221. MONTHLY MEDICINE: April is Wisdom
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Welcome to a new month, Wild Souls! The theme for April 2023 is Wisdom.
Air date:
March 30, 2023
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About the Episode
Welcome to a new month, Wild Souls! The theme for April 2023 is Wisdom. We are being invited to work closely with discernment, making space and time for the things that really want to be paid attention to at this time -- and trusting ourselves and our wisdom enough to accomplish this. What resources might we need to reach for to strengthen that trust? What might we need to say no thank you to in order to center the big yesses in our lives?
Plus, we answer a listener's question about challenges related to free will and surrender around the idea of Spirit and our soul work.
Transcript coming soon!
Lindsay’s Links:
Seeking a channeled download on the season ahead? Enrollment for Spiralic Tarot closes on 3/31!
Download your Ultimate Soul Tarot Card Guide here!
Got Q's for the podcast? Ask them here!
Help Turkey and Syria:
https://www.akut.org.tr/en/donation
Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cop City!
https://defendtheatlantaforest.org
LINKS TO HELP IRAN:
Thank you to Ariana (@azadi.times.three) for sharing these with us!
1. Center for Human Rights in Iran (based in NY, provides news and in-depth reports on human rights abuses in Iran)
2. How to Talk About Iran (a living document from the Iranian Diaspora Collective on Instagram)
3. Persians With Purpose (Educational content, news translated to English, and other Iran resources on Instagram)
Land Acknowledgement
Honoring and acknowledging that this podcast episode was recorded on the unceded land of The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, currently called Portland, OR, with the deepest respect to the Kalapuya Tribe, Cowlitz Tribe, and Atfalati Tribe.
Please Note
CW Tags: Covid-19, illness, capitalistic structures, anxiety, trauma, organized religion, religious structures, harm in certain New Age beliefs, ableism, spiritual bypassing, pain, physical death, and religious trauma
The content in this episode contains references to mentions of Covid-19, illness, capitalistic structures, anxiety, trauma, organized religion, religious structures, harm in certain New Age beliefs, ableism, spiritual bypassing, pain, physical death, and religious trauma. We have done our best to identify difficult subject matter, but the labels may not be comprehensive for your personal needs. Please honor your knowing and proceed with necessary self-awareness and care.
Transcript
[Introduction]
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(Instrumental intro music)
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Welcome to Tarot for the Wild Soul, a podcast that explores the Tarot through an inclusive, soul-centered, trauma-informed perspective for growth, healing, and evolution. I'm your host, Lindsay Mack.
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Hello loves and welcome back to Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast. It is such a joy to be gathered here together with all of you. Thank you so much for being here, as always. Apologies, I know my voice sounds a little different today; I'm getting over COVID-19. Doing really well. Thank God for Paxlovid (Lindsay laughs). For real. Doing well, my family's doing okay. But I just sound a little road-hard today (Lindsay laughs). But feel very, very good spirits and really thankful to be feeling that way. I'm very grateful to be again, gathering here with all of you in this virtual space for our April Monthly Medicine.
I cannot believe we are already in the month of April. To me, this year has felt like it's been just flying. I'm sure there are those who are like, “Oh my God, every moment is going by twice,” but it feels very fast. Like I truly, can't believe we're in April.
So we've just gone through a very big initiation, right? Like we're in a new astrological cycle. Pluto has pivoted into Aquarius, and it’ll only be for a few months. But it's huge. It's a really, really powerful preview for all of us about this energy. And about this, you know, this time, this generational shift and invitation that this medicine of Pluto is bringing to us. And we just went through a new moon in Aries last week, like we're in a great time of New Energy.
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And because of all the newness and because of the different layers of newness, we're kind of all still figuring out what that means for us and how it feels and what it's showing up—you know how it's showing up for us personally. So just really bowing to and respecting that I think is very important; continuing to be very gentle around that is really important. If you're feeling and going through illness—maybe I'm a bit biased (Lindsay laughs). But if you're feeling somewhat tender or a little bit like, “I don't know what to do with this energy,” I would just you know, really encourage you to take it nice and slow. Just really, really easy. And continue to let it tell you what it wants you to pay attention to—which I think is really the best call no matter what.
