stay fit with rigorous exercise because that's what my family demanded. Drinking, you know, was something you just did for fun. And none of those were my actual opinions, but just ones that I had absorbed. There was no part of the way I was living that was in alignment during this time. I even let my sister convince me to live with her again, even though I knew I didn't want to just because it seemed practical.
Mari:I didn't wanna say no to her. I didn't wanna make her feel bad. I mean, I had no boundaries. I love my sister so much. We're best friends.
Mari:But at the time, for whatever reason, I hadn't really wanted to live with her. Again, I I had lived with her in the past. So I ended up applying to grad school, was planning to move to California. I just didn't know what else to do. And guess what happened?
Mari:The place I moved into with my sister had black mold. I became extremely ill. Over the following year, I was diagnosed with a slew of autoimmune disorders. I had pain all over my body. I had no energy.
Mari:At some point, I could barely walk. Like I couldn't walk to my mailbox to get mail. And when the symptoms didn't go away after I did eventually move to California and start grad school, I had to drop out. I dropped out of school and moved in with my parents so that they could care for me and we could figure out what was going on with my health. That was my tower moment.
Mari:The moment that the mold of my insane pace of living and all the things I was doing that I didn't really wanna do caused essentially my nervous system to shut down entirely. My identity as an active, fit, hardworking grad student, you know, with big dreams of what I would do for work just crumbled. Now I was a sick person living at home with my mom and dad and with no idea how to get better or what to do with my life. So while I was ill and basically resting all the time, I ended up going down a big spiritual rabbit hole, which is usually what I do. All I could do is lay around.
Mari:So I devoured books. I got really into the teachings of a spiritual teacher I've always loved named Leslie Temple Thurston. I meditated daily. I was studying the writings of Yogananda and Kriya Yoga because I was living with my parents in San Diego and they were close to the self realization fellowship in Encinitas. I was visiting there and as I improved, I did go back to school part time and you know, then I started to, I slowed down so I had time to do what I needed.
Mari:I discovered Iyengar yoga, which worked so well for me in a body that was just no longer able. I couldn't do the kind of insane fitness that I had enjoyed before. I really needed some kind of movement that was more compassionate and could cater to what I needed at the time, a gentler approach. And throughout this healing process, I started to piece together the connection to my body and my own soul again during this downtime. And that's one of the gifts that the tower can give you is some downtime.
Mari:Right? If you get really sick, what do you have to do? Nothing. If you lose your job, what do you have to do? Nothing.
Mari:So a lot of times it does end up giving you time and space. So in the long run, this did eventually lead me to getting back into music and, you know, being a musician myself, working in music. I also found my husband during that time, during my recovery, much healthier relationship than I'd ever been in. I found my spiritual practice again. Many, many things happened post Tower that I'm so incredibly grateful for and just don't think I would have taken the time for if it hadn't happened.
Mari:Also, it just gave me great compassion. As like an able-bodied privileged person with a very pleasant upbringing, I really don't feel like I had that much compassion for people in the world before this. It was kinda like, why isn't everyone just doing great? It's like so, you know, ignorant really. But I feel like after my tower moment, I I had so much deep compassion for literally everybody.
Mari:I was like, wow. Everyone struggles like this. You know? Like, everybody goes through something like this or their whole life is like this. And I really feel like I changed entirely into a much better person after this experience.
Mari:If you are going through this now, it really does feel like an entire crumbling of identity. It's painful, confusing. How could this happen to me? I think back to that time, and I felt like I couldn't even recognize myself. I mean, I was so much a victim too.
Mari:And, you know, in part rightfully so, it was horrible. Everyone felt bad for what I was going through. And, you know, I could just barely move and all that. So, yeah, I was in a lot of self pity and all of that and and really was like, why? Why did this need to happen to me?
Mari:Why? Like, why? So unlucky to have lived in a place with mold. But as I said, one of the gifts of the tower is that you may find yourself forced into a slower pace. You may be able to rest more.
