So you picked up the Hanged Man. What does it mean for you?

The Hanged Man Upright Meaning

This card indicates a lack of ability to help oneself through independent action. Your energy is arrested and awaiting judgment. With this card, you are in a losing position and there is no avenue for the will to regain control until the situation has passed.

This represents a good time for you to be philosophical, to study and meditate upon the position you find yourself in, and to form plans for the moment you become free again.

It is challenge to you and only those who possess wisdom, patience, and optimism will be able to break through the downs, the limitations, including possible humiliation, to grasp the inspiring lesson one can gain from such an experience.

The Hanged Man Reversed Meaning

If this card is reversed, this suggest that your seemingly noble deed of offering yourself as the sacrificial lamb is, at least for the time being, a useless gesture. There will be no benefit to the greater good; you will experience no expansion of consciousness.

It would be an empty move, so don’t put yourself in that position. Ask yourself on what basis you allowed yourself to hope that your sacrifice would make a difference in this situation. Who knows? Perhaps this is meant to be an opportunity to learn something about self-denying tendencies.

The Hanged Man Advice Position

This card advises you to surrender illusions of control. Accept that you have been overcome and deceived by your own devices. Having made your bed, you now need to lie in it. This is not a negative judgment. It’s just that sometimes there are consequences for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Bad things can happen to good people. These consequences are not fatal, even if they are inconvenient — or perhaps even embarrassing.

Stop resisting your circumstances and let some time go by. Eventually, you will be released a little wiser and not much the worse for wear. You will come to realize in time how you collaborated with the problem. However, the issues you were stuck on when you were first hung up have subsided and no longer concern you. You are free to take up new endeavors. You will ultimately feel refreshed and grateful that you were derailed from your former track.