Our theme for the month of April is wisdom. How it's coming through to me is wisdom from within, touching more deeply into that wisdom that lives within each of us; that deep compass that isn't necessarily our feelings. Feelings are so valid. They're so important. They're crucial. But feelings are not always facts, right? So we can have huge feelings about something we find out maybe later was unwarranted or irrational or they were really important for us to feel but not necessarily in alignment for us to act on. That being said, No feelings should be pushed away, right? We just don't necessarily want to act out on all of our feelings.
Incredibly, feelings live inside this, this framework of deep wisdom within us. And yet, that channel, that chord of wisdom is wise enough and loving enough and compassionate enough to hold the feelings. The wisdom actually can help us inside of our feelings, let's just say, to know how to respond to the feelings. Whether or not it's in alignment to say anything, to act out on them, to respond out of them, or to tend and hold ourselves through them. Right? So while all of our experiences, feelings, thoughts, big emotions, they're all so valid and deserve our loving awareness in whatever capacity we have the ability to bring to that—the wisdom that's being really spoken about and centered is this incredible depth of loving wisdom. Again, that is large enough to encompass all of those experiences. It's the witness, it's the watcher, it's the holder, and it's the internal mother, the internal parent. And that deep, deep compass that sometimes, in spite of what we feel, in spite of what we may have been told, in spite of, you know, what our brain is telling us is the smart thing to do—we may be pulled in a different wise direction.
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Now, what I'm not talking about is going against really important medical advice and doing something irresponsible financially or, you know, that's never what this means. What it might mean is that we might have a really strong idea of the right thing for us to be doing this month or the next right thing in our lives. Like we want to do this, we want to do that, or we want to get started on this thing. This month is a very powerful time to be able to pause and remember that we are in collaboration with any project, any child, any endeavor, anything that we might be creating we are we are in a co-creation with it. So while we have this gorgeous free will and this ability to initiate, we are still working with the natural flow of alignment, right?
So the wisdom that is present during the theme of this month, is one of discernment, one of humility, one of pausing, one of reflecting, one of listening. The wisdom that we're being invited to work with and cultivate, is born out of that desire to be in co-collaboration with what is in alignment—that might be bigger, or different than what we thought would be or what we might do. It might be a very different path than we thought our April (Lindsay laughs) was going to be. And if that's the case, it's okay to have some really big feelings around it.
It's not necessarily in our best interest to let those feelings force us from the wise path that it really naturally wants to go on. And really what we're talking about is the essence—at least in my mind, in my experience—what it is to live a soul of life. There is within all of us, a soul knowing, a cord of wisdom, a natural current—sometimes it's harder to feel that current—that we ideally want to be following. And it's in the nature of the mind, it's in the nature of our nervous system to want to fight that current.
And sometimes it might feel like the opposite. Like we're swimming so, so hard upstream to live a soul-led life, sometimes it can feel like that. And yet there is still an alignment that happens even when it feels really contracted and tough, which soul work often does. This month, and it's theme being connected to this idea of wisdom, of sovereign wisdom, of soul led wisdom, of really listening deeply and investigating; getting curious about “Why do we feel the way we do? What's the story behind that? What's the belief, right? Why do we feel like we're in a rush? Why do we feel like it's a yes or no?” Or, you know, what might be to just get really curious?
[0:08:55]
The main thing for us this month, is there's something very important here in trusting the timing of things. So you may find that something happens way faster than you're imagining it will, and you might be like, “Whoa, I'm not sure!” Which is, again, totally valid. And yet, if something is really going, ideally, we want to follow that current. And we can always slow down if we want to. But I think it's it can be very helpful if we can just ride the rapids (Lindsay laughs) when it happens because it can be very eye-opening.
And then there are other things that we might have thought like, “Oh, I'm going to do this starting in April, I'm going to work on this, I'm going to whatever.” And we just may find that the days flow differently. Who knows why, who knows for what reason, we just may find it's a little different. So that is like, in the briefest of nutshells, sort of what we're doing here. Sort of the larger invitation here.
