139. Reversals, Part 3: Completions
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Today, we are diving into the final installment of our three part series on the medicine of Reversals, exploring what it means when a reversal shows up in a reading as a signal of completion. How can we honor those thresholds and transitions when a particular cycle or lesson in our lives comes to an end?
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About the Episode
Happy Scorpio Season, Wild Souls!
Today, we are diving into the final installment of our three part series on the medicine of Reversals, exploring what it means when a reversal shows up in a reading as a signal of completion. How can we honor those thresholds and transitions when a particular cycle or lesson in our lives comes to an end?
Together, we will look at how we can begin to skillfully work with Reversals that fall into this category, looking to The Tower, The Devil, Five of Wands, Four of Pentacles, and Nine of Swords as Anchors for this work.
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: relationship to grief, inherited generational patterns, death
The content in this episode contains references to relationship to grief, inherited generational patterns, and death. 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)
[0:00:12]
Hello Loves and welcome back to Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast. I'm your host, Lindsay Mack, and, as always, it is such a joy to be present and gathered with all of you in this virtual space. Thank you so much for being here with me.
I'm wishing all of you a very happy Scorpio season, my personal absolute favorite time of the year, and yeah, I'm very, very excited to get started on today's episode.
We're finally at our third and final installment of our three-part series on Reversals. We've been looking at the medicine of reversals, the offerings of reversals, how we can befriend them, welcome them, cherish them. As messengers from our Guides, from parts of ourselves that are longing to get our attention. they really just want to bring us a little closer to our own hearts and our own experience.
And today, you know, we've spoken about them as invitations into resistance, when we're experiencing resistance, when we're experiencing a lack of willingness to move forward, what happens when we experience expansive resistance versus contract resistance. Like how can reversals be sort of this beautiful invitation into that space?
We've looked at them as opportunities to come home to presence, to ourselves, when we may believe a card is saying, “Ooh, don't do that,” or “Whoa, you know, this might not be a great idea,” and it may or may not be true, but what's kind of the first and foremost invitation is that a part of us is, typically, scared, unsure, in need of some space and time and connection to get clear. And even if we're not necessarily so interested in, like, what the answer is, whether we engage with a card or not, what we do with it — which I'm all about, you know, what do we do with these cards is really like the essence of what I think I teach and I'm personally interested in — but more than anything, if we’re bringing forward reversals in that category it’s an opportunity to tend the self, to be loving with ourselves, to be intimate with ourselves, to actually be invited into a particular experience around what we're going through that we may not have even been aware of. So it's a chance to dive even deeper into a little pocket in the cave as it were.
[0:03:15]
And I would say that an invitation to come home to self is the largest majority of how a reversal is gonna show up in a reading. More than anything, reversals are always an opportunity, always an opportunity, even if it's multiple categories, always an opportunity to come home to self. Resistance, I would say, is the second most sort of common category, invitation, that reversals fall into, but there is a third — and obviously there's way more than three categories — but for our purposes, kind of the big, big, big umbrella of how reversals can show up, this is largely what you'll find.
But this third umbrella is a more specific one. This third category is a bit more specific. It's a little bit less every day, but when it does come up, it can be a revelation. It can be extraordinary. It can ignite our spirit. It can bring about emotions, it can be an experience where we go, “Oh my God, thank God!” and that is completions.
Some reversals show up as Anchors and invitations, heads up information, that we are complete with a particular cycle in our lives; a lesson, a season of experience, that we've done everything we need to do in that particular lesson and season. We're complete, we're ready to shut the door and walk through that threshold, walk through the transition, of bowing to the lessons that came from that time, honoring what we learned, honoring what we left behind, honoring what we're walking into, and sort of starting anew in a way.
And while all Tarot cards — there is no bad, wrong, even problematic, Tarot cards. There can certainly be problematic depictions of cards, but at their root and soul, the Tarot is truly, so spiralic, so inclusive, so multifaceted, constantly changing in such wonderful and deeply inclusive loving ways. And really, all cards bring deep medicine, huge invitations, huge, for our growth, for our expansion.
We may not always like a card. Sometimes we cannot like the idea of a card. You know, we cannot like what we've been told about a card. We cannot like the depiction of a card. That doesn't necessarily mean that we know the card outside of what we've been told, or outside of what it looks like. And, ideally, we wouldn't do that with anyone else in our lives. So with the Tarot, we just want to offer the courtesy of going a little deeper.
But even though there is no bad, wrong, problematic Tarot card, there are definitely some, they’re just not fun. And some of them that might be really personal to us. There might be some that we just don't get, we don't care for, we don’t enjoy them.
