Tarot deck shown is the Rider Waite Smith published by US Games. Photo by Magenta
By late October, you usually know more than you did at the beginning of the year. You know which intentions, and new year resolutions, survived contact with reality.
You know which relationships have changed. Which ideas still excite you. Which ones have quietly fallen away. You may know which parts of your work give you energy and which you keep having to force yourself through.
And sometimes, if you look closely enough, you can see that the person who made those plans at the beginning of the year isn’t quite the person looking at them now.
We tend to notice change when something tangible happens.
We leave the job. Launch the business. End the relationship. Get the promotion. Complete the qualification. Restructure the team. Reach the goal. But some of the most important changes happen before there is anything particularly impressive to point towards.
Important changes like you react differently. You ask a different question. Something you used to tolerate begins to feel uncomfortable. Something that once frightened you doesn’t carry quite the same weight. You realise that you no longer need to prove something you spent years trying to prove.
This is one reason we like this time of year. Halloween gives us a culturally familiar moment for thinking about endings, thresholds and things that aren’t always immediately visible.
And before deciding what needs to happen next, perhaps there is value in noticing what has already changed.
Why reflection matters when you’re changing
When something isn’t working, there can be enormous pressure to do something about it. Personally, we might search for another self-help book, practise, therapist, course or solution. In business, we might decide we need another strategy, launch, offer, platform or content plan. In organisations, uncertainty can quickly become a demand for an action plan, milestones and deliverables.
Sometimes those things are exactly what is needed.
But action isn’t always the first thing that is missing. Sometimes we haven’t yet understood what has changed, and that distinction matters because personal growth rarely moves in a neat line from problem to solution. There is often a strange, and messy, middle period.
You can recognise that an old way of being no longer fits without knowing what should replace it. You can understand intellectually that something needs to change while finding that your habits, emotions or environment haven’t caught up yet.
You might be changing your relationship with yourself and discovering that the people around you are accustomed to an earlier version of you.
You might be building a business and gradually realising that the version of success you started pursuing isn’t actually the one you want.
Or you might be leading at a different level for the first time and discovering that the skills which established your credibility (knowing the detail, solving problems, having answers) aren’t always the same skills you now need.
We believe that recognition comes before integration, and sometimes the most useful question isn’t “What should I do next?”, it’s “What is already different?”
What does change actually feel like?
Change doesn’t always feel like progress, sometimes it feels like uncertainty.
You know what you don’t want, but can’t yet articulate what you do want or you find yourself behaving differently and then wondering whether you were right to do so.
Perhaps an old situation would once have triggered days of self-doubt, but this time it didn’t. Perhaps you said no without constructing an elaborate justification. Perhaps you made a business decision because it was right for the business you actually want rather than the one you thought you were supposed to build. Perhaps you walked into a difficult meeting and, instead of feeling that you had to provide the answer, you were comfortable enough to ask the room a question.
These moments can be easy to miss because they don’t necessarily produce anything visible. By this we mean there may be no certificate, promotion, revenue milestone or completed project attached to them, but they are evidence of becoming.
Something you once had to consciously practise may be beginning to feel natural. Something you once believed about yourself may no longer seem entirely true. An old response may still be available to you, but it is no longer the only response.
That matters.
October as a natural point of reflection
There is something fitting about doing this work as October draws to a close. For us, the days are getting shorter. The natural world around us is visibly changing. Halloween itself sits amongst a collection of traditions concerned with endings, remembrance, darkness and transition.
You don’t have to attach any particular spiritual meaning to the season to recognise the metaphor.Things change. Things end. Things become dormant. And endings create space.
There is a practical rhythm to this point of the year too.
For someone working on their personal growth, the intentions they made many months ago have now had time to meet ordinary life.
For a business owner, enough of the year has passed to begin seeing patterns. What actually sold? What felt sustainable? What kept being postponed? What did you discover about the work you want to do, or the person you want to be while doing it?
And in organisations, autumn can coincide with planning, budgeting, reviewing priorities and beginning to look towards the following year.
Different worlds, perhaps. But similar questions.
What have we learned?
What has changed?
What are we still carrying because it used to make sense?
What deserves to continue?
What might we need to stop doing before we decide what to start?
Reflection creates a space between experience and the next decision. And that space can be useful.
You don’t always need another answer
One of the patterns I’ve become increasingly interested in is our tendency to equate progress with visible activity.
Doing something looks productive. Thinking can look like hesitation.
This happens personally, in businesses and in organisations.
When we’re uncomfortable, action can offer relief. We have made the plan. Booked the course. Created the project. Reorganised the team. Written the list.
But occasionally we move too quickly from discomfort to solution. We start answering a question we haven’t properly understood.
Reflection slows that movement down just enough to notice what might otherwise disappear beneath the activity.
The output of reflection might not be an answer. It might be a better question. It might be a distinction you couldn’t see before. It might be recognising that the problem you thought you had isn’t actually the problem. Or it might simply be noticing that something you have been trying very hard to change has, quietly, already begun to change.
Where tarot fits into reflection
You don’t need tarot cards to do any of this. You could journal. Take a long walk. Talk with a coach, therapist, supervisor or trusted friend. A business owner could step away from their usual working environment for an afternoon. A leadership team could build genuine reflection into a retrospective or planning session.
