Dining with the Archetype

Dining With the Archetypes

Using the Tarot to Work With Food Issues

Sandra A. Thomson

Last year on the advice of my doctor, and because of health issues, I began attending Weight Watchers™ meetings—favored by my doctor because she had lost 75 pounds on the program. Now this doctor is not the most sensitive of women, and I know she didn't have the experience I did, but part of what I learned from my own experience is that if a woman is the least bit sensitive to her inner life, after the first ten pounds of weight loss, her psyche begins to cry out dramatically, and weight loss must activate what Canadian tarotist James Wells calls "soulcentric" work. That is, developing our spiritual life, honoring our soul with each breath, and especially with each bite of food and how we think about food. It involves finding and honoring the sacred life in our bodies. It isn't about dieting at all, but the need often is prompted by the dieting experience.

Diet plans, diet books, diet cookbooks, and diet supplements are a major industry today. No longer is dieting just for women who want to look more fashionable. Obesity has become a major health problem. It now rivals smoking as the largest cause of premature death, contributing to some 400,000 deaths annually. While Americans are becoming more aware of the consequences of obesity, the causes of this epidemic are extremely complex, involving not only physiological, genetic or inherited factors, but social, economic, and familial ones as well.

I can't tell you how many Weight Watchers™ meetings I sat through grimly muttering through clenched teeth, "You're missing the point." Or, "In the long run, counting points isn't what it's all about." And other such mutterings.

In her book The Holy Longing, Jungian analyst Connie Zweig says the holy longing—which can manifest in overeating—is really an innate urge to transcend the ego, "to move up the ladder of [inner] evolution to reach ever greater levels of awareness toward unity with the One."^[1]

Soul work involves being in the present moment, having a fresh experience of food just as we can have fresh experiences of a sunset even though we have seen thousands of them. Addicts do not live in the here-and-now, says Jungian analyst Marion Woodman. We are always going to change in the future. We are never where we are; we are always running, or dreaming about the wonderful past or the wonderful future. We are seldom in our bodies; yet the body lives in the present. It exists right now. So the addict's body is essentially uninhabited. And, there, says, Woodman, is where the terrible sense of starvation comes from. To be in the now is to be full.

Eating spiritually also involves reverence for the plants and animals that nourish us, a sense of connectedness with all life, and gratitude to those whose labor provides our food. When we say grace, we often thank God for our food, but how often do we thank and honor the plants and animals we are eating, and all the people along the line who have prepared them? Since I have become aware of this notion, my grace has gotten a lot longer.

When we begin to seriously confront food or addictive issues as a gateway to finding ourselves, "primeval muck" begins to surface in our dreams, says Woodman.^[2] Through them injured, forsaken, or starving animals often attempt to get our attention. My journey really started with a dream where I went into the house of my childhood piano teacher. She said we could not play the piano because she had just returned from a trip and needed to do the laundry (wash away the shadow). We went to the basement (the unconscious), and a door opened and my starving cat Tuna emerged where she had been held captive by prankster boys.

When I considered this dream while awake, I knew right away that Tuna represented my "instinctual feminine," and understood that the dream was saying that my instinctual feminine was starving.

Since I believe that the Tarot is an excellent way to promote soulcentric work with our unconscious muck, I began to connect the Tarot cards with food issues. Tarot expert Robert O'Neil believes that the crustacean that is emerging from the pond on the Moon card, is emerging from just such primeval muck as Woodman describes. Waite himself called it cosmic chaos—the stirring up of unconscious material, of course.

Woodman believes that the essential problem in eating disorders—and obesity is an eating disorder—is an identity issue. Who am I? What is my reality? These are the same questions that a good Tarot reading attempts to answer if it goes beyond the "Will-Mikey-marry-me" type of question. So, more and more I came to understand that Tarot work and food work can be intimately connected.

People who are addicted to food—whether in overeating (my own addiction) or bulimic or anorexic problems--are in fact, starving for an inner life, says Woodman. We have a terrible emptiness inside, often because we had parents who failed in many ways to honor our authenticity and tried instead to create children who matched their idealized version of what their child should be. As a result we have a "gnawing hunger, incessant yearning" to know who we are and what is our reality.^[3] Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, thinks that the meditation practice of women is to call back those "dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves."^[4]

One of our tasks in eating disorders, according to Woodman, is to develop our spiritual life by working with our opposites through different levels of consciousness. This is shadow work. If we reject our human or animal or baser aspects, we transform them into unowned aspects of ourselves which is then projected onto others, requiring them to carry our darkness instead of making its acquaintance ourselves.