In terms of our reading for the month ahead, our collective Anchor Card for all—for again, all of us, really the crux of what this month is doing, and the highest invitation of the month ahead—is Four of Cups.
So, Four of Cups is the ultimate wisdom card. It is the ultimate card for self-sovereignty, it is the ultimate card of wise discernment. Ultimate. Four of Cups is not about isolating oneself, it's not about saying no to something that's really important. It's not about—for lack of a better way of putting it, you know—disregarding an invitation because we're like a sourpuss or something; which I kind of think is the energy behind a lot of the interpretations of Four of Cups. And even if it's put far more delicately, or expansively, there's always something I find in this energy—not in all decks, not for all sources, but I think many—that has to do with like, “You better not,” right? Like, “This cup is coming to you, you better take it. It's, it's here. So just take it.” By the way, the chimes out of the window are a lot louder (Lindsay laughs) than they usually are right now. So sorry, if that's bothering anybody, the window just has to be open, as I'm recording today. So thank you for rolling with it.
[0:11:36]
But yeah, like there's always this thing of like, “Don't. Don't not take that fourth cup.” And that's not my, that's not my medicine. Because I think that what's actually the truth, is that we don't just get that cup that we've said, “No, thank you” to. In the Five we get an additional cup. So we're not losing anything. It's just teaching us about the wisdom of timing and going with the flow of our bodies.
April (Lindsay sighs), you know, it might feel just like any other month, but there's something happening in the bedrock and in the ground water that is all chemical; it's changing us. Like, there's something happening and I would bet that it has to do with Pluto in Aquarius. Pluto in Aquarius shines a light on where there are wounds inside of the collective experience where we're—you know, things that have to maybe come down in order for new things to be built. And one of the biggest things that Pluto in Aquarius is really, I believe, going to be shining a huge light on, is essentially “hustle culture” and this idea of us pushing and grinding—and there's nothing wrong with working hard. There's nothing wrong with that. And also some people don't have a choice. So I completely understand that. And many of us are very burned out very exhausted, we're running on empty. And so, you know, what do we do?
Four of Cups is what it is to embody the wisdom to say “Yes, but not right now.” Yes, but not right now because we're already full up. You may also find with your April, and how you work with Four of Cups, that you actually say yes; that there are a number of things that come to your doors that are very exciting, that are really powerful, really wonderful. And then there might be a couple other things that might tip the scales a little bit into a point where you can't quite hold it all. So we want to be able to root into that deep wisdom, into that discernment.
It might not totally make sense. It might not feel like you know, whatever, who knows what adjective we could ascribe to it. When we're working with Four of Cups, especially as we kind of map it onto the month of April and onto this, you know, monthly theme—what we have here is really again, trusting ourselves enough to know what's really meant to come with us for right now and what's not.
[0:14:20]
Another really important thing I think about Four of Cups is that if we are in deep devotional work on something, like if we're focused on something, if we're channeling something, if we're working on something—we have to be really willing to say no to anything that might be popping up as a distraction. And especially when something's very expansive, those invitations into contraction and resistance and into like kind of stopping the process are really very common. So it's really about being really crisp and clear and gentle with ourselves about kind of like, “I wish I could do this, but it's it's not for right now,” you know? Or “I so wish I could sort of, you know, balance or or hold all these different ideas like right this minute now but this one has to come a little later. This one has to come in May or June,” or whatever it is.
If there's something completely different that's happening in your life, it's really about just trusting in that deep yes or deep no. It might not make total sense to you. Again, if you have family members and friends and like, people in your life that you love and respect, reflecting to you, like, “Hey, I don't know if this is really like the safest and best course of action for you,” and they have very solid reasoning—again, we're not going against common sense responsibility. We're not doing any harm here. This is really about, it's very challenging to trust oneself, especially when it doesn't totally make sense. Or when there's a big “should”, we feel like we should be doing this or should be doing that. Four of Cups doesn't take us away from anything. It puts us closer to what is wanting our radiant devotion and attention.
