Six of Swords
i. The Nutshell
Upright
The Six of Swords points to a period of transition where something is being left behind, this could be a home, job, relationship, belief, or version of yourself. Sometimes the change is chosen; other times it's forced. Either way, it often comes with regret, sadness, or unresolved emotion. Psychologically, this card can reflect shutting down to cope by disconnecting from what’s painful rather than meeting it fully. These habits often begin in early experiences where emotional safety was missing. Spiritually, the Six of Swords invites you to bring awareness to what you're carrying because it’s not just about moving forward, but doing so with integrity. Growth means acknowledging the grief, letting go of what no longer fits, and slowly rewiring the mind toward a future shaped by perspective rather than survival.
Keywords: Transition, mental processing, rite of passage, releasing baggage, sadness, inner journey
Translation: Identify what new state of consciousness and understanding you’re moving towards.
Reversed:
The reversed Six of Swords points to difficulty moving through a necessary transition. You may be holding on to something that has already ended be that an identity, a relationship, a belief, or emotional pain that’s served its time. This card can show up when you’re stuck between chapters, aware that change is needed but unable or unwilling to face the grief that comes with it. You might be trying to suppress emotions, deny the impact of past events, or repeat coping strategies like withdrawal, mistrust, or emotional detachment. This card asks you to be honest with yourself. Progress comes from pausing to face what you've been holding inside and change starts when you stop pretending you've already dealt with it.
Keywords: Resistance to change, emotional backlog, fear of release, grief in transition, delayed processing, clinging to the past
Translation: Identify what is holding you back.
ii. Illus-traits
A look at the symbolic language of the Six of Swords in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck:
Figures in the boat – Show emotional withdrawal after stress. Reflects coping through detachment or numbing when overwhelm becomes too much to process.
Boatman with pole – Represents the inner drive or support that carries you through difficult transitions. May reflect learned coping strategies or external help.
Six swords in the boat – Unprocessed thoughts or past experiences are carried forward. Suggests unresolved issues still influencing the present.
Still water ahead, rough behind – Movement from conflict to calm. Points to a shift in mindset, though emotional integration is still needed.
Distant land – Symbolises potential for healing or clarity. The journey is about facing what has been avoided as much as it is about reaching safety.
iii. Influences
Planetary Influence
The Six of Swords is influenced by Mercury and the Moon. Mercury brings focus to thought patterns, problem-solving, and communication. The Moon adds emotional memory, intuition, and unconscious reactions, reflecting on the mental processing of emotional experiences. Psychologically this shows up as overthinking, withdrawal, or avoiding emotion through logic. There may be a habit of staying in the mind to avoid discomfort in the body or heart - which can delay healing. The soul is learning to feel without being overwhelmed, and to think clearly without disconnecting from emotion.
Natal Houses
The Third House shows how thinking and speaking patterns are shaped by early learning and emotional tone. Defensive or avoidant communication may develop when emotional expression felt unsafe. The Fourth House reveals how early emotional environments taught you to withdraw rather than express pain. The Sixth House reflects how daily stress or routines can trigger mental overwhelm, pushing you into conflict or detachment, and the Twelfth House shows hidden emotional material, often buried, that shapes how you relate to grief, loss, and change. Each of these areas highlights where heightened mental stimulation has replaced presence, and where integration is needed.
Astrological Signs
Gemini may detach by analysing emotion rather than feeling it. Cancer may withdraw when emotions surface, fearing they’ll be too much to hold. Virgo may try to control feelings through routine, perfectionism, logic, or self-criticism. Each sign expresses difficulty tolerating emotional discomfort, often by turning to thought, silence, or over-functioning. These patterns create isolation, even whilst trying to manage pain. The soul lesson is to stay present with internal states without shutting down or intellectualising them.
Numerology
The number six relates to adjustment and recovery after disruption. In the Six of Swords, it reflects the mental effort to move forward after conflict or confusion. Psychologically it shows a need to create distance from pain even without having fully processed it. This may show up as withdrawal, emotional detachment, or silent endurance. These behaviours often begin in early life where safety depended on avoiding confrontation or emotion. Six can show martyrdom so remember to show love for yourself because reciprocity is the war-cry of the six. For sword-energy, this means knowing when thoughts are a result of other’s behaviour, and aren’t yours to carry.
