121. Monthly Medicine: May is Choice
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We are working with the theme of choice this month. How do we engage with this the energy of choice in a time when so many of us feel so powerless, so totally devoid of choice?
By coming home to ourselves — by choosing ourselves, no matter what. By coming home to what resides within ourselves, giving it our attention and acknowledgment, even in the midst of challenging situations.
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About the Episode
Welcome to a new month, Wild Souls! We cross the threshold into the month of May on the Bealtaine/Samhuinn portal, a time where we are invited to sense the intersections of birth and death.
We are working with the theme of choice this month. How do we engage with this the energy of choice in a time when so many of us feel so powerless, so totally devoid of choice? By coming home to ourselves — by choosing ourselves, no matter what. By coming home to what resides within ourselves, giving it our attention and acknowledgment, even in the midst of challenging situations.
What and where are we birthing? What are we growing, nourishing, giving our time, attention and energy to? How are we moving through a death process? Are we giving space for our grief, our anger, our bewilderment in the midst of that process, and more importantly, can we choose to be in both at the same time, honoring both/and, instead of either/or?
Wild Soul Collective Reading for June:
Card of the month: Five of Swords
Anchor Card to call upon when we work with choice: The Emperor
What are we releasing?: Four of Swords
What are we walking toward?: Eight of Cups
What card is helping us to stay in our center?: Queen of Swords
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: Trauma, white supremacy/privilege, systemic marginalization, extinction, climate change and environmental degradation, cultural appropriation, addiction, body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria, birth, death, loss, grief
The content in this episode contains references to trauma, white supremacy/privilege, climate change, extinction, and environmental degradation, cultural appropriation, addiction, body dysmorphia, gender dysphoria, birth, death, loss, and grief. 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]
[0:00:00]
(Instrumental intro music)
This is Tarot for the Wild Soul, a weekly Tarot podcast about life, death, and rebirth, hosted by me, Lindsay Mack.
[0:00:16]
Hello Loves. Welcome to a brand new episode of the Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast. Welcome to a new Monthly Medicine episode and Beltane - Samhain blessings to those of you who are listening whether you'd be honoring Beltane in the Northern Hemisphere or in the Southern Hemisphere. We really walk through both when we go through these kinds of cross-quarter holidays and so just bowing to everybody in shared blessings and celebration of this really powerful portal of experience.
So we're going to talk a little bit, Beltane and Samhain will be kind of like woven into the Monthly Medicine this month because this particular cross quarter is very big, very big. And, again, we really do kind of feel both regardless of what hemisphere we're on. And it's particularly powerful because it does kind of ripple through the month, and we do feel the invitations, the reverberation, or the kind of the echo of Beltane and Samhain throughout the month of May. It's really quite powerful. So yeah, we're going to be talking about it through the episode, going through a reading for the month.
This is a really, really intense month. And, you know, it's... like, of course it is. These are incredibly unprecedented times, period (Lindsay Laughs), but really, in the intensity level, you know, pretty unprecedented in that way. And, you know, it's pretty powerful because our theme for the month is “Choice”.
You know, how do we engage with that word and these times? And I don't even know that I have the answer for it. It was just what came through, and I understand it because macrocosmically we’re at the most crucial time of choice that human consciousness has ever known. We're essentially collectively deciding whether or not to die out as a species, and that's really intense. You know, that's really intense.
And it's not just this virus, you know. We've been deciding that for a long time. It's, you know, the climate change-related extinction that is the most rapid in human history. Like, we're really... we've been choosing for a long, long time. Like, are we in this or are we not in this?
[0:03:14]
And it's powerful because as human beings, we don't feel that. We're not taught that. We were never taught that. That's part of why we're in this because people have been living so not-in-that-sense for so long. Now everybody is waking up, which is really very powerful, and also, you know, hard. And it's hard because even, you know, because everybody's waking up, not everybody understands what's happening to them, and it can — on the way to kind of connecting with the heart, you know — we can get stuck in denial and anger and, you know, denial and anger aren't really a problem. It's just not it. You know, there's stuff usually underneath that.
We're not ultimately talking about, “Oh, we got to feel into our choice, you know. What are we choosing? We got to choose.” What I'm really sensing about what's possible with May is, like, looking at choice as a living meditation, like, in this time when most of us feel pretty fucking disempowered. And, you know, where do we find our flexibility, our connective point, with choice? Because choice is really powerful.
