TdM Haiku

[Joan Marie]

Welcome to our latest experiment.

In this thread we will attempt to compose Haiku using a draw of 3 cards from the Tarot de Marseille.

(fyi- there is another thread called Tarot Haiku where you can use any deck you like. It’s lots of fun and you can find it at: https://www.cultoftarotforum.com/viewto ... =184&t=952 )

A Haiku is a 3-line poem that adheres to a strict number of syllables per line, namely 5-7-5.

It is recommended that we stick with the TdM majors for this, although if you are comfortable with the court cards and pips feel free if you think they will lend well to this.

The trick is to pick up very clear motifs shared by 2 or more cards. That is the "loose brick in the wall" that initiates more complex readings with the TdM - a striking visual coincidence on which you can build more elaborate ideas. I think the tight form forces us to keep the imagery as concrete as possible. No room for explanations or elaborate interpretations of symbols. Objects/events/details have to stand alone in the poem. It should be a good demonstration of what Enrique Enriquez says about the inbuilt metaphorical power of analogy.

You can disregard any books on the meanings of cards. They will be of little to no use here. This exercise is meant to stretch your ability to focus on the visual facts you see before you, to let the images on the cards speak to each other. The TdM is especially great for this kind of reading because of the repeated motifs in the cards. They do speak to each other. That's what makes the TdM so unique.

ANYONE looking at your haiku should be able understand the connections you are making, even without any background in the tarot.

If you can, please post an image of the cards you drew although we kind of all know what the TdM cards look like so it isn’t absolutely necessary, but it could be helpful.

Also, please feel free, in fact you are highly encouraged, to make your own Haiku from someone else’s draw. The TdM Majors are deceptively rich and riffing off each other’s haikus can be a lot of fun and also a great learning experience.

Remember, this is poetry, there are no wrong answers, however, that doesn’t mean there aren’t skills here to use and develop.

Most importantly, have fun with it.

Let’s go!

[Joan Marie]

I'll try the first one and say up front I am really rusty although I did take a kind of 30-day course with Enrique Enriquez almost a year ago. It'll be fun to get my feet wet again with this deck and see if I can't get back some dexterity with it. I know I'm not the only one.

I know there are several of you out there who are quite versed in the TdM and I hope you'll have a go at this and/or comment.

So here goes:

1st try
Preoccupation
It's focus or distraction
Are you in or out?

*********
2nd try
Wildness tempers
and becomes contemplative
A lot was learned there

[dodalisque]

So here goes:

Devil / Hermit / Empress

An auspicious beginning, JM. Very brave to acknowledge all 3 cards and to use one line per card moving left to right. And the content even relates to the launch of the new thread. I think that's the Madenie deck by Yves Reynaud, right. How about:

Haiku: the two imps
Are both five syllables tall
The Devil seven

or,

Hermit and Empress
Avoid our gaze - the Devil
Is pleased to see us

or,

The Hermit's lantern
Glows with light. The Devil's torch!
He caged his demons.

or,

Angel wings of white
Once dark like those of a bat
Sprout from her shoulders

[Joan Marie]

An auspicious beginning, JM. Very brave to acknowledge all 3 cards and even to use one line per card moving left to right. And the content even relates to the launch of the new thread. I think that's the Madenie deck by Yves Reynaud, right. How about:

That's so funny, because I didn't even think of the Haiku as relating to the launch of the thread until you said it and now it seems so clear!

I don't think I was reading left to right though, but it is hard to tell.

Looking forward to more of these! And yes, it is the Madenie deck from Yves. Just beautiful.

[Joan Marie]

And the content even relates to the launch of the new thread.

When I took the course from EE (Enrique Enriquez) part of the method he used was to NOT have a question in mind when drawing and interpreting the cards.

I found this very difficult especially at the beginning. Without any direction to give to my thoughts it felt like the 3 cards were just staring back at me. I was getting nothing. Then the challenge was to not just project something onto the cards but to draw something from them.

EE seemed to have a certain contempt for most tarot queries. Not all, but most. I find myself that often the question being asked is too superficial, that the querent needs to dig a little (or a lot) deeper to get at what they really want/need to know. But to approach a reading with no question at all in mind is a real challenge and I think this activity of using the cards to write a Haiku is a very effective way to exercise those reading muscles.

That my first reading here actually in some way related to the situation at hand is real proof of the magical validity of EE's approach.

