You know those moments when you’re just going about your business… Everything is fine. And then all of a sudden, BAM! Out of nowhere the rug, aka stability and security, gets ripped out from under you?

Maybe your relationship ends unexpectedly.
Maybe a job loss, illness, or big shift happens.
Maybe a truth gets revealed that changes everything.
Maybe it’s just a knowing that something needs to change, even though your logical brain is like “WHAT? WHY??”

Whatever it is, it knocks the wind out of you.
You don’t know which way is up, you feel like you can’t breathe, and you have no idea what the hell just happened—or, maybe worse, what the hell you’re going to do now.

Yep.
That, my friends, is a Tower moment.

What Is The Tower

If you’re familiar with tarot, you might know the Tower card. It shows a bolt of lightning striking a tall tower. The tower is literally on fire. People flailing about and leaping from the tower into who knows what below.

Fun times.

The Tower typically represents sudden, often painful disruption. Things falling apart. Expectations or plans crumbling. The foundation, once thought to be stable, crumbling beneath you.

Real life Tower moments aren’t much different in how they feel to us. I bet all of us can call to mind moments like these in our lives. Where you can clearly identify a “before” and an “after” the thing happens.

This thing—whatever it is—is happening whether you want it to or not.
There’s no stopping it.
There’s no “thinking your way out of it.”

Those moments bust us open, vulnerable for all to see. And there’s no way to “fix” it or make it go away. You cannot look away and you cannot stay the same. There’s only the invitation to surrender and trust that things will work out and there’s something better on the other side.

It’s one of those cards that tends to freak people out when it shows up in a reading. But despite its chaotic energy, the Tower doesn’t show up to punish you. It shows up to liberate you. Promise.

Let me explain.

Tower Moments Reveal What’s Been Out Of Alignment

The Tower, despite feeling like the worst thing ever, is here to help. It clears out what was never meant to last or stick around. It shows us what’s bound to break and reveals what holds false security. It shatters the things we thought we could count on—but maybe never truly could. And while it sucks in the moment, it could be saving you from even worse heartbreak in the end.

It’s deeply uncomfortable and wildly disorienting.
But it can also be a gift. A blessing in disguise if you will.
Tower moments often catapult us into deeper alignment—with ourselves, our truth, our path—even if it doesn’t feel that way at first.

They’re trying to reveal something that’s been quietly out of alignment for a while, or all along. Something you’ve probably even sensed wasn’t quite right, but for whatever reason pushed your awareness aside.
Because you probably weren’t ready to see it.
Or admit it.
Or do anything about it.

There’s a right timing to all this stuff. Sometimes it goes down the way it does because we have to have that experience to keep us from clinging to things longer than we should.

It’s Okay To Want To Hold On (Really)

As humans, we desperately want things to work out as planned and for nothing to change. We want our comfort, our habits, our identities. Even if we’re unhappy, even if we’re exhausted, at least we know what to expect.

We’re actually designed to feel panic or unsafe when something big is changing. Back in our cave-dwelling days, instability could signal some pretty legitimate pain or death was on the horizon.

After nearly a decade of working with therapy and coaching clients, I know at least one thing to be true: despite our fear of change and feeling totally caught off guard by Tower moments, we usually sense deep down when something’s off or isn’t quite right in our lives… but we don’t always know what to do with that “knowing”. Something inside is trying desperately to get our attention.

And when we resist the shift that needs to happen to push us in the direction we’re meant to go in, the handy dandy Tower card shows up and is like:
“Hey. So. Looks like you need a little encouragement. I’m gonna help you out by blowing up your life, okay? Don’t worry, you’ll figure it out.”

And we’re like, “Wait, what??” It feels awful. But also… maybe necessary.

Tower Moments Are Rarely Convenient

They usually don’t come with warning. And they almost never feel like a quiet or “gentle” nudge. It’s full on lead foot on the gas, baby.

But please hear me when I say this:
None of this is happening because you “fucked up”.
You didn’t mess up.
You didn’t fail.
You aren’t a failure.
You didn’t do something wrong to make this happen.
You’re not being punished.

This is just what it feels like to be a person in the middle of what was and what will be. The unknown.

And you know what?
Even if this was all happening because you fucked up, I promise you’ll still be okay. And I promise it doesn’t mean you’re bad or fundamentally flawed. It just means you are, indeed, a human. Welcome to the party.

None of us have a manual or playbook of how life is supposed to go. None of us know what will happen 5 minutes from now.

We may feel like we’ve got a good idea of what will happen, but genuinely, we do not know. A meteor could hit Earth and we’d all be donezo. Lights out.

And, as far as we know we’re only conscious of being in these bodies in this lifetime. None of us know what in the hell we’re doing. And all of us are regularly making mistakes.

This Isn’t The End

In Tarot, the Tower is followed by a very important card. The Star.

It reminds us that there’s always hope. There’s always a path forward. It may not be visible just yet. It may feel forever away. But it’s there.

The Star comes along after the Tower’s destruction and upheaval and shows us how bright we shine when all the unnecessary shit that was weighing us down is stripped away. We feel raw initially, but in time, the path forward seems clearer.

The Tower reminds us that sometimes no matter how much we will try to do everything “right,” we will still crash and burn.
We will need to grieve what we thought was solid and true.
We need to feel the pain of what’s been lost. And we feel the pain because whatever it was, it mattered to us. It meant something to us.
And at the same time, we need to trust that something new is being born—even if we don’t know what that is yet. Even if we can’t imagine something being better than what we had.

You are allowed to rest here.
You are allowed to fall apart.
You are allowed to not have a plan.

There’s a saying that, “Whatever we resist, persists… and then comes back stronger.”

Let yourself feel what you feel.
It’s the only way to get through to the other side.
And when you’re ready, begin to rebuild—on your terms, from your truth.

You’ve got this.

Want more reflections like this? You can sign up for my newsletter here or explore more on the blog.