Element
Air relates to thought, perception, and communication. In this card, Air shows a tendency to use thinking to avoid feeling. You may try to solve emotional problems intellectually or stay silent to avoid conflict. This creates distance both from others and from your own emotional reality. When overused, this element leads to disconnection or unprocessed grief. The work is to stay aware of how your mind avoids discomfort and to learn to remain present with feeling instead of bypassing it.
iv. A Day in the Life of the Six of Swords
Well That Escalated Quickly
You feel stuck between wanting change and fearing what that might bring. You avoid difficult conversations and decisions, hoping time will fix things. Unfinished business weighs on your mind, but you keep moving without fully naming what’s been lost and what needs to be lost. The familiar feels heavy, yet the unknown feels unsafe. You carry old beliefs, guilt, or roles that no longer serve you but can’t yet imagine life without them. Change feels threatening rather than freeing.
Adjusting the Knobs
You start to sense the cost of staying where you are. There’s more perspective around what needs to be left behind such as old narratives, defensive patterns, or outdated responsibilities. Resistance to change is starting to rotate its shoulders. You create distance to think rather than escape, and begin to separate what’s yours to carry from what’s been inherited or assumed. Transition becomes less about running and more about choosing where to direct your energy.
Unsubscribed from Self-Sabotage
You stop repeating cycles that keep you in limbo. You let go of roles based on survival rather than the truth of who you are, and stop making space for relationships or habits that keep you tied to past versions of yourself. Baggage becomes both visible and optional. You can now identify what holds emotional weight and actively release what’s no longer aligned. You move forward with fewer justifications and more presence.
Writing the TED Talk
You accept that some parts of life end without resolution. You honour what you’ve outgrown without needing to revisit every detail. Rites of passage become internal; a shift in how you relate to loss, memory, and meaning. You navigate change with intention holding self compassion for where you’re heading, knowing perfection doesn’t exist and packing only what’s necessary.
v. Working with these Energies
This card highlights patterns of emotional withdrawal, avoidance, and unresolved transition. You may leave situations without closure, stay silent instead of speaking up, or move on physically while still carrying mental or emotional weight. These habits often begin in environments where expression or conflict felt unsafe. Over time, they lead to unfinished emotional business, internal pressure, and disconnection from others and yourself.
Track the turning point – Recall a time when you avoided a conversation or left a situation without expressing what mattered. What were you trying not to feel or say? Was it fear, helplessness, guilt, or the sense that your needs didn’t matter? Recognising this helps you see how past experiences shaped your instinct to retreat, run or shut down when facing discomfort.
Name the cost – Consider how these patterns have affected your relationships and self-worth. Has avoidance created distance, misunderstanding or regret? Have you been holding onto thoughts or emotions that were never expressed? Acknowledge what staying silent or moving on too quickly has cost you in connection or viewpoint.
Don’t override discomfort – Stop for a moment when you notice yourself detaching or shutting down. Ask what emotion is beneath the urge to avoid and become aware that it might be grief, shame, anger, or an old fear. Stay with it, even briefly. Let the emotion exist without having to act on it or fix it. Use it as a signpost. This builds the capacity to stay present during transitions and observe emotions rather than wrestle with them.
Take one step forward – Do something small that keeps you emotionally present in a moment of discomfort. This might be speaking a simple truth, naming an emotion, or choosing not to exit a hard conversation too early. It’s not about resolving everything, but about learning to stay connected to yourself and others as you move through change. This is how inner movement begins to match outer movement.
vi. Building Skills
Releasing Judgement, Detaching from Time, and Truths of Past and Future Thoughts
This card reflects the difficulty of letting go… of pain, of identity shaped by past experiences, or fears about what’s ahead. When you stay mentally fused with what’s already happened or what might go wrong, the present moment becomes distorted. Judgement often appears as harsh self-talk, resentment, mental overwhelm or quiet shame. These thoughts are rarely about now. They’re echoes of what was… or projections of what you fear will be... Left unchecked, they influence decisions, distance you from others, and keep you from moving forward.
This exercise helps create space between you and these thoughts. It allows you to see them clearly, without needing to believe or act on them.
Practice: Releasing Judgement
Find five minutes to sit quietly. Let your attention rest on whatever is happening internally - thoughts, emotions, body sensations.
Notice judgemental thoughts. Let them arise without resisting them. They may sound like:
‘I shouldn’t still feel like this.’
‘I always ruin things.’
‘They’ll never change.’
Defuse by adding a phrase. Silently say, ‘I’m having the thought that…’ before each one.
‘I’m having the thought that I always ruin things.’
‘I’m having the thought that I shouldn’t still feel like this.’
‘I’m having the thought that I must be a bad person.’
This doesn’t argue with the thought or try to fix it, it simply helps you see that it’s something your mind is doing and not a truth you have to obey.