And on that topic, what we are being invited to devote our attention to this month is Nine of Pentacles. Nine of Pentacles has been popping up a lot. It was a card in Spiralic Tarot in the Spring cycle of Spiralic Tarot; very prominent card. It's been popping up here and there and that is really interesting. To me. It's interesting, on a number of different levels, because Nine of Pentacles is a crucial, it's almost like a crossroad. And it has to do is really unpacking our relationship to pleasure. How we take space, how we take time—like our quality of life. How is there a high quality of life? Is there not? Could there be a higher one? You know, I also think Nine of Pentacles has to do with really emphasizing pleasure for pleasure’s sake, and feasting from the fruits that we feed others but might forget to feed ourselves with, right?
If our attention is going in that direction, part of what we're doing with Four of Cups is clarifying what has a place in our life, on the altar of our life, right now. So that there's a little bit more spaciousness for that pleasure. And as we're navigating, whatever we happen to be navigating in April, one really big kind of persistent, gentle question that's going to come up a lot for us is, “Could this be sweeter? Could this potentially be even more enjoyable? What would have to change in order for that to happen? What might I have to let go of and what might I need to get a little closer to?” Right?
[0:18:23]
But sweetness, sweetness of pleasure and beauty and like centering that; reaching for that. Saying, “No, I won't have this thing. I want that thing,” right? It doesn't need to be expensive. It doesn't need to be inaccessible. It can be sweetness, that's right here—making space for it. But especially again, Nine of Pentacles is a very specific kind of sweetness and it has to do with again, the Pentacles are all about what we build, right? It's about soul work. It's about utilizing this vessel this body for creation, like what it is to be a channel, what it is to support the body inside of that kind of work. And what it is to be kind of a humble, devotional steward to our soul, yeses and noes, right? I mean, we don't always get it right and sometimes we're not as interested (Lindsay laughs) in that—that's really normal. We're talking about a lifetime journey.
So again, Nine of Pentacles of what we're being invited to pay attention to, the questions that we're being invited to ask is, “Can the fruits of my labor go a little bit more to me versus other people right now? Can I hang on to these? Can I take more bites of the sweet fruit? Can I enjoy this? Can I enjoy this?” Like, it might not necessarily be like, “Can I keep you know, can I cut expenses and keep more money?” Because Pentacles aren't really about money. But if we're talking about “fruits of labor”, it might be, you know, intuitive to go there. What I'm talking about, and I think what this card is talking about, is more along the lines of asking, “Could I take more space, even though it might feel a little hard to do that? Could I emphasize projects that feel really important to me, and put different things on hold, because these projects or these endeavors, or these adventures, are going to support and suit and nourish me, as a person?”
So all of those different pieces are what we're being invited to pay attention to. And it's not just sort of this month; these are kind of radical seeds that we're planting, not just for now—but ones that big, big questions, you know, about kind of looking top down at the whole kind of framework of our lives and saying, “Is it possible for there to just be a little bit more of a top loading of pleasure? Is it possible for there to be a little bit more space in there for me?”
What we're learning about right now, this month, is Four of Swords, our second Four. So I want to, before I start talking about Four of Swords, I want to ground us into what The Fours do and how we can really work with them. Fours are connected to Emperor, which makes sense: Emperor is the number Four in the Major Arcana, it's also ruled by Aries. So Fours are very connected to Aries energy, Emperor energy. We can think of The Fours as literally a table with four legs. Super sturdy. And how I like to describe and teach The Fours is almost like a little fort. It's like a table that we drape a blanket over and make like a special sacred fort underneath and we get down in there with whatever is precious to us. And you each Four is kind of a little fort. And each fort is a little bit different. It serves a different purpose.
[0:22:14]
So Four of Cups has to do with being like “I'm in here in this fort with only what feels digestible to me.” That's a huge part about Four of Cups is recognizing like, “I've had enough here, there's enough on my plate, I have to consume and digest this before I can take anything else on or in.” With Four of Swords. It's about okay, Four of Swords, I think can show up really differently. It's about a couple of different things.
