134. The Great Rebirth, Part Three: The World
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Today’s episode of TFTWS marks the third and final segment of The Great Rebirth series!
Ruled by Saturn, The World is a portal of transformation that ushers us from one stage of development and evolution to the next. It is a paradigm shift, letting us know that we are complete with a particular cycle of our lives, and are ready to rebirth into a whole new level of lessons, growth, and experience.
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About the Episode
Today’s episode of TFTWS marks the third and final segment of The Great Rebirth series!
Ruled by Saturn, The World is a portal of transformation that ushers us from one stage of development and evolution to the next. It is a paradigm shift, letting us know that we are complete with a particular cycle of our lives, and are ready to rebirth into a whole new level of lessons, growth, and experience.
In this episode, we will explore ways to understand and embrace the medicine of The World card, and look deeply at how the cards in Line Three of the Major Arcana prepare us for this huge, soul level rebirth of our being.
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: birth, death, environmental degradation, ancestral and land-based trauma
The content in this episode contains references to birth, death, environmental degradation, ancestral and land-based 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)
This episode of Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast is brought to you by my brand new, upcoming course, Heart of Service, a five-week, online, intuitive, Tarot immersion for Spirit-guided service that runs from October 1 to the 29th.
Enrollment for Heart of Service is currently open, and will only be open until Tuesday, September 29, which kind of seems like it's far away, but it's actually less than two weeks away. So if you feel the call to be a part of this transformative journey, I invite you to take the leap.
To learn more about the course, or to sign up, visit tarotforthewildsoul.com/heart-of-service.
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(Instrumental intro music)
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Hello Loves and welcome back to Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast. I'm your host, Lindsay Mack. Thank you so much for being here.
So here we are at the third and final segment of our Great Rebirth Series, exploring for the last three weeks each of the last cards of the three lines of the Major Arcana. And today we're exploring The World card and Line Three.
And, you know what? What I think, in part, inspired this series was the fact that we are going through right now as a world, a planet, a collective, all of us, all living beings, are going through one of the most intense rebirths in history, in recorded history (Lindsay Laughs) ever. And rebirth is a really funny thing, because we tend to romanticize it; like rebirth wipes the slate clean. We can kind of emerge anew and that is true. That is actually true.
And the reality is that to do that, we have to die in order to come back. We have to simultaneously be available to be kind of stripped, harvested, in a strange way, of the identities, the stories, the lessons, the cycles that we are complete with. In one way or another, whether we understand it or not, we're complete with them, which is very hard for the thinking mind, the nervous system, the ego to move through, which is totally understandable. And at the same time we're being squeezed through the great birth canal of the universe and emerging on the other side new.
And that is not a comfort to the nervous system either because the nervous system does not care for nor does it really ultimately even trust new and exciting things, takes — I think — a lot of practice for most of us to be available to excitement. But it also tends to make the even the exciting anew. It tends to go into the file of kind of scary and unfamiliar.
[0:03:49]
So, no matter what, in the rebirth cycle, there's discomfort right because what is gone, or what's being cleared, there's a grief around that. There's a fear around that inevitable, inevitable. We can surrender and trust the rebirth process all we want, but the thinking mind is still going to think.
And now we're not the thinking mind. Your thoughts are not necessarily truth, and some of our thoughts have literally nothing to do with us. It's just the thinking mind just thinks. That's what it does. It's our job I’d say, actually, where we can, where we feel able, to bring a sense of consideration to thoughts. To say, “That's interesting. I wonder if that's the truth. Does that really matches as truth?”
And that's ultimately the work, if we can bring that word to rebirth at all, ultimately, the work we do in the Majors, period, this idea of surrendering to these larger energies. Our experience with those energies, whether they be uncomfortable, welcome, wholly unwelcome, are valid. We must absolutely create a space of validity of, ideally, total honoring and embracing of the experience, while also being able to remember what's actually happening, which is that we're simultaneously dying and birthing anew, and that can be very hard and scary. It can also be exhilarating and exciting. And both can be true at the same time.
And I think no card in this Rebirth Series — or maybe even the Tarot, period — holds the duality, holds the both/and, holds the totality of those experiences of that range, like The World card does. The World card really solidifies — I think, in many ways — what it is to say goodbye to what no longer serves and walk into what, ultimately, is a totally new frontier, a totally new valley, you know, Fool's Journey of our lives.
[0:06:26]
The Fool shows up in many areas of our lives, so does The World. They're both pretty porous, pretty permeable. And the thing that makes The World card so powerful and so different, which we'll talk about, is that it's ruled by Saturn. And there is a sense of tasking, of sacred obligation of duty, related to Saturn. Saturn helps to keep us good and right with what our souls promised to do in this lifetime.