Identify the time focus. Ask yourself if the thought occupying you is mainly about the past or future:
Past-based thoughts often carry guilt, grief, regret, or replayed pain. People often stay mentally in the past because, as children, they couldn’t make sense of a caregiver’s harmful behaviour, so they blamed themselves; forming beliefs that later shape the adult identity until consciously examined.
Future-based thoughts often carry fear, anxiety, assumptions, or control. People often live in fear-based future projections because, as children, they had to anticipate danger or instability to stay safe; creating a pattern of scanning ahead for threats, which the adult mind continues, even when it’s no longer necessary.
Paying attention to your focus on time helps you see what you're really reacting to and whether it relates to the present moment, no matter the (repeating) situation, and showing you the wound you need to heal.
Stay with what’s here. Shift your attention to your breath or the weight of your body. Let the thoughts come and go without needing to act on them.
Growth and soul evolution comes when you stop treating thoughts as facts. The evolutionary task is to witness these patterns without being shaped by them. Letting go is not forgetting; it’s choosing not to carry what no longer serves your direction. Defusion creates space to move toward what matters now.
vii. Embodiment
The Six of Swords symbolises mental transition requiring full self-engagement. Avoidance or control traps the body in survival. Feeling numb, distracted, or stuck in overthinking with old thoughts coming back means you have inner changes that aren't healed yet, often because you left things behind too quickly or didn't fully transition. Accept your choices, become aware of old fears in order to release them and bring all parts of yourself together now.
Sight – Look at something neutral - a shadowy corner, the floor, or a window frame. Let your eyes stay without analysing or labelling. This practice slows the need to judge what you're feeling or where you should be by now.
Sound – Listen for what continues in the background, like a distant hum or a natural rhythm. Let it remind you that not everything needs to be silenced immediately. Time can unfold without force.
Movement – Gently shift your posture and pause in between movements. Notice how your body prepares, then releases. This helps you feel the difference between responding in the moment and reacting from past pressure.
Taste – Hold something simple in your mouth. Notice when the flavour peaks, then fades. Let the full duration of the flavour register. This restores presence and shows how experiences don’t need to be rushed to be complete.
Natural Image – Watch a movement that doesn’t hurry such as water settling or a tree steadying after a gust of wind. Let this mirror back the value of taking time. Judgement often comes from trying to be further along than you are. This helps you stay with what’s real, not what’s expected.
viii. Your Impressions
Look at the Six of Swords in your deck or the image above. Notice your immediate thoughts without trying to change them.
Where is your focus drawn - the figures in the boat, the water, the swords, the horizon? What memories or emotions come up in response?
Now check your body. Notice any tightness, numbness, or unease. Where do you feel it? Does it seem connected to a part of the image?
What does this card show you about how you cope with emotional transition or uncertainty? Do you shut down, go quiet, overthink, or push ahead too quickly? Are these responses familiar from earlier times when you had to move on without clarity, safety, or closure? What else could it be about?
What could shift if you allowed the discomfort to be felt, without rushing past it? What might you learn if you gave yourself time, without needing to explain or resolve it immediately?
ix. Intuitive Meaning
Use this space to reflect on what the Six of Swords means to you personally:
When change is happening whether that’s internally or externally, do you rush through it, shut down, or try to manage it with logic? What early experiences may have taught you that staying still or feeling things wasn’t safe?
When you feel disconnected, uncertain, or emotionally flat, do you isolate, become overly focused on solving things, or numb-out? Has this been a long-term pattern to avoid pain or delay emotional processing?
What happens when you pause and let yourself stay in the middle of the experience, without solving or escaping it? What helps you stay present without needing answers right away?
Applied insight with a three-card reading using the Six of Swords as your anchor:
What thoughts or emotional habits surface when you feel distance, silence, or unresolved tension in a relationship or situation?
What helps you remain steady when you're in transition?
What opens up when you give yourself space to reflect before acting or deciding?
Let your cards talk and note your feelings as your answers unfold, writing your own words below:
—————————————————
—————————————————
—————————————————
x. Closing Reflection: Track Your Evolving Lens
Your relationship with each card will grow over time because it’s meant to shaped by your life. Consider the prompts below to revisit and reflect.
What I thought this card meant when I first pulled it: —————————————————
A recent experience that changed how I see it: —————————————————
How I feel about it now, in my body or life: —————————————————
What surprised me as this card kept showing up: —————————————————
One way this card is living in my life right now: —————————————————
If this card visited me today as a guide, what would it want me to remember? —————————————————
Revisit these after a week, a moon phase, or a meaningful moment. Let the card evolve as you do.
If you feel a quiet sense of recognition, curiosity and want to explore it, browse the sessions page for what feels right.