But I wanted to finish my thought I apologize here. What I wanted to mention about the connection to Emperor is that I think The Fours actually Anchor Emperor in. The Fours are kind of the roots that allow Emperor to rise. And when we're in Emperor—as we are right now, it’s Aries season—we are really, we actually have to reach down for The Fours to support our work in Emperor. That's really what we do there and that's really how this card can start to, these cards can help us to sort of lift up higher and taller as Emperor. And when we're in The Fours themselves, it can be useful to map them to Emperor because it's a reminder that these are really about the foundations of who we are in our service and how we show up in the world.
So going back to Four of Swords—which is our card that represents the pull for what we're learning about this month—Four of Swords is a number of different things. It is about rest, it is about mental breaks, it is about kind of tuning out to tune in, as my friend Erin Aquarian would say. This card teaches us sort of how to rest effectively. It's not about you know, completely moving away from what's important. It's not about disengaging, because we want to bury our head in the sand or we want to—year we're just sort of opting out. It's disengagement, like Four of Cups from what is not in alignment for us to place our focus on right now. And for a lot of us, this might feel super uncomfortable in a world where, again, there's a million distractions, there's social media, there's news that's depressing and crucially important.
There are times, I can say as a creator and an artist myself, that I'm not as much in one of those things, while I'm creating a big project because it requires all of my focus and attention. And there are times when I engage with those things, it can really take me out of what I'm doing. So we have to really decide for ourselves, it's going to be completely different for all of us. For some of us like opting out of news is not even an option. That's often the way I feel personally, for others of us opting out of certain, you know, social media pieces or other pieces that are important and can also be a distraction, it could also be something completely different. You know, some of those things might not feel like an option other others might.
[0:25:50]
We are disengaging from what is not a yes for us, as an act of radical self care and as an act of wisdom. As an act of wisdom. I can also speak anecdotally about the fact that often when I pull Four of Swords for myself, it is a moment where I have to say, “Brain, mind, I see all of these invitations, all of these, all of these things that you're pulling me into, and I have to say no. For today. I'm going to work today. Tomorrow, I'll be happy to move through the litany of all the things you're bringing forward (Lindsay laughs). For the next hour, the next afternoon, the next few days, I'm not going to engage,” you know? I have to do that sometimes, in order to create certain things because creation is, it's an expansive process, my brain can sometimes get all, all mucked up in the weeds and it can get scared and worried and you know, all different kinds of things.
So, sometimes Four of Swords is about saying no to certain invitations of the mind so that we can actually be more effective in other ones, which is also a huge form of wisdom. And that might look like working for an hour than stopping and scrolling or doing a meditation or doing prayers. If we, especially if we suffer from anxiety, or there's been trauma, sometimes those pauses are very, very important. I think that that's wrapped in Four of Swords, too.
But the most important thing about this is again, leaning into the wisdom, leaning into that self trust. To be able to say, “I absolutely—not only can do this, but I'm allowed to do this. It's in my benefit to do this. That I don't have to—I don't have to push it. I don't have to engage with every thought.” That it is wiser, in fact, to say, “Yes, all of these different things might happen; all of these, like all the what-ifs of the mind.” We're learning how to not necessarily give credence to all of them. That's a big part of this month. For whatever it's worth and however it might show up for us. Really disengaging and saying no thank you to things that don't feel like a yes. And placing our focus on those that do.
How to work with these energies, how to kind of work with the energy of the month, and all of these cards I pulled, Death reversed and Five of Pentacles. So I think that's really important because whatever is happening for us this month, it will all be—we'll all be experiencing it completely differently, you know, on a personal basis. There's a lot of magic and seed planting that is inherent in this month. And the more attention we can give that again, the more that we can say, “I recognize that there's a part of myself that might want to do this or this, or feels that I should do this or this but really this, you know? Really, XYZ—that's what's calling out to my attention. How can I hold that? And keep the rest at a minimum? And say no, thank you.”