And then there are some that while some of us may have spent enough time in them to really appreciate the experience, maybe it's a bit of an acquired taste. For other ones of us, we just genuinely don't like the experience of a particular card.
That's fine. We don't like everything about life. And if a card brings forward a flavor that you can appreciate, maybe can appreciate what it's doing for a particular area of your life, you just don't really like how it feels to be in it, that's totally valid, you know. There are also some that we may not dislike being in them, but they do bring maybe less pleasurable experiences than others.
[0:07:44]
And reversals that signify a completion typically do come up around these slightly more unsavory, more, perhaps, spiky or bitter cards. I love the medicine of spiky things and bitter things. It's really good for us.
But spikes on plants and thorns are such good medicine about boundaries. And we can have little thorny places in us that were invited to get closer to. Bitter medicine is maybe not the most flavorful thing, but it's so good for our digestion. And we can appreciate it, right? While saying like “I don't, it doesn't taste very good,” you know (Lindsay Laughs). We can hold both.
And so reversals that signify a completion, again, typically come up as an opportunity to say, “Hey, you've been in this kind of tough, spiky, bitter place. And now you're getting ready to transition out of that.” It's typically like the bells go off and say, “You've spent your time in deep study with this energy. And now you're prepared to move past this. Now you're prepared to take what you learned and go off into something a bit different.”
[0:09:11]
So do reversals show up as signals of completion around cards that we enjoy, that are particularly pleasurable to us, that we appreciate, that we don't have an association of spikiness or bitterness with? Absolutely.
We are in… cards move through us in seasons and spirals and layers. So you could 100% get The Sun and dependent on your pull, depending on where you are, depending on what's coming up around it, or if you pull it for a client, The Sun can 100% come up reversed as a signal of completion. You may think, “Oh no, does that mean I'm complete with like the medicine of The Sun with warmth and brightness and light and good stuff?” No, because that's not quite what The Sun is.
The Sun is an invitation to, well, it's a time when we, you know, we talked about it last week, right? A time when we move out of an experience or a period of time where we don't really have a lot of answers, we don't kind of know what's going on. The Sun comes up, and we're able to see.
And the whole idea with that card is seeing; we're allowing ourselves to be seen as we actually are, like, really letting ourselves be free. We're seeing others in their freedom. We're allowing for there to be a spaciousness. We're open to answers, to clarity that maybe we just weren't able to have access to. Now it's coming forward to us.
So when we consider that card as a reversal that signifies a completion, we're not saying you're done with that. But it could be that you are moving into, moving out of Sun reversed, and into The Fool. So it could be that you are — if it strikes you and resonates for you as a completion — it could be that you’ve done a ton of work, maybe with processors, with your practices, with certain exercises, to open, to really open; to be seen, to see others, deepening your intimacy, deepening your willingness to receive maybe channeled information from your Guides. And now you're taking everything you learned from that energy, you’re walking away with your lineage, your teacher, you know, all those lessons, and you're leaping, choosing, saying “yes” to a whole new journey in your life. That card isn't moving away.
When we honor any Tarot card, whether it be reversed or right side up as a kind of a completion, we're not getting rid of anything. This is a good lesson for all of y'all who get really — there are so many people who I work with, as students and those of you in my community — a question that I get a lot is, “I pulled a really good card in my reading for: What am I letting go of? Why would I want to let go of that?”
[0:12:32]
First of all, you're not letting go of anything; it's letting go of you. And it's an opportunity for you to just see that, to check that out. Secondly, you're not losing what's ready to be cleared and released. It's staying with you. You're just moving out of the particular season of study that's been coming up around that card.
Also, the key is what we're moving into after the card, you know, and be willing to expand your mind about what's good and bad, right? If you're clearing out or if 10 of Cups is what's being released, and what you're stepping into is Three of Swords, how I would legitimately, and genuinely, interpret that for myself — just on paper, not listening to my Guides or asking the cards what medicine they might have for me and receiving probably something much more specialized than this — I would acknowledge the work that I've been doing, even subconsciously, around being present to joy even when it's hard. I would acknowledge that maybe I've gone a little further with that than I imagined that I was capable of, and now I have the opportunity to take that deep work into spaces where my mind might really be covering over, or attempting to cover over, some wounding in grief, which is what Three of Swords is.
It's not heartbreak, it's not backstabbing, it's not betrayal. It's honoring and acknowledging deep grief that often lives underneath a lot of our thinking, strategizing mind, or desires to kind of know what to do.