[Joan Marie]

Ideas are forming
For your consideration
They are your power

(I'm not crazy about this one- I feel like I'm falling into something less than poetic- But I'm not going to delete it just because I'm a little embarassed of it. )

[dodalisque]

Ideas are forming
For your consideration
They are your power

I'm not crazy about this one

Emperor / Chariot / Wheel

Funny, because I think it's rather good. If I'm reading it right, it's a kind of backwards haiku. The word "forming" is brilliant because it's happening on the far right card in the back of the Emperor's mind. The Wheel shows the wheels spinning in his mind, right? Then the way the Chariot driver is gazing forward he looks like he is "considering" those ideas spinning around on the Wheel. And these two cards, the ideas and their consideration, form the basis for the "power" that the Emperor embodies as he faces the world. The fact that the "ideas" are in the position on the far right, which is usually associated with "the future" (as we move from left to right across the cards - corresponding to past/present/future), suggests that action, as represented by the Emperor, depends on a kind of precognition! Our imagination projects possibilities into the future and then ponders the potential outcomes before acting. This haiku would not be nearly as suggestive if the order of the cards had been: Wheel / Chariot / Emperor.

[dodalisque]

That my first reading here actually in some way related to the situation at hand is real proof of the magical validity of EE's approach.

When we do a reading to answer a querent's question we are drawing on our intuitive understanding of the querent's personality and our store of knowledge about their problem to project an interpretation onto the cards. But when there is no question and no querent, WE become the question. We are projecting something about our intuitive understanding of our SELF.

Self knowledge is harder to come by than opinions about other people. We have lots of blocks in place that prevent us from seeing the truth about ourselves. Our projections - which is how unconscious wisdom communicates itself to our conscious mind - for dreams are projections - need to fight their way past those blocks before we can give them expression. Truth hurts, right. Part of us doesn't want to see what it sees about itself in the cards. We have an ego and persona to maintain. That's why doing the readings for Enrique often felt like a grim internal wrestling match - the conscious mind fighting to preserve long-held comforting illusions and keep those blocks in place. The more we practise reading the cards the more adept we get at fighting past the blocks, or ignoring them, and tuning into our first impressions of the images. That's the pure projection that carries the scent of our true identity. Surely this is what it feels like for an artist to finally produce a painting that glows.

I think this is how Enrique is able to get to know us so quickly. The readings we come up with, which for me most of the time felt like an agonising clutching at straws, and which seemed mostly irrelevant general statements that didn't seem to have much to say about anything, were actually revealing a lot to him about who I am. Our projections about our self, when we look at tarot cards without a question in mind, leave us naked.

You get good at golf by hitting lots of golf balls. Once we attain that level of engagement with the cards then we are in a better position to read for others. Our readings for them will be coming from a deep place of true awareness rather than from relatively shallow intellectual convictions. In practical terms I think it means that our readings become more charged with poetic energy, more immediate, apposite, right. Our readings will fit the images on the cards like a glove and this will expand the consciousness of whoever we are reading for. With an expanded consciousness they will see themselves more clearly and make better decisions about their own lives, answer their own questions. It's like the way future Jungian analysts were required to go through years of therapy before they were capable of being useful to their patients. Enrique's approach to the tarot seems to demand that level of commitment. But nothing is more serious than fun.

[Joan Marie]

Thank you so much @dodalisque

I feel so lucky to be able to discuss the experience with Enrique and your insights into it are so deeply illuminating for me.

That experience with EE was a lot and I confess to being just confused about 95% of the time during it. It would have been a real shame to have just gone away from it without the kind of examination we've given it and continue to.

There were many layers to it and it would have been easy to write it off after peeling away at just the first couple or so.

Also thanks for liking my last Haiku.

Sometimes "trusting my gut" doesn't actually feel good, in fact I'm often left with a lot of doubt. Maybe that's how it is for everyone and maybe that's why it's so hard to do sometimes.

dodalisque wrote: Our projections about our self, when we look at tarot cards without a question in mind, leave us naked.

yup.

[Joan Marie]

I want to add something here that I just read. It's from "Within a Budding Grove" by Marcel Proust:

All novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotyped attitude to which we've grown accustomed, and which seems to us to be reality itself. Any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar. The speaker appears to be speaking to us entirely in metaphors and this wearies us and gives us the impression of a want of truth.

This in so many ways sums up my feelings about the experience with EE. This was the challenge and in order to be met it first had to be understood and accepted. I feel like that's what our discussions have been, trying to understand exactly this and to get past the weariness and exhaustion to find the truth.