[0:29:42]
It really is like an act of huge devotion. And it's a skill to be able to say, “I'm gonna walk this tightrope, and I'm going to focus on what I'm getting a yes to focus on and I'm not gonna get pulled into other stuff and if I do, I'm gonna recenter, you know? It's a huge skill. And that's a big part of the month ahead. But I think all of it is very expansive. And all of it again, does take a lot of skill. And I think that there is an inherent sense for me of transformation in this month, that's possible. And that's where I think Death reversed is coming in.
Because Death is a transformation. It's a transmutation, it's a shift from one thing to another. It's pulling up certain things from the garden of our lives and placing them on the compost pile, so they can not die—but change into a living fertilizer, to become food for what actually wants to grow in our lives. So we may find this month, that in this process and in this huge cycle of change and turnover: realizations. April's a big month for realizing and for big awarenesses to come to the forefront and just being aware like, “This isn't working anymore, I'm out of here.” Or “This actually is something I'd like to give more of my attention to. I'm going to go in this direction,” right?
Death reversed really speaks to the same medicine as Death card right set up, with the addition of potentially more contraction, more resistance to the surrender that this card asks us to engage with. So how to work with all of this energy in April is honoring the medicine of resistance and surrender, that is absolutely natural when it comes to big change, different ways of doing things, focusing on what is a yes for us, and trusting that there absolutely will be a time for what we want to do but isn't a yes to do right now. It's all about what's in alignment, trusting that timing, honoring that wisdom.
And the Five of Pentacles of it all, I think speaks to just that, that we may be a little afraid of losing something. Or we might be afraid that what we're focusing on isn't going to be lucrative or it won't be fruitful, or what if it's the wrong thing; like those doubts. I don't think these cards are here to broadcast a challenging month, I think that they are just representative of the really natural aspects of soul led surrender and what happens when we honor, place our focus on, the things that do actually want to come through—when they're ready to come through—can bring up a lot.
[0:32:44]
The myths of like, everything feeling so good, and so natural and so perfect, when you live a soul led life is really a pretty huge falsehood (Lindsay laughs). It is a myth, just straight up. Like, we have brains, we have nervous systems. The bigger the soul expansion, usually, the more the brain freaks out, bowing to my teacher, Michelle—it's the whole cornerstone of Michelle's work. And I've found that it's very true (Lindsay laughs) for me, you know? So, yeah, I think just really having a lot of compassion for ourselves and recognizing there probably will be experiences of a little resistance around surrendering to this process and around trusting ourselves and a little contraction around like, “Is this the right thing, eugh!” You know, if we can hold that, rather than believe it, it can be really helpful. Super duper helpful.
So, that is our reading for the collective for the month of April. And now I'm gonna pivot to our listener question and then we'll be complete for today. So this one is from anonymous this week. And they ask,
Good morning, Lindsey and Wild Soul team,
I'd first like to say a quick thank you. This podcast has invited me into ways of soul evolution that wouldn't have otherwise been possible. Thank you for your voice. I'm very fortunate to have access to it through this platform.
My question is in regard to surrender. Like many, I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with religion and spirituality. I spent a lot of my life trying on different fits of connecting with Spirit/God/the other side. My shortcomings with Christianity and Catholicism really stem from the idea of surrender. There seems to me to be a disconnect between the idea of free will and surrendering. When it came to the conventional idea of “God”, I was asked to surrender to his will. In essence, God took the weight of my sins while also taking credit for my triumphs, by ways of praising him for all of the blessings and beauty that came essentially for me giving my will over.
I struggle with the same idea when it comes to Spirit. I have a rebellious nature and I'm in love with the idea of freewill. I very much want Spirit and my team to be actively involved in supporting and guiding my life here. But I'm having a hard time distinguishing the difference between my surrendering my will to one entity or another.
Would you please discuss, would you mind please discussing the term “surrender” in regard to Spirit, ourselves, giving up control and its relationship to free will, in your opinion, when it comes to Spirit and spirituality, it would really help me perhaps trust and take down some of my walls. I appreciate and love you. Thank you.