Goodness knows, any one of my Tarot students will testify to how very many cards I define as calling for a recognition and resolution of some aspect of the tension of the opposites. The messages of Tarot cards can guide us toward confronting and integrating the split between spirit and matter as reflected in polarities such as passive/active, discipline/freedom, and civilized/animal. In one of her private classes, Mary K. Greer, the doyen of West Coast Tarot, once referred to the Moon card as a "dream landscape" formed by our emotions, especially those expressing our fear that we will be unable to resolve our own dichotomies, our unclaimed aspects of ourselves.

When a woman consciously chooses to meet and listen to those parts of herself, she will "not be bombarded with demands for attention" in the form of "food obsessions, secret binges, and diets gone out of control," says psychologist Anita Johnston.^[5]

In fairy tales, friendly animals often carry the hero or heroine to the goal because the animal "is the instinct that knows how to obey the Goddess when reason fails," says Woodman.^[6] This is the animal in the Tarot Fool card. If we listen to our dreams, says Woodman, they "urge us to cross bridges, leap over dangerous chasms, [and] out of the world as we have known it."^[7] Tarotists call this The Fool's Journey. It is the food addict's journey, as well.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck, the Fool stands near an abyss, or precipice, below which a river runs. The scene simultaneously symbolizes the depths to which we are going to have to go in our journey to understand our food issues, the trip into our unconscious material, and the "false hunger" that "waits on a single false step."^[8] The RWS Fool faces left (symbolizing the past), which shows us that we are going to have to dig into our past to understand how our present relationship with food developed.

After experimentation, I now suspect that the perfect Tarot deck for working with food issues is the colorful World Spirit Tarot. In the Fool card of this deck, a chubby lady dances precariously close to the edge of a roof, typifying the danger and the excitement of beginning a new journey into discovering the depths of our relationship with food.

She cavorts with the birds, which carry offerings of flowers (a time of blossoming). Does she dream of flying, or does she merely wish to be nearer Spirit? Lucia Capodilupo believes, for instance, that overweight people are unhappy and alienated from the earth because they really seek to escape from the physical world, and to experience that of the Divine.^[9]

The Fool card urges us—challenges us—to leap out of the world as we know it, take a chance, grow up, learn what is missing from our inner core, and fulfill ourselves with something other than food. It is this challenge and its resulting conflicts or tensions that will stretch us so that we may come into our own body, says Woodman.^[10] While the Fool can be a trickster in leading us to the dangerous abyss of over-eating, she also encourages us to adopt a new, transformative way of regarding our food issues and ourselves. No longer will we despair—or even rejoice—when we step on the scales (there is no set of bathroom scales on any tarot card anywhere!). Rather, we are going to get reacquainted with ourselves, and our work involves changing the way we think about ourselves, which ultimately will indeed change our relationship with food.

Imagine a table filled with 78 wisdom figures, all of whom will offer stimulating conversation for "dining." We'll call it The Fool's Buffet; we are too busy talking and listening to overeat.

In order to pursue my work with using the tarot to explore food issues, I have formed an e-list exploratory and support group I call Dining with Archetypes. Already we have become a warm, caring group of women (no man has yet joined) exploring our issues with food through the Tarot, and otherwise. If you are interested in using The World Spirit Tarot cards in exploring your own food issues, I invite you to join us at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/diningwitharchetypes.

Sandra A. Thomson is a California-licensed psychologist (inactive) and marriage, family, and child counselor (inactive). She is the co-author of The Lovers’ Tarot, Spiritual Tarot, and The Heart of the Tarot. She is also the author of Cloud Nine: A Dreamer’s Dictionary and Pictures from the Heart, a tarot dictionary. She is president of the American Tarot Association, and secretary of Phoenix Rising Tarot, Inc., a non-profit organization. She can be reached at robt_sandra@earthlink.net.

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