Strength | Lust Year Card
Year of Strength Tarot Card Meanings
What the Strength Year Card Means for Your Journey
The year of Strength teaches you that true power is not domination — it is embodiment. You are discovering that courage is not the absence of fear but the willingness to act with your whole being engaged. Strength energy is not about controlling your animal nature; it is about becoming fully alive, letting desire and instinct move through you with consciousness and joy.
When the Strength year card arrives in your life, you enter the year of Strength — a twelve-month initiation into vitality, courage, and the sacred integration of your primal nature. This major arcana card doesn't ask you to tame your wildness; it invites you to embody it, to let your life force move through you without apology or restraint.
The Strength tarot card brings profound card meanings when it appears as your personal year card. As the eleventh card of the major arcana, Strength adds up to 11 in numerology — the number of mastery, spiritual illumination, and the integration of opposites into higher consciousness. This root number amplifies the Strength energy of vital power throughout your year ahead.
This is different from having Strength as your birth card (your lifelong persona) or drawing the Strength tarot card in a reading (universal guidance). Your Strength year card represents a temporary 12-month cycle where you apprentice with this archetype's lessons and integrate its transformational card meanings.
The Lust | Strength Year Card: Major Arcana Meanings & Initiation
CORE ARCHETYPE
The Sacred Beast, The Life Force, The Courageous Heart
MAJOR ARCANA
XI (The Eleventh Card of the Major Arcana)
NUMEROLOGY
Adds up to 11 (mastery, spiritual power, illumination, integration of duality)
ELEMENTAL ENERGY
Adds up to 11 (mastery, spiritual power, illumination, integration of duality)
ASTROLOGICAL CORRESPONDENCE
Leo (solar radiance, courage, sovereignty, heart-centered power)
Understanding Strength Tarot Card Meanings in Your Personal Year
The Strength tarot card meanings shift when this major arcana card becomes your personal year card. Unlike a single tarot reading, the year of Strength is a sustained initiation where Strength energy permeates every aspect of your life for twelve months.
Traditional tarot card meanings describe Strength as representing courage, vitality, inner power, gentle control, and the integration of animal instincts. In the Thoth tradition, this card is called Lust — not as vice, but as the sacred life force, the yes to existence, the integration of desire with consciousness. When the Strength year card appears as your tarot card for 2020 (or any current year), these core card meanings become your curriculum.
The Energy of Strength: What This Major Arcana Demands
The year of Strength will ask you to:
Embody your vitality — Even when others find your aliveness threatening or "too much"
Trust your instincts — Where the Adjustment year demanded objective truth, Strength energy demands trust in your animal knowing
Act with courage — Not the absence of fear, but full-bodied action despite it
Celebrate desire — Reclaiming passion, pleasure, and life force as sacred
Stop apologizing for being alive — Taking up space, having needs, wanting things
The challenge of the Strength year card is not becoming reckless or destructive. Strength is not about unconscious impulse — it is conscious embodiment. This yearly tarot card teaches you that true power integrates instinct with awareness, passion with intention, wildness with wisdom.
Strength energy is fierce and ecstatic. This major arcana card reveals every place where you have diminished yourself, where you have apologized for your aliveness, where you have chosen safety over vitality, where you have repressed your life force to gain approval or avoid judgment.
Months 1-3: The Awakening Roar (The Awakening Phase)
What's Happening: Strength energy begins stirring in your body. You feel restless, hungry for more life. You notice where you've been playing small, dimming your light, apologizing for your needs. This is when the Strength tarot card meanings become visceral — not theoretical.
The Work: Notice where you've been suppressing your vitality, desires, or instincts Begin saying yes to small acts of aliveness (moving your body, expressing wants, taking up space) Identify the voices that taught you to be "less" — internal critics, family messages, cultural conditioning Study the card meanings in relation to your specific life circumstances
Shadow to Watch: Confusing recklessness with vitality. The Strength year card asks for conscious embodiment, not unconscious acting out.
Gift Emerging: Recognition that your aliveness is not a problem to solve
Navigating Your Strength Year Card: Month-by-Month Guidance
The year of Strength unfolds in waves of vitality and integration. This major arcana card teaches through cycles of expansion, embodiment, and courageous action. Below is your map for the twelve-month Strength year card initiation.
