Taroga: Tarot and Yoga

An Introduction to Taroga: Tarot and Yoga

There's so much a single Tarot card can teach us. One of the most unexpected lessons came to me a few years ago.

Looking at the Rider-Waite Magician card, I suddenly thought: the way he's standing looks just like that point in a yoga routine when you're fully extended in the Heaven and Earth Stretch.

The next card in my deck that day was The Star. I looked at her and got genuinely excited — she was in a position that mirrored a yoga pose too. In fact, looking at her, an entire yoga sequence came to mind. What if there's a connection here?

Yoga and Tarot come from very different histories. Yoga originated in India. Tarot's own origins are debated, but the cards became known for their spiritual properties in Europe in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Different roots — but both practices heal. I'm not the only one who's noticed the overlap either: fellow Tarot readers including James Wanless (creator of the Voyager Tarot deck) and Elisa Lodge, who ran a Tarot retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii I attended years ago, have explored the same connection.

As with reading Tarot itself, what each reader finds here is deeply personal, even when the root meanings stay the same. As I moved through each card in the Rider-Waite deck, yoga poses and breathing techniques (pranayama) started presenting themselves to me. I wanted to build my own series of movements based on each Major Arcana card — a way to literally draw in what you need, physically and spiritually.

Not every Major Arcana card echoes a yoga pose directly. For those, other ideas came instead — poses that carry the same energy as the card, letting us draw that energy in and explore it.

While working on this, a word came to me, playfully: Taroga — a mix of Tarot and yoga. It's stuck ever since. It's fun to say, sure, but it's also made the whole process feel like a real, legitimate branch of yoga — at least in my mind. And I believe it should be for others too. In combining cards and poses, I've found healing, personal discovery, and release.

I've started publishing individual posts on particular cards and their corresponding poses — you can find The Hermit here and Death here, with more to come. I invite you to play with these poses yourself, and see how they evoke the Tarot archetypes I've matched them to.