[Joan Marie]

For some reason this setup is lending more toward a Limerick than a haiku! But I just don't think I can tackle a Limerick right now.
So here's my Haiku:

What's up m'Lady?
Pretending not to see me?
Everyone sees you.

That was literally the first thing that came to mind.
I'm sort of torn here between just going with my gut no matter how silly, or should I really try to refine these into something more?

Day's occupation
So easily distracted.
You need a force field.

Taking this opportunity to remind everyone of another TdM thread that is sort of related to this.
The Distracted Hermit


EDIT: I just re-read my two earlier posts above and now I see more layers in these 2 haikus.
The thing about being naked, all that. I think I'm going to have to stop judging myself so much and just see what happens.

[dodalisque]

Papesse / Magician / World

You're on a streak, JM. These are bang on. The subject of the second one, the one you describe as more polished, seems different but is actually a variation on the same dynamic that you first identified in the images. I think identifying that dynamic is what we get from tuning in to our first impression.

I can see now that the real test is perhaps to acknowledge all 3 cards. In my first attempts at the beginning of the thread I (quite brilliantly if I do say so myself and will maintain until my dying day) picked on something in just one card in the first example and ignored the other two, and in my other 3 tries I identified a connection between just 2 of the cards and ignored the other one. It seems the truly satisfying TdM haiku come when we see the story contained in the relationship between all 3 cards. To acknowledge the cards one at a time, the way Pen does it in the Tarot Haiku thread, and as you do above, is virtuoso stuff. Picking up on a connection between two cards I suppose is occasionally useful as an illustration of the way EE encourages us to look for "eye rhymes", but it's like shooting fish in a barrel compared to acknowledging all three.

Perhaps the value of this exercise is that in a haiku there is no room to waffle. We waffle when we are maintaining a block - hiding the truth - the way Enrique talks about using language in general conversation as mostly "squid ink". Think of a politician in a TV interview NOT answering a difficult question. In this analogy our ego is the politician.

I know what you mean about feeling an impulse to write a limerick. English syntax is so slack compared to Japanese. A limerick would give us more elbow room. It's hard to get anything done in just 17 syllables. Perhaps the limerick is the English equivalent of the haiku, since ours is a language based on the distribution of stresses within words rather than one based on syllabics like Japanese. Maybe the rhymes would make it even more difficult to pull off. Oh jeez, are we looking at opening up another thread?! Perhaps the occasional limerick could be slipped into this thread in parentheses if we ever feel inspired. Maybe the insight established by the haiku will suggest a limerick. Right now I'm liking the haiku and don't want to go near that rhyming rabbit hole.

Putting our thoughts into any fixed form, especially one as tight as the haiku, is simply a strategy for forcing us to concentrate. Deciding to write one is like lighting a stick of incense before sitting down to meditate. It's announcing our intention to concentrate and banish irrelevant, distracting mind-stuff for a few minutes. Calling the meeting to order. I suppose the odd number of syllables in each line - 5-7-5 - discourages us from falling into the traditional iambic jog-trot of most English rhyming verse. The limerick relies on even more rhythmically insistent anapests (di-di-dum). Odd numbers of syllables forces our mind into different channels. I know during the 60s American poets such as Marianne Moore, and W.H. Auden and Thom Gunn, who both emigrated to the US from England, experimented with new forms by choosing, more or less at random, odd numbers of syllables for each line and then pouring their poem into that mould. The poems took on the relaxed informal prose rhythms of free verse but actually had quite a rigid structure underneath the surface.

[dodalisque]

Papesse / Magician / World

What's up m'Lady?
Pretending not to see me?
Everyone sees you.

Day's occupation
So easily distracted.
You need a force field.

Aren't these some more examples of the projection mechanism you were just talking about. See how the first one above picks up on the idea of nakedness in readings that we were just discussing. The second one too seems to comment obliquely on inner defensiveness and the way we set up blocks to avoid seeing ourselves clearly. Also the need for uninterrupted concentration. Or were you conscious of all that when you wrote the haiku?

[Joan Marie]

Aren't these some more examples of the projection mechanism you were just talking about. See how the first one above picks up on the idea of nakedness in readings that we were just discussing. The second one too seems to comment obliquely on inner defensiveness and the way we set up blocks to avoid seeing ourselves clearly. Also the need for uninterrupted concentration. Or were you conscious of all that when you wrote the haiku?

I was totally NOT conscious of that and even had my usual feeling of "another senseless reading" but then afterwards, later, when I re-read my previous posts I saw it as clearly as you just described.

