BTP53: Creating Constructive Inner Energy with Carrie Mallon

>>Download the Free PDF: Creating Constructive Inner Energy with Carrie Mallon

Have you ever found yourself stuck in a rut, doing something that isn’t serving you without a clue how to change? Perhaps you’re in a relationship that has become dull and disconnected. Maybe your eating habits have gone astray and your health has suffered. Or, maybe you’ve found yourself chained to your mobile devices, eagerly awaiting the next notification but disconnecting from the real world around you.

Well, did you know that you can also use the Tarot to turn that destructive energy into something more constructive?

In this podcast, I invite special guest Carrie Mallon to share her Tarot technique for discovering destructive behaviors – and replacing them with constructive energy – to create your best life.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• What constructive energy vs. unconstructive energy really means
• How to identify your unconstructive patterns
• Techniques for using Tarot and journaling to spark behavior change
• How to make the change last
• Carrie’s real life example to show how the technique works in action

Additional Resources:

• Carrie Mallon
• Carrie Mallon on Instagram
• Download my free Workbook: 5 Simple Steps to Read Tarot with Confidence

Podcast Transcript

Brigit: You’re listening to the Biddy Tarot Podcast, and this is Episode 53: Creating Constructive Inner Energy with Carrie Mallon.

Welcome to the Biddy Tarot Podcast, where you'll learn to connect more deeply with your intuition and live an empowered and enlightened life with the Tarot cards as your guide.

Listen as Brigit and her guests share their very best tips and strategies to help you read Tarot with confidence.

And now here's your host, Brigit Esselmont.

CREATING CONSTRUCTIVE INNER ENERGY

Brigit: Hello and welcome back to the Biddy Tarot Podcast. As always, I’m super excited to have you here to be talking about Tarot.

Have you ever found yourself stuck in a rut, doing something that you know isn’t serving you, without a clue how to change things for the better? Perhaps you’re in a relationship that has become dull and disconnected. Maybe your eating habits have gone astray and your health has suffered. Or, maybe you’ve found yourself chained to your mobile devices, eagerly awaiting the next notification but disconnecting from the real world around you.

Well, did you know that you can also use the Tarot in a really beautiful way to turn that destructive energy into something more constructive?

In this podcast, I invite special guest Carrie Mallon to share her personal technique for discovering your destructive behaviors and replacing them with more constructive energy to create the life that you most want to live.

Carrie is a Tarot reader, blogger, and Instagram-er; she has a modern, practical way of working with the Tarot cards, and she shares her fresh perspectives at her website: www.carriemallon.com. I’m so excited to have Carrie here today. Welcome, Carrie!

BRIGIT: Welcome Carrie! It’s my pleasure to have you on the Biddy Tarot Podcast!

CARRIE: Thank you so much, Brigit. It is my pleasure as well, I’m very excited to be here.

BRIGIT: What has been your journey with Tarot? And how did you come to find it?

CARRIE: As the story goes, I was in a phase of my life that I now somewhat jokingly refer to as my quarter-life crisis. But that really is what it felt like. I had finished college, and I took all the steps in life that I thought I was supposed to do. I got a degree, a corporate job, but I was feeling inner dissatisfaction. I was feeling this craving for something more meaningful in my life and I couldn’t really pinpoint what that was or what to do about it.

And then one day I really, truly just woke up and thought, “I want to get a Tarot deck.” I was aware of Tarot at that point. A friend who was quite into the cards used to do readings for me back in college, so it had always been in the peripheral of my awareness. But one day, during this quarter-life crisis, I just thought, “This feels like what I want to do next.”

So I did. So I got a Tarot deck and I kind of slowly started reading some books and kind of forming my own relationship with the cards. And as I did, all of these images and archetypes in the cards started truly clicking within me. And they helped me make sense of a lot of things that were going on within me. They helped me find that meaning, and that magic, and that ‘something deeper’ that I craved. It was just this wonderful thing and I never looked back from there.

BRIGIT: Wonderful. And did I hear a rumor that you may have met your husband because of Tarot?

