12.15.2015

Chakra Wisdom Oracle & Osho Zen Tarot

More birthday goodies!

I like that my dear friend sent these, and though they aren't necessarily the kinds of decks I normally go for, I'm enjoying playing with some new and different energies.

The Chakra Wisdom Oracle has 49 cards separated into (you guessed it) seven sets of seven, color coded by chakra. Now I don't know a whole lot about chakras. I know there are seven of them and they have different colors. That's about it. So lucky for me there's a really nice, full-color guide that comes with these cards to explain things.

When I first looked through the deck—I always go through a new deck and familiarize myself with it, get to know it a bit—I was a little confused by the images. They didn't seem to always match the name of the card. And when I read the descriptions of the cards in the book, they were sometimes not what I would immediately expect either. Which is to say this is not a quickie oracle. This is one you have to take time to get to know, and you do better if you go with intuition over trying to reason things out logically.

sample Chakra Wisdom Oracle reading
I mean, look at that Recovery card up there. It's like, "What now?" But that's because each card has a story. So reading about the card in the guidebook is a must.

I do like these cards. It will take me a while to get the hang of them, perhaps, but so far I've enjoyed the bit of work I've done with them. They've been consistent and direct but also gentle.

The same dear friend also sent the Osho Zen Tarot. (This friend is a Buddhist Reiki master.) What struck me when I opened these cards was that the cards were not pre-sorted in a natural order. Normally when I receive a deck, the cards are packaged by suit. These were just . . . random. And I feel like that says something about this deck in general.

sample 3-card Osho Zen Tarot reading

The tarot suits are all there. Kind of. They're different in that the court cards are not people, per se, and the four suits are Fire: Action, Water: Emotions, Clouds: The Mind, and Rainbows: The Physical. I'm not sure how I feel about the somewhat cutesy "Ice-Olation" (what we would think of as the 3 of Swords), but on the whole I do find the changes to the traditional deck interesting. There's a different feel to these cards; they answer less directly because they want you to work for it. They want you to go deeper and really examine the situation—what you're asking, why you're asking, and so on. There's a sense these cards want to say, "You know the answer if you just stop and think about it. So we're going to throw some signposts up but it's on you to follow through to the destination."

In short, if you want a quick answer, something surface, don't ask Osho Zen. But if there's something you need to get to the root of, these cards are going to be great for that. I look forward to exploring further with them.

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