You know, we're the only creatures on the planet that gets to work with choice the way we do. You know, animals choose, plants choose. Like, there's choice for sure, in all creatures on this planet. But because of our brains and our ability to communicate, and ability to have evolved to think the way we do and speak the way we do, we get the privilege, actually, of engaging with the idea of choice in a really different way than other creatures on the planet.
Now, does that mean that everybody has the privilege of choice, as in capital P, capital C, like Privilege of Choice? Absolutely not. No (Lindsay Laughs)! I'm not in any way implying that choice is as easy for one person who has huge privilege, you know, white skin, money, is in any way the same as somebody else who may be in a different position where there is a sense of inequity.
But we do have a privilege of choice in terms of our connection and our embodiment, in a human body versus the body of an animal versus the embodiment of a plant. And it's important to just remember that that's there. And it's important to remember that we can engage with the idea of choice in the tiniest grain of sand way.
It doesn't need to be so big. It doesn't need to be visible. It really, really doesn't. If you're thirsty, and you choose to nourish yourself with a glass of water or some other beverage, you've just engaged with the medicine of choice.
[0:06:50]
Ironically, because we're in such a big time right now, where these themes are so big, the invitations are so big, the action steps are getting very, very, very small. I mean, there is a tight radius around all of us right now, in terms of what we're doing and what we're available to do, and, you know, there's not actually all that much room to be out much further than where we are now because nothing's written yet. We're writing it.
You know, and this has always been true. That, I mean, I've been talking about how the future isn’t fixed for years (Lindsay Laughs), you know, and I didn't know something that other people didn't. That's just the truth. Like, there is no future. We're birthing it in every moment that we choose to be awake to what is.
So this is where we can plug into in the midst of this insane time where everybody feels disempowered. Nobody feels like their choices are being honored. Everybody is experiencing the same thing: “I didn't fucking choose this. I don't want this. It's not fair.” There's not an argument for any of that; that gets to come with us. That actually gets to be honored here. But that sentence, “The realization that the future is not fixed. It gets written”, with every moment that we choose to be awake to what is, is the key. That is where… that is really where we can plug into choice in a way that is beyond probably our deepest imagining.
[0:08:39]
Whatever is with you right now is, really, the set of tools on your altar, the treasures from Spirit, to get you closer to empower choice, for real. And we can either be in victimhood about that, or we can be in empowerment about it. And you don't need to feel empowered to be in empowerment about it. And you also don't need to feel necessarily victim-y to be in victimhood about it.
You can't argue with what is. You can try, but it won't work. And what is here? Let's not start with what's here as in the external pieces. Let's start with, like, what's here? — I'm tapping on my heart. — I'm talking about what's in you, your feelings, what you're moving through right now, your heart.
And I'm tempted to ask, like, how’s your inner little one. How's your inner caretaker? How are you doing? You know, could it be, in any way, even 2% easier than what it is for you right now? Could it be even 1% more compassionate, even a half a percent more tender with what you're going through? That is choice.
You've never had control over external circumstances in this life. Never. We've had the illusion of control. Now all that's gone.
This is not about feeling into some false, spiritual narrative of like, “Feel into the empowered choice,” you know, like you have control or something. This is actually an invitation to recognize that we're being birthed out of a sense of false control, and fully initiated into the fact that this is really a spiral that we're living in, and we don't need to be afraid of that because it's always been that way. The veil of illusion is just lifted.
[0:10:59]
This is about gaining the capacity, the resourcing, the flexibility, the conditioning, experience, to be with ourselves and what arises within our life in a present way. When we're able to do that, pockets of choice and pockets of inquiry start to open up where we did not see them before. We're in, again, a huge birth-death time. Huge. And we're all choosing now, you know.
And with regard to that birth-death thing, that's part of the reason why Beltane and Samhain really ripple out for a long time after they happen on either May 1 or, you know, October 31/November 1. There's… you know, Beltane is the bonfire and Samhain is the lit candle in our room at night. You know Beltane we are celebrating everything again that is worthy of living for, that is beautiful, that lights us up, that sparks a sense of connection and joy, and, you know, this in between time between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice and Samhain is about honoring life; understanding that as we live, we get closer to death, both spiritually and actually.
And both mark a very high sense of transformation. Both are about a turn from our center, a shift, you know. And, again, neither of them have anything to do with being happy, feeling into anything, with any particular ritual. You don't have to do anything to engage with these energies, and, again, for the 80th time, if you're going through one, you're going through the other, too.