So when we get to The World card, we're essentially reviewing almost like with a clipboard everything that is no longer meant to go with us, everything we've really mastered and come to do. The World card is where we initiate the final checklist, the final pieces of this particular cycle, the final to-do list, as it were. So that when we venture back up to this Fool's leap, as The World holds the space of clearing and releasing all these Saturnian themes, everything that we were supposed to learn in the entire cycle of the Majors, but it also bridges us and forms the pathway to The Fool, where we will leap into a whole new elevated cycle.
And that is ultimately how we keep evolving, evolving, evolving as souls in this lifetime. We're never finished until we're finished. And then even when we're finished, there's probably a lot more (Lindsay Laughs) regeneration, that the universe is evolution, death, and rebirth. So even after we've passed and, you know, moved on from these particular bodies, there's still this incredible movement, you know, cycling, that just keeps happening.
So, again, this theme of kind of totality, of kind of like drawing down and in, really happens in The World card.
[0:08:59]
And I find that for most folks, The World card is really interesting, right? Because we get it, we understand what it is, but like kind of Wheel of Fortune, like Temperance in some ways, it can be hard to kind of nail down what to do with this card or what, how to how to open to it. So we'll talk about that. But, you know, again, these themes are so present for us always, but they've probably never been more present than they are right now on the planet. And I would say that there's some very powerful Saturn themes happening in The World right now, especially right now.
And to really, I think, dig in and understand the full spectrum of what The World card is here to do, what it does, we have to explore Line Three of the Major Arcana because The World is the end, marks the end of Line Three, but it also marks the end of the whole journey. So there's something really strong here with regard to acknowledging and honoring all we've learned from The Fool leap, and everything from the beginning of Line Three to the end of it. So there's again this kind of both/and happening here.
Line Three of the Major Arcana is what we call in Soul Tarot “the rebirth spiral”, where we are emerging from that chrysalis in Line Two, where we were held in this state of in between, as a fully formed butterfly. And we may feel like our wings may still be wet. We may feel a little shaken, weird, you know, we may be still kind of looking at the, like, grappling with the enormous expansion that happened at the end of Line Two and we moved from Death to Temperance, and really saw ourselves kind of emerged.
Line Three is really where we start to take that flight, where we start to really look at where we’re moving through The World differently. I’m literally alchemically changed. You can't move through Line Two without that. So we're different, right? We've changed.
[0:11:25]
Each card in Line Three, helps us to learn how to fly with those new wings. And each card inLine Three of the Major Arcana is a death-rebirth process in and of itself. Every single card in this line from the Devil to The World is here because we have, well, it's here to further and further initiate us and help us to clear away any bits, any little teeny splinters, any teeny little pieces of shrapnel, anything that's still embedded in our being, big or small, that is of the ego that is of, or rather, that's not necessarily matching our truth, that's not necessarily in our soul's highest and best.
The more we as human beings say yes to the soul, the more we give over to Spirit, and the more we give over to basically saying, “I'm available to live a spiritually guided life,” the more we welcome in, whether we know it or not, these kinds of interjections on our behalf (Lindsay Laughs), which is why The Tower happens in Line Three. Because The Tower comes down with that lightning strike, because we've essentially committed ourselves in Line Three, again and again, to saying, “I can only go so far. And where I can't go, where I can't see, where I'm unwilling or unable to undo particular knots, I invite you to show me where they're at and free me from them.”
You know, so now that we're in co-creation with Spirit, Line Three is all about that. Every single card is about deepening that co-creation. And, in fact, we even see this in the visual shift, you know, in these archetypes, especially a more kind of older decks like Smith Rider-Waite or more backbone decks as it were.
In Line One, in the foreground, there's just human bodies facing us kind of going by their titles and identities. In terms of the focal point in Line Three, these are suns, moons, towers, mythological beings, structures, astral archetypes. There's no human on any card in the third line, other than the Tower, that has clothes on. Like we've kind of gone back to the land in some way.
And really, to make it out of Line Three and get to The World is to move through an entire lifetime, an entire soul’s journey of transformation in which everything that wasn't serving us is gone, or on its way out.
[0:14:43]
And the Soul Tarot phrase for Line Three of the Major Arcana is “There is no I”.
So we've moved from, in Line One, “I am”, to Line Two, “Who am I?” to Line Three, “There is no I”, realizing that the little “I”, who we thought we were, isn't even a thing; that we're one with this beautiful, huge spiral of life, death, and rebirth, that there is no separation. It's just the mind that believes that we are separate. That's the only thing that attempts to separate us from oneness with this large, this ever-moving cycle, again.