[dodalisque]

Aren't these some more examples of the projection mechanism you were just talking about.

I was totally NOT conscious of that and even had my usual feeling of "another senseless reading" but then afterwards, later, when I re-read my previous posts I saw it as clearly as you just described.

Jean Dodal TdM, c.1650 ( by Jean-Claude Flornoy, 2002)

The cups are empty -
When the jars are empty too
I am free to go

I moved this over from the Tarot Haiku thread to provide another example of unconscious projection. I checked back and realised that I wrote this the day after I had sold a bunch of my tarot decks to the local second-hand bookstore. I'm trying to cut down my collection to those 4 or 5 decks I like to read with. It's a bit of a shock to realise how much our unconscious preoccupations determine our actions. Our ego thinks it's running the show but most of the time it's just not true.

[dodalisque]

Emperor / Chariot / Wheel

Ideas are forming
For your consideration
They are your power

How about for these same 3 cards:

As he grows smaller
The man with the golden crown
Is raised up higher

or,

Obsessed with the past
His journey of adventure
Goes round in circles

[Joan Marie]

Our ego thinks it's running the show but most of the time it's just not true.

So this morning I decided to try this Haiku exercise first, before updating the homepage here or really any other activity. My thinking is I'd get a "reading" not influenced, or less influenced by any preoccupations of thought.

Here is what I got:

The secrets we share
Will keep the others guessing
Aren't we tricky?

....

Who's really in charge?
Who delivers the message,
Or who receives it?

....
As usual, I thought "what is this nonsense?"

But then afterward, scrolling through some art on Tumblr the thought came to me, clear as a bell: What if you just shared stuff you made without any need for personal recognition?
I really thought about what that would mean, how freeing it would be to not require any validation, to let others just experience your work, and make it their own, to not feel the need to give a "personal stamp" to anything (something artists are always told they need, that "voice" or whatever), to not care about recognition. This removes the ego from the work entirely and in fact it is no longer "your art" it belongs to whomever sees it.

It felt like a door opening to me.

This concept goes against a lot of online discussions these days, I know. Most of those discussions pretend to be about artistic integrity but really they are about getting paid and about social validation. Nothing wrong with that. But let's at least be honest. (I think I may have my next Devil's Advocate topic)

I don't know exactly where this idea came to me from but when I look at the 2 Haikus I wrote just minutes before, I see a connection.

Many years ago, Francis Coppola said that all art should be free. You can imagine how that statement was met. But now I think I see where he was coming from. I don't think he meant it literally neccessarily, but in the sense that money and/or recognition should never be part of the creative process. The artist needs to free themselves from that.

But I don't think this applies only to the strict definition of "Art." This could also be about any human activity that can be done for the sake of validation, recognition or money. It's about the spirit behind all we do. In these times when so much is driven by "likes" and "follows" etc, I think it's important to step back and consider how our egos are manipulated and how much of it we do to ourselves.

[dodalisque]

I want to add something here that I just read. It's from "Within a Budding Grove" by Marcel Proust:

All novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotyped attitude to which we've grown accustomed, and which seems to us to be reality itself. Any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting. It is based on figures of speech with which we are not familiar. The speaker appears to be speaking to us entirely in metaphors and this wearies us and gives us the impression of a want of truth.

EE said to me that direct light tends to flatten objects. I think that's why he prefers to communicate obliquely in metaphors rather than indulging in the kind of clarifying "mansplaining" plain-talk that we are doing here. And also why he refrains from overt praise or criticism. The ego feels uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. I think that's why poetry makes most people uncomfortable: it always seems to be evading the issue. "Why can't he just say what he means?" We wanted EE to tell us what to do and what the game was. But if he did that we would just be duplicating his method, which is the opposite of creativity. He presents conundrums to keep us intrigued and leaves things open for us to make our own discoveries and to formulate our own explanations in our own words.

In hypnosis this is known as a transderivational search - a sort of open-ended search through the contents of our unconscious memory banks in search of something as yet unknown. A puzzle will stimulate a transderivational search but when the ego is given a simple solution on a plate it is satisfied and stops searching. A simple example of a transderivational search is when we suddenly come up with the answer to a crossword puzzle clue that appeared in a newspaper we threw out a month ago. The search keeps going on quietly in the background, sometimes for years. It's why a book that was way over our head 10 years ago suddenly seems to make sense on second reading. We have been conducting a series of transderivational searches during all that time. It's also the reasoning behind the advice, when we have a difficult decision to make, to "sleep on it".