[0:13:14]
When we go through a death experience, when there is death close at hand, the most tender love and compassion can come forward within ourselves, our love for the being or the person or the animal that we're losing, the care that we can receive from a friend, the idea that the heart could love so much to be breaking so deeply when things begin to die. We are in enormous grief right now, collectively.
And there is a lot of Beltane medicine in Samhain, just like, you know, it can be really hard to celebrate the beautiful things of life, because we know that they're not permanent, you know. It can be really hard to be present for the most beautiful springtime, for the most beautiful time of the year, when the air is really sweet, when things are starting to bloom, especially when most of us are, you know, either inside at work, not, certainly most of us, going out and enjoying the outdoors. So, it can be really hard when things are sweet and beautiful to not kick them away, because we don't want to feel the loss of them. And that's how there's a lot of Samhain in Beltane.
So the birth-death portal, it's one portal, you know. And that's true of us right now that we're all rebirthing right now, and a huge piece of us is dying, even if in a couple months we’re totally “back to normal”.
There's no normal after this. There has to be a confronting of grief. There's the entire false structure of our country in America is really just kind of coming apart. We all knew what it was built on. These are Tower times (Lindsay Laughs). Like this is, you know, there's a lot of good Tower medicine in Beltane, weirdly, because of those big bonfires, but the fire is represented as present in Beltane and Samhain. There's a lot of burning away here.
[0:15:40]
And the question becomes, again and again, if we're choosing now, and if we're in a time of Choice with a capital C around whatever is particularly coming up first, and remember it's really easy for the brain to get in here and be like, “I don't have choice over anything,” but you do.
There are things that you have choice over. You have a choice as to whether or not to engage with that thought in the first place. It's not bad or good to do it, but are you available for that? Are you available to believe that you don't have any choice of or anything at all? Because what that will do is rob you of being able to see where you do have enormous privilege, where there is potentially room to unpack that privilege, use that privilege to help others.
And if you are in a position where you do not have as much access to privilege and feel like you don't have choices, it can really paralyze us around situations where we actually might have some options available to us, and we're so identified with our story that we can't see.
And I'm not saying any of that is not true. And I'm certainly not saying it's not valid. It literally could not be more valid. We're just not necessarily being supported anymore in assuming that anything is true. We're being asked to come into a much more intentional time of asking.
Is it true that I'm being asked to totally surrender to this right now? That is a choice. You can surrender when you don't have any choices, when you don't get what you want, or you can kick and tantrum. That's a choice, too. And neither one are bad. They just kind of lead us down different paths.
[0:17:43]
We have so much more access to choice than we believe we do. And the point with paying attention to our choice right now, again, it's not to bypass the fact that so many fucking people right now are disempowered and don't feel like they do have any choice.
It's an invitation to not abandon yourself if you feel that way. It's an invitation to recognize that even if you do feel completely not able to access any part of your empowered choice, you still can choose to be with what's coming up in you. That's a really, really valid, crucial choice that can change a person's life.
It can be a line drawn in the sand, which, holy shit. I never knew what it was to choose myself. And I realized that I had been putting all of this energy on the external world validating me, giving me options, giving me choices, and that's not, again, something that we need to bypass. It can be both/and. Ideally, there should be more choice for everybody available to them.
And yet what it comes down to is one simple thing: are you choosing yourself? And I don't mean selfishly. I don't mean choosing yourself over others. I mean, choosing yourself so you can be available for others. I mean, saying “yes” to your soul, instead of fucking around with whatever happens to be coming up for you that does not resonate, has never really been true for you.
And by the way, I'm going to come in hot right now a little bit. You know, I'm giving everybody listening to this the benefit of the doubt. You and I both know that there are some people in our world right now that truly, truly, truly, absolutely know that there are choices available to them, that can and have the ability to move out of certain aspects of their lives. And they don't do it because they're afraid, or they don't do it because the only way they ever knew love was to be, you know, in a particular situation, or, like, that's absolutely true. That's not true of everybody. It's probably not true of most, but it is there.
I know quite a few people that that's true of, actually, and that doesn't make them any less worthy of this conversation. But it is really easy. Really, the brain loves to tell us we have no choice. This is Eight of Swords shit: you're trapped, you're caught, you can't do anything.
What you can do is come home and get yourself. What you can do is take care of yourself in the midst of those feelings. You don't need to tell yourself, “Oh, you actually do have all these choices.” But the biggest choice is, “Well, I choose you. I’m here, you know. I love you.” And from there we just take one more step forward, and it becomes about like, what do you need? How can I tend to what's coming up for you right now?
