Carl Jung, famous psychologist and ultimate bad-ass, believed that we all share a collective unconscious and that Tarot, among other systems of divination, presents a way to tap into those collective archetypal memories/experiences/and knowledge.

 8 of Cups by artist Michael Goepferd

     So, buried down deep in the beautiful swamp that is the collective unconscious lives the energy of the 8 of Cups. The most well-known and widely-used image for this card comes from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, and depicts a man walking into the distance, leaving behind 8 golden cups. His back is bent forward in silence and it is this energy, a remorseful energy, which carries him forward away from what he already misses: a person, situation, or life purpose that no longer serves him.

    Whoever you are, wherever you are in your journey, you have had at some point (or many) an 8 of Cups experience. This is the child watching her mother disappear as the school bus pulls away for the first time. It is the experience of closing a door for what you know is the final time, and then walking away. It doesn’t feel good, but you do it. What we are leaving was probably good for us at the time, but has served its purpose for our lives and is no longer good for us at this time in our lives, so we find ourselves moving forward toward what is now supporting our best interests.  Someday we may find that it is time to return, but when we do so we will be doing so with greater self-knowledge and the experience necessary to return in a healthy way.

Although the traveler in the tarot card I described does not look back, that too, the hesitancy we may feel in making our separation from what has been, is what makes this energy so difficult to experience. Whether physically or emotionally, we often do look back. As Lot's wife does in her biblical journey from Sodom, we put ourselves at risk of metaphorically turning to salt (crystallizing during a time of necessary forward-movement) by resisting that very movement. And some of us do turn to salt. But most of us, through our intuitive understanding that what lies ahead is best, are able to overcome our stagnation in order to both grow and heal.

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