Understanding Tower Moments: When Spiritual Breakdown Becomes Spiritual Breakthrough

Recently, I finished a live class called Towerproof for the School of Limitation about the Tower card of the tarot and its relevance to our spiritual lives as a necessary agent of transformation. What I didn't expect was how deep this exploration would lead me and how appropriate the tagline "breakdown to breakthrough" would become from a literal magical perspective.

Dramatic black and white view looking up at tower castle ruins representing spiritual breakdown and transformation

If you know me, you know that most of my personal practice is focused around the aspects of death, renewal, and transformation through challenge. Now, one thing Saturn has taught me is that transformation doesn't always have to come on the heels of immense pain and challenge—there are other ways to learn and much of that has to do with our own mindsets before all else. But when it comes to the lightning path, cataclysmic-style transformation really does do us a huge service where gentle prodding might only get middling results. So it was natural for me to teach on Tower moments as impetuses of beneficial transformation.

Personal sidenote: I was more or less strong-armed into work with Saturn prior to preparing for this class while creating an alchemical shadow work course for my personal mentorship clients. Saturn is a being of immense power and should be approached with reverence. My way of working with such energies is often haphazard—I am a messy magician following the tugs upon my heart that leads me to my greatest discoveries, but the way this is done often does have me careening down the edge of a cliff like a ragdoll. I say this primarily because, honestly, I think this method of work is profoundly impactful and does not get enough context: working with your inner communication and following its lead is how the magician often finds their most profound discoveries and gets them to arrive on-time for appointments with beings they might otherwise miss. But establishing a grounded way of hearing and responding to this nudge is key to deeper communication being possible. So while I don't recommend finding the nearest metaphorical cliff's edge of the mind to fling yourself off of, if something is telling you to leap into the unknown...you might want to follow it. Knowing, of course, that you might find your way to the ground a bit more beat up and bruised than you were before. But what's a few missing teeth on the path to magical discovery, right?

Now, back to the Tower.

Destruction is a constant of life and in these times I think we are becoming almost numb to collapse. Maybe we view it with a kind of resigned acceptance that it's just "the way it is." But anything that makes us feel resigned and out of touch with our world because of its intensity instantly gets my attention: from my perspective, this is the time to lean in, not crash out. But the drama of crashing out, of mainlining sensation until we crumble under the pressure and humpty-dumpty ourselves into dissociation is enticing and it seems like, in that dissociation, we crave the drama of a loud and proud crash-out. No shade, my loves. I'm a Scorpio sun and a Virgo rising.: the loud & proud crash out was perfected in this combination. But the thing about that Scorpio sun (and venus, and mercury, and... shhh, don't you dare), is that I want to go deeper into the death and this response to the death. What's going on here? What is the nourishment we can gain from this?

My opening for the class began with a little thought experiment and I'm going to share it here, too: what if we, for the sake of being a spiritual scientist for a moment, what if we assumed the universe was inherently benevolent? What if, knowing our response to life's challenge, difficulty, pain—all those tower moments. What if we had the understanding of and inherently benevolent world?

Now, seriously, take some time with this. Imagine how you feel about the tower card when it comes up in a tarot reading. But then imagine that with this worldview. What changes? And, if you're feeling tension from that, if you're feeling resistance, ohhhh, why? What's at stake to believe in a benevolent universe? What opposition is there inside you to that?

The thing about Tower moments that get us so offtrack is often that, somewhere inside of this, we want to fail and we want it not to be our fault. We want there to be some unknown force that makes our life impossible so we don't have to take ownership of it. The biggest temptation of a demon isn't in it leading us astray, but in using it as a scapegoat when we want to be led off-track, when we want to feel like there is some unknown force that makes it impossible to do what we truly want to do. If there were no demons to blame, supernatural or cloaked in human flesh, well, we might need to start moving through our world differently. So we associate Tower moments with it not being for us, us not being worthy, the Universe saying "no" instead of seeing the reality of destruction: that the tearing down of old structures clear the way for something new to be built, and that this destruction is, in actuality, a helping hand, not a closed fist.

But if we come from the perspective of a benevolent universe things start to change for us in really dramatic ways. In fact, I've now received feedback from participants in the class on how drastically this changed things for them to the point where a difficult situation they were dealing with drastically improved! And I know, it sounds way too simple (and why is that bad??), but I'm already giving you the formula: imagine a benevolent universe and how does it change your perspective to empower you in this situation? Try it and see what happens.