[0:21:16]
We have a lot of collective — and for good reason — emphasis, energy, attention, on the places in our lives right now where we feel so fucking powerless, again, where we don't have choice, where things are so unjust, so unfair, where people are not getting the care they need. They're dying because nobody is literally stepping up and caring for them.
Hospitals are fucking overrun. People have still not received unemployment benefits, who, it's been months that they've been trying to get them. Like there's people are trying to get jobs, or they have to work, or have a job where they're essential and maybe even want to stay home, but are showing up every day to unforeseen and unimaginable things because they made a commitment to do so.
None of that. None of that. We're not bypassing a single part of that. And it's precisely because of that, that it's so important to begin to feel into:
Where do I have access to choice? Where can I feel into my empowered choice in this microcosmic second of my life? In this moment, in this breath, in this whisper, this nanosecond, what's here for me? How can I show up to this moment and bring a sense of empowered choice?
You know, we are in this birth-death portal. So in the birth end of things, what are we giving birth to with our choice? You know, what are you growing and nourishing right now? What are you gestating right now?
You might feel like you're just getting through. You're still gestating something. What is showing up? You know, what are we giving our time, attention, energy to? That's all a choice. And I can tell you, I mean, I can tell you from personal experience, really, that I'm continuing to find myself in this spiral, where I come home to myself in these ways that are more kind of connected and intimate and close with myself than I've ever been.
And then the energy externally is so strong with regard to, you know, all of the restrictions in place, and I can get spiraled out pretty quickly around like, “Oh my god, I don't have any choice. I can't do anything, or I can't not do this thing, and I don't want to do it,” or, you know, whatever the particular scenario is. And it's a constant moving out and moving back in, but that's part of the growth cycle, too.
[0:24:25]
You know, birth is not easy. Birth is really hard. Birth is about serving something. It's about honoring. When we give birth to something, we're doing it not just for us, but for the thing that we're birthing, too.
We're birthing a new collective together. You know, there's, again, even if things like “go back to normal” there is no normal anymore. And that's a part of what we're grieving. We're trying to process that. Like, what does that even mean? Like, again, this is unprecedented shit, and we’re choosing, and we're showing up.
And the way that we do that, the grist for the mill, the actual lived practice of it, is to show up to what you've got going on. You're pissed at yourself, at a situation in life, and with somebody in, you know, your office working remotely. Show up to it. Choose yourself. Give yourself the space. Yes, you feel angry. Feel it.
Can you imagine what would happen if we actually let ourselves feel our anger in a healthy way. If we actually made space for it, it would be, like, unimaginable, you know.
And this is just about beginning to come home to ourselves, you know, and to that end, too, you know, in terms of the death side of the portal, what are we supporting in terms of the death process right now? You know, what, where are we, the midwives, the doulas, around a particular death process? Are we showing up to that?
We are in enormous death time right now. The death of a dream, the death of what we had hoped would happen, the death of our expectations for our time, and what we thought life would be like, I mean, it's so different, and there's a lot of trauma and grief in that for many of us. And we can still touch them with our blessings and appreciate how good we might have it, and still feel the trauma and the grief of the death of something that we'd hoped would happen and now will not. You know, or may not, right now anyway, and that's valid. That's valid.
[0:26:52]
We're learning emotional resiliency. We’re learning vulnerability. We haven't been taught that. Nobody knows, really, how to handle their grief. You know, it's really hard.
So are we actually showing up to the places in which we are in a death process? Are we present for those times? Are we giving space to our grief, our anger, our bewilderment? And can we choose to be in one or both of these experiences at the same time?
I really believe we can. And again, how we do this, how we engage with choice, how we reclaim the medicine of choice is by coming home to this moment, not necessarily what's out there, but also not bypassing what's out there. We're just redirecting that attention back home to ourselves. This is not what you think you should be, what you should be doing, what you should be engaging with, how you should feel.
We're constantly doing violence against ourselves by “shoulding” ourselves, and as cliche as it is, it’s true. This is about starting with what's here.
[0:28:20]
Our card for the month is Five of Swords. And that's a huge card of choice, actually.
Five of Swords — I know that some people are like, “Oh my god” — Five of Swords is not an indication that this month is going to be particularly anything. Not hard, not bad. It might be contractive, but really, the last few months have been highly contractive. So that's not weird, you know. We're alive in these times. So it's contractive.