CARRIE: No! If you’ve read the about page on my website…I mention meeting my husband. It wasn’t directly because of Tarot, but it was directly because of my intuition. It’s a long story, I won’t go deeply into it, but I’ll tell you the short version.

Just like I had that intuitive hunch one day to get a Tarot deck… I’ve never tried to purposely meet anyone through online dating, but one day I came across a dating profile by complete accident. It’s a very long story. I wasn’t even on the dating site, this is how strange it was. And I thought to myself, “I need to message this person.” So it was completely out of character for me; I wasn’t even registered with the site. I wasn’t even looking for the profile. I did message him, and events transpired and he is now my husband. So it was an intuitive thing, very similar.

BRIGIT: I love it. And what a good affirmation for listening to intuition and seeing that pay off.

CARRIE: Exactly.

BRIGIT: These days, how are you using Tarot in your life, both personally and professionally?

CARRIE: Professionally, it’s what I do. I offer readings and I blog, so it’s very much part of what I do professionally. And personally, I do things that I think probably a lot of Tarot-type folks do. Almost every day I do a daily draw for myself and look at the energies for the day. Then I use the cards in all kinds of other ways in my personal life. I use them as writing prompts, as blogging prompts, for problem-solving, and for solving creative blocks. It’s a tool that I use for all areas of my life.

BRIGIT: Wonderful. Again, I always keep saying this – Tarot is so beautiful when it’s integrated with your everyday life. It’s good to hear that it’s integrated into your everyday life as well.

And I’m just recalling from reading your ‘about page’ that you left your corporate life, right? …To become a Tarot reader. Tell me a little bit about that.

CARRIE: The image that pops into my mind is the Fool because it was definitely a leap of faith. There was a lot of planning and strategy that went into it. Ultimately it was stepping out into the unknown and thinking, “I don’t really know what’s going to happen, but I feel like this is the right move for me to make right now.”

That was a few years after the story I initially told you about how I got into the cards and how they helped me navigate the quarter-life crisis. I reached a point where I thought, “You know what? I think maybe the next step for me is to create a business around this. Because I’ve seen how these cards have helped me transform myself, and I think that I have something to give other people to help them with their transformations.”

BRIGIT: It’s such a leap of faith to leave behind a “traditional job” to do Tarot. Did people think that you were nuts, or…?

CARRIE: Some people. Frankly, I was one of them to some extent. The level of fear was competing very closely with the level of excitement, to be completely honest. It was very exciting, but it’s definitely not something that’s advisable for everyone because I essentially didn’t have a bridge. Which is the thing that’s probably more wise to do in most cases. Keep the corporate job and build up the business at the side. I didn’t have that bridge. But I did try to create a safety net for myself. I tried to be very aware of the worst-case scenario and how to navigate it. I planned with savings, but yeah, some people were a bit wide-eyed about it, to say the least. It was a scary thing, but I wouldn’t change anything. It’s been quite the adventure, that’s for sure.

BRIGIT: Awesome. Today you wanted to share about the concept of constructive energy with the Tarot, so tell me, what is constructive energy? What does that mean for you?

CARRIE: I was purposeful in the wording. What I’m going to be talking about today is creating constructive inner energy; moving out of what I call unconstructive inner energy. I like the term constructive versus the term positive, for example, because when I think about constructive inner energy, I think about things that are helpful. I think about things that are geared towards expansion, geared towards growth, geared towards learning lessons. So constructive energy to me is energy that is serving a useful purpose, whereas, unconstructive energy would be the inner energy that drags you down and isn’t giving you any kind of fuel to propel yourself forward.

BRIGIT: I appreciate that difference between positive and negative for example, because there can still be light and shade with positive and there can still be light and shade with negative. Whereas constructive is probably dealing more with the balance of things, and is it in your highest good? Would that be fair?

CARRIE: I think so, because sometimes there are energies within us that we might be quick to label as “negative”. I think criticism is a good example of something that maybe in some instances can be quite negative, but on the other hand, criticism can be very constructive. It just depends how it’s directed. So that’s why I like the term constructive instead of positive or negative.

