What do you think?
Rate this book
Tarot Life Lessons: Living Wisdom from the Major Arcana
Real-life stories using the Tarot as a tool of insight and self-transformation
• Explores the living wisdom of the Tarot, based on the author’s more than 40 years’ experience as a professional Tarot reader
• Shares stories from the author’s client readings to show how each card tells a story and how it only takes a small amount of familiarity to decipher a world full of meaning in the cards
• Shows how to use the Tarot to grow your strengths, identify your weaknesses, conquer problems, and move on from painful situations
As Julia Gordon-Bramer reveals in profound detail, the miracle of tarot is how the right cards show up, time and time again, to provide guidance or symbolically illustrate your story—whether you believe in the tarot or not.
In these real-life tales of tarot wisdom, Gordon-Bramer explores the modern applications and the living wisdom of the tarot, based on her more than 40 years’ experience as a professional tarot reader. Sharing stories from client readings and her own spiritual journey, she shows how to intuitively, logically, and sometimes playfully glean the meaning of each card that appears and integrate its powerful spiritual lessons for deeper understanding, guidance, and personal healing. She compares reading the tarot to dream analysis, explaining how the Major Arcana, such as the Fool, the Magician, the Lovers, and the Star, represent the key players and milestones in life, the sacred adventure from birth to death. She explains how each card tells its own story, often revealing subconscious beliefs and motivations through its colors, numbers, symbols, and pictures.
Allowing you to make the leap from an abstract understanding of the tarot to actually working intuitively with the cards, this book shows how, when used as a life-transforming tool to awaken and tame the subconscious, the tarot offers a way to grow your strengths, identify your weaknesses, and conquer problems as you journey through life.
• Explores the living wisdom of the Tarot, based on the author’s more than 40 years’ experience as a professional Tarot reader
• Shares stories from the author’s client readings to show how each card tells a story and how it only takes a small amount of familiarity to decipher a world full of meaning in the cards
• Shows how to use the Tarot to grow your strengths, identify your weaknesses, conquer problems, and move on from painful situations
As Julia Gordon-Bramer reveals in profound detail, the miracle of tarot is how the right cards show up, time and time again, to provide guidance or symbolically illustrate your story—whether you believe in the tarot or not.
In these real-life tales of tarot wisdom, Gordon-Bramer explores the modern applications and the living wisdom of the tarot, based on her more than 40 years’ experience as a professional tarot reader. Sharing stories from client readings and her own spiritual journey, she shows how to intuitively, logically, and sometimes playfully glean the meaning of each card that appears and integrate its powerful spiritual lessons for deeper understanding, guidance, and personal healing. She compares reading the tarot to dream analysis, explaining how the Major Arcana, such as the Fool, the Magician, the Lovers, and the Star, represent the key players and milestones in life, the sacred adventure from birth to death. She explains how each card tells its own story, often revealing subconscious beliefs and motivations through its colors, numbers, symbols, and pictures.
Allowing you to make the leap from an abstract understanding of the tarot to actually working intuitively with the cards, this book shows how, when used as a life-transforming tool to awaken and tame the subconscious, the tarot offers a way to grow your strengths, identify your weaknesses, and conquer problems as you journey through life.
- GenresTarotNonfiction
224 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 7, 2023
9 people are currently reading
31 people want to read
About the author
Julia Gordon-Bramer
5 books23 followersJulia Gordon-Bramer is a professional tarot card reader, Sylvia Plath scholar, award-winning writer and poet, and former professor of Humanities and of Graduate Creative Writing at Lindenwood University. She is the author of several books and, in 2013, was voted St. Louis' Best Local Poet. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 13, 2023
I love learning about tarot - and this was a great book to do it! Julia weaves in personal stories that give life to the meaning of each card. I wanted it to keep going!
April 6, 2025
Professional tarot card reader Julia Gordon-Bramer, an award-winning writer and poet, has written an incredibly readable and valuable book about her long experience with the tarot card tradition, combining a winning personal touch with a practical, universal reach. She relates stories of some of her most memorable clients with verve, humor, and wisdom, and it is all but guaranteed that readers will see themselves in at least some of them. Each client's story was chosen because their issue(s) exemplified one of the 22 cards from the "Major Arcana" in tarot.