Love you too. Okay, so of course, I want to just first start by saying that I felt very called to answer this question and at the same time, it's a very big one. And I just bow to you and I bow to my own shortcomings, in terms of working my way through answering this question, and know that I'm just speaking on what I know to be true today and I'm right here with you around these things. I struggle with these things myself. And yeah, I just want you to know, I'm not alone and I feel honored and privileged to be able to think through this question. Thank you for trusting me with it, truly.
[0:36:27]
So, I want to first say that your experience here is so completely valid, and you're not alone in it. The kind of more Christianized, Catholicism-rooted way of approaching the idea of surrender, just as you said, that God is you know, God takes our sins and took the weight of our sins while also taking credit for our triumphs. It's definitely a different tone and harmonic structure when we think about the idea of surrender. And while I can't necessarily and will not necessarily get into all that I feel is problematic about that, which you likely agree with, (Lindsay laughs) because that's why you're asking the question; I believe that free will is the most important part of a relationship to Spirit.
In fact, a lot of the time (Lindsay laughs), like, I'll tune in, in my channel and be like, “You know, what, you know, what, which one, what would be an alignment?” Sometimes my Guides come in with a lil, a little bit of a sass and they'll be like, “Do whatever feels right.” Or they'll just say, “Try. Try something. Try anything.” Sometimes it's the only way we know. In fact, free will is really the keystone and the cornerstone of a relationship with Spirit, with Source, with this universe, and with a soul led path. What we're in devotion to, on this path, like a Spirit led path, is that of the soul and the soul's wisdom; which is essentially our heart's truth and our knowing. That's what we're in deference to.
A path with Spirit, I think really champions and cherishes learning through experience, which means like, fucking up and making mistakes and needing to be able to go off here or there and try something. I cannot tell you the number of times that I've tuned in and I've gotten a no in my channel of something and I'm like, “Fuck that. I'm going to try it anyway.” And usually what happens is that whatever it is that I was hoping for is very different or it's completely inconvenient or I'm not getting paid nearly enough (Lindsay laughs) or like, it's just like a shitty situation that they were just trying to help me avoid a little bit. But they're not blocking me from trying. Right?
So there's, there's—my teacher Michelle also, and I hope to give help to really accurately paraphrase this: there was a point where she said to me once “Isn't it incredible?” And again, these are my words, and this is my paraphrase, “Isn't it so incredible? The power we have as humans, to be able to channel down Spirit, to live a soul led life, to live in alignment with them. Beings in the Spirit realm actually need us. Because they're not able to get the message they're not able, like, inspiration needs us to actually embody it and put it down on paper or film it or whatever, right? We are so powerful. And I think that's really the ultimate goal of much of organized religion is to dismantle and dissenter, the power that we have—is really just a method of attempting to control people, right? And to give a sense of order to a universe and in existence, that's pretty spiralic and chaotic, honestly (Lindsay laughs), you know? Which is really scary to a lot of people.
[0:41:04]
So I think the term “surrender” with regard to Spirit has to do with surrendering to the deep wisdom within us and letting it guide us. But also knowing that if we opt or choose to not do that, it's okay. Like, we're not going to be punished, we're not like we might have like we might get our knees scraped. But honestly, we might get our knees scraped, if we do surrender. So like, there's no avoiding it. I think one of the things that is really important to remember—and I say this with tremendous gentleness, and just respect to where everyone is with their path right now, I'm not trying to take anybody down or anything, but—much of New Age, belief systems, I think, are ultimately rooted in, like, somehow, avoiding pain, avoiding, like, just the inevitability of suffering, and the fact that we're in these bodies that will eventually, we will get sick, we will die, it doesn't matter how well we look after the body, or our health, like we're headed in that direction. And there's a tremendous amount of ableism and a lot of other harmful stuff. I think that's involved in spirituality. So in modern-day kind of new age-y spirituality that I don't, I'm not a fan of, and I'm not, I don't consider myself to be a part of.
