From Reactive to Responsive in your Magical Life

The Tower card is associated with crisis and emergency. When it shows up in a Tarot reading, the signal is that the tower is falling. When the tower falls, your life or the specific situation is falling apart. That’s one way to read the Tower card. But in Tower Time, Sheena and I share that there are other ways to work with the Tower. One way you can work with it is to shift from reaction to responsiveness in your magical life.

The Tower card is a warning as well as a signal.

It tells you that your life as you know is going to blow up and some changes are incoming. You can react to the Tower. Many people will react in an attempt to try and control the outcome or avoid the crisis that the Tower is signaling. Many people will react from a place of fear, which actually fuels the crisis even further.

On the other hand, you can choose to be responsive and prepare for the Tower moment. You may already be in the moment and trying to resist it will just make the fall harder than it has to be. One of the best adjustments you can make is to accept that the collapse of the Tower is really just removing what you don’t need in your life.

Our Towers are built of the complications and compromises we have allowed into our lives for the sake of surviving. When the Tower breaks, the illusions of the comfortable discomfort come tumbling down, leaving you with the opportunity for stark clarity and a choice: You can rebuild the Tower and replay the same patterns or you can choose a different path. The fall of the Tower offers you the choice to react or respond.

Your Tower walls are made to lock you into a comfortably numb life

The compromises are small at first, almost invisible and you tell yourself they are worth it. You take a job you don’t really want, but the pay is good so you justify it. You stay in a relationship after the expiration date because its what you know. You can probably think of some other compromises you’ve made in the course of your life. You know the cost, perhaps in hindsight, but you know it. The Tower you build creates a life for you to settle into.

Then one day the Tower comes down. The reactive approach is usually about rebuilding the Tower. It’s familiar, comfortable and gives you the illusion of control. You know the Tower. It may make you feel boxed in, but you know it. When it falls, the reaction is to try and put it back together.

The problem is that rebuilding your Tower just puts you back in the same patterns that caused it to fall in the first place. You start to break up with someone and then you panic and go back to the relationship. You leave your job and then you find a similar one even though you hate the work. People go back to what they know because it seems to be safe, when in fact is the real danger you aren’t facing.

You’ve reacted to the fall of the Tower by rebuilding and putting yourself back into the cage that you didn’t really want to be in.

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The Tower’s Fall is the Freedom you’ve longed for

The Tower falls and your life is shaken, stirred and upside down. Everything you know falls away and you are presented a blank slate. You can react and rebuild the Tower, but you already see where that’s going to take you. The fall of the Tower is an opportunity to claim your magical life on your terms. Yes, a lot will fall away. I’m not making light of that. You have been given a clarity call and you can respond to that call with curiosity.

The magician who steps into Tower Time takes the catalytic energy of the Tower fall and uses it to get curious about what their life could become. They break free of the numbing comfortable discomfort that the Tower put them into and walk a path away from the rubble, because they already know that rebuilding the Tower will just delay the inevitable.

The responsive magician chooses to let go of control and surrender to the current that is called in by the Tower’s fall. They surrender to the current and leave the tower behind to seek their north star and come back to the truth of their lives…the truth that brings them into integrity with their calling and with themselves.

Pull the Tower card out of a tarot deck. Look at what’s really happening. The Tower is broken. People are falling. The collapse of structure is the release of all the patterns that have gotten in your way. It’s also the opening of your next adventure. You can react or you can respond. If you respond you will definitely be taken out of your comfort zone. You’ll be challenged but you will also step into your most magical life and find what you’ve been looking for. The tower walls blocked it out, but they’ve fallen.

The lesson the Tower teaches about emergencies is that they are moments of existential awareness that bring your life into clarity. Embrace the moments, explore the opportunities and let your life be magical because you took the risk to do something instead of sticking with what comfortable.

Near Life Experiences in Tower Time

The first time I watched Fight Club what stood out to me was a line from the movie where the narrator is told he had a near life experience. It was a powerful inversion of the near death experience, calling in how vivid a person feels when they nearly die and experience that clarity of still being alive. It’s a Tower Moment and its an imaginal portal that changes everything.

I want to be clear here: I’m not advocating purposely seeking out near death experiences or randomly crashing into cars so you can have a near life experience.