So, this is the line of soul mastery. This is the line of profound, personal depth. This is the line that births us onto our true path in this life. Now, there's no such thing as an untrue path, but, really, in Line Three we do the deepest, deepest work in clearing up and out all those really tough, really, really deep layers. And I believe that Line Two is no joke, but Line Three, it's really the furthest we travel in the Tarot. And when we reach The World card, it marks the end of a profoundly deep journey of lessons and self exploration, and we, you know, leave that spiral of evolution.
What's unique about The World card — and we'll talk about this — is that we never return to the themes in that cycle again. We may come close, we may excavate a little deeper, but once we've left The World, we never quite go back again, which is really intense and powerful (Lindsay Laughs). And that's why The World card can bring up a lot of joyful grief, because it can be that in The World card we leave, finally step away from what we've been ready to graduate from for so long. But there's a finality to it that brings forth the necessary energies, or, yeah, it brings forward a lot of grief as well as celebration.
[0:17:11]
I believe that we also leave Line Three with a different understanding that we can move through a lot more than we think we can. Once you've moved through enough Tower journeys, enough Judgement journeys, enough Moon journeys, Devil journeys, you actually can begin to open your arms to them, knowing that they're coming as friends, helpers, allies, all of them.
It doesn't mean we like it. It doesn't mean we appreciate what gets handed to us necessarily, but it does mean that we can appreciate, ultimately, perhaps the bigger picture of what's going on, while still tending to the very human feelings of like, “Oh my God. This shit again.” (Lindsay Laughs) So that's a part of the both/and of being human beings having soul experiences, right, is that we don't have to like it, and yet we can understand what it's doing here.
And yeah, the journey of Line Three begins with The Devil card. And it makes complete sense that it would, given the fact that we just moved through Temperance, which is just about one of the biggest expansions that we go through in the whole Tarot, whole journey of the Tarot, Minors and Court Cards included.
We are demoting the ego in Temperance. The ego previously was largely in charge. Temperance is the first time where we begin to acknowledge like, “Oh wow, the ego, thinking mind, the brain strategy is limited.” It might get us far, might even get us really far, but just far enough for the ego and the thinking mind. It won't actually bring us to what might be so aligned for us that we might not even understand or even believe very often.
I go through this all the time. I have some very strong opinions about what I want to do, what's in my highest and best, what I'd prefer. And I often find that when I don't get that, when it doesn't come as easily as I think or, you know, whatever it is, there's enormous gifts to it. And sometimes I don't understand, and there's huge grief. And in that grief, there's also medicine, you know.
So, no matter what, it's... there's always something in there to open to, but we begin with the Devil because whenever we expand, whenever we open to Spirit, whenever we say, “Yes, Spirit, absolutely. I trust my soul. I open to my soul.” The brain’s going to go, “No, no, you don't.”
The brain is so protective of us because it's in charge of keeping us alive. It's primal. It's, you know, it's the lizard brain. So when we move into these areas, these expansions where we say, “No, I'm going to say yes to my soul,” the brain gets very threatened. The mind can get very, very threatened, and it can do and use all kinds of different things, all kinds of different invitations, to pull us out of that and to try to bring us back down to safety.
Even though the brain and the thinking mind can be very challenging, and the thoughts that we can be embedded into can be wholly painful and very intense — depending on the kind of brain, nervous system we have — it's doing it to attempt to protect us, which is hard to understand sometimes, particularly when the brain is not being very nice.
[0:21:27]
The Devil is a profound liberation from the stories that we get invited into. Because at the core of The Devil card, there's something, something, a pebble in our shoe typically, and sometimes it's a huge thing. Sometimes it's a very, very small, this little whisper in the ear, “There's probably something wrong with you. There's probably something wrong with you. There's something wrong with you. It shouldn't be like this. You should have done this. You ought to have done that. You're bad. You're wrong. You're not okay.” Invitations into guilt, into shame, “Why can't you get this right?”
All those things that we all go through — I go through them, and so do you — everybody goes through them (Lindsay Laughs). Some people talk about them, some don't. And we all have our own intimate, tender personal experiences with where those things can just feel like ugh, like a gut punch.
The brain isn't, you know, the mind doesn't call us into those things because it wants to hurt us. It calls us into those things because it says “Anything is better than this person being out in the unknown, out in the unfamiliar, out in the soul territory. I know what can get them distracted, stirred up, just away. I just need to get them away. I'll kind of go into my chemistry lab, and I will pop up and send out something that typically stops them in their tracks, which is ‘You're a bad person. You did something wrong. What if this person hates you?’“
[0:23:22]
So The Devil is a kind of a chain that binds us to an old story that previously to this — or maybe even now — really stops us in our tracks and makes us question what Tara Brock would say “our basic goodness”. It makes us question: are we okay or not okay?
Here's what's so beautiful about The Devil card is that it's this incredible two-winged freedom, liberation, is that when we learn in this card, we don't have to believe that. We can witness the story. We caneven feel the hit of the feeling and go, “Oh, man, that hurts. What if I am bad? What if I am wrong? What if?”