BRIGIT: Absolutely. So tell me, what’s constructive and what’s unconstructive energy?

CARRIE: Ooh, that’s such a good question. I think a lot of it comes down to our deepest wisdom. Going beyond even what our ego tells us, what our ego’s idea of what is constructive and what is unconstructive; going into what is deep within us. So I think, to some extent, this concept really appeals to people like us, and people listening, who are already in tune with their own deep wisdom. Maybe have already gained some knowledge about what is constructive for them. But I think it certainly requires kind of going into something more holistic within you and really sitting with what constructive actually means for you.

BRIGIT: And you’ve got an activity that can help you decide difference?

I’d love for you to share that with us, because I’ve been privileged to have had a little sneak peek, and I think it’s wonderful.

CARRIE: Absolutely. So, the goal of this exercise, or this process, is to identify your unconstructive inner energy and then look at what you can do to transform it into constructive inner energy. So this process is really good for giving you a way to anchor your intentions. And it asks you to take real action, energetic action, so to speak. So I’ve designed this to be kind of open-ended, so if people are listening and feel like they want to take what I’ve outlined and tailor it to themselves, obviously I think that’s wonderful. But I’ll tell you how I’ve outlined the process and how it works for me.

The first thing that I do is journal. I’m huge on journaling. This is related to what you were asking me about a moment ago, how to know what’s unconstructive and constructive – journaling is a good way to get you into that headspace to dive within yourself. So the first step is to journal about what unconstructive inner energies you’ve been experiencing lately. So, examples of prompting questions for that would be:

• What are these energies?
• How do they feel?
• How have they been actually manifesting in your life?
• How have they hindered you?
• Why do you see them as unconstructive?

And then, from there, we journal about the constructive inner energies that we intend to invite in. Some questions spark that kind of soul-diving would be:

• What new perspectives do you need?
• What viewpoints do you sense, on a deep level, will help you expand?
• What energy would serve your highest good?

The we look at the gap between the two. This is really important; we're looking at your bridge. Journal about some steps that you could take to start closing the gap between what’s happening now with the unconstructive energy to move into constructive energy. This is open-ended, but think about what new perspectives you need, what actions you can take, and what mindset shifts can you make.

BRIGIT: Do you have an example? Are you brave enough to share a personal example or a hypothetical example? What kinds of things might come up, say, in unconstructive? And do you need to set a context? Do you need to say, “All right, my goal is I want to lose weight,” or something, so then I’m going to think about unconstructive and constructive energy.” Or, are we looking at this more broadly?

CARRIE: I’m glad you asked, because I think you could do it either way. The way that I’ve done this for myself was a little more broad, but, of course, specificity often leads to the best results. So I think if somebody did want to frame it around something really specific like weight loss, that would be useful. I was already aware of two main unconstructive behavior patterns that I had going on. So that’s what I did; it’s still somewhat specific in the way that I outlined it, but I think you could nail it down even further.

BRIGIT: Would you be happy to share one of those unconstructive patterns?

CARRIE: Sure! It makes me feel a little vulnerable because I’m still… I’ve been actually doing this process for myself pretty intensely for a couple of weeks and I’m seeing the difference it’s making. But it’s still in that “bubbling” phase where I’m doing the work.

I’m currently working on technology addiction.

BRIGIT: Oh my gosh, I have that too.

CARRIE: Oh goodness. It’s a big thing in our world. When your little notifications go up, you want to look at it right now, and then you get distracted from what’s actually important. So that is a specific habit that I have been trying to work through with this exercise.

BRIGIT: What kind of unconstructive energies have you identified that are linked to this technology addiction?

CARRIE: I find that I’m often in reactionary mode instead of action mode. Instead of being very mindful and choosing what I’m focusing on in this moment, it’s kind of like, “Oh, ding, a text went off! Oh, ding, there’s an email!” It’s reacting to things in the moment instead of stepping back and doing things one thing at a time and being more focused.

BRIGIT: Excellent. As you were identifying that unconstructive behavior, you’re almost, at the same time, identifying the constructive behavior that you wish to put in place, because it’s opposite, effectively, right?