Five of Swords is about the medicine of recentering. It's about living a process of recentering, not thinking about it, not being a conceptual piece, but actually living it. Now, if we mess up, screw up, make a mistake, say the wrong thing, Five of Swords teaches us to be like, “Okay, wow, now that I've realized they've kind of messed up or made a misstep somewhere, I can potentially recenter and make amends or seek to undo the harm. But if I'm not acknowledging that that happened, the recentering process can’t occur.”
And, sort of in the same lines, if we're so consumed with our guilt, and our shame and our “oh my god, I should never have done that”, and our fragility, even, in some situations, we also can't really learn. So we reclaim this idea of choice because Five of Swords teaches us and says, you know, even in the shittiest of times, recentering is always available to you.
You can always recenter, and you don't need to feel good to recenter it's just about being like, “Okay, is there something? Is there a way that I can ease up on my judgement around myself? Can I catch my brain in these stories? Is my brain “shoulding” me? Is it telling me I should be doing better, I should be doing more, I should be able to keep up with my work and the kids homeschooling, I should be able to handle the pressures of my work better, I should feel more grateful because I'm not going through anything horrible right now, I’m just sort of going through, you know, whatever.”
You know, we were constantly shoulding ourselves, and it's really valuable to begin to acknowledge our own habits and patterns with that, because the more we do it to ourselves, the more we tend to do with other people and it's got to go, you know.
[0:31:03]
So the month is not gonna be a Five of Swords experience. And by the way, for those of you who have sort of an old school relationship with this card I just did a podcast episode about this not that long ago called, I think, like “Fucking up and something”, something with fucking up? But it was all about Five of Swords and basically how to work with this card.
And being that it's coming up as the card of the month, again, this isn't a day-to-day microcosmic or even macrocosmic experience. This is about learning how to plug in our sense of choice with recentering, beginning to recognize the little pockets and the gems of feeling into our empowered choice that are available to us all the time.
You know, we pick a fight, we get pissed, we lose our temper, we have an attitude, we cop a, you know, we cop an attitude in some way. Like, we can hold that. And we can also, if we really know that we're responding out of a sense of anger or grief that we're not really paying attention to, or tending in the way that it really wants us to, we can recenter.
You know, Five of Swords teaches us, “You will eventually, even if you lose all of your swords, even if you make a choice that really ‘fucks you’, there is recentering available.” You know, it's just about coming home to, okay, you didn't take your medication for a month? Call your doctor, and like, start today. See what you can do. You know, you broke your commitment to recovery? Call your sponsor, your new cycle starts today (Lindsay Laughs). You know? It’s like, we can either get into, “Ugh, how could I have done this? How could I?”
[0:33:09]
You know, it's also about learning what happens when we make choices that don't really serve us. Everybody does that.
So how do we make amends? How do we recenter? How do we reach out for help when we need some extra help?
This is a big, big, big month for pausing before we step forward, externally. Just hang out, hang out a little bit longer than maybe you think you should. Just hang out with it, you know. You don't have to make choices right away.
So this is about unpacking, opening up, letting blossom what's with us, but we have to choose it. We have to be able to say, “I'm choosing not to engage with my brain's invitation here, so I can be in greater spaciousness with myself with what's coming up. I'm choosing to believe that my brain has the right idea, and I'm going to make this choice, and we'll see whether or not it matches with what feels good or not good,” you know?
We're really learning how choice is available to us all the time. And there are all kinds of different ways that it comes up, and we get to learn, how do we recenter back into it in a time of total feeling of disempowerment and the lack of choice, you know. What, where are there these beautiful, again, these pockets of sacred choice that are available to us, that are actually more constant and more reliable than anything external, which is, are you available to choose yourself? When you fuck up how do you come back home?
That sense of rupture and repair pair is one of the deepest ways to create bonds. You know, it's very hard to, you know, sometimes that that kind of journey can be the very thing that leads us into an even deeper, richer relationship with ourselves than if we hadn't had that opportunity.
[0:35:22]
When we… you know, the Anchor Card that we can call upon, to work with us and to be by our side, when we feel into this sense of choice, is Emperor.
Because when it comes to choosing ourselves, when it comes to making time for ourselves, when it comes to choosing us, we need the Emperor to help us. Because the brain will, you know, it's got a million disguises that it likes to put on this core, this core shared thing.
