The Everyday Happiness Tarot Spread

The final installment in our Top Five Regrets of the Dying Tarot Spreads series, we have are looking at how to avoid the regret ‘I wish I had let myself be happier.’ One of life’s greatest ironies is that it is often not until we are told that we only have a few thousand breaths left that we realise the simple truth that we have been exactly as happy as we made our own minds up to be.

But simple doesn’t mean easy. Most of us grow up with wounds that turn into big ugly scars and we haven’t the first clue about how to actively heal the wounds… Instead we allow those scars to form over time, making our approach to life increasingly rigid and full of mistrust…

To illustrate this, I’d like to share what happened when I was doing dreamwork with the runes. Every night before going to sleep, I would invoke a dream for each of the Futhark runes in turn, staring with Fehu. I had no problem with this relatively simple exercise and would remember on average three dreams every night until I came to the Wunjo (happiness) rune.

Nothing. Not a single dream for the first two nights… and then, on the third night, I have a dream of walking in beautiful emerald-green grass… I’m looking down, treading carefully as if I’m expecting trouble… and sure enough, a snake comes slithering toward me with great haste. I turn to walk away…

That was all I remembered when I first woke up. At first I struggled to make sense of the dream (possibly because I expected to dream of actual happiness), although the symbology is glaringly simple: I was allowing the snake in the grass to steal my happiness. The snake is symbolic of betrayal, deceit and mistrust… all the fruits of a mind shaped by abuse and abandonment in childhood.

Neither of my parents was mentally and emotionally stable. My eternally adolescent mother left when I was three. From then on I was in the care of my father who was a maths genius with Aspergers and possibly other mental health issues which were never diagnosed. All I knew as a child was that his eyes would occasionally turn black and then I would most likely get a beating. There was never a sense of just punishments of anything I had done wrong, just a perpetual fear that all hell could break loose at any time… I came to fear going to bed because I thought he might kill me in my sleep.

Growing up like this creates a mindset that catastrophises easily and it also creates someone who is extremely needy in love – someone completely incapable of generating happiness for herself… until she learns how to do just that. Like I said, the truth is simple but the work required is not easy.

Hopefully, the Tarot spread below will be an ally on the path to generating all the happiness you need every day for the rest of your life… However, please don’t see this as a replacement for therapy; don’t skip out on counselling or seeing a professional therapist if you struggle with trust issues because of abuse and/or early childhood abandonment. You owe it to future generations as well as yourself!

But before I share the Tarot spread, I want to share some common stumbling blocks on the path to happiness…

Comparison of your own happiness levels with others. Comparing leads to jealousy, not happiness. We simply cannot know what is going on inside them and judging by appearances never works so forget about it! But yeah, the human tendency to compare is how marketing gurus cash in by playing to our insecurities…
The idea that we have to chase happiness and achieve success/recognition before we can allow ourselves to be happy. Happiness is simply put about choosing to put ourselves in a happy frame of mind and if we struggle with this, the fastest way to turn things around is to make another person smile.

My top three tips for generating more happiness today are:

Develop trust. Trusting in the goodness of life and our fellow human beings helps us relax and a relaxed stance is what attracts more of the good stuff into our lives. This doesn’t mean we should be completely naïve or not have any boundaries in place; it just means that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge and should always give people the benefit of doubt.
Put yourself in a state of creative flow as often as possible. You know what makes you happy because it is the kind of activities that make space and time seemingly disappear. You could spend hours doing something you love and it will have felt like only minutes…
Spend more time with friends… for the simple reason that they give our lives meaning and we give meaning to theirs.