Integrate Your Shadow — Tarot Pick a Card

Hello, my soul friends! I have a psychic tarot reading today on integrating your shadow. This is the part of you that you repress, consciously or unconsciously, but would manifest in a more healthy way if you integrated it correctly.

To receive your message from the universe, pick one of the piles above using your intuition.

After you select your cards, scroll down to your pile or choose below.

For this reading, I’ve used the Hermetic Tarot deck. This is an affiliate link, and it helps support me if you love the deck and want to buy it for yourself too.

Remember that you have free will. That means you can manifest the positive and avoid the negative of any reading.

Now let’s see about integrating your shadow.

Pile 1: Mushrooms

Anxiety and Perfectionism

Your spread is all about your innate ability to manifest, but you have anxieties about perfectionism.

The first card, Four of Wands: Lord of Perfected Work indicates that you’re someone that can be relied upon to deliver quality. You either take pride in your work or want to show compassion to those who seek your help.

But the Nine of Swords: Lord of Despair and Cruelty means you second guess yourself a lot. You’re worried that your manifestations won’t meet a standard. This is a bit silly because you’re actually fairly skilled. But just because you’re good at something, doesn’t mean the voices inside your head don’t make you doubt yourself.

But where does this come from and how do you integrate this anxiety into a healthy expression?

Use a Quality Scale

One way to view any type of anxiety is as motivation. You desire to do well, and you want to manifest quality. There’s 100% nothing wrong with that desire and integrating your shadow isn’t about changing this essential aspect of you.

But there’s a difference between good and perfect. You want to deliver good work in your manifestations and sometimes perfect can get in the way. Often, it slows you down or prevents you from manifesting your next project.

When I was in college, I wanted to get a 100% on every assignment I did. If extra credit was available, then I wanted that 110%. But my school’s GPA system made it to where 90 and 110% both were A’s. So I wasted a lot of time. Not to mention I could have easily accepted more 80’s in my grades and it wouldn’t have affected how anyone perceived my transcripts.

Consider ranking your project on a scale of 1 to 10. At what point are you delivering enough quality to satisfy? You can overdeliver a little bit, but have a limit. Once you hit that number, it’s okay to walk away from the project and start on something new. Abundance is quantity, so if you have enough quality, you should let the rest of your life bloom.

Get Your Reps In

Your final card is about the promise of integrating your shadow. This card is the Princess of Pentacles: the Princess of Echoing Hills. The moment you shift from needing to be a perfectionist is the moment you’ll be able to start many new projects and increase your abundance.

I think your anxiety over perfectionism has led to two possible outcomes for those who picked this pile. Some will overanalyze a project they’re on and keep working on it until it’s perfect. Others won’t even get started out of fear they can’t do the work perfectly.

But that analysis paralysis will fade when you integrate your shadow and the particular way you do that is start more things and get your reps in. Want to write 1,000 words per day? Try writing a short story based on a single word prompt that’s a single page.

It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be complete. It can just be a scene or idea. But the point is that it’s sort of low effort and low expectation of quality. There’s no emotional attachment to outcome.

This example would be to get into the practice of writing consistently, so in this case, that person would eventually get to the point where writing four one-page stories leads them to find writing a 1,000 words per day trivial.

So ask yourself: what easy reps can you get in right now to get you used to finishing what you start? Take some time to think about it in the area of manifestation you hope to master.

And mastery is done, not perfection.

Did this reading resonate with you? Let me know by leaving a 🍄 emoji or saying “mushroom” in the comments. You can also leave a tip on Ko-fi to help support future readings or book a private tarot reading with me on Etsy.

Pile 2: Silhouette

A Focus on Ease

It appears as if you think you need to be very comfortable to manifest a good life. And that certainly makes things easier. However, your desire for comfort, which can manifest as laziness, leadsyou to struggle to make things happen in your life.

But let’s figure out how to integrate your desire for comfort into an amazing future for yourself. The first card, Two of Pentacles: Lord of Harmonious Change, is reversed. This is a sign that when too much happens in your life, you get overwhelmed and protect yourself.

Valid. But the problem with this tendency is you retreat into your personal comfort zone instead of doing the work you need to do to make the future better. This is sacrificing tomorrow for today. You may not believe your future can get better, so you hold onto whatever comforts you have.

The next card, Six of Cups: Lord of Pleasure, is also reversed. You’re not optimistic or you lose your optimism when friction appears. You may ruminate or dream of reworking your past. For example, it’s a common fantasy for people to daydream going back in time in their own bodies and redoing their lives to have a better outcome. That’s the energy here.