But it's the same thing, which is, you know, the biggest wound that all of us have around choosing ourselves is, “Well, who might do that? Who am I to do that when people are suffering? There's such privilege in being able to choose to tend and take care of myself, you know, who am I to do that when, you know, who would care? Why me? Like, what's so special about me? You know, toughen up, just get over it.” Or, you know, “I'll be fine” or well, you know, whatever our stuff is.
And the Emperor really, above all things, says you have a right to be here on this planet, and you're not just here to be someone else's caretaker. Someone else. Like, you're here, first and foremost, before you do anything for anyone else, choosing yourself is the most important piece here.
This is what Aries teaches us. Aries researches the self so deeply and is then able to really sit and be with other people, is able to really, you know, serve the world through the observations they make around their own process. And this is what Emperor tells us. It says, “If you truly want to be, you know who you came here to be on this planet, if you want to actually access your own medicine, you don't want to dip in and, you know, take from anybody else or appropriate from anybody else, or parrot anyone else's work as your own, if you want to really feel that sense of choice.”
And, obviously, I'm not implying that everyone on the road to really tuning into their own medicine is copying other people, but it is something that's going around right now. You know, as everybody who is really, you know, everybody is really waking up right now. And so many folks are really in need of such great care. And in the effort to really help and serve, a lot of people are just kind of reaching for what other people have done because it's worked well and kind of doing their own, I’d say, “subversion” of that thing.
And if you find yourself doing that just, you don't have to do that anymore. You have your own medicine, they have theirs. And they walked probably through a lot of what you're walking through, which is, like, not fucking knowing what they're doing, and the not knowing what you're doing is a huge part of this work.
You have to actually let that void be there in order to have enough space for your own medicine and content to come in. So it's just something to think about, just something to consider and to notice in yourself whether or not, you know, you're really finding a sense of borrowing happening for you right now, or whether it's feeling like you're coming through with more medicine and more content than maybe you ever have. I feel like it's I'm seeing both so tremendously right now.
[0:39:38]
The Emperor says, “Be yourself and know that you have a right to be here. There's enough room for you here. There's enough room for you to shine here.” You know, the point where we can fall apart in Five of Swords work is that we say like what's underneath that? Why the choice to recenter is so powerful is because there's so much discourse, dialogue, noise in our head that says “Who the fuck cares about you? Why? Why you? Why? You fucked up.”
The brain so fucking cruel. We get to be like, “Because I'm alive on this planet that's fucking why. Because they have a birthright to be here. I have a right. I'm my own parent, and I refuse to abandon my kid anymore, you know.”
The Emperor can really, really help us with that.
[0:40:45]
What we're releasing is Four of Swords. Not a time to be sleepwalking anymore. Not a time to kind of be checked out, not a time. And I'm not talking about checking in with external. It's about checking in with yourself. What we're releasing is, you know, kind of, I think Four of Swords is such huge medicine, but what we're going into is Eight of Cups.
And that's what we also got for the Weekly Medicine this past week, which I think is really interesting because Four of Swords is essentially a foundation-building time, and we've been doing that, weirdly. We've been building this foundation. We've been oddly getting used to this time, to a certain extent many of us. And well, I wouldn't say that it's like feeling cozy and homey by any extent, but we have been in it for a while and the landscape of the grief and of the experience keeps changing, but it's not as shocking to many of us as it was. It doesn't mean that it's welcome. It just means that it's... we're moving through different shades and landscapes of it right now.
So we're leaving behind Four of Swords. We're leaving behind that sense of floating, of maybe feeling like, “Well, I'm not gonna, you know. I can't, like, deal with what's coming up in me,” and we're moving into a lot of different energy.
We're moving from Sword energy this month to a sense of Cups. We're moving from a Four — which is really about braking, sheltering, kind of going a little bit more internal, but not necessarily doing internal work, just sort of keeping the outside at bay — to an Eight energy.
Eight of Cups and Eights always let us know in the Tarot that we're going into them in one way, and we’re coming out of them different, coming out of them changed. So this month, we really get to feel into that sense.
[0:42:51]
What we're stepping into, and walking toward is Eight of Cups.
We're leaving behind something that did not work for the hope of something better. We are leaving behind all the ways in which we have abandoned ourselves, betrayed ourselves, done harm to ourselves, believed that we're not worthy of being with ourselves, believed that we're not worthy of choosing ourselves, tricked and lied and believed in the lie that in order for us to be more compassionate to other people, we had to abandon our sense of self to be of service to them.
