Workshop: Intuitive Thinking through Tarot Interpretation
About the Workshop
The intuition plays a role in cognition similar to what the instincts play for the body: it provides a mode of pre-understanding environments and allows humans to anticipate potential outcomes of actions. Like logical and creative forms of thinking, intuitive thinking is a skill that can be practiced and developed as part of a self-aware mode of living well.
Put otherwise, the workshop will provide you with an ability to do more than simply say “I have a bad feeling about this” when confronting a potentially perilous situation.
This workshop series shows how tarot cards provide one avenue for developing intuitive thinking skills. Putting aside the possibility of using the cards as a source of spiritual guidance, this workshop offers a philosophical, historical, and practical inquiry into the possibilities of tarot cards to become a more agile, proactive thinker.
The workshop is broken into four, two-hour components, and will meet on alternating Monday evenings in June and July from 7-9pm at Over the Moon Studio in downtown Iowa City. Cost per component is $30, with a $20 total discount for those registering for all four sessions.
Session 1 | 03 June: Introduction to Intuitive Thinking
This session looks into the nature of intuitive thinking, defining its differences from and similarities to other forms of thinking. It also explores the history of the tarot and the symbology of the Major Arcana relative to traditional religious and philosophical entry points for the intuition.
Session 2 | 17 June: How to Ask Questions
The session begins with a discussion of how tools tend to frame and limit the sorts of questions that we ask, and how becoming familiar with these limitations can allow for a more robust and expansive form of questioning. This emphasis on tools will be concretely complemented by a discussion of the tarot deck, focusing on how numerology and the individual suits are grounded in a well-rounded understanding of human capabilities.
Session 3 | 01 July: Developing Your Questions
This session looks at how to respond to the frustration of receiving somewhat enigmatic answers by refining and adapting questions. It also will look at how the tarot’s systems of symbols provide a kind of guidance in terms of potential questions that one might fruitfully ask. This session will also include a demo tarot reading in order to provide a concrete example of the tarot’s particular relationship to intuitive thinking.
Session 4 | 15 July: Expanding Your Answers
This session concludes the workshop series. It starts by looking at the tarot and considering the kinds of readings that require multiple readings that clarify a particularly ambiguous card. It also includes ways that an “answer” might include multiple, contradicting possibilities. The workshop series ends with a conversation about how the skills that are developed by reading tarot become important in intuiting and interpreting coincidences, synchronicities, and the symbols present in everyday life.
About the Presenters
Daniel Boscaljon
is a humanities scholar with a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (focused on secularism) and one in English (focused on 19th-century American Literature). He is the author of Vigilant Faith and has authored and edited many other books and articles. His emphasis as a teacher has been on developing modes of humanist thinking that tend toward the uncertain, including faith, hope, love, horror, and humor. His recent project, and more information about him, can be found at danielboscaljon.com.
Dawn Frary
is a photographer, death doula, wildlife educator, and tarot practitioner. She has spent her life exploring and acclimating to the limits of human experience–serving as a guide through the liminal spaces people tend to visit, perhaps briefly, before returning to the everyday world. Dawn believes anyone can tap into the symbolism and archetypal energies of the tarot to enhance their understanding of the world while remaining firmly rooted in reality. Visit her at dawnfrary.com & auroramortuorum.com.