Becoming Dragon, a card deck to transform difficult emotions such as envy and resentment into a reliable GPS to navigate the toughest challenges in life.
How to Use the Cards
If you’re not familiar with card decks, read on. Here are some tips for how I believe cards work and what they are and aren’t good for.
It’s best to draw a card with some specific question or context in mind, as that makes it much easier to see how the card connects to your life. If you just have it be general you’ll wonder… hmm, is this about my work, romance, friendship, or what? If you didn’t already ask a question, no worries. My default question is “what’s most alive for me in this moment?” Other good questions for future draws are “What’s being born in me?” “What’s dying in me?” “What’s blocking or enabling my transformation in X situation?” “What am I ready to heal right now?” “What energy am I bringing into the dynamic with Y person?”
Before you draw a card, commit to actually *doing* the exercise, if there is one. None take more than about 15 minutes. If you don’t have that much time, come back later when you do. The card deck performs best for you when you carve out the space to sink into what’s going on and do the work to transform it. This isn’t like putting a quarter into a gumball machine and getting a sweet fix to make you feel better. A hit-and-run approach is unlikely to reveal much. Many of the exercises are body-based, which means your mind won’t be reliable at predicting what it will feel like to do them. Your intellect can be damn tricky. They tell us they know how the body will react, but unless you’ve experienced something before, our intellects are notoriously inaccurate. It’d be like you refusing to try cloudberry jam without knowing what it tastes like. I could try to describe it, but unless you’ve eaten a cloudberry before, you’re not really going to know what it’s like. Give it a try, even if your intellect thinks you won’t like it.
Stick with the card you drew. Resist the urge to go back and draw another card for the same question. More cards lead to fuzzier guidance and more hooks for your mind to get distracted from doing the work.
If you hate the card you drew, celebrate! Where you find the greatest resistance lies the greatest potential. I find I get the most out of the cards I hate. Break out your notebook and write down just how much you hate it. Why do you hate it? Write the guide text you wish I’d written for you. I guarantee you know more about your path than I do. (If you do write new guidance, please email me so I can improve the copy for future seekers.)
What isn’t this deck good at? I don’t use oracles for fortune-telling. In my experience, it’s not great at predicting the future. I’m not even sure that’s a thing that’s possible, although some people are attuned to patterns in the greater world and can spot the trends of where we’re headed with reasonable accuracy. That’s great. I don’t use the deck to try to figure out when events will happen.
Also, the deck isn’t good at answering yes/no questions. These cards aren’t designed to directly answer any questions for you. If anything, one of the most important lessons I’m hoping to get across is to nudge you to reclaim your own authority and sovereignty. I do NOT want you to outsource your decisions to this or any other deck.
These cards work by bringing your attention to information that’s already present in you. You already have the answers, these are simply the pickaxes and chisels to excavate those out from under the noise of all your other distracting thoughts.