I’m slightly digressing, but I think it's important to honor kind of looking at completions in the Tarot as a whole. That, really, when we're in particular seasons or cycles with certain cards, they're not going away. It's just an opportunity for us to recognize that we're, whether we're aware of it or not, whether we have all the answers, all the clarity or not, that we've moved through a beautiful season of wisdom and understanding with a particular card, or maybe a really hard one, and that we're coming out on the other side and getting ready to move into something different. And that's really, really powerful.
[0:15:14]
And as far as these reversals today go, that we're going to cover, I think there's a lot of power in looking at how these energies show up in particular pockets of the Tarot.
So when a card is particularly strong, spiky, a little bitter, again, very strong, strong medicine, we may love that flavor, it might be really hard for us. Again, I love bitter stuff, it's just not like honey, you know. So we may not have an acquired appreciation of that. Most of the time, when those cards come up reversed, it's a signal not that we're blocking anything, it could be a signal to come home to sell.
Very often, it's a signifier that the energy is lightning, that what was once very dense, very strong, is getting a little bit softer, a little bit lighter, that we've moved through a lot more of it than we think, or we’re moving through something, maybe on a subconscious level. We're getting ready to transition out and move into something different.
We can see almost 100% of the time any Four in the Tarot, and especially any five, chances are if you pull those reversed, and if you start — if you're, like, really in need of some deep, foundational help around tethering to more confidence with your Tarot practice, if you have your own practice, there's no need to solve anything for your own knowing and experience. — but it can be really helpful with Fours and Fives, if you feel really overwhelmed at what those cards mean reversed. Chances are you're going to be very, very helped, very assisted, by starting from a place of completion, because nine times out of 10, and even beyond that, if a Four or Five in the Tarot comes up reversed, it's typically a signal that's letting you know: You've been in this. Now you're getting ready to move into something different. So bow to what came, be open to what is ready to come.
[0:17:39]
Sevens are typically pretty similar; that we're in kind of this nebulous, inner space. Sevens can be a bit confusing. And now we're getting ready to go into something different.
So it doesn't always have to be spiky, but there's lots of, this is perhaps kind of the most spiralic of the categories that it can really apply to certain cards almost all the time and is not uninclusive of other categories, by the way. Sometimes certain cards can span all three when they come up reversed. But looking at all the different ways that completions can happen and can unfold in us, and even deepening our understanding of what that word even means, like, are we ever truly complete with anything? Are we complete with some things? Are we not complete with others? Do we name that we're complete? Do things let go of us? Do we let go of them? Like it's just all things to begin to look at and explore.
[0:18:48]
So the first card that we're going to be looking at as our Anchor for how reversals can show up, when they're a signal that we're complete with some kind of cycle or lesson is The Tower - very classic reversal, signifying completion.
The Tower is ruled by Mars. It is a card I have a very, very... I love The Tower. I don't just love the idea, that I actually appreciate the experience of The Tower. I'm very used to it, you know. I, again, really appreciate what it's doing. I don't always love it, but most of the time, I really appreciate what it brings.
In The Tower, we have the opportunity to get a sense, a very strong clarity about a structure, a belief, a thought, a relationship that we've built up on an unsteady, false, or broken foundation. Most of the time The Tower is not total, burn it down to the ground, crazy pants. Most of the time, The Tower can come up around things that might feel pretty surprising, like, our stuff about feeling like we're not deserving of love, or we're not worthy of affection, or if we have a limiting belief about charging our worth or about “shoulding” ourselves.
The Tower, you trust and believe, will come up around that, because it will say, “This was built on something. There's a foundational crack here that needs to be tended. So let me torch this for you. Let me bring somebody into your life who completely defies those expectations. Let me bring in an opportunity for you to charge your worth and not apologize for it. Let me bring in an opportunity for you to blossom, essentially. And let's go down to the very heart of this and examine when this foundation got cracked. And rather than heal those foundations you just built on top of it.” Right?
[0:21:17]
The United States of America is, or Turtle Island is, in that right now. Like, there's so much in the structure of this country that was built on a completely broken foundation, and it's all coming down. And that's an example of like, major, major, major, multilevel Tower, huge, where the foundation isn’t just broken but like rotting, bleeding, sore. It's deep work, and sometimes we go through those things, personally, with The Tower where it can feel like a fucking nightmare, and yet, The Tower is a friend.
It knows you have an infected wound. It knows that that wound is not really healing correctly. It wants to blow it open for you, so that you can heal it, finally, so that you can clear it; so that you can allow whatever has been stored in that wound to come up and out, so that there can be, again, a clearing. Then we can really heal in the star.
