five of wands - enter the fray
I make it my daily routine to draw a Tarot card as soon as I awaken. It helps me find myself and consider what I want to bring to the day. Sometimes it’s a lovely ritual, and sometimes it’s annoying—especially when I feel haunted by particular cards.
For example, lately it feels like I draw the Five of Wands all the time. I’ve learned to understand this card as an experience of contraction—feeling attacked, paranoid, or anxious. Emphasis on feeling—this card isn’t about what’s “really” happening, but about the inner experience of conflict.
In a grander sense, life is full of contractions and expansions. Our hearts beat, our lungs breathe, the sodium-chloride channels in our brains open and close to allow neurotransmitters to flow. When rhythms like these stop, things die.
But I hate contraction. Not that anyone likes it, but I resist it tooth and nail. I fight the fighting depicted in the card.
A Breath-Holding Exercise
When I was learning Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), I encountered an exercise:
Hold your breath while looking at a stopwatch.
Just when you think you can’t do it anymore, push yourself five more seconds.
When I tried it, I wanted to give up at 30 seconds, but I made it to 50—with great emotional duress.
The irony? I used an example of lung expansion to illustrate my issues with contraction. The exercise made me panic. I nearly hyperventilated afterwards, like air had been stolen from me and I needed to steal it back before it was gone forever.
The point, of course, was to show that we can do more than we think we can. That sometimes, instead of rushing into action, we’re asked to hold. To be still.
That’s also the point of this card.
The Inner Conflict
Looking deeper: what are the common sources of my soul contractions?
In most versions of the card, you see five figures holding five wands. They’re dressed differently, suggesting different roles or energies. It’s tempting to externalize: jobs, societal pressures, climate change, oppression, tyranny. These are real. But the card asks us to look inward—at the competing energies within.
Every human contains multitudes shaped by countless factors. For me, the dominant energy is survival mode. That part of me is practical, proactive, high-functioning under stress. I pick up the slack when others can’t.
I’ve emotionally set myself on fire to keep others warm.
It’s a theme in these writings and in my ancestry, one I’ll continue to explore. For the longest time, I believed this was all I was—that I was doomed to repeat my mother’s life, and the disaffected lives of my ancestors.
As Jung said:
“That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.” (CW 9i, para. 126)
And there has been nothing short of a rebellion into consciousness from the parts of me once relegated to the shadows, told: “Someday.” “Not now.” “Maybe after I accomplish [x].”
They’ve brought their sticks out.
Expansion Through Contraction
As I’ve been swatted around by my inner energies and outer events, I’ve realized something:
What I’m most afraid of is not contraction itself—
but the inevitable expansion that follows it.
The Five of Wands demands that I let the fray play out.