The Strength Year Card in Different Life Areas
The year of Strength is not a quiet professional year. If your Hermit year was about inner wisdom, the Strength year card asks: What work makes you feel fully alive? Where do you need courage to claim your authority?
Strength tarot card meanings in career: Take bold action on projects that excite you, even if they feel risky Speak up in meetings, claim credit, advocate for yourself without apology Pursue work that engages your passion, not just your competence Build authority through authentic presence, not performative credentialing Navigate authority figures by maintaining your vital core — neither dominating nor diminishing
Shadow: Confusing loudness with power. The Strength card meanings include heart-centered leadership, not ego display.
Gift: Work that engages your full vitality and courage
Strength energy teaches that intimacy requires courage to be seen fully, to want without shame, to need without apologizing. This is a year of recognizing where you've diminished yourself in relationship — and having the courage to show up whole. The Strength year card asks: Who can meet your vitality without trying to tame it?
The year of Strength asks you to: Express desires clearly without shame or manipulation Honor your needs as valid, not "too much" End relationships where you must constantly dim your light Build partnerships with those who celebrate your aliveness Navigate intimacy with awareness of your full range — fierce and tender, passionate and gentle
Shadow: Dominating others. Confusing vitality with control. The aspects of Strength include collaboration, not conquest.
Gift: Relationships where you can be fully alive without apology
The year of Strength brings primal creative power. Strength energy creates through embodiment, through letting life force move through you onto the page, the canvas, the stage. This major arcana card asks: What wants to be born through your vitality?
Strength tarot card meanings for creativity: Work with themes of courage, desire, life force, embodiment, and integration Trust the creative process that emerges from your body, not just your mind Create from vital energy, not perfectionism Share work that carries passion, risk, and undefended presence Allow your art to roar — to be "too much" rather than polite
Shadow: Creating without discipline. The Strength card meanings include conscious embodiment, not just wild expression.
Gift: Art that pulses with life, courage, and authentic power
Spirituality during a Strength year card is embodied awakening. This is not a year of transcending the body — it is a year of discovering the divine in flesh, desire, and instinct. Strength energy is the bridge between spirit and animal.
Strength energy in spiritual work: Develop embodiment practices (breathwork, somatic meditation, ecstatic dance) Explore the sacredness of desire, pleasure, and vitality Study traditions that honor the body as temple Trust your instinctual knowing as spiritual guidance Work with fire element, solar practices, heart-centered awareness
Shadow: Spiritual materialism. Using embodiment practices to inflate ego rather than integrate wholeness.
Gift: Direct experience of the divine through your body, your desires, your aliveness.
The Lust | Strength Year Card: Jungian & Archetypal Perspective
The Archetype of Integrated Vitality
In Jungian psychology, the Strength tarot card represents the integration of instinct and consciousness — what Jung would call the reconciliation of ego with the Self through the body. This is not the taming of the beast (repression) but the collaboration with it (integration).
The year of Strength initiates relationship with this archetype, regardless of gender. You embody qualities Jung associated with integrated power: courage over compliance, instinct honored alongside intellect, vitality as wisdom rather than enemy, the lion and the human in conscious partnership.
The Strength year card balances the Hermit (solitary, interior, ascetic). Where the Hermit year withdraws from the world, the year of Strength engages fully. Both are necessary. This major arcana teaches you that wisdom requires both contemplation and embodied action.
The Sacred Marriage of Beast and Consciousness
The Strength year card depicts the integration of opposites: the woman (consciousness) and the lion (instinct) in partnership, not combat. In alchemy, this is the sacred marriage — the union of opposites that creates gold.
Strength energy teaches that consciousness alone is sterile, and instinct alone is destructive. Wholeness requires both. The ego (consciousness) learns to honor rather than control the body's wisdom. The beast (instinct) learns to move with awareness rather than blind impulse.