[dodalisque]

Pope / Hermit / Chariot

The secrets we share
Will keep the others guessing
Aren't we tricky?

....

Who's really in charge?
Who delivers the message,
Or who receives it?

I totally agree with what you say in this post but I'm trying to follow your thought processes in the readings...The Pope is sharing secrets with his two students, and the Hermit and Chariot driver are looking over in that direction, wondering what's going on. Is that it? The Hermit's lamp is trying to shed light on the secret being shared? He's being kept guessing? I'm not sure about "Aren't we tricky?" Can't really see it in the images. I think it's really important to come up with some visual feature on the cards that is immediately apparent to everyone in order to grab their attention. I think it's a mistake to be too subtle. But I might just be a bit dim today. In the second one, is the Hermit "receiving" the message and the Chariot "delivering" it? I'm struggling to see the "loose brick in the wall".

[Joan Marie]

But I might just be a bit dim today. In the second one, is the Hermit "receiving" the message and the Chariot "delivering" it? I'm struggling to see the "loose brick in the wall".

For the first one, I'm seeing the Pope and the Hermit as colluding against the others, sharing secret knowledge of some kind. The pope seems to be ignoring the supplicants. The Pope and Hermit seem to be sort of winking at each other while the supplicants and the chariot driver look on as if to try and hear.

In the second one, I see the supplicants as analogous to the horses (two people become 2 horses) and they are taking the message off and away. I'm asking the question, once a message is delivered who does it then belong to?

I realise it's a little obtuse. Maybe very. I'm still warming up here!

If I were writing this for EE, not as a Haiku, I may have gone with something about evesdropping. I can't not see how the Pope and the Hermit seem to be looking directly at each other and all the other figures sort of straining to hear. Like people in a coffeeshop.

[dodalisque]

If I were writing this for EE, not as a Haiku,

OK, I see it now. I like the Hermit and Pope "collusion" idea. They are talking "over the heads" of the students. The level of the conversation could be "over their heads", i.e. too sophisticated for them to understand. The chariot driver is definitely eavesdropping, or maybe waiting for the conversation to end, like a taxi driver waiting for a fare. I see where the idea of delivering a message comes from now. I wonder if we could string a few haiku together in the same reading if we needed to make the connections clearer or flesh something out a little.

[dodalisque]

Pope / Hermit / Chariot

The secrets we share
Will keep the others guessing
Aren't we tricky?

....

Who's really in charge?
Who delivers the message,
Or who receives it?

Carrying on my thought about linked haiku from yesterday:

Two monks, two horses -
First they receive the message
Then deliver it.

The conversation
Between the Pope and Hermit
Is over their heads.

The Chariot sits
Waiting outside, eavesdropping
On the two great men.

I can hear Basho spinning in his grave. These aren't poems by any stretch of the imagination, but when we link together a few in a row maybe the 5-7-5 form still encourages us to be concise and concrete.

For fortune-telling mystics I wonder if our discovery about the power of projection isn't a bit worrying. (I notice now that even my noticing of the "talking over their heads" thing happened when I was complaining that essentially your haiku about these cards were "over my head".) I mean, are all tarot readings just projections of the personal preoccupations of the reader? Where is the client in all this? Where is the clairvoyance? Is it ALL about us?

No, I don't think it is, though I expect EE with his distrust of all things "occult" would probably disagree. My own feeling is that readers tend to be empaths whose minds are filled by the thoughts and feelings of those around them. Obviously, being an empath is a worthless inconvenience most of the time. It's not good to have "weak ego boundaries" in most situations. We should all be more aware of what WE are feeling than allowing our consciousness to be swamped by others. Art is probably a way we mark our ego boundaries. But for reading tarot cards perhaps it is an essential talent. We are still projecting our personal preoccupations onto the cards, but for the duration of the tarot reading our personal preoccupations happen to be the thoughts and feelings of the client!

I wonder if EE, in his determination to banish unicorns and New Age mysticism from the tarot world, isn't refusing to own up to his own empathic sensitivity. He claims that he "just reads the cards", but what directs his attention to certain details and not to others? And why do so many of his readings seem so accurately directed at our deepest concerns? He would maintain perhaps that his style of reading - allowing the natural metaphorical power of language to stimulate in the client a search of their own unconscious store of personal memories and experiences - ensures that each client will always seek out and discover something deeply significant for them in what he says. Sure, that's a big part of why his way of looking at the cards is so powerful, and it's a brilliant contribution to tarot - it somehow makes the whole business of reading cards seem so much more sophisticated, a branch of 21st century cognitive psychology. It's nice to have the support of all that modern scientific jargon, but I don't think it really demands that we throw out the baby of clairvoyance with the bathwater of New Age thinking. I still think he is just using 21st century scientific-sounding words to describe a process that always has and always will continue to feel magical.

