Hello and welcome to My Tiny Tarot Practice.

My name's Amelia Hruby and on this show I share my journey exploring the tarot

card by card, starting with each suit of the Minor Arcana.

Today's episode is about the Nine of Swords.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith edition of the tarot, So this card depicts a person

sitting on a bed and they're sitting up clutching their head.

And there is a quilt over their legs covered in roses and what look to be constellations

or even zodiac signs and symbols in blue.

And above them hang nine swords horizontally mounted to the wall behind them.

This card is very visually evocative

for me it immediately evokes the

feeling of a migraine that is when i am in

bed clutching my head covered in a

quilt feeling like there are swords hanging all around me for rachel pollock

in 78 degrees of wisdom this card is a card of agony for jessa crispin in the

creative tarot it's the card of and i'm quoting here being awake wake again at four in the morning,

replaying all the ways you are a failure and will always be a failure. It's that card.

I really appreciate Jessica Dorr's interpretation in Tarot for Change,

where she describes this person as so fused with the swords that they can't see anything else.

It's not that we see the swords piercing the person here, we will see that in

the Ten of Swords, but I think there is this sense of the pain,

that fusion, that piercing of the way that our thoughts can become inescapable.

Often that is a feeling of anxiety, as Jessica Crispin mentions.

For me, it evokes the physical pain of a migraine.

I think with this card, we're invited to consider where something may be really nearing the end.

That moment when the pain reaches its worst point right before it clears.

And I think we're also invited to consider whether our thoughts,

our way of thinking about the pain,

our way of conceiving of it, of intellectualizing it, might be a part of the

problem or the pain itself.

I think the nine of swords is an invitation invitation into a different relationship

with pain or challenge or sorrow or agony.

And maybe in this card, we don't see what that relationship could be yet,

but I do think there's a sort of promise of, it can't get much worse than this.

There's almost a light at the end of this tunnel.

And that said, I wouldn't take this card as an opportunity to bypass pain.

I think that it is situating us right in that moment when we can't escape it, we can't bypass it.

Perhaps all we want to do is escape or bypass that pain, but the nine of swords

is reminding us that we have to be with it. We have to surrender.

We may not have any other choice.

But also, yet again, following this spiral of the card and what it means and

doesn't mean and means and doesn't mean,

I'm reminded that pain is a necessary counterpoint to joy in our lives,

lives, whether it be the pain of grief, the pain of loss,

the pain of heartbreak, the pain of injury,

the pain of deceit, betrayal.

There are so many pains we can experience, and it is through the surrender to

the pain that I think we find greater and greater heights of joy,

or at least open the possibility of those heights in our lives.

So again we can't skip it we can't

bypass it the nine of swords is not letting

us take the easy way out or the hard way out or any way out of this moment but

within that we can always find our counterpoints our silver linings our oppositions

that we are reaching toward and sublimating.

Thank you for listening to this episode of My Tiny Tarot Practice.

If you'd like to explore any of the books that I referenced here,

you can head to the link in the show notes where you'll find my bookshop that

has an especially curated list of tarot decks and books.

If you make a purchase through that link, you will get a wonderful tarot resource

and I will receive a small affiliate payment that helps me keep this podcast going.

If you've arrived at this episode because you are feeling the depths of the

challenges of this card, please know that my heart goes out to you in this Nine of Swords moment.

I hope that you are able to surrender, to rest, and eventually to be well.