And that is the moment where we go to the altar, so to speak, and say, “There may be things I've done in my life that I wouldn't do now. There may be things I've done when I was scared, hurt, upset, angry, confused. So has everyone. And I can at this moment, review, drop in with my Guides. Is there anywhere where I'm being asked to make amends here? Is there anywhere I'm asked to kind of turn my life over, really step forward in greater accountability?”
And I'm sure for every one of us, there's a place where we can deepen into that. Where can I make my life a living amends? Where can I be more honest about what's…? You know, we can absolutely do all that work around accountability and must, you know.
But at the core, you can say, “No, that's not true of me. I don't… I'm not available for the thought that I'm bad and wrong at my essence and my core. That's not true. That's not true. And I'm not available for that. And I see that that previously has been a really strong motivator for me to kind of stop doing what I was doing. And instead, I'm just really gonna hold this in a lot of tenderness and compassion, but also be really strong about my own boundaries. And I'm going to watch that float in, float out, float in, float out. Just watch those thoughts rather than identify with them.”
[0:26:00]
And just by doing that alone, it cuts a part of that chain. Because the brain, the mind, learns “I have to start moving with this being, moving with this soul work.” And in that way the brain starts to actually — this is something my teacher, Michelle, has taught me, and I've really seen that this is true — the brain starts to support the soul work. And we get to bring compassion to the tender places in us where we still have those really tough feelings of wrongness or badness.
It might even be historical, where we were told we were wrong or bad as children, or where we were identified, or perhaps received some shame, you know, some projections of shame or guilt, or because of our sexuality, because of our gender identity, because of our gender, because of our expression in some way in our body in the world, because we were in in touch with our sexuality, and you know, we were made to feel not okay for that.
So that second wing of that Devil liberation is that on the other side of saying, “Thank you so much, Mind, for that invitation into shame that was never mine, and I'm not available for it,” the chain begins to crumble, and we start to fly, because that second wing is actually the embracing of the aspects of ourselves that we were previously taught to be ashamed of.
The embracing of deep desire, the embracing of our whole identity, of who we are, of the blessing of that up and down, it doesn't need to feel like some big, ecstatic embodiment. It comes in little bits, little layers, all of which deserve to be celebrated. That is the first rebirth in this line: to recognize, with great compassion and tenderness, where the mind tends to get really scared of those Temperance, Spirit, soul-level leaps.
[0:28:18]
I mean, I opened my course up for enrollment. I’m recording this a few days before this is dropping, before this episode is dropping. I just opened my course for enrollment and had to sit down and have some words, you know, (Lindsay Laughs) some compassionate words with that inner part of me that, you know, was moving into judgement, comparison, “You're bad, you're wrong,” because this launch is a little different. And there's a sense of fear and of threat that the brain, you know, my mind has around that.
And I can totally hold that. I also know that it's not the truth, and that there's so much to celebrate in the way that I treated and worked with this enrollment; that the invitation into wrongness or badness or “you should be different”, it doesn't match.
It's just that the brain is... my mind wants me to do things in a linear way, by the book, to make sure that, you know, whatever it wants me to do things in, like, the standard way. And I didn't with this one, and so it's scared.
And that's okay. I can hold that fear. It wants me to be safe. It wants me to like, be okay. These are primal fears, and we can hold that. And also with great care, and with time, and with experience, we can open to stepping into this place of actual celebration of the things that the mind is deeming as not okay, you know.
So it's a really powerful initiation. And even in that there's a death-rebirth, right? We're never done, finished, with Devil work. We do it our whole lives. And the more awareness we have of where the brain, the mind, whatever you want to call that, the ego, tends to get threatened by soul work, the greater compassion we can bring it.
It just then becomes like, “Oh, of course. Oh, you're here again. (Lindsay Laughs) My little visitor, you know, tell me again, why you think we're gonna be broke, and, you know, have nothing and how everyone doesn't care about us anymore.” Like, yeah, of course. yeah, I get it. (Lindsay Laughs)
And you can actually laugh instead of feeling so horrified that it might be true when that's never true. We'll always have folks to serve if we're doing work from our soul. Sometimes the numbers change. It's no big deal, you know.
[0:31:11]
So The Devil card initiates us into this, just like we talked about Strength and Justice for Line One in kind of initiating this. We do this kind of deep inquiry, noticing the story that the mind calls us into, and begin to say, “Oh, let me honor that, acknowledge it, scoop it up, take care of it, and also come back to the truth and actually where I'm growing from this.”