[Joan Marie]

For fortune-telling mystics I wonder if our discovery about the power of projection isn't a bit worrying. (I notice now that even my noticing of the "talking over their heads" thing happened when I was complaining that essentially your haiku about these cards were "over my head".)

This is a really interesting and kind of hilarious observation.

I'm starting to wonder if clairvoyance is less mysterious of a thing than we are led to believe.

Its like being a so-called empath.

And I think, as soon as I have time, I am going to this topic for the Devil's Advocate because I have some strong feels about the whole "Empath" thing.

The thing is, I don't think it's that special. Being empathetic is part of being human. Some people are more in touch with it than others and it probably makes them better poets and card readers. Then there are others who really romanticise their own feelings to a point where they mistake normal empathy for some kind of rare magic power. As soon as we made it into a noun, "An Empath," it became an identity instead of a quality like kindness. *

I think we have to learn to just accept these things, like clairvoyance or empathy, as normal and learn how to not get in their way.

Like the example at the top. It was I can say, for me anyway, a pretty unfiltered reading of those cards, in haiku form. Obviously there was projection, which is proven by, for example, that it was in english. But that it struck you the way it did, causing confusion, that was kind of the punchline.

Slapstick. (we had this conversation before.)

I could have never intended that, but it makes me smile and makes we wonder where it came from. But could over-thinking it just be getting in the way of it?


* I don't doubt the existence of true "Empaths" with a hyper sense of empathy that causes them true pain. I just think that about 99% of people who call themselves that are mistaken. Many I have found, are actually quite the opposite of empathic.

[dodalisque]

I'm starting to wonder if clairvoyance is less mysterious of a thing than we are led to believe.

Its like being a so-called empath.

The thing is, I don't think it's that special. Being empathetic is part of being human. Some people are more in touch with it than others and it probably makes them better poets and card readers. Then there are others who really romanticise their own feelings to a point where they mistake normal empathy for some kind of rare magic power. As soon as we made it into a noun, "An Empath," it became an identity instead of a quality like kindness. *

* I don't doubt the existence of true "Empaths" with a hyper sense of empathy that causes them true pain. I just think that about 99% of people who call themselves that are mistaken. Many I have found, are actually quite the opposite of empathic.

I totally agree that pretty much anyone could develop clairvoyant sensitivity if they wanted to. In fact most of us regularly have experiences in that line without ever defining them as clairvoyance. Most we brush aside with socially acceptable words like "intuitions" or "hunches". Perhaps "having empathy" with someone is different from "being an empath" in the same way that "being depressed" is different from "suffering from depression". The first of each pair is a temporary state, while the second of each pair is a pathological condition. Unfortunately there is a kind of grandeur in having our unhappiness dignified by a label. It gives us a kind of spurious identity to have attained the status of a condition.

I certainly agree that most self-declared empaths I have known have very little empathy with others. Empaths tend to be unaware of themselves and others to the extent that they get the two mixed up. Isn't this mixing up of identities supposed to be how a baby relates to its mother until about the age of 2? An empath might have a pain in their knee while standing next to someone who has just had knee surgery, and not realise that the discomfort they are feeling has an external source: it is not their own pain even though it hurts. I have known people who practise Reiki who frequently have that kind of experience. It's almost a requirement.

It is helpful for an empath to know they are an empath - or have leanings in that direction - so that they are not always puzzled by sudden shifts of mood. Finding oneself overwhelmed by crowds is another troubling symptom and it's useful to be able to forgive yourself for it and organise your life accordingly. The downside to defining oneself as an empath is that there can be tendency to blame everything that happens to you on someone else. This has the potential to become a kind of paranoia, and it can certainly be a curse to have that level of vulnerability. Empaths should read up on the subject of "psychic protection". But at the other end of the scale I wouldn't want to be a beer-swilling soccer lout with the sensitivity of a brick. That also has its downside. But as the tarot teaches us, ideally we should all be striving to achieve a healthy balance between the "active" (Wands and Swords) and "receptive" (Cups and Pentacles) aspects of our consciousness.

[dodalisque]

But could over-thinking it just be getting in the way of it?

Until I have over-thought something I can't get over thinking about it.