So we can appreciate The Tower. We can even love The Tower, because, again, most of the time, The Tower’s coming up around things that, while it might feel kind of confronting, are not earth-shattering situations. Sometimes no, you know, but it really depends.
I find The Tower to be quite expansive and inspiring and even a little invigorating, which I know to many makes me sound wacky (Lindsay Laughs). But when we get it reversed, of course, it can be an invitation to come closer, deeper, into presence. 100%, it can. It can certainly be an indicator of resistance perhaps, but more often than not, when The Tower shows up reversed, it is a signal that something around the way that we've engaged with a structure, a system, a belief, a story within ourselves or in the world is transforming. And that we are, whether we feel like it or not, getting ready to prepare to build something new.
[0:23:49]
It can also be an indication when we get The Tower reversed that this is happening on a very subconscious, deep, deep inner level. We might not even feel it, believe it or not. It kind of shifts everything to the inside. Sometimes it can be an external experience, but very often, reversals that indicate completion can also represent the passage of time.
It could be that you've been moving through The Tower for a long time and maybe didn't even realize it. You know, we're never done, right? Like that's why I say we need to kind of redefine “completions” for ourselves or even define it, period. But one of the really, really powerful opportunities to work with around this is: if you get Tower reversed, and it's an indication that you've been moving through Tower, and perhaps not even really acknowledging or even totally being aware of it, it's an opportunity to pause, to say like, “Holy shit, is that true? Have I been moving through Tower? Have I had these systems, these structures, coming down in my life? Did I not even think about that? Did I not even realize? Did I think like everything was going to shit or that I was so lost that I…?”
And by the way, all those experiences are very valid, but sometimes we can kind of forget, underneath those moments where we feel like everything's going to shit, we can be in the truth of everything needing to kind of die and be burned away to allow things to emerge renewed. Tower’s very, very important for that.
Have you actually been trying and working with totally new beliefs? And maybe it's been hard, but have you really been working on that? You know, sometimes we just don't give ourselves a whole lot of credit for that.
So when The Tower comes up reversed, again, this isn't a hard and fast, but it's a nice place to land. Can you check in about it? Can you acknowledge or reflect, have you been doing this Tower work? Has The Tower been coming up for you? Have you been responding to it? Have you been changing things from the inside out? Can you acknowledge that, perhaps, you've done a significant portion of deep work with The Tower, and are now preparing, perhaps, to move into a different energy for a little bit?
Tower might come back, but your nervous system may be able to rest. Things may be able to come down a little bit more, you may be able to integrate the situation a bit. Very, very often, this reversal is an indication that you've been doing a lot more work than maybe you've given yourself credit for and that the energy is lightening, it's lessening. If it was a storm, it's moving a little bit away from you. So how can you honor what that time has taught you and open to what may be wanting to come through? You know, not in its place, but what's the next season of your life informed of this work that you've done with The Tower?
[0:27:29]
The next energy that we're going to look at in this way is The Devil.
So we've talked about The Devil, but The Devil is an invitation, when we get really expanded, really in our soul yes, really in our sovereignty, our autonomy, our individuality, The Devil can come up. And it can present us with an invitation from the thinking mind, from the ego that the thinking mind and the ego’s strongest desire is to invite us back into an emotion or an experience that slows us down a little bit. And it can sometimes use fear and shame and guilt. It can bring up old stuff, and we can really find ourselves locked in this story: “There's something wrong with me.” or “I'm bad.” “I'm not okay.” “There's something wrong, fundamentally, with me.”
Sometimes, very often, those stories from the thinking mind and the ego were picked up from our caretakers; they were picked up from their stories from inherited belief systems. No one's ever born with that story, but we pick it up, right, from the world around us and the people who are caring for us who may be doing the best that they can, but maybe they have their stories about that. Maybe not.
So The Devil is a huge opportunity for transformative liberation because it offers us the chance to practice saying, “I see this invitation, and I know it's not the truth of me. It can be here. I can feel it.” It may be painful. It may feel very true, but we can come into an embodied fierce understanding reclamation of ourself: “My pleasure is my birthright. How I exist in the world is a joy. It is my birthright to be in this world, to enjoy, to take up space, to be in my soul yes.” To acknowledge the places where the mind might be really, really feel really threatened by our expansion, to be able to say like, “You know, okay, this is coming up here right now, and it's not true, you know. It's real, it's happening, it's present with me, but it's not the truth of me,” we don't actually have to believe it.
