78 days of #dropm78 with Terra Volatile

Thanks to a tarot friend, I was reintroduced to Esther Frienkel Tishman of Mindful Tarot’s #dropm78 — a daily tarot challenge that goes through an entire tarot deck your choosing by studying one card each day, from 15 October to 31 December.

Interestingly and unlike the traditional Golden Dawn order of suits, Esther instead chose this order based on a body-awareness practice. It begins with the ‘here-and-now’ Pentacles (dropping anchor), then moves to the engaging Wands (respond), then the receptive Cups (open), and then the discerning Swords (piercing through), followed by the Majors (manifest), hence the acronym Dropm78.

The goal of the challenge is to journal about the ‘3 Ds’ for each daily card. These are: definition, detail, and day. For seasoned participants, there’s an optional fourth D: discovery.

By doing this journaling and putting pen to paper (or keystrokes to a digital document), you’re essentially creating a stronger understanding for yourself about the tarot, and also contributing to your ever growing, ever changing personal tarot language. And if you’re also exploring the fourth D, you’re creating concrete, lived examples of these cards in your mind by tying them to life experiences, which is a wonderful way to really create new connections in your brain around persepctives and detail.

Can you tell I’m excited to participate? I love making new brain connections!

Typically first years are told to stick to using only one deck for the entirety of the Dropm78 challenge. Returning challengers are encouraged to include a second or third deck to help ‘calibrate’ their daily card from their main deck.

It’s my first year diving in, but I'm using two decks — hear me out, I have reasons.

Firstly, I've already watched 2 years of this challenge pass me by. It’s really time for me to make up for lost time.

Secondly, I’ve been waiting for a little something special to sink my teeth into with the decks I’ve chosen for the challenge. They were early purchases in my tarot collection, and it’s time for me to put them to great use. I’m using Terra Volatile by Creo quia Absurdum as my main deck and The Nameless One by ‎‪Xia Hunt as my calibration or companion deck. I’m so looking forward to diving into both of these decks and their accompanying books!

To kick things off, I’ve done a quick walkthrough of the deck. Skip to the five-minute mark if you only want to see the cards and not hear me waffle on about the challenge you’ve just read about :)

And lastly, I help to admin a very lovely Deep Dive Tarot and Oracle Study Facebook group and host a weekly one-card deep dive based on the Rider Waite Smith tarot system. We do exactly what this challenge does: Look at the definition. Dive into the detail. Apply the card to your question (for this challenge, replace question with your day), and then by seeing and discussing everyone else’s unique version of the same card, we discover new layers of meaning that we hadn’t previously seen or noticed in the card as a collective exercise.

I think I’ll be OK using two decks. I hope the narrator doesn’t turn around to say, “Dear readers, she was not, in fact, OK using two decks.”

As always, only time will tell! I’ll be posting my updates here, so please feel free to follow along :)