Tarot Therapy: Harness the Healing Power of the Deck

• Author: Leona Nichole Black
• Genre: Self-Help/Inspiration
• Publication Date: June 13, 2023
• Publisher: St. Martin’s Essentials

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Essentials for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Bring connection and purpose to your life through the wisdom of tarot

Tarot Therapy is practical toolkit for understanding your life more fully through the wisdom of the tarot. Tarot therapist Leona Nichole Black, guides readers through every aspect of daily life—from love and relationships, to careers and social impact—using the major arcana a source of inspiration and guidance. The process is intuitive and immersive, a unique and powerful way of finding mental clarity, processing life experiences, and giving voice and language to your emotions.

Throughout Tarot Therapy you’ll find personalized prompts, meditations, and tarot spreads that will empower you to:

– Read the map of your life’s journey

– Hear the wisdom of your inner-voice

– Take time to heal and grow

– Make life-changing decisions

– Reveal your talents to the world

Tarot Therapy is a reflective guide that will help you deepen and strengthen your most important relationship—the one you have with yourself.

I’m relatively new to tarot cards, and have been reading a few books to familiarize myself with this art, and learn more about the cards and their meanings. While there are no shortage of books that can explain how to do a spread and what each of the cards mean, Black offers a whole new perspective on the art.

The first thing that I noticed while reading this book is that it is so much more than simply a book explaining cards. The author relates cards from the major arcana to emotions, and shares experiences from her own life, often painful experiences, but also plenty of joyful experiences, that she’s gotten to with the help of therapy and tarot. I especially liked how she related the way that tarot cards assisted her in moving through obstacles and getting through various experiences, whether they involved making changes, in relationships, or in processing emotions. 

Black explores each card in depth, explaining how they relate to different emotions that are commonly experienced, and how we can process them. I’ve never quite seen the cards explained this way, but it all seemed to make a lot of sense when laid out this way. Throughout each of the chapters, readers are offered in-depth emotional and life-oriented questions to think about and pull three tarot cards to journal about and then discuss with friends or a therapist. It allows readers to put the principles practiced in the text into practice, and really view how tarot therapy can occur in real-time.

This was my first experience reading a book about tarot that was written by a Black woman, or even a person of color, and I loved the diverse perspective that was offered. The author talks about her experience of processing feelings such as anger, which is very different from the white experience of processing anger, especially when viewed through a societal and historical lens. Through her practice of sharing life experiences, she also discussed the influences that her family and religion has had on her later life and how she processes emotions, and I loved the idea of incorporating therapeutic principles with tarot. She also includes a quick reference guide of the minor arcana at the end of the book, along with a matrix to follow when completing an exercise that she provides at the completion of the last chapter.

Overall, this was a fantastic read. It’s incredibly informative, and I can already tell that I’ll be referring back to this book often. The questions posed throughout the text aren’t the kind that you ask once and are finished with, but can be asked over and over again, and will have different responses at different points in my life. And it opens a whole new world of opportunities for the use of tarot.