CARRIE: Yeah, I think in a lot of cases it really is.

BRIGIT: I think this is such a good example to work through because I’m sure so many people can relate.

I’m the same. I keep looking at my phone thinking, “Oh, come on, this shouldn’t be in my hand anymore, go away!” And it’s still there.

So then you’ve identified your unconstructive and your constructive. What was the bridge you saw to help you go from reactive to more conscious and mindful behavior?

CARRIE: I’ll get to this part in a moment when I keep going through the actual steps with the exercise. But one of my bridge cards that I chose for myself is the Strength card, because when I look at Strength, I don’t see someone in reactionary mode, I see someone who is handling what she needs to handle but doing it with grace and dignity and being very present with the task that she is currently working through.

BRIGIT: Fabulous, so tell us then how we integrate Tarot to help us with this process.

CARRIE: It is a face-up Tarot exercise, so it’s a little bit different than doing a traditional spread where you’re, like, shuffling and laying things face-down.

After you’ve journaled, you might be getting some ideas. “Oh, this card would kind of fit in here,” etc. Get your Tarot deck and just start going through your cards face-up, and loosely and intuitively being the key, start dividing them into three piles. Not every single card, but just kind of pulling out random cards that you feel fit for this exercise. And your three piles, of course, will be cards that show, or represent to you, what your unconstructive energy has looked like, cards that show what your bridge might look like, and then cards that show what you want that constructive energy to look like. So when I did this for myself I first ended up with maybe five or so cards in each pile, but I wanted to get it down to something a little more manageable, so I went back to my journaling and narrowed it down to about three cards for each pile.

BRIGIT: So what cards did you choose for the unconstructive behavior with the technology addiction?

CARRIE: For the unconstructive behavior with technology addiction, I chose the seven of wands from the Rider-Waite, because something about the way he’s in this stance of looking so reactionary and looking like he’s just dealing with things as they come up and being almost frantic about it. That felt like my unconstructive energy around technology.

BRIGIT: Actually, what I’m thinking here, too, is you’ll consciously choose that card, and then you can look at that card and you’ll probably find even more aspects within it that start to uncover some of your unconscious awareness around the issue. Did you find that happening as well?

CARRIE: Absolutely. In fact, I ended up adding another thing to the exercise. After I had narrowed down my piles and had the cards that I chose for this exercise, then I did some more journaling, and I wrote about, why I picked the card and what it represents.

But then – and I think is a really powerful way to do this exercise – I’ve actually left the cards out. So I actually had them sitting in my office for a couple of weeks since I first did this for myself, and as I look at them and remember this process, new insights keep coming to me that I didn’t even think of when I first did the exercise.

BRIGIT: This comes back to Tarot being an awesome tool for connecting your intuition and your unconscious mind, as well, and just having that visual stimulus to connect in at that deeper level. I’m sure it brings up things that you might not have been aware of before.

CARRIE: Exactly.

BRIGIT: What did you choose for the constructive energy for this situation?

CARRIE: I chose the Queen of Pentacles. I suppose now even thinking about it I’m wondering if I could have switched those, you know? The Queen of Pentacles could have been the bridge and Strength could have been the constructive energy. But I chose the Queen of Pentacles because she speaks to me as a businesswoman and someone who’s very grounded in reality. She’s very good at concretely accomplishing what she needs to do in the here and now. Whereas I think Strength, as the Major Arcana is a little more archetypical, or the more ethereal energy. It shows me what this constructive inner energy is actually going to look like in my daily life.

BRIGIT: And I’m sure that’s embedding and reaffirming what you want even more because not only have you got the concept and the words around it, you’ve also got a picture around it. Maybe every time you look at your iPhone and it’s going “Ping!” you also bring up that image of either the Strength card or the Queen of Pentacles and she pops into your mind, “Oh, this is not really what the Strength card would do, is it?”

CARRIE: Exactly. You just gave me a great idea which is that I should put that card as my phone background.

BRIGIT: So powerful. So, is that the process end-to-end or is there anything else that you add?

