I'm Bringing Tarot Cards to My Next Mediation

Big thoughts, quick talk, flip facts, tiktok, level up your mind, every single line. Welcome to another spectacular spontaneous adventure in the podcast Land, Land's Rhyme Glock on I'm the host of Anatomy of Complex and this is something special and indeed spectacular and indeed spontaneous, a reflection podcast where I look back over the last three episodes and try and consolidate consent myself on what I've learned, what I'm learning, what I still need to double back and relisten to. I think without these consolidation moments, at least for me, there's just too much noise happening in my head, too much information, too much intake, too much, everything is too much.

And so without an opportunity to step back and reflect and consolidate and distill from memory unscripted, I get lost in the weeds. And this is as a practitioner, as a person, as a dad, as all the things. So if you are a practitioner or anyone who's trying to improve their conflict resolution skill set, which should be everybody, right, then this episode for you, if you've listened to the first three episodes, if not, maybe this is a clip notes version for you, maybe this is some sort of highlights is a real where we take the best and the best and the best from everybody. Or maybe this is just sort of psychological projection where you can really look at me and say, hey, what have I gotten?

So by way of recap, and again, this is all from memory. I am voice messaging right now, recording a voice message as I drive to my Monday night adult dance class. And so this thing is going to be capped at about 15 minutes, which is the time it takes to drive to the dance class.

Okay. And again, this is a bonafide attempt for me to see what I remember and what has stuck because you do these podcasts and it's all about, it's all about how are you applying what you learn, right? If you listen to podcasts and listen to podcasts and read folks and that's all of well and beautiful and wonderful, but unless you do something about it, change something.

So like the question is like, what have I changed? Really? I mean, the question of what have I learned is less important than what have I changed? What have I done differently? So let's go there. Let's go there first and foremost. Let's just, just to make this podcast episode even shorter, let's just ignore the question of what I've learned and only look at what I've changed about my, and this is a professional setting, meaning like, I'm specifically scrutinizing my, I want to say, play, even though Sam Arterie has cautioned me against the Sam Arterie mediator with 5,000 at-bats.

Sam, but he's cautioned me against using the word the noun play to describe my professional calling and practice of mediation because it downplays it. And so even when I say at-bats, sort of subconsciously, so I leave that to the therapist in the room. Why do I use the terminology of play and game vernacular versus calling profession, etc, etc. I don't know. You tell me. Regardless. One thing, I have a tarot card deck, it's actually not a tarot card deck. It is a Oracle deck. I didn't, someone introduced it to me, a fellow dancer introduced it to me, introduced me to it in the fall, this past fall, fall 2025. And oh yeah, guys, I wanted to just interrupt this episode.

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So Oracle cards, I googled or actually went to Amazon and typed in Oracle Deck Dirt. And the first result that comes up is this Oracle Deck that sort of is Earth themed. And I've done a podcast episode for the podcast Untying the Not with Julie Tibo, Julie Tibo. And Doug Richards, Douglass Richards, Douglass Richards, Doug Doug is a mediator and owner of this whole mediation in Edinburgh, Scotland, Julie Tibo is a divorce attorney from suburbs of Harris, France.

We did a podcast episode and after that conversation, we had a group chat and Doug mentioned that he was working on a tarot deck to help him as a practitioner kind of identify personalities that he observed or is observing in the mediation space to better help him sort of understand them and understand them through the lens of an archetype.

So he has, I forget the archetypes, but one of them is like, I'm completely making this up, but like the rule follower or the scorekeeper or the rebel or the clown, just ways of understanding people, ways of framing them, ways to just, you know, you want to be careful with types and typing because all of us have all of them. And you also don't want to fall into a trap of judging people and assigning values to people.

But to the extent that it helps, the mediator sort of play with story in a fluid way, I think that's really useful. Does that make sense for my being opaque? So let's, so let me get to the point of the story. I'm going to order, so it's not quite an action, but it is in my Amazon cart. I just have to ask it to order it for me because he has the Amazon Prime membership. I'm going to order an Oracle deck, which having maybe four to five very, very meaningful tarot slash Oracle slash rune reads in my life. I'm really excited. This is probably, this is a long time overdue for a first deck. It's 20 bucks, which I even, I've just select 20 bucks, but I think the time was right.

The conversation with Doug during that conversation, I really promised them that I would do this. And I promised them as a way of promising myself. And I think it is a useful tool, the way I'm going to use it isn't for me. It is for the participants in a mediation to say totally optional. Would you both be interested in, and both of you have to be interested in both parties need to say yes. If one party says no, then it's a no go. Would you be interested in pulling a card or two cards? I think quite no like how the whole pulling of cards, I'll figure that out. Like whether it's one, two, three, or how you do the whole spread thing, but I'll figure that out.

The point is at an impasse or even at the beginning, I think it is a useful. OK, and here's what the research says. When there's a conflict, OK. By definition, there's tension between two points. Imagine two points on the line, right? That's what there's a polarity, a difference, a distinction. And that distinction creates attention, OK? And they tend to, those are opposing forces, if you will. They tend to see each other as such. They tend to see each other as adversaries versus a versus b, rather than a collaborating with b, a building with b, a in conjunction with b. And that's, I think, natural, wired.

