​Reader,​

Years ago, when we were trying to teach my daughter about the power of words, we used the metaphor of a tube of toothpaste.

Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, you can’t put it back in. You can try to clean it up and apologize, but you can’t go back to the moment before the words were said.

I’ve been thinking about that metaphor a lot this week.

Once someone gives you a way of seeing something, you can’t go back to the moment before you heard it. Even if you disagree with the interpretation, it’s out there now taking up space in your brain.

And that brings me to a weird little experiment I’ve been running for the past few weeks.

I’ve never used AI for tarot. But since I was going to be talking about that very topic with a group of people, I decided to test it out. Get some real life experience with it.

I wanted to know what would happen if I asked AI to give me the meanings for my daily card draw.

So I started pulling a daily card around the question: What do I need to know today?

Each time, I took five minutes to journal my own intuitive takeaway first. Then I headed over to the paid versions of Claude and ChatGPT.

I gave them the same prompt every time, including whether the card was upright or reversed. I didn’t share my journaling with them. I just let each model answer based on the card and the question.

What came back was… unexpected.

I guess I assumed AI would spit back a guidebook meaning, like the ones you find on tarot sites when you Google a card.

It did not.

It gave me a card meaning and then it took it one step further and tried to make meaning of it and apply it to my life.

One day, I drew The Hanged Man in Reverse.

I’ve been working with my deck for over 15 years, so I know that when the Hanged Man in Reverse shows up for me, it usually speaks to my tolerance for uncertainty and the unknown and my patience – or lack thereof – for pauses.

This time my journaling drew my attention to the dynamic between the pause and the push through.

My takeaway was that the pauses I’ve experienced over the last few years have created a practice ground for learning when to push through and when to rest and be ok with things not moving forward.

In fact, The Hanged Man reflections actually inspired my last email. What started as five minutes of journaling eventually connected to a much bigger story about the way I had pushed through for years when my husband was diagnosed with cancer.

Then I plugged the card into Claude and here’s part of what came back:

Reversed, the Hanged Man is about a pause that has stopped doing its job. The suspension that was supposed to give you a new view has turned into stalling.

So what you most need to know today is that waiting and stalling are different things. If you've been hanging there and the view hasn't shifted, that tells you something: you probably don't need more patience, you need to decide something or release something you're gripping.

Where in your life right now are you waiting on clarity you already have?

You can see how differently that went.

I came away with deeper insight on pausing and pushing. Claude essentially said, the pause means stalling out and it’s time to move.

Almost the opposite direction.

ChatGPT took me somewhere similar. Its interpretation was that maybe the perspective shift had already happened and I was continuing to wait because I didn’t quite trust myself to move yet.

Also not it.

What if I had read those interpretations first – without journaling?

The AI takes weren’t necessarily wrong, but where would I have gone from there?

If someone starts by telling me I’m stalling, I’m going to naturally look for places to move things forward.

If the card is framed as if I already know what to do but don’t trust myself enough to move, I’m going to start examining my experience through that lens.

Would I have gotten to the push-through pattern? I don’t think so.

Would I have connected that card to something I had been doing for years rather than something happening that particular day? Probably not.

I suspect I would’ve gone on a little bit of a wild goose chase trying to figure out where I got stuck and trying to fix it.

Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, there’s no putting it back in.

Once we’ve been given a way to see something, we can question it, disagree with it, decide it doesn’t fit, but we can’t completely return to the version of ourselves who hadn’t heard it yet.

And this goes far beyond AI and tarot.

We’re handed interpretations all the time – about our relationships, what success should look like, about who the world thinks we are.

And once that interpretation is there, we can start to view the world from that external perspective. Sometimes without us even realizing it.

So the part of my experiment that is catching my attention the most isn’t whether AI gave me the “right” tarot interpretation. The definitions weren’t technically wrong.

It’s what might have been lost if someone – or something – had told me how to look at before I had the chance to notice my own.

P.S. Missed the live Tea and Tarot Conversation and want to watch the replay? Click here.​