Self-sabotage through the glasses of the Tarot of Marseilles and the method of Referential Birth Chart.
I don’t think there is one person who hasn’t gone through the situation at least once, when, although animated by the best intentions, he or she experienced the state of failure, of “it shouldn’t have happened”. Strong emotional charge, contradictory feelings, guilt, waves of emotion and apparently no rational reason why our wish did not come true.
Much has been written about self-sabotage, about how it can be recognized, especially since we seldom sabotage ourselves consciously, about what we could do to avoid self-sabotage, but what seems clear on a piece of paper or on the phone screen is rarely clear when the whole amalgam of states comes upon us and we get carried away, again.
To be aware of, to understand, integrate and transform these behaviors that make good intentions useless is a challenge for each of us. It is often easier to depersonalize behaviors, to take them out to look at them from all angles, and to identify our own way of transforming them. In my personal opinion, when we talk about self-development there are no recipes but there are tools, tools that become effective when the person, the individual, consciously chooses to work with them.
And here we raise the curtain for the Referential Birth Chart, a method developed by the psychologist, philosopher, director and researcher of religions, Georges Colleuil. The author proposes the perspective of interdictions, unconscious or conscious, which act as limiting factors in self-development. The less we recognize the interdictions we impose on ourselves, the more we run away from what sabotages us from within, the more these inner actions will be felt in our outer words and actions. But interdictions can become friendly when they contribute to our development as individuals.
It may be difficult for us to accept and understand self-restraint, resentment, comparison, judgment, or guilt, to name a few self-sabotage factors recognized in the literature, but we may at least be more open when resentment wears the robe of the arcana XX, Judgment, or comparison enters the role of the arcana VI, the Lover of the Tarot of Marseilles. We step on the Emperor’s territory more easily than we recognize the suffering caused by the invasion of our personal territory and possibly as the arcane of house 3, of conscious moral interdictions but also of the way we see the world, and that of house 1, of the image we project on the outside, to help us look, if we experience this, more easily the narcissistic wound related to the image we have of ourselves. But, as I said before, there are no recipes but there are methods, such as RBC (Referential Birth Chart), which allow our personal experience to manifest in a meaningful framework. And if the interdictions make sense then we are perhaps on the verge of turning their destructive energy into creative energy.
The Lover, the arcana VI of the Tarot of Marseilles, talks, among other things, about commitment, about learning the hard way that the real choice is to not choose. In stage clothes, with all the manifested potential, the Lover is the one who chooses the path of the heart, the one who will not hesitate to put himself in the service of those in need, but always aligned with his own desires, the one who manifests unconditional love. A self-restraint and self-sabotaged Lover might act differently. Maybe he will become aware of the weight with which he makes choices in life or the impossibility of choosing. And what is the impossibility to choose? The self-constraining of the Lover is, perhaps, the lack of commitment that can come, in turn, from self-censorship – I imagine the terrible consequences of my choice and then I better not choose. As I was saying, personal experience is the first in the hierarchy of working rules with RBC, so I invite you to develop in terms of your own feelings and to answer honestly: “Who is really sabotaging you?“
written by Monica Măgureanu
What is the Referential Birth Chart? A method of self-knowledge and a useful tool in working with people that combines symbol therapy, the archetypes present in the 22 major arcana, and the personal intuition of both the client and the practitioner of the method.
In order to compose the Referential Birth Chart it is necessary to match the fourteen arcana (thirteen major and one minor) obtained by a numerological calculation with the fourteen houses, each house corresponding to a different aspect of existence. Personality traits, personal quests, challenges and resources, personal and parental projects, interdictions or unconscious interior conflicts, these are some of the aspects that we can at least look at in the framework provided by this method.
We find illustrated in the arcana of the tarot the great concepts of modern psychoanalysis and psychology. This supports the psychological dimension of the tarot and the therapeutic force of the symbols. The Referential Birth Chart provides the framework in which the secrets (the word arcana comes from the Latin arcanum which means secret) are revealed symbolically and by projection to the one who walks on this path. However, it is not about secrets external to our being but about what the specialized literature calls the unconscious. The very meaning of the word symbol, from the Greek symbalein – to put together, completes the picture and provides the key to symbol therapy. Inscribing the symbol in our personal lives is a therapeutic path.