Um, the research suggests in multiple ways that if you can be a magician, you can change the outcome by introducing some magic. And the magic is a third thing, a thing to get between them. Maybe a thing to distract them like magic, just but anything to deflect, mediate between two of them.

So I think this is where the word mediation gets its meetings, right? Like the effect of a third party here, a lot of the times why the third party is effective is because it's a third party, right? Like it's per se helpful. There's something about not dealing with the person directly who we're in conflict with. That is helpful. It gives us our brains. It tells our brains there's something new here happening.

And so we have to exit our default mode, operational thinking. We have to exit our condition, habitual responses to the person for the conflict which we've developed and which quite frankly are neuro protective, right? Like we're in fight or flight mode, even if we're super calm and controlled, we're in I am protecting myself. I have a story or narrative driven creatures. I'm not going to change like that isn't what we're saying explicitly. It might even not be on our lean, but I think it's the way we're generally wired. Our brains are looking for patterns we like to make predictive stories just like LLMs. And a third party introduces something new where we kind of have to like adjust our formula a bit.

And that makes us a teeny weeny bit less certain. This is one mechanism. So anyway, I can go on and on and on and on about the mechanism, but the point is that tarot cards are a nice way to do this. What does the tarot card party A, let's say Gary, Gary and Will, Gary what does the what do you notice in the in the card? I think the question here is really important, not how do you feel about the card, Gary? Gary, you pulled the sunrise card. How does that feel for you?

But I think we can even level up our questions and I did a whole post on this like how do you say? How do you say? How do you feel? How do you feel about that? How do you all pal? Right? Like what do you notice, Gary? What stands out to you? Gary, when you look at that card, what's the first thing you see? Gary, go to a point in your body. What do you feel? Gary stand up and what's the first motion you'd like to do with respect to that card? What's the first word that comes to mind?

These are great ways of accessing Gary and having Gary access and people and there's the research is, you know, this is just a third thing, just like the mediator, just like the research says, a plate of chocolate chip cookies is a third thing that helps people, it takes the, it's like a buffer, a pillow, it absorbs, it's absorbing some of the heat, some of the, you know, you imagine two people like, like, when they used to charge horses at each other in the medieval days, right, they're going to charge each other. This is a way of pillow between them, right, like now you have to go, now there's a third party and just take some of the attention and absorb some of the energy.

More than anything, I think, I'm really interested in the tarot cards as a way to help people and part of like one of the biggest indicators of success in therapy is the relationship between the therapist and the client. That is the rapport, the sense that the therapist actually cares, number one, and number two is, it's not, it's not tactical skills, right, it's not what shit they cite, it's, do we have rapport, do we connect, and what drives that is, do I have a sense that they give a shit, right, and part of, part of how we sense that they give a shit is they can't be pretending, they can't be distracted, they have to give you what Simone Vé says is the most, sort of, the highest gift is one's utmost attention, and so I think that's a wrap.

I think that's a couple of thoughts for you guys to digest on, that's why we're doing tarot. I don't know how many, what kind of recap that is, but that's my recap, that's my 15-minute pre-dance. I've done really intense episodes, I'd suggest listening to my favorite, I think the nice buffer between Sam Arterie and Sam Arterie was amazing, 5,000, 5,000 mediation, can you imagine, holy shit, a lot of mediation, and Arthur Pressman, who's also a veteran of the space, right, different, so specialized, franchise, franchise, or mediation, both veterans, both just tremendous chops, interviewing Claude AI as an expert in complex resolution field, was just really interesting to me, particularly given all the news and the talk and the flubber about AI, so I would, if I'm gonna recommend, I'm curious what you guys think about that, the Claude interview, stay tuned, past the first 5 minutes, because I sort of get stuck asking it about divorce mediation, which I'm saving for the divorce mediation podcast, and then I sort of transition generally to, how do you neuro hack mediation generally speaking, which is where I wanted to go from the beginning, so check that out, that is episode 2, after Sam Arterie and before Arthur Pressman, and this is episode 4, a recap, what did I learn, how do I distill it, I think it's really helpful for me to consolidate to, I don't know what it's called in computers, consolidate files, it's in zipping, or like do they do cleaning, do computers do cleaning, file cleaning, I don't know, purging, something like that, that's what this was, so I think the distinction, I think I kind of talked through a lot, there's probably a lot more underneath there, but as you can see, I'm trying to, what this is all in service of, is building the best conflict resolution, the most skillful conflict resolution practice in the world, that humans dealing with either to for unsolvable conflicts, come to me to, to get help, period, end of sentence, end of story, end of podcast, please do yourself a favor by doing me a favor, like share, subscribe, because when you do something nice for somebody else, when you give them something, when you show them some love, right, that practice of showing the love of doing something nice for someone that puts you in this, people who are in a positive mindset are more productive, they are happier, and they're well-being from physical to emotional increase, so that is the neuroscience reason of why we love to ask you to like and share and tell a friend, are you guys, be well, until next time, big talk,