And when we practice, catching the mind in those places, we wind up observing, rather than identifying. And the more that we're able to do that, the more we can show up as our inner caretakers, loving on those parts of us, while maintaining good boundaries with ourselves. And we can say, “I'm not available for that story. I’m not available for that thought. No, thank you.” We can totally say that. We can be much more fierce with our language or even more gentle than that.
[0:30:45]
But The Devil is the first time that we're really invited to feel, you know, the story, the weight, the beliefs, that live in the body, and live in our embodied, liberated truth, which is “I'm allowed to expand, I'm allowed to live. I have a right to be here, to take up space. I'm seeing that my brain feels a little threatened. I don't have to take that invitation.” So we're not ignoring or bypassing anything; we're practicing what it is to hold the experience while not acting from it.
So that's a really strong deviation from what the typical themes of Devil are, which are really kind of rooted in religious, sinful, structure, which is like, “Don't fuck around with vices. Don't do anything bad or sinful. Don't engage with things that aren't clean.” Really, that's at the base of it, when really, I think The Devil is kind of like, “Embrace what makes you feel really good.”
And there are moments in The Devil where the mind might even say, like, “Go ahead and like embrace this thing, even though we know it's not really the best thing for us.” We just want to start getting much more observant with our minds and the stories of the ego, and checking in and saying, “You know, is this the truth for me? Would this really be useful, helpful? Is it true that I need to feel shame, you know, about this particular desire? Is it true that I need to feel guilty for this particular experience?” Of course, we're going to feel what we're going to feel, but we're asking, is it true? You know, is the shame connected to something that I’m meant to take action on or is the shame just with me? You know, can I just bow to the shame?
It's a really, really powerful space of starting to witness the way the mind, again, gets really threatened by expansion, and will use the things that have previously really slowed us down, or made us feel like we're not enough, to get us out of that really, deeply expanded place.
[0:33:16]
And the reversal of The Devil is typically an indication that we've done, again, far more work in this cycle than we believe we have. It's typically an indication that we've been in The Devil, whether we've realized it or not, and it's starting to cycle out; that it's starting to lessen, again, to lighten. We can see kind of the edges and the borders of the invitations a little bit more clearly than when we were, you know, where we were maybe a few days ago.
Sometimes we can, in The Devil reversed, be in a situation where we can be — this happens to me all the time (Lindsay Laughs). When I say “all the time,” I mean, all the time. — in a space where I am really expanding, which I always am, or evolving in some way, and my, my sweet, you know, little girl is like so scared, and my mind is like, freaking out. It's so scared for me, and it's kind of bringing up all the really, really tough stories and thoughts and feelings. It's inviting me into so much fear and terror and all these what ifs.
And I've had many experiences where it, like, totally breaks me down. It moves me to tears, where I'll say, “I'm very aware of what's true and what's not true in this moment. Everything's valid, but like it's so hard. It's like so painful to have these really intrusive thoughts, really intense invitations.” It's painful. It hurts my feelings, even though it's me, you know? And all I can do is, really, you know, as much as I can say, “It’s not true, really bowing and really acknowledging and honoring that,” you know, and again, really committing myself to staying in what I know is, again, what I'm committed to, the truth, while holding the fullness of my experience.
So sometimes we can be so deep in that work, that we're not even aware we're in it. I know that that sounds so wild, but it is true. We really do not give ourselves a whole lot of credit for this kind of work. We really don't. We don't really value it over culturally either, to work through really hard brain chemistry, really hard thoughts, really hard, emotional experiences, to actually be present with them and stay rooted to what we believe, what we know is true, what we're committed to, in moments that are really hard for us.
[0:36:11]
And when we pull The Devil reversed, that's not to say like, “Oh my god, everything's great, no more problems!” But The Devil only ever comes up when we're doing everything right (Lindsay Laughs). So the the mind only ever tantrums when it knows that we're about ready to deeply expand, when we're really connected with our intuition. It often doesn't feel like that, but the truth is, that that is often the case.
So when we also get The Devil, or rather, when we get The Devil reversed, and it can come up around completions, it can also signify that we are complete with the story that if we're uncomfortable in this way, then it must mean that we've done something wrong; that we screwed up somewhere, that we took a wrong turn. It actually has the power, this completion, not necessarily to clear us of The Devil work we're doing, but it can keep us really tethered to the truth, really presently, that if contraction’s coming up, it's because I'm in some kind of expansive process, and it's actually a great thing.