So surrender doesn't mean that everything's perfect. Surrender—it simply means that we are giving that deep cord of wisdom our attention and that we are actually co-collaborating with that part of us. So what I would love to invite you to consider is maybe the word “surrender” is not appropriate for you. And maybe anytime anyone talks about surrender, you opt into the word collaborate. Because for me, even though I say surrender a lot, I consider my relationship with Spirit to be a collaboration.
Are there times where I am asked to do something? And I'm like, “What?” (Linday laughs) You know, and it kind of feels like, “Oh, my God, why?” I do feel that way sometimes. But I have learned through my own life experience that to ignore that, I'd rather not. So there are times where my mind or my preferences are kind of like, “I don't want to do this.” But there's a lot of things that I've wanted to do that have been terrible for me, honestly, and a lot of things I've not wanted to do that have literally been the best things that have ever happened to me, without exaggeration.
So I think collaboration is a great word. And I think that when we think about surrender, we're just amplifying the volume of that soul truth rather than that of the mind, which is not really necessarily the best arbiter for what we look upon for our decision-making. We just you know, it's really important to involve the mind. It's just not necessarily the place that we want “driving the car” if that makes sense.
[0:44:29]
I think to wrap this up, what I also want to say is like, Spirit and your Guides want you—they, they operate out of freewill. Right? So we can't really have help from Spirit, I don't think, unless we're directly asking for it. It's very rare that Spirit pops in and just sort of intercedes on stuff. We might get a really strong call, we might—but again, that's in collaboration with our soul. Spirit speaks and like, it's hard to explain this, but I really believe that the soul—like your soul, my soul—it's this, it's the same channel as Spirit, like they're all working, it's all a collaboration, all of it. That we can't have one without the other. That Spirit speaks on the soul path, that the soul path speaks on Spirit.
So it's not surrendering to anything outside of us; it's surrendering to a wisdom that wraps around us, that lives within us. And that's not necessarily the dominant voice inside of our mind that we're used to. So we're collaborating with Source to honor and devote ourselves to saying yes to the soul, rather than squashing it or immediately dismissing it, or, you know, we're we're choosing to move into something different.
So, I hope that helps. And I hear you: I was raised Catholic, and I used to be like (Lindsay laughs), when I was starting to reclaim my intuition and stuff, I had an attitude, a little bit of like, “Can't fucking tell me what to do. Like, I'm going to do what the fuck I want to do with Spirit.” I had to go through that. It, that was really important. They held me very tenderly through that, by the way. There was just a lot of like, hard, literally hard lessons and hard falls and hard mistakes and there still are sometimes and tough moments—but the biggest thing that I've learned is that they loved me enough to let me go through all that because free will is that important to Spirit. Like we have to choose, they can just support us through the choice, right? We're always allowed to choose.
And I think that's at the heart of it, is that if we tune in and we say, you know, “What would you have me know about this? What would you have me do?” We could get an idea or a hit. And we are totally free to change our minds are totally free to be like, “Thanks, but no, thanks.” Like really. And there's no threat or fear of Hell, because there is no Hell and there's no Heaven and there's, you know, we just are in what we're in. And then we pass through the veil and the next adventure begins, right? There's no punishment. The punishment, if you can even call it that is just the pain of having gone against our, our knowing which is super painful. Right?
So it's just a re—it's a relearning, and a reconfiguration of I think, you know, all kinds of different things. So I hope that that helps and I'd love to hear from you. Let me know how it lands with you.
—
[Conclusion]
[0:48:20]
Aw man, thank you so much for being here y'all. And it was a joy to be able to record this and connect through a very unique experience of having, of being sick sounds odd but channeling helps me. It helps me feel better. So it was very nice to be gathered with all of you through this, it always is.
Just a gentle reminder that enrollment for Spiralic Tarot closes really soon, our spring edition. So if you feel called to a really beautiful download a channeled download about the season ahead, encourage you to click on the link in your show notes and just check it out. I love all of you, and I'll catch you at the next episode until we greet each other again. Please take exquisite care of yourselves.