The crazy thing is, the magical language of the Tower card in tarot confirms this. So, no blaming me for an inconvenient truth. It's already written in.

In the Tower card, we see the imagery of a tower being struck by lightning: symbolic of the journey of the "lightning path" through the Tree of Life. We also see two figures plummeting from the heights: a King and a Queen. These two figures represent the sephirah of Hod and Netzach and while I could spend ages breaking down their meaning and correspondances (if you do want something like this, let me know and I'll likely teach it for School!), for the sake of time and succinctness, I will simply mention that between these two lies the Tower path, which symbolizes the natural destruction of the house of personality so that the house of the Divine might be built, and it is the result of these two figures being transformed that aids in your evolution. It is telling us that in order to move further along in our spiritual evolution, we naturally will begin to experience the crumbling of our personality-driven desires and will be left with empty silence in its place, all the better to be able to hear the voice of the Divine. But when we're in the midst of this structure crumbling, a structure that has served us and gotten us this far in our life, the destruction can feel personal and cruel. And, in a sense, when we are identifying from that personality, it is. But if we begin to shift our perspective to the awareness behind the experience or to the Divine itself, we might see how these structures were limiting us, exhausting us, and keeping us trapped. This is the evolution from personality-level work to soul-level work and it is a crucial crossroads moment where, hopefully, all the work we've done before can serve as an aid to help us get through this time of immense change and the outward dramatic shifts that might occur alongside it (including, but not limited to: divorce, job change, relationships crumbling, moving, etc.)

Now, I'm not going to go through it all because I could easily write a whole book here, but I encourage you to check out the replay I have in the School of Limitation. It's about two hours long and jam-packed with information and a good amount of group participation and you'll get access to audio meditations, magical courses, a magical community, and so much more! But what I did want to share was the Gematria involved in this work.

The Tower card relates to the path on the Tree of Life that runs between Netzach and Hod, as I've said, and its number is 16, which 1+6 equals 7. In the Gematria (very, very simplified,) 7 is a number of breakdown and 8 is a number of spiritual breakthrough. When I initially created the tagline "breakdown to breakthrough," I wasn't even thinking of this significance in the numerology of it all. If you look at 7's in the Tarot, too, you'll see that all sevens in the suits relate to struggle and re-evaluating your perspective. You've got the cups that tell us not to get lost in our emotions (Netzach relation here), we've got the 7 of swords urging us against shortcutting growth (ooof, very Tower-coded), the 7 of wands urging us to understand that oppositional forces are a natural part of the journey (also very Tower-coded) and the 7 of pentacles urging the kind of steadfast clarity that comes with taking your time and having patience. And then, should we want to return to the major arcana we have the Chariot at the 7th position as a perfect display of subjugating both emotions and social values and desires, once again reflecting Netzach (related to the emotions) and Hod (related to rational and structural intelligence and to me speaks to the "community-mindedness" that impulses us to "seeking glory" in an old world understanding, serving the "greater good" from the mind of intellect and uprightness). Leading these two and acting as mediating factor that clears biases of both primal desire and intellectual authoritarianism is the Greater Mind, that of Divine Intuition. So we see what crumbled from the Tower (netzach and hod and their duality) as being brought into unified purpose under the Divine Mind. It's a quick and dirty way of it that I'm writing here, but nonetheless, there it is.

I apologize for the amount that I am leaving unsaid here—and there's a lot—but I hope this has given you something to chew on. For me, the numerological depth and significance here really took it to the next level and the Hebrew letter "peh," meaning mouth and relating to the Divine as creator-power through speech (think about the Charioteer here again, holding the reins), which is associated with the Tower path is another trail I went down that led to absolute delights of symbolic beauty and deeper meaning. Like I said, check on the class. I think you'll dig it. And perhaps I'll even delve into "peh" here on the blog in the future, because it is a juicy exploration and writing about it here from my own experience with exploring it might be a fun little jaunt.

The main point is that this is an endless trail to wander with about a bazillion little bunny trails to follow after and explore, too. But I hope this whets your appetite as it did mine and encourages you toward your own study and reflection. The ground of learning is as endless as reality herself, so if nothing else, my darlings, go forth! Explore! Learn! Experience! Grow! God created an infinite playground here and the time limit on exploration from one life to the next is not felt in that infinitude, so there's no time to waste! (And yet all the time in the world, too, hehe!)