Now, it's not to say that if we're really going through a very challenging time, mentally or emotionally, like, “Woohoo, hooray! We’re in expansion!” I'm only discussing when we happen to be in a really challenging time, it happens to feel like it is consistent with some contraction, born of perhaps evolution or growth or expansion in some way, and we're pulling the card, you know; that there is kind of a breadcrumb trail that, you know, we may go to our deck in a moment of saying, like, “Whew, I'm getting ready to do this offering. I feel so scared, and I want to reach for this thing. I'm having this old thought. I'm having this thing, like. what the fuck is happening?” And if The Devil comes up, then we kind of know we're in that experience, and that's what I'm very specifically speaking to.
[0:38:26]
So again, the reversal of that is letting us know, in some way, we've done some very deep work around those beliefs, and now we get to integrate that. We get to remember, we get to solidify it in our being that, “Wow, you know, when I'm expanding my soul work, really offering something up that's deeply vulnerable, deeply challenging, really brings me to some majorly, you know, potent places in myself, chances are my thinking mind will get a little wackadoodles, and how can I see the least? And how can I honor that? You know, how can I include and open my arms to all those experiences?” Or, you know, “How can I love, bless, honor myself, for all of me, even the parts of me that don't feel particularly lovable? Even the parts of me that feel kind of shameful or not okay? You know, how can I remember that that was something that was told to me, you know? That was something I picked up on a long time ago,” or whatever it is.
So when we get Devil reversed, it can be a completion around feeling like we're stuck, we're chained, we’re caught. It can represent a liberation of some kind of those old stories in a way that can really, really be quite growth full and quite expansive, and can most certainly represent a completion with that particular cycle, those particular lessons, with The Devil.
[0:40:04]
And the next card we're going to explore is Five of Wands.
So Five of Wands, any Five card in the Tarot is a contraction, just full stop. It's often a real scrunch before a big opening. We’re crunching, crunching, crunching, crunching or being crunched, in order to really dilate and expand. And all Fives really represent that big, scrunch, crunch of contraction that can come up and really just presents us with an opportunity to acknowledge, do our work around, an area that wants to come forward for us to, you know, get a little bit more clarity on.
And Five of Wands is kind of like, it's a lot of big, hot, messy feels kind of all at one time. We can feel kind of angry and maybe internally combative. We can feel kind of like “Meeehh” and just like kind of like kicking the can down the street, like really pissed off. And there can be a sense of actually big creativity with this card. There can be some frustration. It's pretty volcanic, in terms of the sort of heat, Wands-style, that it brings forward. It's a temporary experience, but a very particular, specific one, where kind of everything is a little jumbled. We're getting ready to obviously expand. Everything is a little messy, it is a little kind of all over the place, but it's unnecessary messiness, in order to yield to a more unified future, or a more unified or holistic set of next steps.
So it's really this kind of, you know, when a volcano erupts, we're creating new ground with that lava, with that magma. So we're sort of creating new ground with the heat that comes out of this card.
Now, deep wisdom, with any five, especially the Five of Wands essentially says, “Can you channel that in a way that's constructive and productive, rather than kind of letting it eat away at you or, you know, be projected onto someone else?” But traditionally, that's at the heart of this card is that it really is an energy that brings us into a really important space of hot, sometimes angry, sometimes creatively-connected messiness of the mind, just being so pissed about (Lindsay Laughs), like, kind of a million different things we feel. We're all those people with five different wands, kind of clinging against one another, that that's really how it can feel, and that's almost sort of the point is like, we're working something out in this card. We're finding a way forward through a more confusing situation or something.
[0:43:21]
Now, when we pull, Five of Wands reversed, typically, it's letting us know we've been moving through this energy, and now we're getting ready to transition out of it. We may feel clearer, we may not feel clearer, but we may, over time, actually get more answers. We may sit down to write and be like, “Oh, where I was blocked a couple days ago, things are now really flowing. Where I felt like I was completely out of my mind, I didn't know which end was up yesterday, now I really feel kind of actually clearer than I did before.”
The reversal of Five of Wands can indicate and can guide us through that passage of time. What happens when we apply the medicine, what happens when we actually let Five of Wands land with us, move through us? And then when we get it reversed, it can be, again, a signification, or a signifier, that, whether we realize we were in the card or not, there's been a lot of medicine that's come forward around it, and now we can walk away, and we'll have information for the future. That when we feel like that, when we feel messy and hot, and like maybe hot-headed, or we want to, like, run and take an action and do something just to kind of get out of the energy versus, again, channeling in a way that's helpful to us and constructive.
Now that we've actually had that experience, we have a better chance of retaining it for the future. We have a better chance that when we're inevitably in that energy again, we’ll remember. And whether we pull Five of Wands or not, we’ll be able to build on, “This is like some definite Five of Wands feels, and I'm just holding space for it,” you know, and on we go. And that can be really powerful.