Mari:You may be able to just have some more space for mental freedom. And it may not mean you have more energy, but you may just have less to do and have more time with yourself. So hopefully in this time, we reconnect to the pentacle coming back to that page of pentacles. We relearn how to connect to the body. We learn how to be present in the world and reality around us.
Mari:What is this life about if not experiencing it through this body that we have in this lifetime instead of, you know, getting lost in the swirl of collective ideas, beliefs, past, and experiences that aren't even ours. Another amazing thing about the tower, it sets off that final incredible sequence of the major arcana. The peace, hope, and relief that comes after the collapse, that's the star. The waiting through shadow to find your truth, that's the moon. The wisdom and clarity and joy that finally comes, the sun.
Mari:The understanding that you don't actually want to bring those old parts of yourself forward, judgment. And finally, the immense gratitude and a deep knowing of how vital the whole experience was and how beautiful that whole bigger picture is. That's the world. If you're still afraid of the tower, I'd like to bring up one more thing. Researchers at Harvard Business School ran a study and found that experiencing a wide spectrum of emotions, which they call emo diversity, creates better mental and physical health.
Mari:They found that experiencing a diverse range of positive and negative emotions was also healthier than having a very narrow monotonous negative emotional life. So experiencing that full rich spectrum of human conditions leads to less depression, lower chronic inflammation, and fewer doctor visits. That's what they found. So I don't mean to make light of a very, very serious and challenging part of life. But if you can zoom out and take in the bigger picture, these experiences can and probably will contribute to you being a healthier and potentially happier and more content person in the long run.
Mari:I actually get really excited when I see the tower come up in readings because it means that change has been a long time coming, and it's usually here. And it's up from here, especially if you don't fight it. If you can trust that the universe is working for your good, it can be easier to pivot and realize, like, that job or that relationship or your way of living, has it even been working for me? You know, maybe not. So it's easier said than done.
Mari:I know. In the moment, it's more just like, why? This is so hard. Why? But, hopefully, you can sort of leave the why to the side.
Mari:Just get through it, figure it out, you know, day to day, and know that years down the road, you're gonna you're gonna be grateful for it. Oh my god. I hate it. In Sally Nichols' book, she also writes, one of the possible outcomes of our own meditation on the tower might be to help increase our awareness of areas in our own life when we are in danger of psychic imprisonment, of attitudes or ideas we have crowned king, where do they constrict our freedom, in what ways do we use religious, psychological, or philosophical systems to elevate ourselves above the mass of humankind? She goes on to talk about idolizing youth as a good example of this, as a good example of like a tower we have built as a society that, you know, really doesn't serve us and has no connection to earth or nature because, like, we all age.
Mari:We just do. Like, why would you even bother idolizing youth? Everybody gets the same amount of youth, relatively speaking. But I've used her quote there to inspire a tower spread. Okay?
Mari:So I'm calling it a tower spread for blowing up old programming. Okay. That's what I'm calling it. So it's gonna be a three card spread again. I love three cards.
Mari:Question number one, card number one, where have my thoughts and beliefs become too rigid? Number two, how is this restricting my freedom? Number three, what can help me come back down to earth? So I'm gonna pull this for myself right now. We'll see what comes up.
Mari:Today, I'm using the Tarot of the Witches Garden, which is like my new favorite deck right now. Oh, okay. So for question number one oh my god, Tarot. You're so annoying. Okay.
Mari:Where have my thoughts and beliefs become too rigid? I got, literally guys, the queen of swords reversed. Thank you for being, like, so on the fucking nose. That's, like, the question in a card. Where have my thoughts and beliefs become too rigid?
Mari:Queen of swords reversed? Are you kidding me? K. So making this personal, though. Okay.
Mari:So swords, our suit of air, our suit of thoughts, thinking, logic, discernment, all that. And we have the queen who is one of our masters of the sword. And I think of the king and queen or really all the court cards when they're reversed is, like, wielding that sword too sharply, being too disconnected from emotion, and almost there's, like, a brutality in it or a coldness and a severity. Do I feel like that's applying to myself? I don't know.