And I’ve had more than a few near death experiences. Each of them has created an indelible imprint on my life that has transformed my life in the moment and my overall appreciation of being alive. I even had one recently, almost a year ago, when I hit a deer and my car was totaled. I’m grateful I was able to walk away from that experience and it definitely was an existential Tower Moment for me.

There’s something transcendent about going through a near life/death experience that is reminiscent of going through a Tower Moment. When the Tower falls, your life changes, usually in the form of a loss. Maybe it’s the loss of a job or a relationship or a loved one. Maybe it’s something more interior, such as a feeling of confidence or joy. Whatever it is, the experience of the Tower is one that people try to avoid.

I don’t think the Tower can be avoided

It’s an experience all of us have at some point, losing a structure in our lives that we thought would last forever. The lesson of the Tower is that instead of avoiding the fall, accept it. The deeper lesson, however, is that what you lose also paves the way for opportunities to come into your life that the Tower was blocking you from.

I’m not sharing that as a platitude. It’s a reality I’ve lived first hand. When I got divorced, I lost my home as well as the marriage. But I had a lot of opportunities open up as well. The Tower fell and in it’s rubble I found a new path forward, which gave me options in multiple ways. The Tower challenged me to stop settling for the status quo and actually discover what I really want for my life. In that way, it was also very similar to having a near death experience.

Tower Time is imaginal time. You are experiencing the breakdown of your reality as you know it and if you are wise you are inviting your imagination to come and play. At one point, several months into my divorce I had a realization: I could choose to uproot and live somewhere else. I had a few friends still in the area I was living, but I wasn’t attached to the area. I had lived there a long time and I began to wonder what it would be like to move somewhere else for the sheer sake of choosing to start over.

I explored a coastal town and ultimately decided not to live there. Then I moved 2 hours south to a college town, where I still live now. I was drawn down here for the wrong reasons, a rebound relationship, but it turned out to be exactly what I needed. I left the familiarity of what I knew, the Tower, and embraced the unknown. It wasn’t easy. There were a number of times I questioned my choices and that’s the point of the Tower. It challenges you on an existential level. In one form or another you are having a near death/life experience that causes you to question your existence.

When we question our existence as we know it, the fall of the Tower offers us glimpses of the possibilities we blocked out of our lives. In my case, it was having adventures and traveling. I had spent so much of my life not doing any of those things, and as my Towers fell, I started doing the activities I had denied myself. I got into martial arts, finally, after many years of wanting to. I traveled internationally and I chose to pursue my professional life as an occult author and magic coach in a way that was in alignment with what I really want for myself and my community.

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The Tower isn’t just constructed by you.

It’s also constructed by the people in your life and the compromises you accept to have those people in your life. Sometimes it’s worth it, but a lot of the time you are making agreements to keep the peace or accommodate someone else while costing yourself something essential in the process…and that’s when the relationship becomes a tower.

Towers fall because you need them to fall. You tolerate a bad job or go with the flow in a relationship even though you are deeply miserable. You settle for less and it costs you, because while that tower may feel safe, it’s actually crushing the life out of you.

When the Tower falls there is a strange exhilaration that is simultaneously terrifying and liberating. It falls and you see the stars and sky that you forgot was there. You discover the possibilities that you put aside.

Now you can claim them, or you can rebuild the Tower. I’ve done both. I rebuilt a Tower a few times over, but it always collapsed. The foundation is faulty and cracked. I’ve walked away from the Tower, leaving the rubble behind and discovered a new path, leading me onto the next adventure.

When your Towers fall, embrace the fall and walk boldly forward. You deserve the opportunities you’ve denied yourself and your Towers will keep falling as long as you deny yourself your essential truth - that messy, inconvenient one that makes you feel alive.

The path forward, scary as it may be, is also the choice that your soul is singing for. You can deny it only so long or you can use the fall of the Tower to be a clarion call of discovery. Get curious, rewrite your life and discover what you really want, unshackled of your fears and the limitations of others.

Choose your Star…it’s calling for you.

How to be Present with Tower Time

I share how to recognize Tower Time in your life and describe how the Tower can actually be a really useful and powerful card and energy that shouldn’t be avoided. Instead we can welcome it and use it to help us transform our lives and turn the tower energy into momentum that works in our favor.