tarot – Allan Johnson, PhD

Henry Moore’s sculptures don’t have an obvious purpose or meaning. I found myself thinking at the recent exhibition of his monumental work at Kew Gardens, where I went to celebrate my partner’s birthday. We had just made it through the hottest May on record in the UK, but the weather was now colder and threatening to rain. I found myself standing in front of one of Moore’s reclining figures for quite a long time because it seemed to reward simple attention. It simply occupied space in a way that encouraged me to do the same.

That experience stayed with me, perhaps because it arrived during a period that has been unusually rich in encounters with things that don’t fit neatly into the categories through which contemporary culture often understands value. In short, I’ve been busy lately. Recently, I attended the centenary conference at University College London celebrating the 1926 publication of Lolly Willowes. Then, a week later, I found myself in Canterbury attending a tarot conference. Very different events, but both revolve around forms of meaning that require patience.

We live in a culture that has become remarkably efficient at extracting value from experience. Experiences are no longer allowed simply to be experiences. They must become content, products, strategies, frameworks, or outcomes. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that ours is increasingly an achievement society, one in which human beings become entrepreneurs of themselves, constantly converting every aspect of life into a project. I think he is onto something. Increasingly, it feels as though we struggle to encounter anything without simultaneously asking what can be done with it. Yet some of the most important dimensions of human life seem to operate according to a different rhythm altogether.

One of the reasons Lolly Willowes continues to fascinate readers a century after its publication is that it refuses to reduce itself to a single meaning. Every time I return to it, I find a different book waiting for me–is the Devil real or is it a figment of Laura’s imagination? The psychologist James Hillman once suggested that modern culture has become overly attached to explanations when it might be better served by images. An explanation closes a question. An image keeps it alive. I’ve been turning that idea over in my mind ever since.

Perhaps this is why I find myself increasingly drawn to practices that create space for uncertainty rather than rushing to eliminate it. Much of my coaching work involves helping people navigate periods of transition, and one of the things I encounter repeatedly is the assumption that uncertainty itself is a problem. People arrive wanting clarity, certainty, and direction. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. More often, however, what is required is the capacity to remain with a question long enough for a deeper answer to emerge.

We don’t talk enough about incubation. We celebrate breakthroughs, decisions, launches, and achievements, but far less attention is given to the long periods during which meaning slowly accumulates beneath the surface. Yet anyone who has written a book, developed a creative practice, changed careers, navigated grief, or undergone a significant personal transformation knows that the visible outcome is usually the final stage of a much longer process.

And I suspect many of us are carrying experiences whose significance we do not yet fully understand. Books that have affected us in ways we cannot articulate. Conversations that continue to echo years later. Encounters with art, landscapes, ideas, or people that seem somehow unfinished. We are often encouraged to resolve these experiences quickly, but perhaps some of them are not asking for resolution. Perhaps they are asking for companionship.

As I write this, summer is beginning to gather momentum. The temptation at this time of year is always to focus on goals, plans, projects, and ambitions. There is nothing wrong with any of those things. But I also find myself wondering what might happen if we gave equal attention to the slower work of reflection. What might emerge if we allowed experiences to become part of us before demanding that they become useful?

If these reflections resonate with you, I’d love to invite you into some of the upcoming events I’m hosting over the summer. Each, in its own way, is designed to create room for exactly the kinds of conversations and explorations I’ve been describing here. And if you find yourself at a significant threshold in your own life or work, I continue to offer one-to-one coaching for creatives, academics, practitioners, and thoughtful people navigating periods of transition.

Perhaps the most radical thing we can do in a culture obsessed with output is occasionally refuse to rush. To allow a question to remain open. To spend an afternoon with a sculpture. To sit with a symbol. To reread a novel. To trust.

Upcoming Events

Inner Alchemy: Practices for the New Season of You

Thursday 11 June | 8.00-9.00pm UK time | Free

As the seasons shift, so do we. This free workshop explores practical and contemplative approaches to navigating periods of personal transition with greater awareness and intention.

Returning to Yourself: A 4-Week Journaling Circle for Creatives

Mondays 7.30-9.00pm UK time beginning 15 June | £60

A month-long guided journey into reflective writing, self-discovery, and creative renewal. Together we’ll use journaling practices to reconnect with what matters most and cultivate greater clarity, depth, and presence.

The Symbolic Imagination: Tarot for Writers, Artists, & Creatives

Wednesday 8 July | 7.00-9.00pm UK time | £15

An exploration of tarot as a creative and symbolic tool. Ideal for writers, artists, coaches, facilitators, and anyone interested in working more consciously with imagination, archetype, and symbolic thinking.

One-to-One Coaching

I also offer individual coaching for academics, creatives, spiritual seekers, and professionals navigating transitions, creative blocks, questions of purpose, or significant life changes. If you’d like dedicated support in exploring what is emerging in your life and work, get in touch and I’d be delighted to discuss how we might work together.

Book your FREE Clarity Call to discuss ongoing 1-1 coaching:

Creativity Coaching

I left a tarot workshop yesterday with an insight that was startlingly clear: I spend a great deal of time living in the future. Card after card suggested anticipation, projection, preparation, movement toward what comes next.

