Finding Your True Self

This week I'll be using the Touchstone Tarot, created and self-published by Kat Black. Along with it I'll be using the John Waterhouse Oracle, created and self-published by Elaine Wilkinson (aka Seven Stars). Today's draws are the High Priestess and 'Ophelia:'

          With a book, scroll, and pomegranate in her arms, this High Priestess seems to beckon us into the darkness without speaking. Her manner illustrates the word 'quietude' - the state of being quiet, still, and calm. The symbols she holds promises hidden knowledge that once revealed will be fruitful. She asks only that we become open and receptive; in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, "Make your ego porous." At the other end of the spectrum sits Ophelia by a pond of lilies moments before her death. She drowned herself after Hamlet killed her father and deserted her. Without a porous ego, it is impossible not to be bound by the many ways we define ourselves. When these labels are ripped from us, it can be as if we've had the rug of reality pulled from beneath our feet. The High Priestess implores us to see beyond this limited sense of self.

'Finding yourself' is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right here, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. ‘Finding yourself’ is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.

—Emily McDowell