There is Veronica, a wealthy older woman falling for a supposedly smitten-with-her "Facebook Admiral" across the seas, despite Julia pointing to "The Magician" card's primacy on the table, and the warning from a tarot-- and common sense--perspective that he very likely wants only to make her money disappear. (More specifically, it's the "Magician in reverse" card--the author does journeyman's work in helpfully explaining the many different card permutations that can occur.)
There is Jay, a young family friend who seems doomed to a heartbreakingly unfulfilled life for want of self-application. He is in "The Hangman" chapter, for being "continually in a state of dying but never dead." (p. 119). A "martyr awaiting enlightenment," or--as Coleridge said of Hamlet, one who is "continually resolving to do, yet [does] nothing but resolve." Procrastinators, if they can ever find the time for it, would do well to read this chapter...
Here we have Ifunanya ("Nani"), found in a chapter many might turn to first ("The Lovers"), a strikingly beautiful, accomplished, and wealthy woman from Nigeria, who nonetheless chronically looks for love from "narcissists, users, and abusers" (p. 82). The cards, and Gordon-Bramer's sympathetic but direct insights, showed these habitually unhealthy couplings traceable to the lingering malinfluence of Nani's violently cruel father. It is perhaps telling that Nani said she chose to consult the author after becoming familiar with her not only through interviews online, but also from Gordon-Bramer's published poetry. Nothing like poetry to glimpse a person's heart, and at the time of the chapter's writing, the two were still working together to continue improving the quality of love in Nani's life.
The reader will also find, in this skillfully woven memory quilt of tarot-infused parables, clients who test the author's Buddhist, We-are-all-One sensibilities with their exasperating demands ("Brenda in "Judgement"), and ones who move her to tears, as in "The Hermit," where, after reading his cards, the author tenderly ventures to Harold--an old, hesitant man--that he had never genuinely known or given love (his sudden weeping confirms the suggestion), as well as an extraordinary card session from the early 2000's involving a group of friends, bound together by their shared enthusiasm for the intoxicating effects of poetry, the songs of Elliott Smith, and actual alcohol (although the author has chosen sobriety since the day she learned she was pregnant, 30+ years ago), whose readings yielded passion and hilarity, wild, impetuous creativity, and lessons about the power of intuition, with startling examples of tarot working through it ("The High Priestess").
Gordon-Bramer's writing is excellent. It is clear and workmanlike when laying out clients' stories and tarot details, but frequently enlivened by asides that propel the narrative at hand while providing endearing glimpses of the author's take on it. "I like slightly messy people with vulnerabilities and mistakes and occasionally lipstick on their teeth," and "He shrugged. My words rained on him lightly. Soon they evaporated and were forgotten." (pp. 69 and 117, respectively) are but two examples of this.
She is also a student/facilitator of A Course in Miracles, and cites nuggets from it to illustrate tarot-relevant points from time to time. (e.g. "There is only Love and Fear: And Fear does not exist.") In addition to ACIM, she pulls from other spiritual and intellectual sources she reveres, as a way to bring the nature of what she does and believes to the reader.
Helping to illuminate this are such eminent figures as Carl Jung, Pema Chodron, and Sylvia Plath (on whom Gordon-Bramer has written scholarly works, bringing to light the great poetess's own mystical interest in, and artistic incorporation of, the tarot).
The author also includes many useful sidebars throughout the book for aspiring tarot card readers. Gordon-Bramer's thoughtfulness, humor, and straight-up common sense shine through especially brightly in these boxed little gems. She is a mystic, but comes across as a refreshingly down-to-earth one.
In the end, it seems, tarot is best at reminding us of what we already know (The author basically states this on p. 178). I can vouch for this, having been gifted with a reading by Julia, who I am pleased to call a friend. Suffice it to say my agnostic mind was blown towards belief by the results of my reading by her. (I was like many who looked--and still look, sometimes--askance at what are considered to be "New Age" belief systems, to put it loosely. All I can say is: tarot seems, somehow, to work.) But we often don't realize we know these "already known" things because we so often won't reflect more deeply on our lives. The rather marvelous--in all senses of the word--thing about tarot seems to be that the cards, falling meaningfully, in some way magically, from the shuffled deck, so often seem to "know what's up" when they are turned up.