Really, that's true of any Five, that it's an opportunity for us to see and reflect on, again, whether we pulled the card right side up first or not, if you get any Five reversed, it's letting you know, kind of the challenge, the contraction, that's been present or that was present, around maybe a particular area, around like a general idea. It's a chance for us to really witness the full spectrum of growth and change around that and see how we've grown, see what we've learned from that.
[0:46:00]
When we look to Four of Pentacles as an Anchor for this work, any Four that we're going to work with, it kind of forms like a little box, a little square, and we kind of step into that square. And it contains us. Fours help to root us. They help to provide resourcing. They help us to take little breaks from a particular area of our life where we may be feeling like a lot of activity.
And Four of Pentacles is a body boundary card. It's a card that has zip, zero, to do with greed and money because Pentacles don't have anything to do with money. It has to do with allowing the pentacle, this symbol of Earth, of the elements, of spirit, of connectedness, this beautiful symbol that bridges Spirit work into the material world, into the earthly world, it allows it to be a symbol that creates a container of protection and space around our bodies.
It may be a time when we need a little space. It may be a time when we're quarantining. It may be a time when we don't want to be available for a particular kind of touch or a particular kind of physical experience. It could just simply be that we kind of want to tuck in and be by ourselves. I know a lot of people can resonate with that, you know, Four of Pentacles is a very strong energy that really invites us into a space of connectedness, of communication with our bodies, where we're asking it, them, “What do you need from me? What can I do for you?”
Now, when reversed, this card often lets us know, we've gotten that. We've had that time. We've had that experience to kind of be a bit more in our own energy. We've taken some space, we've taken time, and now we might be sort of invited to come out a little more. Obviously, you get to be the arbiter of that, but it can be really powerful to touch him with it and say, “Oh, wow, you know, this is interesting. You know, I don't know how I feel about it.” And maybe that we are reluctant to sort of come out of that cocoon, but the body might be super excited to start maybe sharing again, or connecting again in a different way. It might want to move, it might want to dance, you know, who knows.
So very often, it's a heads up — and this is true, again, of most of the Fours — that we have spent a lot of beautiful, good time in this energy of this beautiful container that's held us through this process. Now we want to take what we learned from that container and step forward.
We've done all the work that we're meant to do today, as of today, in this energy, and now can we be open? Can we be just a little bit more open, a little bit more available? If it feels like a “yes” to give it a try.
[0:49:13]
The last Anchor card that we're going to look at as, you know, kind of an Anchor for completions is Nine of Swords.
So, Nine of Swords is, I like to call it, it's really the card that can bring us into some worst case scenario thinking. It's really centered on fear. And you know, that classic image from the Smith Rider-Waite deck, the story of the image of that person sitting up in bed is that they're receiving like almost a psychic premonition about the death of perhaps a beloved, perhaps a friend, someone in their lives.
That's not necessarily the truth of this card. We know that because if that were true of everybody, there would be, like, a lot of psychic premonitions, and it's not happening, as far as I know, with relationship to Nine of Swords, right. So we know that it's not an absolute truth, because it's not happening to everybody.
Really, when we go down just a little bit deeper, what's really true about this card is that it can come up in moments when we're experiencing just a huge amount of fear. And fear, you know, we don't need to decode fear. Sometimes fear can come up, when we're legitimately afraid, we're going through a really scary situation, a really scary time. Sometimes we can be going through a huge amount of excitement, and the mind doesn't kind of know, most of our minds don't know, what the fuck to do with excitement. So they tend to file it into fear. We can be doing that. Really, no matter what, we deserve a huge amount of deep care and tending, because it can be really big.
[0:51:20]
I know for myself, I've spent many a moon in Nine of Swords from my childhood on, even when I was young, this was a card that I regularly pulled, and it never brought anything frightening to my door; it only illuminated the fears that were there. It illuminated and validated for me, “There's a lot of fear here. There's a lot of fear about potential outcomes, worst case scenarios,” all kinds of things.
And so when we pull that card, we really want to focus, instead of trying to make the fear go away, understand why the fear’s here, we want to Tend, “Tend” with a capital T, and say like, if you are that person who sat up in bed, and you put your head in your hands, and you were terrified, and had just had this horrible nightmare, nightmare’s feels so real, right?
But we want to try, if we can, to gently wake ourselves up, gently, gently. Maybe we get up, maybe we cuddle our cat, maybe we put something comforting on our phones, or whatever, you know, if we sleep with a screen near us, maybe we put a podcast on or the radio. Maybe we even, like, get up for a bit and pull some cards and journal and try to shake some of that energy.
