Understanding the Tower Card - A Glimpse Into Tower Moments

As long as you are alive, you will experience Tower moments!

Photo by Osama Khan on Unsplash

Among 78 cards, each having different vibes, energies, and teachings, one such card is the one that incurs fear, amazement, and reflection like no other card can.

This would definitely be the card of the Tower, about sudden upheaval, chaos, and change one may never have expected.

The Tower foretells turbulence and yet is something that actually pushes the querent toward inner transformation.

This symbolizes those moments in life when everything that is the premise for understanding life itself gets torn.

It leaves one to pick up the pieces and forge a new way forged out of resilience and introspection.

DALL-E creation of the Tower tarot card.

Literally, in life's Tower moment, there is no ground beneath the feet, and a seismic shift has already occurred in the world.

It is a reality stripped of its illusory nature, a jarring yet necessary wake-up call to the absolute truth about one's circumstances.

Let us delve deep into those moments when we shared how they molded and redefined who we are.

An Early Tower Moment - The Unexpected Cruelty of Adolescence

Looking back, I realize that one of my first major Tower moments in life was when I was 13 years old.

With hopeful naivety, my family moved into a new town, opening what I thought at the time was an opportunity for new starts and endless possibilities.

I was even excited about a new school and a new piece of paper on which to rewrite my identity and dreams.

Yet, it was not a nice surprise! The reality unraveled in front of me with brutality.

The first brushes with bullying turned out to be a lesson in the disparity between expectation and reality.

DALL-E creation of a girl being bullied in middle school.

It was one of those very vulnerable moments that really made me think about my notion of self-worth and resilience.

Although at that time this painful experience shattered me, it planted the first seed of strength inside.

It laid the foundation for an inner fortitude understanding to take root and flower.

Don’t get me wrong. I will never be thankful this happened to me as the bullying was a contributor to my C-PTSD.

I will also never forgive my bullies but that does not mean I am plotting revenge on them all of the time.

I just have no compassion for anyone who is mentally and cognitively sound for harming others.

Let’s now go over another Tower moment of my life.

Challenge of Parenthood - Battling the Unseen

And then, as life unraveled, another Tower moment came along in the form of parenthood.

Conceiving dreams of a family with my husband into the unknown curveball of fertility struggles we were thrown into.

No one prepares you for the heaviness this journey brings, and more often than not, you feel lonely and isolated from others because of the uncertainties it heralds.

The emotional detours notwithstanding, our daughter came into our lives through Intrauterine Insemination.

That was a testimony to persistence, faith, and trust in the unbelievably whimsical course of life.

A lesson in patience and the gradual acceptance of outcomes beyond our control requisite virtues prepared us for further challenges of being a parent in unexpected circumstances.

And then when my daughter was 15 months, I unexpectedly got pregnant with my son without any intervention. That leads me to my next significant Tower moment.

Navigating Complexity - Maternal Resilience in the Face of Neurodiversity

My son had complications at birth.

Years later, the ground shook again with the diagnosis of my son with severe ADHD and autism situation that again rewrote the meaning of being a mother.

The parenting roadmap turned abruptly away from the initial course, casting me deep into alien territories that call for true, raw resilience.

Every day since, learning how to be a special needs mom has required more than I ever thought I could give.

They push me to explore reserves of love, patience, and determination that I never knew existed.

But I quickly became severely burned out, battled compassion fatigue, ballooned to 300 lbs battling severe depression.

When he turned 13, we faced another precipice: his needs would be best served in a therapeutic residence.

This decision was wracked by heartache but rooted in unconditional love and clarity about what truly served his well-being.

Confronting Personal Health - A Journey from Denial to Empowerment

More recently, another Tower moment came knocking, and it was time for me to take up long-avoided aspects of my health.

Decades of dieting and body image distress, ignoring well-being reached a pinnacle with a diagnosis of diabetes.

It brought home the inescapable fact that health is not some sleeping partner that can be ignored.

This new path toward reclaiming my health has been a journey of learning to be gentler and more compassionate with myself.

I had to begin shedding misguided perceptions, and embracing a more conscious embodiment of vitality and self-care.

Beyond Illusions - Finding Gratitude Amidst Life's Tumults

In all these experiences, one underlying theme has stayed with me: every moment in the Tower uprooted pieces of my life set on sand.

They put me through trauma and losses that invited me to redefine personal limits- to eliminate people-pleasing tendencies at the expense of self-authenticity.

While I am not grateful for the traumas themselves, the clarity and insight into life provided by these have become so valuable.

They remove the facades so one can relish life's things that truly matter.

It cracks open to show the soul, revealing complexities, vulnerabilities, and the surprising strength inside the fracture.

In those fissures, I found my voice- a voice now laced with experience, boundaries, resilience, and relentless limits.

It is a life alive, sprouting in the dark nooks of Tower moments yet shining bright after them.

The meaning of a Tower moment, whether in Tarot or in life itself, is just this unrelenting attempt to remind us of our humanity, that fragile and ever-so-powerful essence in our hearts.

These moments continue reverberating through time, calling us onto a path of self-realization, change, and growth.

May it be in these turbulent seas that we find comfort in the realization that we are boundless, navigating our way through times of uncertainty with courage and grace.

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