And that, essentially, is the foundation of soul work, period, is noticing the story of the mind, caretaking the story of the mind, checking in, saying, “You know, does this really match the truth for me? Is it real but not true? Is it?” You know, that doesn't mean that we don't tend and acknowledge and honor it, just as we would anything else. It just doesn't mean we believe it.
The Devil really calls us into that another layer of self-responsibility, actually, self-tending, and radically beginning to choose ourselves, and actually really celebrate the parts of us that maybe, for other people, feel like they're shameful, they’re vices, they're not okay. And it doesn't matter what they think (Lindsay Laughs). It really just matters what’s kind of in our highest and best to work with.
The Tower continues that theme. Once we've made that kind of dent in the chain, The Tower comes in and goes, “Oh, great. Now that you're willing to really celebrate and step a little further into who you actually are, notice where the mind tends to invite you into things that aren't true to slow you down. We're going to help this out, and we're going to strike and burn down everything that does not match, really, ultimately, not only where you're meant to go, but we're going to burn down any structure in your life, any system, any belief, that's built on a broken foundation, so that you can go down to the root and seal and heal that foundation.”
That's what The Tower does. Tower loves us enough to clear out anything that's on top of a broken foundation.
[0:33:28]
And with respect to the millions of people who are dealing with the horrors of wildfires right now, all fire does not equal Tower. If you went through the enormous loss of losing your home in one of these fires, that doesn't mean that you are living on a broken foundation. Language really matters, so I really want to be clear.
I also moved through some pretty huge trauma around wildfires this, like, last week, and we’re still dealing with the worst air quality in the world out here in Portland. I recorded last week's podcast with no power, and we were packed to run the whole week. That doesn't mean you had Tower work to do. That's the exact same thing with, necessarily, the exact same thing not all human deaths equal Death card. So I just want to be very sensitive with my languaging.
Towers can be internal, external, they can be very public, they can be very private, they can be very quiet, they can be very intense. The more you go through Towers, the more the nervous system begins to actually… like when I received The Tower card, there's no more fear. I'm just delighted. I don't want to live with anything on top of something that's not true.
So every single card in Line Three wants to drive us home to the truth, to the essence. It wants to say “Yes, now that you've done the internal work on this in Devil, now we're going to bring it to a more excavative, or more, external.” You know, it's excavation work, you know, in really big ways. And so it allows us to dive deeper into that.
Once we do that, we can actually go to that foundation. Why did we build that structure on top of it in the first place? You know, there's always a reason: because we didn't want anyone to know we were struggling, because we wanted everyone to think we were in a good relationship, because we didn't want to deal with the fact that we weren't in something that matched for us. No matter what, you know, Towers, again, can be intense, but they're here to set us free, just like The Devil.
[0:35:43]
Whenever we go through such a big upheaval, there has to be time for the nervous system, for the Spirit to come down and process, and that's why we move through The Star.
The Star is here to help us heal, and internalize, and process anything we went through in The Tower. And it's a fixed hold, The Star. So, in other words, it's not like a night or day or a week that you spend kind of like, you know, talking about it. The Star will have you in The Star for however long you need until you're not in The Star anymore. That's how important it is to strip, to clear, to weep, to shed those layers and bring the heart forward, allowing the healing to be just as important as the excavation.
The Moon teaches us, ultimately, to be comfortable with the unknown. I would say with all the cards in the Tarot The Moon is the one that I have had the most challenge with because of my trauma, my personal cocktail of trauma (Lindsay Laughs); that the unknown and hanging out in the unknown, a big feature of The Moon, is that there tends to be an experience of almost retrograding, like we're called back into something, an echo of the past. And so a feeling, or an experience, or a thought, or a feeling state may kind of float back almost like an echo. And we may have this feeling like we're just kind of floating in the void, and all of the things, the worst fears, the old experiences that we've had that were really challenging can bubble back up in The Moon.
And this is good. It's not comfortable, but it's really good because it allows us to, again, see the places where we may have some hold over fear, some hold over stuff. It's, essentially, a final checking of the internal grounds, being able to say, “Is there anything in here, anything at all, that you're still holding on to, still have a story, about still are fearing? If so let's, let's let it bubble up. Let's let it clear away. Let's bring it out. Let's let the moon really bring those tides out. Let's let it rush forward.”
The more time we spend in The Moon, the more we can actually dive into those waves and explore what's under them without being afraid. And there's enormous treasures, where we actually learn in this card, once we've graduated from The Star, to dive into our depths without fear. That's really what The Moon helps us to do: to dive into the deepest depths of our being without feeling afraid.
And for me, that used to be very scary. Now, it’s a lot less so, because there were some scary things in there (Lindsay Laughs). And that's why The Moon can feel so uncomfortable, you know, because we're being held. So we can go in.