Mari:What's coming up for me is just that I can be kind of a cynical person. Just being, like, really honest and vulnerable here. Like, I come from a family of a bunch of smarty pants, and I think that as a result of that, I can really hold myself and my whole family above other people, you know, in a way that is kind of egotistical to be honest. And I can kind of quickly write off what other people say. I don't trust other people's intelligence and insight very easily.
Mari:Like I'm hard to impress. I don't know. All of that's coming through with the queen of swords. And wow. I mean, gosh, the tarot is so crazy.
Mari:I'm like, I'm so happy I'm seeing that part of myself because I haven't thought about that in a while. And I would love to soften, you know, that part of myself and and, yeah, like, come back down to earth a little bit, not be so queen of swords, not be so queen of swords y. Be a little bit more open to other people and other experiences and things like that. So wow, that's very cool. Okay, Number two, how is this restricting my freedom?
Mari:For this card, I got the knight of pentacles in reverse. I think the knight of pentacles is that that slow grounded earth connected approach. And, you know, the the queen of swords is the swords are fast. You know, they're airy. They're quick.
Mari:They're decisive. They're a little bit brutal making this decision onto the next. And, I think that as a result of that, I I am losing some freedom or I I do lose freedom because then I don't really have the choice to slow down and make that slow approach. I'm just quick to judge, quick to make yeah. Quick to make a judgment, quick to just create some logic around something and not really be that sort of present slower grounded approach like the knight of pentacles would represent.
Mari:So it's limiting that part of myself that can take that more grounded present approach and the pentacles are that connection to the earth as I talked about in the episode. So I think it's wild that I for the first one, I got a swords guard and the second one I got a pentacles guard. It's like so on the nose there again. Okay. So what can help me come back down to earth?
Mari:Oh, I love this because I got a fire card. Oh my gosh. Three court cards, I'm just realizing. So for this, I got the knight of wands. So for me, this reading is really about like embodying these things or or seeing these different parts of myself, less about the experiences in my life, which that would have been more of the PIP cards, right?
Mari:The one through tens. I didn't get any majors or PIP cards. I got all courts. This reading is really about seeing the different sides of myself, observing them, choosing to bring out different parts of myself, at different times or or, you know, tempering one part and helping another part grow or come out. So, I got the knight of wands for what can help me come back down to earth.
Mari:And I think that's so cool because to me that's showing stepping away from the queen of swords which is about following logic, thought, mental processes, and choosing to instead follow the the passion, the intuition, the instinct. So it's like moving away from the mental state and moving into the intuitive state. That's the fire. That's the that's the wands. And I love that I got two nights.
Mari:Very cool. So it is taking action. Right? It's like learning to take action through through instinct, through passion, through through intuition. I'm just gonna take that as not overthinking things, right?
Mari:Following joy, following what's energizing me, looking to where the torch is, where the light is, and seeing that in daily life and not just being quick to judge, to overthink, to make an opinion about something. So, I'm I'm gonna leave it there for now. I may actually think about these three cards a little bit more, but I'll I'll leave that, for the episode as myself reading which yeah. This this does feel a vulnerable reading for myself on the podcast. So hopefully it like helps you all learn or or understand how I'm thinking about the cards and how you might wanna think about it too.
Mari:So, yeah, very cool reading. And I would highly recommend doing this spread for yourself if you are feeling a little trapped maybe in your own mind, which I I've lived I've lived a life of that. So I'm better now than I ever have been, but queen of swords is telling me I'm not done. Okay. Well, sending you all so much love and compassion for whatever you're going through right now, whether you're in a tower moment or you're not, I'm sure you've been through one.
Mari:We all have. So, yeah, sending you like extra love and a huge hug. Do something today that brings you joy. Do something the knight of wands would do, right, following that passion, following that spark within. Thank you so much for listening.
Mari:Episodes are out every Tuesday. Again, you can subscribe, leave a five star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can subscribe on YouTube. You can follow me on Instagram at Mari of the Woods. Feel free to drop me some listener questions or things you want discussed on the podcast.
Mari:You can email me at info@MarioftheWoods.com. And Mari is spelled m a r I. The editing, artwork, and music for this podcast is all done by me. Until next time, have a wonderful week and happy wandering.