You don’t want to create a future, you want to preserve your present comfort to the best of your ability.

But this doesn’t help build the future you want. It just helps you to prevent your situation from getting worse.

You Can Be Ambitious and Go Easy on Yourself

Your spread doesn’t go into details about the source of your troubles. You likely have very logical reasons to be so protective and maybe you haven’t had a lot of opportunities to improve your situation.

However, the final card in your spread, The Magician: The Magus of Power, is the best indicator that you have the tools and resources at your disposal to improve your future now. It may not seem like that at first, and you may not be able to perfect your future before tomorrow, but you can start to take steps to improve your life.

But how you integrate your shadow of “laziness” is to make future goals on how you can be even more comfortable than you are now. Imagine a person who had a terrible history with romantic partners. They’ve chosen to be single for years to avoid ending up in an abusive situation.

However, they’re now ready to move on from that comfort and find a future where they can be in a romantic relationship they desire which is actually healthy. The steps they may need to take could be seeing a therapist, hiring a dating coach (not the weird red pill or vindicta kind, but one based in healthy relationships), or studying how to find a good partner.

Every step of the way they need to do it in a manner that respects their desire for comfort. This person would not be happy taking the risk of meeting some random person online and then hooking up with them. They might prefer meeting a friend of a friend who’s been vetted or perhaps take things very slow on the dating front.

Identify the future comfort goal you want and then pick steps to get there which aren’t risks, but safe bets. It may take longer, but it’ll be comfortable and that will help you manifest it when you would otherwise languish in your current life circumstances.

Did this reading resonate with you? Let me know by leaving a 🖤 emoji or saying “black heart” in the comments. You can also leave a tip on Ko-fi to help support future readings or book a private tarot reading with me on Etsy.

Pile 3: Roses

Make Choices

You have an intimate connection to the universe given the Universe: The Great One of the Night of Time card. This close relationship means you have spiritual powers or perspectives that can make you stand out. Sometimes this manifests as not being neurotypical, having a “disability,” or feeling different if you haven’t tapped into that ability in a distinct way.

The reason why this is your shadow is that you’re hiding your ability, perhaps even from yourself. Even if you use your abilities, you try to rationalize or explain it instead of accepting it for what it is: a gift.

I see this sometimes with empathetic teenagers. Their friends will trauma-dump on them and use them as a crutch. This often leads these teenagers to feel overwhelmed and isolate themselves from social contact to some degree as adults.

The truth is, you don’t have to use your gift at all times in all places. You can be precise and controlled, but that requires integrating your shadow and making it intentional instead of unconscious. You should be choosing when you use your gift.

Close the Loop

The second card in your spread. The High Priestess: The Priestess of the Silver Star, is all about your innate intuition. But in this case, I’m drawn to the two pillars which represent light and darkness, male and female, and other polar binaries.

You should exist not in a space where you never use your gifts or always use your gifts, but in a liminal state of being where you can sense how that gift can be used, but choose to step into the world where every manifestation of that gift ceases if you need a break.

Everyone who chose this pile may have a different gift, but let me use a common example that will apply to most of you: empathy and psychic intuition.

Try going to a crowded environment or watching a live feed of a crowded environment and write down your observations of your gift as they come to you. Then after warming up, practice turning off or accepting that your manifestation of the gift can move on.

There’s actually psychology here called the Zeigarnik Effect. Our brains feel tension for anything that’s “unfinished.” When you use your gift, but you can’t solve the problem you sense in another person (like anyone we casually meet takes our advice!), you agonize over it.

Practicing your gift in that crowded environment lets you practice letting go and easing the cognitive desire for closure.

Another example: you sense a spirit in the house. You aren’t sure what it is. Many people feel unease until they cleanse the house or do a ritual to learn about the spirit, integrate it into their practice, or make them go away. This is the spiritual manifestation of the Zeigarnik effect. No doubt it’s what causes haunted houses to feel so bad even if the spirit itself isn’t evil.

Let Your Gifts Shine

Your final card is the Five of Wands: Lord of Strife, Reversed. This is a sign from the universe that your gift is not meant to torment you, even though it can feel that way sometimes. If it’s causing you anxiety or any other negative feelings, it means you aren’t able to use it intentionally and with control.

But should you integrate your shadow, your gift, you’ll find it a benefit to your life and never a burden. It’s a tool, not a curse. You can choose to use your tool or put it away in the toolbox.

Did this reading resonate with you? Let me know by leaving a 🌹 emoji or saying “rose” in the comments. You can also leave a tip on Ko-fi to help support future readings or book a private tarot reading with me on Etsy.