[0:39:15]
And from there we have The Sun, where we actually learn what it is to choose ourselves, to let ourselves be seen, to see ourselves. It's a complete… it is a rebirth of its own. But it's around this theme of shining our light, really witnessing people in their own. It's ruled by the sun so thereby ruled by Leo, so it's all heart, all seeing, all witnessing. Letting ourselves truly be seen can only really happen when we move through Devil, when we really honor the parts of us where we have story, where we let those kind of old, untrue, kind of shaky places in us come down, so we can do that root foundational work, where we heal, befriend, you know, love on the parts of us that most need healing, where we move into The Moon, and actually dive into those unconscious, subconscious depths.
And then The Sun, little by little, really calls us into loving them, embracing them, seeing there's answers in this card. We start to, literally, the sun comes up, and we can see a lot more why we had to go through what we did, and what it was teaching us.
Judgement continues that theme by bringing us into, essentially, a combination of all of those pieces where a blindfold comes off in some way, and we really awaken to something that we're ready to see, we're ready to acknowledge, we're ready to observe and notice, so that we can step forward into something different.
It's Pluto-ruled. So a lot of it may have to do in Judgement with a lot of ancestral themes, a lot of collective themes, a lot of past life themes. It really takes everything that we've gone through before and calls us up for a kind of review, for again, a kind of an awakening. Once you are in Judgement, you can't unsee. You can't unsee, right, these things. So it's often wonderful, you know.
It's also an opportunity for us to really, really observe where we fall into judgement on ourselves or on others. Each of us has an inner judge that is very often rooted and tied to some super old pieces. And again, some of us have some real trauma from witch burning. Some of us have trauma from, really, all kinds of different things, land-based trauma, having to flee our land, having our ancestors be pushed out of their land, being displaced, having, you know, racially based trauma, there are so many pieces that are both old, very old, very ancient, and still present, still happening that Judgement can stir up.
And Judgement is an opportunity for us to look at where we judge ourselves, where we have internalized, in some way shape or form, our oppressors, or the voices of those who have judged themselves, or, you know. It's a place for us to really observe and honor where we judge others, where we judge ourselves, and are we willing to begin to be complete with that? You know, are we willing to complete our journey with judging ourselves in the way that we have, and, perhaps, of other people that are different from us or that we don't understand? So it's very, very big. And again, it's Pluto. So it's connected to past and to ancestors and to… Yeah, it's very, very big, a very big energy, but it prepares us for The World card.
[0:43:48]
The World card is ruled by Saturn. And it marks the completion of our spiral journey both through Line Three and through the entire Major Arcana. And in this card we — gosh, there's so much. It represents a threshold that, you know, as I said before, bridges us from this cycle, the end of this particular cycle, to the new journey that we're about to dive into. But because of this Saturn ruling, there is this sense of, again, lessons, of obligation.
The World card will not let you pass, will not let us pass, until we have actually done all the work, and left behind everything we are meant to leave behind, so we do not feel that we have to go back and do anything else in that area.
I can say that I've been in The World a few times. One was when I left babysitting. I knew for sure, and there's — it's not a knock on babysitting. It's such an honorable privilege, like, to care for people's families and children. But I was complete with it, and I knew because I was pulling The World card constantly, and could feel it and could observe it, that when I left that job, I knew that I would never go back to it again. And it had nothing to do with like, I won't go back, or I refuse to go back. It really was just, I'm complete with this.
When I left New York, it was the same thing… and the lead up to both of those things were excruciating, because, essentially, Spirit and Saturn were saying, “You can't go forward, out of babysitting, and out of New York. without completing certain things here, without clearing certain patterns, clearing certain fears, clearing certain stories.” So especially in the year leading up to me leaving New York, and especially in that maybe four or five months before I left it was, I mean, I cannot even tell you the things that were coming up. It didn't have anything to do with moving, but they had to do with the energy of me living on the East Coast and the energy of why I moved to New York in the first place. There had to be a clearing of it.
And once I left New York, I knew I'd never… I'm never going to go back to New York, and, of course, visits, and, you know, if I ever do, it'll probably be in a different energy, but I am completely, completely complete with New York. I still love it, but I'm totally complete, and it's not because I decided to be complete. It's because The World card ushered me into it. It let me know, “If you're going to move, then you move in this energy. You're going to be complete with this.”
[0:47:13]
So The World card is not play time. It's very exciting, and I think when we get it in a reading, it's a delight to see. The World card can also be kind of confusing because there's a sense of like, “Oh my God, I'm in The World!” when it's a process and usually unfolds over time. You know, it's however long this particular, like, Saturn work. When we're really… we have to go through the whole Major Arcana actually get to Saturn, to actually get to this final frontier. Okay, done all this stuff, now let's go.
