Maybe it comes from having seen this in the movies: Charlize Theron plays a 30-something young adult fiction writer mentally stuck in her teens in the film YA. We are shown a blank page. A black line blinking. Thinking. No words, yet.

As I sit here facing the same scenario I can feel all the people in the entire world who need to write something and just can't quite figure it out, yet. We are all staring at the blinking line on the empty digital page while our minds race through our past, present, and possible futures, digging desperately for something to say that interests you, who are reading this.

The answer comes from taking action. We hear and see very few stories of people who received their big lightning bolt of inspiration while staring at the screen. Yet we all know the stories of people who figured it out while taking a walk or a shower or doing something entirely irrelevant to the problem they are trying to solve.

I want to demonstrate how we can actively seek out the lightning bolt of inspiration with a deck of cards. Not just any deck, the Tarot! Before you roll your eyes or stop reading because spiritual stuff just simply isn't your thing, consider the following questions. Do you like an element of surprise? Do you enjoy games? Do you have problems and challenges in your life that you don't know how to solve? I think this article is for you no matter what your stance on spirituality is!

This famous and infamous deck of cards began as a game. Like all games of chance, it cannot be separated from divination. Here's an example: Perhaps you have a family member who would play a solitary game of cards every morning and depending on whether it was solved or not, it was going to be a good day or a bad day. That was my family member by the way. She died many years ago and I never met her, but her story survived past her lifetime. She would play a game of chance with her cards. The odds were stacked against her and most days, according to the cards, were not that great. There's no surviving information on how she let that affect her, only this story that illustrates how games of chance and our interpretation of fate walk hand in hand. Likely, this has always been so.

Even though the history of tarot is full of flights of fancy and the grand egos of dedicated occultists and those who dared to burden themselves with the histories and meanings of all things, there is truth between all the lines. For one, the Ancient Egyptian connection loses its absurdity when we research the history and origin of carnival. The carnival procession is said to be the inspiration for the trump cards in the Tarot. Some historians trace carnival and its processions back to the lands of Pharaohs and pyramids. If we think about it, it seems likely that a land such as Ancient Egypt would have had something of the like. These processions display characters and symbols for the sake of entertainment and striking awe and wonder into the hearts of all.

Perhaps the important question is not about where what comes from, especially not when we consider that each deck of cards is the result of its time and the narratives most alive at the moment of its making. The stories we tell have always emphasized eternal spiritual truths that can be traced through the eons of existence. It is the times that we live in that determine which ones sit in the front row close enough for us to make eye contact with as we act out our lives on the stage, and which ones fade into the darkness beyond the lights.

When we sit down with the Tarot for divination, asking the right question can be the key to getting a lightning bolt of inspiration. Who cares where or when the cards take their meaning from, or why the images depict one thing and not another? We all know that the facts of history are inevitably lost in the sands of time and the seas of our flawed human memories. Even when we find a grain of truth we can only ever look at it with our microscope lens that wears the filter of our perception, colored in by the age we were born into, our emotions and beliefs, the knowledge we have available to ourselves and a myriad of other factors.

Let us leave histories, herstories, and theirstories to the setting sun of a sandy beach and instead settle ourselves down into the drawing room with our deck of Tarot cards. The deck we chose has 22 archetypal characters that mark out the inevitable cycle of our lives. There are also 16 people cards, marking different age groups, levels of mastery, and ways of being in the world. Finally, our deck also includes 40 cards. They are numbered from Ace to ten, four times over. The people and the numbers are divided into four suits.

We set the scene with a grand shuffle and a little flair. Candles are lit, the room is dimmed, and it is evening. As we shuffle we ponder the challenge that we desperately need a lightning bolt of inspiration for. We know that the key is to pose an excellent question, and better the question marks a path towards what we do want. How will we feel when the challenge is overcome? We imagine this feeling until it saturates our senses and then ask the cards how we can get from where we are now, to overcoming the challenge in a way where we end up feeling as pleasant as in our imagination.

The shuffling stops. The deck is placed on the table before us. We cut the cards once or twice. Stack them back together. Then pull three cards. The answer is not always obvious. It is getting late anyway, so we go to bed, our mind pondering the cards in the following way: How do these three cards explain what must be done to overcome the challenge in a way that leaves us feeling wonderful?

The next morning we walk with our favorite hot morning beverage of choice in hand from our bedroom to the drawing room. Scratching an itchy spot in our body while sipping our drink we look at the cards. Of course! We experience Eureka! How come we never thought of this solution before? How surprising and yet obvious that exactly these cards landed on the table! Three cards form a clear course of action. We write it down and months later we are still flabbergasted while knowing it could be no other way. This game of chance helped us to wonderfully determine our fate.

How great it is to have the intellect that can figure out a great question.

How good it is to know when to stop thinking and sleep.

How wonderful it is to wait for that moment between sleep and fully awake where inspiration, intuition, and a game of cards answer all our big life questions.

If you want to learn how to play this game and play it well, if you want to learn how to ask all the right questions and avoid the wrong ones, if you seek to trust your intuitive and creative faculties with confidence, then you will love the Magic is the Key membership. Sign up for our MagicLetter below to receive a special 30% discount code. Then click HERE and join today!