Doing a reading for a client this week, I was reminded of the power that is held in the suit of swords. Of all the suits, pentacles (earth), cups (water), wands (fire), the swords are the suit that holds, for me at least, the most intrigue and mystery. At its most basic, swords represent the element of air, the element of the mind. You can view the blade of the sword as the sharpness of mind and mental acuity (as in the Ace), putting thought into action (as the Knight), or grounding the philosophies of the mind into the real world (King).
But those of you who work with the tarot know that there is another side to the swords, the side of mental anguish (think Nine of Swords), feelings of betrayal from others (Three of Swords), and the sticky trap of indecision that has the capacity to bring our worlds to a halt (Two of Swords). Truly, the Swords are a suit that reflects our shadow, those parts of us that have not yet fully come into consciousness and are keeping us in our wounded reactivity.
There is a Buddhist teaching called the Second Arrow.
A real life external problem has occurred and has wounded us - that is the first arrow. It comes from the outside in, and generally is outside of our control. It penetrates deeply into our bodies, our hearts and minds, piercing down to the core of our wounded selves.
The second arrow, however, is the arrow we shoot ourselves with. This arrow, signifying shame and self-loathing, tells us a story about how we deserved the first arrow, or that if we had just done things differently we could have prevented that first arrow from piercing us, though that prevention may have been an impossibility. The second arrow deepens the wound, and often, prevents it from truly healing.
For example, let's imagine that you are in the process of dating. You have done your best to vet the person you are about to meet, but it is not until months into dating that you realize that this person has been lying to you and cheating. The first wound is the betrayal from someone that you have come to trust by them engaging in actions that you did not have control over. The second wound is the story your mind creates around this event - maybe you think to yourself ‘You should have done more research, looked through their phone,’ or perhaps the story is something along the lines of ‘this always happens to me or this will always happen to me because I attract this' or most tragically, 'this happens to me because this is what I deserve; who would love me?’
We can see here how debilitating the second arrow is. How it cuts deeper, actually, than the first arrow ever could.
The suit of Swords reflects this second arrow. It is the suit of story, the suit of shame, the suit of how our minds grab a hold of our lives and keeps us back from living into our full potential.The Eight of Swords, to my mind, best reflects this. In the Raider-Waite-Smith deck, a young woman is bound by the shackles of her story, her arms tied tight behind her, her eyes blindfolded. She has the truth before her - eight swords of truth - but she is trapped in her story, trapped in her ego and shame so she cannot see the truth that is plainly in front of her (Tara Brach calls this the “trance of unworthiness”).
When we do a reading that is full of Swords, or if you draw swords quite regularly, I want you to reflect on exactly how your mind is holding you captive. You can start by examining your life via the double arrow analogy.
What is something that has happened to you recently?
What is the story you are telling yourself about that event?
And as always, with mindfulness work, we ask ourselves: is it possible that this story about this event isn’t true? Is it possible that my mind filled in this story to make sense of things, and if it is possible, is there another possible story that we are not aware of yet?