The stories in this volume are taken from journal entries, done over decades, made by the author, who jotted down notes about her card readings soon after the sessions had ended. She credits her husband, Tom, for suggesting they be made into a book. Julia Gordon-Bramer's excellent and endearing vocational and spiritual memoir of how tarot has deeply affected her life, and the lives of many of her clients (who are all, after all, being human, all of us), is a thought-provoking pleasure, and highly recommended.
P.S. For those who may prefer audio books, the author reads her own words for this one (and for her scholarly work "The Occult Sylvia Plath"). I have listened to much of the audio version of "Tarot Life Lessons," and the author's pleasant, energetic voice can profitably be understood even at 2x speed. However, she does throw in some fun little candy for the ear--a sung snippet of lyrics from The Sex Pistols here, a performance of respectful-but-respectable accents from "two ravishing Latinas who emigrated from Columbia" (p. 83) there, etc.--which are definitely worth hearing at regular speed!
There is Veronica, a wealthy older woman falling for a supposedly smitten-with-her "Facebook Admiral" across the seas, despite Julia pointing to "The Magician" card's primacy on the table, and the warning from a tarot-- and common sense--perspective that he very likely wants only to make her money disappear. (More specifically, it's the "Magician in reverse" card--the author does journeyman's work in helpfully explaining the many different card permutations that can occur.)
There is Jay, a young family friend who seems doomed to a heartbreakingly unfulfilled life for want of self-application. He is in "The Hangman" chapter, for being "continually in a state of dying but never dead." (p. 119). A "martyr awaiting enlightenment," or--as Coleridge said of Hamlet, one who is "continually resolving to do, yet [does] nothing but resolve." Procrastinators, if they can ever find the time for it, would do well to read this chapter...
Here we have Ifunanya ("Nani"), found in a chapter many might turn to first ("The Lovers"), a strikingly beautiful, accomplished, and wealthy woman from Nigeria, who nonetheless chronically looks for love from "narcissists, users, and abusers" (p. 82). The cards, and Gordon-Bramer's sympathetic but direct insights, showed these habitually unhealthy couplings traceable to the lingering malinfluence of Nani's violently cruel father. It is perhaps telling that Nani said she chose to consult the author after becoming familiar with her not only through interviews online, but also from Gordon-Bramer's published poetry. Nothing like poetry to glimpse a person's heart, and at the time of the chapter's writing, the two were still working together to continue improving the quality of love in Nani's life.
The reader will also find, in this skillfully woven memory quilt of tarot-infused parables, clients who test the author's Buddhist, We-are-all-One sensibilities with their exasperating demands ("Brenda in "Judgement"), and ones who move her to tears, as in "The Hermit," where, after reading his cards, the author tenderly ventures to Harold--an old, hesitant man--that he had never genuinely known or given love (his sudden weeping confirms the suggestion), as well as an extraordinary card session from the early 2000's involving a group of friends, bound together by their shared enthusiasm for the intoxicating effects of poetry, the songs of Elliott Smith, and actual alcohol (although the author has chosen sobriety since the day she learned she was pregnant, 30+ years ago), whose readings yielded passion and hilarity, wild, impetuous creativity, and lessons about the power of intuition, with startling examples of tarot working through it ("The High Priestess").
Gordon-Bramer's writing is excellent. It is clear and workmanlike when laying out clients' stories and tarot details, but frequently enlivened by asides that propel the narrative at hand while providing endearing glimpses of the author's take on it. "I like slightly messy people with vulnerabilities and mistakes and occasionally lipstick on their teeth," and "He shrugged. My words rained on him lightly. Soon they evaporated and were forgotten." (pp. 69 and 117, respectively) are but two examples of this.
She is also a student/facilitator of A Course in Miracles, and cites nuggets from it to illustrate tarot-relevant points from time to time. (e.g. "There is only Love and Fear: And Fear does not exist.") In addition to ACIM, she pulls from other spiritual and intellectual sources she reveres, as a way to bring the nature of what she does and believes to the reader.
Helping to illuminate this are such eminent figures as Carl Jung, Pema Chodron, and Sylvia Plath (on whom Gordon-Bramer has written scholarly works, bringing to light the great poetess's own mystical interest in, and artistic incorporation of, the tarot).