CARRIE: There are a couple of last things that I suggest adding to stay anchored to the intention.

If you can leave your cards out so you can refer back to them, try to spend about five minutes a day just looking at the cards and then meditating on them. That keeps the imagery fresh in the mind. And then I’ve also been trying to do five minutes or even less of journaling every day about how it’s looking, how my energy is transforming, where I’m getting stuck, what I want to work on next. I think those are simple ways the journaling and meditation ensure that it’s more than just laying out the cards and forgetting about them. It’s really working with them daily to go through that process.

BRIGIT: I think that’s really important. Because, we’re probably both guilty of this, but how many times have you just done, like, a quick Tarot reading and you pop out the cards and say, “Oop, there it is! Okay, yep, done, move on. It’s all fixed now.”

CARRIE: Yeah.

BRIGIT: It does take so much more, work if you want to see real change and transformation, which this is all about. Having that daily connection can really help.

CARRIE: Exactly. What you just said ties into one of the last things I wanted to say about the exercise which is that I think it’s important to be gentle with yourself about the fact that making the constructive energy into your ‘new normal’ is a process. It’s not always easy. It’s something that you’re going to have to keep redirecting because sometimes there are backslides, or there are moments where you’re on the phone thinking, “What am I doing? This is not what I’m supposed to be moving into!” So I think it’s good to keep affirming to yourself and being gentle with yourself. Just repointing yourself towards where you want to go.

BRIGIT: Absolutely, because we do all make little slipups along the way and it’s a choice as to whether you’re going to let that slipup be the complete derailment, or if you just think, “Okay, that wasn’t so good, moving on. One day at a time!”

Awesome. We’re going to be creating a handy PDF handout, so if you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “Yep, I really, really want to do this,” we’re going to give you a nice, simple tool that’s got all of the instructions of how to do it. So you’ll find that at biddytarot.com/53, and of course, you’ll also find the show notes and the transcript and all the other good stuff!

And just reflecting on this technique overall, what’s really lovely is how it’s using the Tarot cards. It’s moving away from Tarot as predicting the future or fortune-telling. Is this the way that you tend to use the cards? Like more in a self-help, personal development or goal manifestation use. Is that how you tend to use the Tarot?

CARRIE: Absolutely. I describe it as Tarot for self-discovery. I really like the way that sounds, so I think most of what I do is really about getting to know yourself in a deeper level and realizing that you get to spend this wonderful lifetime with yourself, so you might as well have the pleasure of learning about what that means and finding out how you can become the most magical version of yourself.

Well, I can’t believe that we’re almost at the end of today’s conversation. It’s been so much fun and I think such a positive and unique way of working with the Tarot cards. Where can people find out more about you?

CARRIE: My website is: www.carriemallon.com.

BRIGIT: You’ve also got a few videos on YouTube, as well, right?

CARRIE: I do. It’s www.youtube.com/carriemallon. Same as the website. I’m really active on Instagram as well. I’m @carriemallon on Instagram. I’m all over the internet.

BRIGIT: Smart lady. We’ll make sure we have those links at biddytarot.com/53 so you can connect with Carrie. Thank you so much for being with us today on the Biddy Tarot Podcast, I really appreciate it and I’m sure our listeners absolutely appreciate it as well.

CARRIE: You’re very welcome! Thank you, as well, it was wonderful.

BRIGIT: Alright, see you. Bye!

CARRIE: Bye!

Brigit: So there you have it, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Carrie Mellon today. I just love the technique that she shared with us. It is so down-to-earth and a really positive constructive way of using the Tarot for self-discovery and personal insight, I think it's really where the Tarot begins to shine.

If you enjoyed today's interview with Carrie, then you're really going to enjoy my free workbook which is the Five Simple Steps to Read Tarot with Confidence. These are five easy, practical steps that you can use straight away to help build your connection with the Tarot and really learn how to use it in ways that serve you. To download that head over to biddytarot.com/53 and instant access to the workbook.

As always it's been such a joy to speak with you and to be in your little earbuds talking about Tarot. I look forward to connecting again very, very soon. Goodbye for now.

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