And essentially, they're showing me, like, spinning down into the earth. Let's go down as deep as we can go, to the very core of your inner being. So we're not taking anything, nothing, no layers of shrapnel whatsoever, no lessons at all, from this particular cycle into the next. And that is part of the intensity, that death-birth theme, of discomfort that can come up in The World.
When I left babysitting, and when I left New York — and again, like, I'm offering two examples in like a 36-year life of World, and I can really, really say that I've had experiences, of course, where I've left relationships and what have you that I thought, “Well, wow, I'll never go through that again,” where I can kind of qualify that as World energy — but those two two situations were so profoundly World and really represented World energy to me a) because I was pulling them constantly during both of those things. But b) because it was an archetypal journey that lasted several months, where I knew with both that I was going to leave it, that I would leave a particular babysitting job.
And I was going to try not to get another babysitting job; that I was going to try to give Tarot a shot and see how it goes. And where I was going to leave New York and move to the West Coast. And when Spirit started to tell us, “Oregon,” we kind of went with that. We had other ideas about where we wanted to go, but we're told here, and the build up to that move was so intense.
That is a character of The World card, because it has that Saturn ruling, because it says “Yes, you're meant to expand here. You're meant to step forward here, 100%. You're not going to do it, you're not going to leave this paradigm and move into the next one, if you bring in anything that is meant to be cleared out from your system, from your mind, from your soul, from your being. So I'm going to keep you here until you're ready.” That's what The World card does.
[0:50:28]
And there's a lot sort of in the Smith-Rider-Waite, visually, that's very powerful. You know, the human being on this card is nude, has left behind all illusions of clothing, they’re free. They're holding in both hands, a double-sided Magician's wand, really showing us that the vessels are so clear, that the vessel of the mind there's an awareness of what's going on. There's clarity being created there. There may be deeper compassion, deeper self-understanding. And with the soul, we're clear channels. We’re becoming clear.
In the Smith Rider-Waite, the four fixed signs of astrology are present in this card. And so there's a sense of rooting that's happening on all four sides. Which is, again, an enormous signal that we are fixing, rooting down, until we're ready to go. There's a sense of ascension, of freedom, of expansion, being one with the universe, and also very much being rooted by our soul work. And that's really what happens in this card.
We are really reborn in this card. We're laid bare (Lindsay Laughs), you know, open to our soul more than ever before. And, again, this card tells us you've gone far as you can go in this particular cycle of your life. You can't go any further. You did all the things. All the lessons that you are meant to learn, you learned them. And whether you know it or not, there'll be different lessons down the road. But in this particular cycle, in this particular area, you did at all, nothing else to do. You did all of it. And you did beautifully. And now you're ready to release this particular set of learning and take another leap into something new.
[0:52:40]
And it requires that death process. I would say leading up to me leaving my babysitting job and moving from New York is some of the most intense death work I've ever done. And being out here has been death work every single day, but in a completely different way.
And, again, we're talking about a soul-level release, not mind-level. So the mind will say, “I can't move without, you know, squaring away all these things.” The soul may be connecting different things for you with leaving a job, or a relationship, or a career, or an identity, or a part of the world or country that you reside in. It may be that there is a sense, absolutely, of the mind and the soul being of one, but very often there is so much more that is connected to those things, those careers, those places that we live, that we don't even realize is happening.
I could not believe the things that were coming up prior to my move cross country to basically saying, like, “You're not meant to take this out there.” So gaining some awareness of why it's happening so that it doesn't hook you in quite that way, is a part of the deal. And there were some things that I was so sure, you know, had nothing to do with the move, and they had everything to do with the move. So that's also a part of The World. It's a rebirth in ways that, because we've done so much bowing over and surrendering to our soul process, it's really letting Saturn come in and guide the process of our evolution and our movement from one cycle of lessons and growth to another.
I spoke earlier, too, about how the birth process, on the other side of rebirth, isn't even that great (Lindsay Laughs) because the brain is so scared that anything new, even exciting stuff, can feel so scary. I wasn't ready to leave a day job. I didn't have enough clients, and I don't come from any money and had no savings. So it was really… I trusted in my work ethic, I trusted in my ability to work very hard, and to do anything I could to try to expand and grow and teach and move myself into uncomfortable circumstances. And I didn't expect that it would… I was prepared to do something else if it didn't work out, but I really wanted to give it a try. I don't even think it would have been a failure if it hadn't worked out, but I didn't, I wasn't sure that it was going to.
When I moved from New York, I mean, I knew I didn't want to be in New York anymore, but there was a lot of fear about that. A lot of fear. So they're a hallmark, another hallmark of The World card is that you're not quite sure. There's the shakiness of The Fool on the other side of it. So you're both clearing and answering to this Saturn work that is a part of rebirthing in the biggest way we have thus far, and that's uncomfortable.
