I’ve been pulling the Tower repeatedly in my daily draws lately, and honestly, it’s making me pretty anxious since I’m already dealing with some major life uncertainty. I’ve heard people talk about a “tower moment,” but terminology gets weird with the Tarot sometimes, and I think people can mean different things when they say it. Is it just a moment of change, or is there something more to it?
For those who’ve lived through their Tower moments, what did they actually look like in real life - was it as dramatic as the card suggests or more of a slow burn transformation?
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A significant life event that scares and destroys, but ultimately prepares you and leads to something better. Named after the Tower major arcana card.
My Tower moment was a health crisis that pretty much destroyed everything I’d built up. Got some bad news that knocked me sideways. The weird thing is, when everything fell apart, I could suddenly see what actually mattered. All the BS just disappeared.
Painful but clear.
Now it’s been a few years and that clarity has faded. Normal life creeps back in with all its little worries and distractions. Sometimes I miss how clear everything was back then, even though it hurt like hell.
I don’t see the Tower as just doom and gloom like most people do. It gets a bad reputation.
When it keeps coming up in readings, I don’t think it’s a warning about bad things to come. For me, it’s more about looking at what you’ve built up in your life, your identity, beliefs, all that.
The Tower shows that even if those things fall apart, you’re still you underneath. You might lose some ego or false ideas about yourself, but the core person stays the same. When things are already rough and you pull the Tower, it’s not piling on more bad news.
It’s actually helpful, especially if you let it be.
Tower moments are times when… life falls apart.
It is the death or ending of a specific experience, relationship, or era.
Tower moments embody the connection between destruction and creation: all endings contain beginnings, and all wipeouts bring spaciousness. Instead of saying “Everything is falling apart” we can reframe it as “Everything is falling apart so that something new can come through.”
I’ve been getting repeated Tower pulls lately and yeah, they do seem like warnings. Gives you some time to brace yourself before things get messy. Your intuition might be picking up on something coming down the road.
My roughest Tower stretch was when a bunch of crises hit at once: a big issue at work, a sudden loss, a health scare for another loved one, plus a few other shocks, all in a few months.
The Tower kept showing up in almost every spread before it, like a warning that everything was about to come apart.
I felt like I was living that card-everything dropping out from under me while I scrambled for solid ground. Afterward, I had to rebuild a lot, but things got a lot better as well.
I think the Tower Moment is a moment of change. Not slight, slow shifts, but tumultuous change.
It isn’t always a negative change but I do think it’s always a change.
In my practice, I notice Tower moments show up in the body before we put the story together. People mention a sudden stomach drop or a fast shift in temperature days before anything actually happens. If you keep pulling the Tower, try a short body scan.
Find where the tightness or heat sits and stay with it. That spot is often where the old structure is already cracking.
If you’re dealing with shadow work, repeated Tower cards can mean an inner story you’ve been holding onto is falling apart.
Mine didn’t look dramatic from the outside and probably wouldn’t fit the normal narrative of “tower moments”.
How much of who I was came from being ‘the dependable one’. The resentment underneath that finally broke through. Here’s a spread that helped me: Put the Tower in the center, then pull three cards asking, What am I defending? What survives after? What helps me rebuild?
Write a page about whichever card makes you most uncomfortable, then pick one behavior to stop doing this week. Whether it happens slowly or all at once, being kind to yourself while everything falls apart helps you build something better.
Tower likes to show up when life’s about to shake things up a bit. Fear is a normal response, but the Tarot can help guide you through these moments and make it as easy as possible.
Tower moments are uncomfortable, but they’re rarely as bad as we imagine they’ll be.
The Tower, for me, shows up when the ground gives way and the story I’ve been living doesn’t match reality. Years back, my ex dropped the divorce news out of the blue. I thought we were fine, steady careers and a new house.
He didn’t picture the same future, and what I was leaning on collapsed. When this card lands, I strip things back. I write down what I believe and test what still holds up. Then I let the rest go, even if it’s uncomfortable. That “dream job” belief is a common one.
It doesn’t have to carry your whole identity. A job can just be work, and that’s fine. No neat bow here. It’s a tough stretch.
My Tower moment happened when the card kept showing up right before I quit my job. A coworker had been making things really difficult and I was scared to leave the steady paycheck. But I did it anyway.
Found a new job that paid better and had nicer people to work with. Learned some new skills too. The Tower showed up again recently when a close friend told me they were moving. I tried that meditation thing with Tower and the Star together, holding both cards and breathing. Tower is supposed to show what needs to go, and Star shows what’s coming next. Sometimes things have to fall apart, whether we want them to or not.
I think maybe people overthink them sometimes. They are moments of change, but not some huge event that’s going to wreck your life. Sometimes, they can be a relatively minor shift that you’ve actually worked toward.
Like if you’ve worked to move city then your tower moment might be when you pack up and move. It’s a new chapter, not the end of the world.
Big transformations from a Tower moment can hurt while they’re happening.
Sometimes things need to break down completely before anything new can happen. Even when you know this logically… they can be pretty high intensity moments and the logical knowledge of what’s happening doesn’t always help.
They can be overwhelming and that’s part of it.
Had several Tower experiences but my biggest one forced me to leave my hometown completely. Funnily enough this was literally an example from above.
Everything was going backwards: toxic relationships, a dead-end job, and feeling stuck. I think a lot of people can probably relate.
For a while, my spreads were nothing but reversed cards. I knew something was going to happen. So I left. Just packed what I could and moved to a new city. No planning, no safety net. The Tower card in action, sudden, complete change that felt like lightning hitting.
Once I settled in the new place, different cards started appearing. The Fool for new beginnings. Three of Cups as I found better friends. Two of Cups when I started dating someone decent. The Sun showed up when work finally clicked.
The Tower tears everything down fast. It’s terrifying when it happens but sometimes that’s what needs to happen. Everything I’d built was on shaky ground anyway.
This thread is a good example of why community matters when you’re working through intense cards like the Tower. Reading everyone’s different experiences here shows that Tower moments aren’t one-size-fits-all, and there’s real comfort in seeing how others have navigated similar territory.
What your Tower moment looks like might be different from mine.
For that matter, what your Tower moment looks like now might be different from what it looks like a year from now. And the card doesn’t always predict the moment itself… sometimes it shows up when we’re ready to stop pretending everything’s fine and actually process the collapse (which can be just as uncomfortable as the original event).
‘The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.’ - Alan Watts