Or the opposite, where some people say, “I don't give a fuck about other people. It’s all about me.” There's still not a whole lot of honoring of self going on with those people either (Lindsay Laughs). So this is about us, on us. This is about the melting away, the dropping, the burning away, whether in our little candle or in our huge Beltane bonfire, to basically say “I’m unavailable for that going forward. I choose differently.”
Choosing yourself will change your life. You don't have to love yourself wildly. You don't have to be in joy. You don't have to like everything that you're handed. This is not about liking it.
I love my body and deeply struggle because of my own gender stuff and body stuff and history, deeply struggle in my relationship with parts of my body, feeling like they don't particularly belong on my body or whatever, and those, nobody needs to worry about that (Lindsay Laughs). You know, it's fine, but I still appreciate the body part. Even if I don't particularly like it all the time. I still want to include it in the fold. And sometimes I don't. It's really a day-to-day thing. But I can separate the parts from the whole. And the body, my body, I choose her every time. And when I don't choose her, I try my best to recenter.
We're never going to get it right. We're never going to get it perfect. This is why Five of Swords is like a best friend to us. Believe it or not, it's really true because it says, “Can we fucking please abandon the delusion that we're supposed to get it right? That loving and choosing the selves means that we never do anything ever again, to betray ourselves.
You will betray yourself again. (Lindsay Laughs) That's just, like, let's just laugh about it. Let's just acknowledge it. Let's let the acceptance of that be so great that we stop wasting years of our lives in shame and guilt, that we stop wasting so much of our energy into self-flagellation or into sinking down so deeply because we think like, “Ugh, I fucked up so bad.” You didn't fuck up so bad. You were just a person. By the way, those feelings are totally valid, too. And I see you in them. And I'm also here to invite you to know that there may be something else in here for you, too; that we really are doing our best.
[0:46:18]
Eight of Cups is supporting us in saying: are you available to let something in your internal mechanism go so that you can be freer?
Choosing yourself also doesn't mean that you have to have the luxury of time. You don't need to have any money for it. You don't need to have anything. It's the only free thing, and it's the last thing… We needed to literally be in a pandemic where everybody is — I mean, not everybody's inside — but where so many of us are inside. Life has been completely interrupted because this homecoming was this important.
Are we going to continue to not choose ourselves? If not, I don't know about the future of our collective existence. This is about really coming back to center, keeping our eyes on our own paper, actually coming back to our own soul work.
[0:47:26]
And, you know, again my situation with regard to, you know, my life is pretty specific but without getting into details, this has been a, you know, there are challenges in this time for me even with my enormous privileges in this time. Like, even just my safety and my ability to be home is a huge privilege, and as I prepare to begin my course today, with my students, there has been more intensity and pressure, and, like, my Guides, like clapping in my ear like drill sergeants to do, really, essentially exactly what I'm telling, what I'm inviting all of you to consider because that was the only way that I was ever going to be able to hold my students in the midst of this time.
If I didn't choose myself, if I made it about, “Oh, other people have it so much worse. Like, I shouldn't even engage or entertain my feelings,” there's no way that I could speak to the experience of others having it so much worse if I didn't make room for my own experience actually. It's not selfish. It's the only healthy, active tending that we actually have available to us in this life.
This is about your personal work. Like, I'm sharing something about my personal work with you, and how it allows me to hold a collective energy so much better than if I just tried to make it all about what the collective needed, all about them instead of about me. I can only serve from my capacity to hold what's coming up for myself because of a million reasons.
So what cannot continue? What has to die in order for you to be reborn into your life? These are intense questions, and yet they are here for us.
[0:49:52]
And finally, the card that is helping us to stay in our center is Queen of Swords. So what we're talking about this month is really, really, really strengthening that sacred container of boundaries. My therapist once sort of led me through this really powerful visualization of being the embodiment of a wild rose, of a rose where a rose is open. It's fragrant. It's beautiful, it's enticing, it's lovely. It's warm.
It's an amazing thing and totally available to be enjoyed, maybe to have, you know, its petals be touched. And, of course, we wouldn't necessarily do that with any other person without consent. But this idea of a rose is available to us. And when you don't honor it and respect, the thorns will be there to remind us like, “Hey, there are boundaries here, pal.”
And I like that image so much. It really resonates with me this idea of, like, being the rose, being this beautiful, wild, amazing, exquisite rose that has such a clear, built-in boundary, such a clear system of boundaries. And we can be that, too. We can step into that as well.
