The first and maybe greatest book is Mary K. Greer's revolutionary "Tarot for Your Self". It's a workbook and filled with ideas on how to use the cards, how to get to know them intimately and to connect them with your life. If you work through this book, your tarot competency level will have risen, no matter whether you want to use tarot for self reflective work or reading for others or both. It's a wonderful book and it will make you want every book Mary ever wrote. Which is a good idea in any case.
Christine Jette's "Tarot Shadow Work" has probably been the most useful for me at a later stage of my tarot development. Jette starts with explanations of the Jungian concept of the shadow, but the wonderful thing about this book is that it's a workbook. Before you start the shadow work, you learn protective practices - building a shadow altar, grounding and centering, casting a circle of protection... I found this very reassuring.
Meditation, a meeting with the triple goddess and journaling are practices that lead you closer to your shadow. Then, the tarot work begins. The spreads Jette introduces are based on the shape of the Star - as symbol of hope.
The first star spread is the Star of Discovery - you meet your shadow. Now you have to deal with it. Not so easy!
Later, you have the Star of Recovery and ideas that remind me of psychodrama - role plays and games that help you get a grip on the shadow, without shying back, without fear. You really learn to interact with your shadow. (Don't think I've done all these exercises! I'm a total coward and my shadow the most slippery thing in the world - it really doesn't want to be caught and confronted! It gets away and whispiers: I will embarrass you - you don't need that - leave me alone and I'll leave you alone....)
Now the great thing is that with the third star, the Star of Illumination, you find access to the energy of the shadow and make it work for your own good.
Anger, pain, sadness, childhood wounds - they're all addressed.
I read the book more than once and it really calls me to do the exercises - the first one was too painful so I stopped there but as I said, I'm a coward. But already the first exercise also brought with it a whole lot of clarity and power.
This is for me the most powerful book in the personal growth part of my bookshelf.
Much easier to read are the following two books - because they're no workbooks, they're teaching books, and the cognitive path is always easier to take than the gut path
An interesting dissertation by Gigi Hofer, available as pdf on the Internet, is called "Tarot Cards as a Tool for Self Reflection". This is one thing we want to do, but Hofer's text is written from a therapists' point of view, not for "self help". It's footnote-heavy and tries to keep an academic distance to the tarot but the theoretical insights about its usefulness for therapeutic work are no news for a tarot crowd
I'm no therapist but found the book quite interesting. It validates what I knew before: that the tarot is a great tool when you're stuck, can't decide, want to have a new perspective on something or are not sure how you feel about something. The writing is pretty defensive, though, because this is a dissertation and she has to prove that her findings are somehow relevant to her academic peers.
Much more self confident is Arthur Rosengarten's "Tarot and Psychology". Rosengarten has the ambitious goal of shaking off the "gypsy garb and occultic forays" in order to "bring Tarot the larger recognition and applicatin that it needs and it richly deserves" (in the chapter A Tool for Self Exploration - I have the Kindle version so no page numbers). The author is a Jungian, and I find his chapter on oppositon especially interesting. It reminded me of Johannes Itten's theory of colours which is scientifically obsolete by now but still taught at schools because it gives us such a rich vocabulary to talk about colours, and such an easy way to analyze colours in relation to each other. Rosengarten does the same for tarot cards and their "structural, numerological, dimensional and directional levels of meaning" (in the chapter Principles of Opposition).
His book is interesting although I find his "Tarot lexicon" at the end too restrictive - I prefer a more dynamic view of card meanings, especially reversals.
Both Hofer's and Rosengarten's books are good reading if you're interested in tarot and psychology. But both are more theoretical treatise than workbook. They belong to the topic Tarot for Personal Growth, but are probably not the first books you should grab if you want to go on your own journey of self discovery. Well, they're useful if the topic interests you but you're not in the mood to hunt down your own shadow.
One book I search for is Nina Lee Braden's Tarot for Self Discovery. Unfortunately, it's out of print and not available for the Kindle. If you want to do me a favour, go there and tell the Amazonian people that we want this book as Kindle edition
Don't we all? I didn't read her book but I read every word she ever wrote on her beautiful website Moonstruck, and I participated in her mailing list and did many of her exercises.
I know that she believed in making up our own exercises, and I will try to do so. Nina Lee's ideas have really shaped my own about the tarot. She builds on Mary Greer's Tarot for Yourself - and nowadays the pendulum has moved so far into the "tarot as tool for self reflection and not fortunetelling", that we're attracted again to the joys of good old fortunetelling! I'm sure the Lenormand boom and the interest in TdM also come from this feeling that we've overdone the self discovery thing.
But doing the one doesn't mean not doing the other.
So I'll continue here in this section of the forums and will from time to time post exercises inspired by Nina Lee Braden. And if you see her book anywhere please tell me so! I'd love to have it.