The irony was not lost on me. Present-moment awareness — mindfulness, contemplative attention, the cultivation of presence — sits at the centre of my teaching and much of my writing. I talk frequently about inhabiting experience rather than managing it, about learning to notice rather than constantly optimise. And yet, as anyone who works in this space knows, the practical reality of such work involves a surprising amount of future-thinking: planning programmes, designing workshops, mapping trajectories, building structures that do not yet exist.

At the moment my notebooks are full of precisely this energy: outlines for new offerings, teaching plans, lists of ideas, and preparations for the opening this Spring of my new online community space, Innerworks (more on this very soon). All meaningful, all exciting — and all subtly orienting attention toward what is not yet here.

The cards were not criticising ambition or creativity. They were pointing to something more delicate: the ease with which we begin to live ahead of ourselves.

Psychologists sometimes describe this as time orientation — the habitual direction in which our attention leans. In The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd argue that individuals tend toward past-, present-, or future-oriented modes of living, each with advantages and distortions. Future orientation, often celebrated in productivity culture, enables planning, discipline, and achievement. But pushed too far, it produces a life experienced primarily as preparation.

Philosophers have long recognised this tendency. Martin Heidegger described modern existence as characterised by projection — the self constantly thrown forward into possibilities. Henri Bergson distinguished between measurable clock time and lived duration, reminding us that real experience unfolds qualitatively, not as a sequence of tasks awaiting completion.

There is a peculiar paradox when presence becomes one’s professional field. Teaching mindfulness, creativity, or contemplative practice requires organisation. Workshops must be scheduled. Communities must be built. Emails must be sent. Ideas must become structures.

The work of helping others arrive in the present inevitably involves calendars. Over the past months, as I’ve been developing new programmes and thinking carefully about how to support creative and reflective communities more deeply, I’ve noticed how easily meaningful planning slides into subtle deferral. The mind begins narrating life as a sequence of upcoming thresholds:

Once this launches.
Once this settles.
Once this next phase begins.

The tarot workshop simply named what I already half knew: I had begun relating to the present primarily as a staging area. And the strange thing is that the more meaningful the work becomes, the easier this trap is to fall into. Purpose intensifies projection.

This weekend my partner and I visited the Orchid Festival at Kew Gardens — its 30th anniversary this year, and something that has become part of our late-winter rhythm. It is, objectively speaking, an exercise in logistical patience. Timed tickets, queues, dense crowds moving slowly through glasshouses thick with humidity and colour.

And yet something happens once you are inside. Orchids have an almost unreasonable beauty. Shapes that seem designed rather than grown. Colours that look improbable even while directly in front of you. People shuffle forward, phones lifted, conversations softening. Despite the press of bodies, time loosens.

Standing there — surrounded by impossible blooms and sharing the experience with someone I love — I noticed a rare stillness. Nothing needed to happen next. The present moment was sufficient.

The trap of living elsewhere is subtle because it disguises itself as responsibility. We believe we are being diligent, visionary, prepared. And often we are. The future matters. Planning matters. But presence is not opposed to planning; it is what prevents planning from becoming exile. The challenge, then, is not abandoning future-thinking but returning, repeatedly, to lived immediacy.

This insight has shaped how I’m approaching my upcoming workshops. Increasingly, I see creativity itself as a form of time practice — a way of restoring balance between imagination and presence.

Creative work asks us to plan and to surrender, to envision and to attend. Writing, especially, teaches patience with unfolding. You cannot inhabit a sentence that you are already trying to finish.

That’s partly why I’m so excited about the programmes beginning this March. They are designed not simply as skill-building spaces but as environments where people can rediscover a different relationship to time that supports both aspiration and groundedness.

If this reflection resonates, you might consider joining:

5 Days of Creative Abundance
9–13 March | 7.30–8.00 PM GMT | £29
A short, gentle immersion designed to reset creative momentum and reconnect with possibility through small daily practices.
Register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313206797/

The Writer’s Flow Circle: A 12-Week Group Coaching Circle
Beginning Monday 23 March | 7.30–9.00 PM UK time | £180
A sustained space for writers seeking structure, accountability, and deeper alignment with their creative rhythms.
Register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313207235/

Both, in different ways, are invitations to stop postponing creative life until conditions feel perfect.

The lesson from yesterday’s tarot spread was not that I should stop imagining the future. It was simply a reminder to visit the present more often — to stop treating it as a corridor leading elsewhere. Presence is not a permanent achievement. It is a practice of return. And perhaps that is why moments like the Orchid Festival linger: they reveal that life is not waiting for us at the end of our plans. It appears briefly, vividly, whenever attention and experience coincide.

The future will arrive soon enough. In the meantime, there is always this moment.

Tag: tarot

The Importance of Reflection: Navigating Life’s Transitions

Upcoming Events

Inner Alchemy: Practices for the New Season of You

Returning to Yourself: A 4-Week Journaling Circle for Creatives

The Symbolic Imagination: Tarot for Writers, Artists, & Creatives

One-to-One Coaching

Time Orientation and the Trap of Living Elsewhere