And then the rebirth, the actual birthing in the rebirth, is also uncomfortable because now we're moving into an area of life that we really don't know. Because we're beginning at a hole, like in a video game where you can move from level to level, when you move from world to world. It's a totally different experience. So that's really what we do in this card, and it's a big, big deal, a big deal.
[0:56:54]
And it's, yeah, those last bits of wisdom and exploration that are meant to free us to actually experience that new piece, and really honoring that grief is a part of this card, too. There can be an experience of falling over, bowing in such sincerity, in gratitude to the lessons that we learned.
And I remember when I left babysitting, the day I left babysitting, when I took a subway, when I took the subway to the last day of my work — and I think I've spoken about this on the podcast before — but I had been really looking forward to that, and thought I would just kind of be like, “Bye,” and instead I was very teary, very weepy.
And on the subway ride — it was an early start. There weren't too many people, but honestly I wouldn't have cared if there was — I was weeping and brought forward the name of every child I have ever watched in my nine years of babysitting, and blessed them, and bowed to them, and thanked them and their families for honoring me, trusting me enough to have them as a part of their lives. And that deep gratitude was something that I wasn't necessarily expecting to feel. And the same thing happened when I left New York.
So I think that World experiences are all around us and can happen in smaller waves. I do. But I think where we really learn about them is in these sort of bigger waves. And all of us, I think, have gone through at least one, where we can really say “There had to be, there was so much that I had to move through and clear out before I stepped into parenthood, before I stepped into this new career, before I moved away, before I whatever it is,” where, for whatever the reason, this particular archetype comes forward and says, “Yes, I'm ready to build the bridge to the other side.”
And you can't cross it until… Well, really, it's not that we can't cross it until we've cleared it all out. But the crossing of the bridge, itself, is the clearing of it, with every step that we walk, away from what we were standing on and walk toward the great unknown. But ultimately, where we're drawn to next we get closer to this idea of rebirth. And, again, it's the biggest rebirth because it's not only the completion of a whole cycle in the Major Arcana, but it's also a completion of the third line of the Majors which is a really big deal.
So, embracing Saturn, knowing that Saturn is so intense and such a task being that it doesn't want us to carry anything that we're not meant to carry anymore. So it really holds us (Lindsay Laughs), you know, holds our feet to the fire in a way until it's cleared. You know, it's a pain in the ass, but also great because it assures us that if we're in some way, if the bone isn't set quite right, Saturn is willing to re-break it and set it correctly so that it can heal. And so we can have deeper mobility and better movements, and you know, all kinds of things like that.
[1:00:44]
So the Great Rebirth of this line is leaving behind the entire cycle of lessons for something new. And every single card in the Majors is a kind rebirth in and of itself, but when we leave a line, when we leave the Majors, when we leave The World, be it, you know, really, in any way, we're opening ourselves to completely new adventures. And it might not feel that way. It might feel really scary and shitty, and like we've made a terrible mistake. That's been my experience with every World card time I've ever had. And it's really just been that my mind, my inner little one, is so scared about these new adventures that they really need me to remind them, their feelings are valid, and we're exactly where we're supposed to be.
So The World is… where we can embrace it is by recognizing the bigness of the journey that's gotten us here, from where we were to now where we are, and to bow to where we're going. It's a huge, huge, huge thing to be in this energy. And it is most certainly a profound rebirth of the whole self, from the soul, from, actually initiated, wholly, by our soul process. And then from there, the next cycle in our lives will be all that much more embedded and imbued with soul purpose. So there's just a beautifully cumulative effect here.
There's always lessons, but in this particular way, we're really bowing and honoring, and actually letting ourselves feel and acknowledge the bigness of being complete with a certain set of them.
[1:02:45]
Thank you so much for listening to this, Wild Souls. The series has just been so lovely to offer to you to speak to you.
We're going to be bringing… We're going to be doing something slightly different for the next two weeks that I think is going to be really lovely and exciting. So you're actually going to get another episode Monday, that's going to be basically an intuitive download about the Equinox, about the Fall Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere, and spring in the Southern Hemisphere. And there'll be a kind of a reading that will bridge us, essentially, from the Fall Equinox to the Winter Solstice. And that will be next week's episode. So then there won't be one next Friday, and then next Monday, we'll have the October Monthly Medicine. So we're, for the next two weeks, we're going to be doing Monday episodes, and then we'll switch back to Friday in however many weeks that is. And so yeah, I'll just be seeing you in a few days.
Thank you so much for listening. I love all of you so much. Please, please, please take care of yourselves. Be tender with yourself. Let this episode, and whatever spoke to you, let it really land with you. And until we meet again, please be well.
[Conclusion]
(Instrumental exit music)
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, visit wildsoulpodcast.com 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.
[1:04:58]