Teneice Durrant, creator of Tarot with Ten, will use various tarot and oracle decks to provide monthly readings for writers with exercises on using imagery and intuition as prompts. April’s prompt is about using tarot’s The Empress to progress a narrative through asking for help and being open to receiving it.
Using tarot’s The Empress to develop story elements
Watch and listen to Teneice's tarot reading for writers or read the transcript of the reading below.
Hi everyone, welcome to another edition of On Deck for April 2025. So we're going to continue our journey through the heroes arc and the Major Arcana of the tarot deck, and this month we have the Empress.
The Empress
The Empress represents what we used to call “divine feminine,” but we now kind of talk more about it in terms of divine reception, like allowing people to give to you, allowing yourself to receive things, receive help, receive resources, receive kindness from others.
There's a lot of kind of energy going around about, you know, people just being like people pleasers and givers and like, oh no no, that's okay, I don't need anything. But when you don't allow people to give to you, you are denying them that positive feeling of knowing that they helped someone, right? So we give because we like helping people, it feels good to, you know, help people, but if you don't let people give to you, you're denying them that good feeling of helping somebody, okay? You also have to understand that you can't do everything, right? And you will have to accept help somewhere on this journey to kind of understand your limitations, understand your strengths, and see how working together creates a more bountiful, plentiful situation than just trying to do everything on your own.
So this month, our character is learning that they can't do it all themselves, they have to stop being stubborn, and they have be willing to accept help in some way. So we're gonna look at a few cards and kind of see if we can get some ideas about which ways our character needs to kind of accept some help, okay? And again, I'm using the Morgan Greer tarot deck, so not exactly the traditional Rider-Waite-Smith images that you might be used to, but has a good kind of funky 70s vibe.
All right, let's see what our main character needs to learn how to accept what they need help with. Any more? One more? Okay, all right. So we have the High Priestess and the Five of Wands.
The High Priestess
We'll take a look at this one in a second. So the High Priestess, we talked a lot about the High Priestess last month. The High Priestess is all about healing so that you can trust your intuition, okay? If you aren't healed in terms of your, let's say, relationship wounds, you're not able to trust your intuition in a relationship, right? You have to heal that part of you that has wounds from a relationship before you can trust your intuition in it.
And the way that the High Priestess is saying to do that is through study. She's got the Torah in her lap. It's unrolled. So she's constantly referring back to her sacred texts. Whatever spiritual practice you have, returning to that will help you get to a place where you can trust your intuition. Because right now, our bodies and our minds will lie to us to kind of keep us safe and keep us alive. And so they don't know, like, your brain doesn't know what a new situation is going to do, but it does know what an old situation would do. So it might tell you to go with that situation instead of trying the new situation because it doesn't know if you're going to survive that—and that's dramatic, but if you're going to survive that new situation. But it knows it can survive the old situation.
So it's very difficult to trust your intuition in areas that haven't healed. And that's not overall, it's like maybe you healed all that money trauma, you know, any issues that your family had with money, you healed that and then you can trust your intuition when it comes to money, but maybe not yet relationships. Okay, so there's different areas. It's not like, don't trust your intuition anywhere. But there's certain areas that we need to kind of keep reflecting on and healing until we can then kind of calm down and trust our intuition.
The Five of Wands
Okay, so our main character needs some help healing some kind of internal wound so that they can trust their self and their intuition. So somebody is going to come and help them with that somebody's gonna give them the gift of understanding how to heal. The Five of Wands is like, a lot of times people talk about it in terms of conflict, like kind of little daily conflict or spats or things. But I look at it as practice, right? I'm a writer, right? We're all writers. So I think of this card as a workshop card. Like, you are in a group, you're practicing, right? They don't have swords, they have staffs, right? So they're just practicing, they're working out their technique, they're figuring out, you know, their body movements.
So this is like practice, okay? And the main character is going to need to understand that the healing and the intuition is not going to happen right away. That he's going to have to or she is going to have to talk to other people about this, whatever situation needs healed, and kind of throw some ideas around.
How can we solve this problem? How can we heal this wound? How did you get this wound? How did you get this attitude about relationships or money or work or whatever it is? And how do we heal that? Like, this is, in this case, another example of leaning on other people to kind of help you work out a problem, right? You have your workshop buddies, and you lean on them to give you advice and help you to work through whatever piece you're on, right?
The Seven of Pentacles
Okay, and then we have the Seven of Pentacles. So one of the things that our main character here needs to learn is—and this could do with the intuition and the boundaries—is that you have to learn when to cut your losses, right? You can't keep investing in something that's not going to grow. You can't keep investing time and energy into a crop that's planted in the wrong soil, right? So this is another one of the things that is maybe a gift, something that our main character learns is to receive, like, don't be stubborn, right? Receive information from people who know more, and don't be stubborn and thinking that you're following your intuition when it's just that you haven't talked to anybody about, you know, your plans or why you want to do what you want to do, and you're not listening to anybody. You know, you're not receiving the gift of good advice, right?
So we're still in kind of the first third of our story if we're going along the narrative arc, right? This is kind of a situation where our main character is learning that, first of all, they don't know how to do everything, and that's okay, and they can learn from other people and ask other people for help.
What did you think of this tarot reading and the cards as visual prompts for story development? Share with us in the comments, and contact us if you’re interested in working one-on-one with Teneice in part 3 of Writing Toward Balance and Wholeness: Tarot and the Narrative Arc (taking parts 1 and 2 first is not required).
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