We sometimes use tarot because symbolic images can give us something else to think with. Tarot can be used as a form of structured self-reflection rather than asking a card to provide a definitive prediction, the image becomes a prompt through which we explore our own thoughts, feelings and interpretations.
There has even been some academic interest in tarot’s contemporary use for psychological exploration and self-reflection, although tarot should not be confused with a validated psychological assessment or a substitute for professional support.
For us, its usefulness is often in the interruption. Ask yourself a familiar question and you may give yourself a familiar answer. Introduce an unexpected image and suddenly you have to think about the question differently.
A Halloween tarot spread for reflecting on change
If tarot is part of your spiritual or reflective practice, Halloween can be a lovely opportunity to pause at the threshold between what has been and whatever comes next.
Rather than asking the cards to predict the coming year, we prefer questions that return some of the agency to us.
Try drawing five cards.
1. What am I leaving behind?
What belonged to an earlier version of you, your work or this situation?
This doesn’t necessarily mean something needs to be dramatically rejected or removed. You might simply recognise that a belief, behaviour, responsibility or identity has served its purpose.
2. What am I carrying forward?
Not everything needs changing. What have you learned that deserves to be protected? What relationship, practise, value, strength or way of working is still serving you?
Growth isn’t only about becoming someone new. Sometimes it is about recognising what was already worth keeping.
3. What am I only beginning to recognise?
This is the threshold question. What feels different without yet being fully formed?
Try resisting the temptation to turn this immediately into an objective or action. Recognition can be enough for now.
4. What needs my attention rather than my action?
Where might curiosity be more useful than another solution? What needs to be understood, felt, discussed or explored before you decide what to do about it?
For some people, this might be deeply personal. For a business owner, it could concern an offer, audience, boundary or way of working. For a leader, it might be a pattern in the system that everyone keeps trying to fix before anyone has really understood it.
5. What might I practise next?
Notice that this isn’t “What will happen next?”. It is an invitation to experiment.
What small behaviour could you practise? What conversation could you have? What question could you ask? What boundary could you try holding? What could you do differently once and then observe what happens?
Change often becomes real through these small experiments.
Can I use these questions without tarot?
Absolutely. The cards are the tool in this exercise. Reflection is the practise. Change is the subject.
Write the five questions in a journal and answer them directly. Use them during a walk. Take one into a coaching or supervision conversation. Adapt them for a business review.
A leadership team could even use versions of them collectively: What are we ready to stop doing? What must we protect? What are we beginning to notice? What needs more understanding before we act? What could we experiment with next?
Nobody needs to produce a tarot deck in the boardroom. Although, admittedly, it would make the meeting memorable.
What does this have to do with Humanistic Magick?
Humanistic magick is the framework we use to bring together psychological understanding, reflective practise and magickal or symbolic tools in the service of meaningful change.
One of the ideas sitting underneath it is that lasting change involves more than deciding what we want. We have to notice how we currently make sense of ourselves and our experiences. We have to recognise the patterns that no longer fit. We experiment with different responses and gradually integrate them until what once felt unfamiliar begins to become normal.
A ritual, meditation, tarot reading, coaching conversation or journal exercise can create a space in which some of that becomes easier to see, but the tool isn’t the transformation. Eventually, what we notice has to meet the way we live.
Before you ask what comes next
Halloween gives us a culturally familiar moment to think about endings but endings aren’t always dramatic.
Sometimes nothing has been lost at all. Sometimes you simply notice that an old way of thinking no longer fits. A reaction that once felt automatic isn’t automatic anymore. A business decision you once agonised over becomes easier. A leader who once needed to have the answer discovers they can hold the question.
We tend to look for evidence of change in what we have achieved. There is another kind of evidence in what no longer feels necessary. Perhaps before asking what comes next, it is worth spending a little time with that.
Because you may already be further from where you started than you think.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can tarot be used for self-reflection?
Yes. Tarot can be used reflectively by treating the cards as prompts for exploring your thoughts, emotions, assumptions and possible responses rather than relying on them to provide definitive answers or predictions.
How do you use tarot for personal growth?
One approach is to ask open reflective questions, draw a card and notice your response to its imagery and symbolism. The useful question is often not simply “What does this card mean?” but “What am I noticing in this card, and why might that matter to me?”
Do I need to believe in tarot for reflective questions to be useful?
No. The reflective questions in this article can be used with tarot, journalling, coaching, supervision or simply as prompts for thinking. People who hold spiritual beliefs about tarot may incorporate those beliefs into their practice; others can use the imagery purely as a reflective prompt.
Why is Halloween a useful time for reflection?
Halloween falls at a visible seasonal threshold in the Northern Hemisphere, as autumn moves towards winter, and sits alongside traditions historically associated with remembrance and transition. That makes it a natural symbolic moment for reflecting on endings, change and what we want to carry forward.
What questions can I ask myself when I am going through change?
Useful questions include: What has already changed? What am I ready to leave behind? What is worth protecting? What am I beginning to recognise? What needs understanding before action? And what small experiment could help me practise a different way of responding?
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