Nine of Swords is really specifically about fear, and we're not quite sure whether or not it's true. So we have to tend first and then, in some cases, investigate. If it's particularly persistent, if we're like, “Oh, my God, this potential outcome could happen,” and we think that — you know, and it feels okay and safe enough to be with on our own — you know, we can say, “Okay, what is really the likelihood of this happening? You know, can we walk with ourselves through this?”
[0:53:30]
When this card shows up reversed, it is an indication, very often, that we have walked through some kind of dance with our fear, and we've come out on the other side wiser for it; that we may have gone through a particularly challenging experience, or a brush with fear, or an experience with fear where we had a lot of it, and we leaned in anyway, and came out on the other side, again, with more information, more clarity, more ability to be with ourselves in those moments.
That is often how this card shows up reversed: that the fear is there, we just may have a better awareness of it. We may understand like, “Oh, yeah, being invited into enormous fear right now. It's big expansion time. Just holding a space for that.”
You know, what helps you when you're in those experiences? And I say this as somebody who this happens to me on the regular, like, constantly. I'm in like Nine of Swords, 10 of swords. It's scary to do your soul work in the world (Lindsay Laughs). I don't know if it ever gets easier. I guess it's gotten a little easier, but it’s still really scary, depending on what it is that I'm doing.
So how can we acknowledge the bigness of what we've moved through while also recognizing that we're coming to a kind of a natural end in our work with this card?
And those are just a few very small examples out of 78 of these cards that we can pull. And just if we intuitively feel like, “Okay, I've been in this card, in this season, with this energy for a while. Now I really, really sense I'm getting ready to leave it behind and move into something different,” trust that. Absolutely trust that. Even if you're like, “I think I'm just telling myself this to feel better.” Why not? It's probably true, number one, because we don't, I don't think we do that as often as we think we do. I think we tend to go to the worst case scenario versus like, “Ooh!” I don't know. I guess it depends on the person.
But yeah, it's so powerful, and then we're free to celebrate ourselves. Then we're free to say, “I did this. I made it through a moment, a conversation, a staredown with this part of myself, with this part of life, with this invitation. I made it. I did it.” We don't forget those things. Those get filed away permanently, and if we have a moment where we realize like, wow, this like, really, really big fear that there was kind of something lurking under the bed, if we were courageous enough to like, look with a flashlight, it may be that we never have that fear again.
When reversals come up as completions, it's an invitation to honor and acknowledge the bigness of the cycles we move through, bow to the medicine they're bringing, and really celebrate ourselves for having moved through them. They're all kinds of natural ends to life. And when reversals show up as completions, it's signaling them, you know, inviting us to be present in the huge growth that it takes to actually move through those things.
[0:57:05]
So I hope this was useful to you Wild Souls. And again, I know I've said this ad nauseum, but please, do not take this as like the hard and fast rule. These are three really, really solid categories that reversals can show up in, but they're not necessarily what's going to resonate with you. You may have another five categories that reversals can show up, and I say that is fucking awesome.
So once again, with everything I say about the cards, about the structure, just take what works and leave what doesn't, you know. We can be different. That's part of the beauty. That’s why the Tarot is the tool of the people because it needs so many viewpoints, because so many of us see and experience the world so differently.
Thank you, again, for being here, Wild Souls.
And there are a couple of really important links on the show notes today. One of them is that I'm teaching a workshop at Modern Witches Confluence. That's coming up next weekend. I'm so excited. It's all about spiralic intuition, and I'm just one humble person in a lineup of spectacular teachers. And the lineup is crazy this year. So if you want to be a part of that you can buy tickets at the link on the show notes.
And I'm going to talk about this more next week at Monthly Medicine, but friend of the podcast, my dear friend, Alia Walston, who many of you may know as being an absolutely extraordinary Tarot worker, intuitive healer, is currently created a GoFundMe to help them during a time of some pretty huge personal transitions and is really seeking some deep support during this time, and I hope that you will join me in donating to help support this absolutely magnificent, magical being who just shows up in their community so exclusively. May we all contribute to help making Alia’s time in this transition feel as nurturing and abundant as humanly possible.
So if you'd like to donate to Alia’s GoFundMe, if you would like to learn more about their work, you may do so by clicking that link in the show notes. And again, it will be mentioned in Monthly Medicine as well.
Thank you again for being here, Wild Souls, sending so much love to you, and until we connect again next week, please take care of yourselves.
[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, 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.
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