Queen of Swords is, whew, a major holder of boundaries. It’s really big. So, what calls us out of choice? You know, how do we give up our choice? You know, what ways do we abandon ourselves? What ways do we, do we betray ourselves, you know? What comes up for you when I mention that? You know, do you find, like, every time you feel uncomfortable you do this, or you do that?
Being super clear about what we're available for and what we're not available for, is a really big Queen of Swords gift; that sense of like, “No to this. Yes to that.” So, really touching in with yourself, what exactly are you available for? What feels unacceptable going forward, and what feels like it is something that you want to really embrace?
[0:52:40]
So as we wrap up here, you know, this is just, it's a gentle invitation. It's just a call to feel into like where are you right now with your sense of feeling like, or feeling your availability or your lack of availability, to really be with what you’re needing, to choose yourself?
And we can do that whether we have multiple children at home, no matter how busy we are. This is not about fantasy. This is about accessible choice. We're not always available to choose ourselves in every moment. And yet, even when we're doing something that we don't particularly want to do, that we so wish we had more space, more time, if we’re at work and we're just completely overburdened, there can be a moment.
Even in the midst of that mess, those feelings, that resistance, that may be that anger, that grief, that rage, where we just maybe even invisibly tap a hand to our heart and be like, “I know. This really sucks right now, but I love you, and I'm here. And I'm never going to leave you. And we're in this together. And it blows. And I wish we had more help. I wish we had more support. I wish we could go outside. I wish we did not have to be working here today. Or I wish that we were able to get a job.” Wherever you happen to be, that is what I'm talking about.
It's not we have had this fucking delusion that choosing ourselves requires all this time, all this work, all these practices, we can't be thinking of anything we don't want to do. Bullshit. It's how you stay tethered to yourself when you inevitably have to do things you don't want to do (Lindsay Laughs). This is life, man! Everybody has to do shit they don't want to do. We never... we're not promised comfort in this life. We're not promised that we're going to like it. We were never promised fair, that's for sure.
So how do we choose us in the reality of all that?
[0:55:20]
The more we come back to that idea, in those moments when things feel the shittiest, how do we call upon Five of Swords medicine? How do we say, “Okay, whew, it feels like I lost all my swords in a bad bet. It really feels like I made the wrong choice. It really feels like I made the wrong call, really feels like things blow and,” you know, yada, yada, yada? How do we say “And I still love you, me,” little version of yourself or you or whatever. “And I won't leave you.”
The more we're able to do that, the more we will actually be able to not leave our planet as it continues to warm, the more we will not be able or we will be able to stay, even as the trees fall, even as things change so rapidly. We will be able to be present for it. We will be able to actually stay with other people when they need us, rather than being so overwhelmed that we can't hold the space.
It is the most profound act of selflessness to choose the self, actually, because the ego really doesn't want us to do it. It's pretty threatened by it, and yet there's so much power in being able to do it. It totally makes us blossom open. And in this time it can help us feel into larger choices, you know. It can help us feel into our Guides, can help us feel into those choices that may come up where we, it might not be any situation where we feel like we have much empowerment, and yet we can stay with ourselves. And even that is something that can totally transform our lives. Sometimes that's the whole reason for a situation to begin with, just so we could practice choosing ourselves.
So, yeah, I think that's all I have to say. I invite you to just reflect on the how that shows up for you through the month, and how the Beltane-Samhain portal continues to echo and reverberate in your life, and what it feels like to work with those energies on a more long-term basis.
Thank you for listening, Loves, really bowing to you in a lot of gratitude. I hope that this served. It's really strong medicine this month. You don't need to do anything, but just show up to what's coming up in you. That's it.
That's actually the biggest recentering that's going on right now is that we're not externalizing, projecting, transferring, focusing on outside things anymore. Or if we are, it's like not really sticking or lending as well as it used to. It's all about coming home right now. So how can that be a reclamation into empowered choice, just the idea of choosing the self?
Again, thank you for listening. And I will catch you for a new Weekly Medicine next Tuesday. Until then, please be well please take care and many many Beltane, and sound blessings to all of you.
[Conclusion]
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Thank you so much for listening to Tarot for the Wild Soul.
This podcast was edited by Chase Voorhees. The podcast art is by Chelsea Iris Granger, and it is hosted by me, Lindsay Mack. For more about the podcast click here, or follow us on Instagram @wildsoulhealing. For more about me and my work, please visit lindsaymack.com.
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Thank you so much for being here.