Individuation Through Courageous Embodiment
Jung's individuation — the journey toward wholeness — requires integrating the shadow, which includes repressed instincts, desires, and life force. The Strength year card is your direct initiation into embodiment:
The Shadow — All the "unacceptable" parts: anger, desire, need, hunger, sexuality, aggression
The Anima/Animus — The contrasexual archetype within, often carrying vitality and passion
The Self — Accessed not through transcendence but through full embodiment
Instinctual Wisdom — Learning that the body carries intelligence the mind cannot access
If you've over-identified with being "good," civilized, or controlled at the expense of your vitality, the year of Strength asks you to reclaim what Jung called the "inferior function" — the undeveloped capacity for courageous, embodied presence.
The year of Strength asks:
Can you trust your animal nature?
Can you let life force move through you with consciousness as its partner, not its warden?
The Initiation Calls for More Than Knowing
You've traced the contours of this archetype—its invitations, its thresholds, the sacred work it asks of you. But reading about initiation is not the same as walking through it.
Is this your current Initiation Archetype?
The year you were born into carries a specific myth. Your Growth Aspect may be this one—or the spiral may be calling you elsewhere. Only your numbers will tell.
Already walking this initiation?
If this year's energy hums with recognition—if these words land like remembering—then the full ritual is waiting. Month by month. Threshold by threshold. The codex holds the map.
Curious, but not yet claimed?
You don't need to be in this initiation to learn from it. Join the Circle to unlock our growing library of free PDF guides, sacred tools, and symbolic wisdom.
Shadow Work with The Strength Year Card
The Strength Card Shadow: Domination, Repression, Recklessness
Every major arcana card carries shadow — unintegrated, unconscious energy. The Strength year card shadow emerges when vitality becomes domination, when courage becomes recklessness, when life force is either repressed or unleashed without consciousness.
During the year of Strength, you will likely encounter:
The Tyrant — Using your power to dominate or intimidate others. Confusing strength with cruelty. The aspects of Strength include heart-centered power, not brutality.
The Repressed — Continuing to suppress your vitality out of fear of being "too much." Spiritual bypassing through excessive gentleness.
The Reckless — Acting out unconscious impulses. Confusing integration with indulgence. Strength is conscious embodiment, not chaos.
The Performer — Displaying strength for approval rather than living it authentically. Ego inflation masking insecurity.
The Exhausted — Burning yourself out. Mistaking constant intensity for vitality. True strength includes knowing when to rest.
Working with Strength | Lust Year Card Energy
Ritual Practice: The Embodiment Vow
What You'll Need:
Quiet space where you can move freely
Journal and pen
Music that moves you
(optional) Candle
The Practice for Your Year of Strength:
Light the candle. Stand and feel your feet on the ground. Speak: "I honor this Strength year card initiation. I welcome my vitality, my courage, my sacred life force."
Move your body. Let it express whatever wants to move — shake, dance, stretch, roar if you need to. This is not performance; it is embodiment.
Reflect on Strength tarot card meanings:
Where have I been dimming my light? Playing small? Apologizing for being alive?
What do I desire that I've been afraid to name?
What would it mean to trust my instincts, my body, my life force?
Write your commitment, framed as sacred vow. Example: "During this Strength year card, I commit to trusting my vitality as sacred wisdom. I will stop apologizing for taking up space. I will act with courage even when afraid."
Create physical anchor. Place objects representing your vital power on your altar (lion imagery, gold coins, fire symbols, anything that feels alive and powerful). This is your Strength year card temple.
Close with gratitude. Thank the major arcana for this year ahead. Blow out candle only when you feel complete.
Daily Practice: Embodying Strength Energy
Choose one vitality practice for your entire year of Strength. Make it embodied, courageous, alive.
Strength year card practices:
Morning movement (5-10 minutes of embodied expression daily)
Desire tracking (noticing and naming what you want without judgment)
Courage commitment (one brave action daily, however small)
Body check-ins (pausing throughout the day to ask: What does my body need right now?)
This is not about discipline (that was the Adjustment year). The Strength tarot card teaches through embodiment — showing up in your flesh, listening to your instincts, trusting your vitality.
The Strength Year Card & Related Major Arcana Cycles
Cards that flow from Strength energy:
The Chariot year (VII) — Directed will before vital embodiment
The Hanged Man year (XII) — Surrender after active engagement
The Sun year (XIX) — Solar radiance at full expression
Art | Temperance year (XIV) — Integration at a different octave