The author also includes many useful sidebars throughout the book for aspiring tarot card readers. Gordon-Bramer's thoughtfulness, humor, and straight-up common sense shine through especially brightly in these boxed little gems. She is a mystic, but comes across as a refreshingly down-to-earth one.
In the end, it seems, tarot is best at reminding us of what we already know (The author basically states this on p. 178). I can vouch for this, having been gifted with a reading by Julia, who I am pleased to call a friend. Suffice it to say my agnostic mind was blown towards belief by the results of my reading by her. (I was like many who looked--and still look, sometimes--askance at what are considered to be "New Age" belief systems, to put it loosely. All I can say is: tarot seems, somehow, to work.) But we often don't realize we know these "already known" things because we so often won't reflect more deeply on our lives. The rather marvelous--in all senses of the word--thing about tarot seems to be that the cards, falling meaningfully, in some way magically, from the shuffled deck, so often seem to "know what's up" when they are turned up.
The stories in this volume are taken from journal entries, done over decades, made by the author, who jotted down notes about her card readings soon after the sessions had ended. She credits her husband, Tom, for suggesting they be made into a book. Julia Gordon-Bramer's excellent and endearing vocational and spiritual memoir of how tarot has deeply affected her life, and the lives of many of her clients (who are all, after all, being human, all of us), is a thought-provoking pleasure, and highly recommended.
P.S. For those who may prefer audio books, the author reads her own words for this one (and for her scholarly work "The Occult Sylvia Plath"). I have listened to much of the audio version of "Tarot Life Lessons," and the author's pleasant, energetic voice can profitably be understood even at 2x speed. However, she does throw in some fun little candy for the ear--a sung snippet of lyrics from The Sex Pistols here, a performance of respectful-but-respectable accents from "two ravishing Latinas who emigrated from Columbia" (p. 83) there, etc.--which are definitely worth hearing at regular speed!
November 15, 2023
It’s in the Cards
In Tarot Life Lessons, Julia Gordon-Bramer deftly intertwines the complexities of Tarot with her personal experience.
You don’t need to know anything about Tarot to enjoy this book, but you will inevitably come away with some basic understanding and a new appreciation for the multifaceted interplay between Tarot reader and client.
Gordon-Bramer convincingly debunks the idea that Tarot is nothing more than a parlor game. When the cards are read with knowledge, honestly, empathy, and intuition, it is a powerful interplay between reader and client and can help reveal what has happened, what’s going on now, and what may be influencing your future.
Tarot Life Lessons is made all the more entertaining by Julia Gordon-Bramer’s powerful writing and her own deeply personal experience, and it’s well worth the ride.
In Tarot Life Lessons, Julia Gordon-Bramer deftly intertwines the complexities of Tarot with her personal experience.
You don’t need to know anything about Tarot to enjoy this book, but you will inevitably come away with some basic understanding and a new appreciation for the multifaceted interplay between Tarot reader and client.
Gordon-Bramer convincingly debunks the idea that Tarot is nothing more than a parlor game. When the cards are read with knowledge, honestly, empathy, and intuition, it is a powerful interplay between reader and client and can help reveal what has happened, what’s going on now, and what may be influencing your future.
Tarot Life Lessons is made all the more entertaining by Julia Gordon-Bramer’s powerful writing and her own deeply personal experience, and it’s well worth the ride.
July 5, 2025
I stumbled across this book when I was searching for books about tarot that went beyond giving another summary of how the cards work and a walkthrough of each card’s meaning. Julia Gordon-Bramer’s lovely book is essentially a collection of twenty-two essays, one for each card of the Major Arcana, which tell stories from her years of reading tarot. Each chapter/essay relates to the essence of a particular card, even if she also mentions others along the way. I loved getting an insight into Julia’s process and her interpretations of the cards, but in a way that was natural and practical rather than a rote paint-by-numbers description of the cards. I read this book over a few months, picking it up and reading about a few cards at a time, and that really allowed me to savor it. I would love to see another book from Julia with stories from the Minors.
April 14, 2025
This is a Fascinating tale of a gifted tarot reader working with people from all walks of life! I learned more about the tarot cards especially their symbolism.
August 21, 2025
This was incredibly enjoyable and I didn't want it to end!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews