152. The Hermit and the Vertical Lines of the Major Arcana
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Welcome back to Part Two of the Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast’s deep dive on the Vertical Lines of the Major Arcana, loves!
Last week, we introduced the concept of the Vertical Lines of the Major Arcana from the lineage of Rachel Pollack’s writings. We explored The High Priestess, our first card in the second Vertical Line of the Majors, followed then by The Hermit and The Tower.
We looked to The High Priestess in Line One of the Major Arcana as an access point to reclaiming and rewilding our intuition. We start seeing ourselves as intuitive, receptive, available and willing to sit in times of quiet.
This week, we are dropping into our second card of the second Vertical Line of the Major Arcana, The Hermit.
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About the Episode
Ruled by Virgo, The Hermit card calls us into a deep, reflective space, inviting us to surrender to the unknown and root into stillness. We can feel like we’ve stopped moving and that can bring up frustration or feelings that we’re getting this whole “intuition thing” completely wrong.
The Hermit is part of our Line Two journey when we question who we are, what we believed ourselves to be, and the meaning of being slowed down when there’s something we really want to do. Together, we will explore how to work with this Tarot card in conjunction with spiritual and intuitive expansion.
The Hermit is also connected to the ruling planet of Virgo, Mercury. As we all move through this current Mercury Retrograde, we may be able to really see for ourselves where or how The Hermit is inviting us to pay attention to what’s here, right now, as we make moves towards our personal goals.
Lindsay Mack invites everyone taking this journey through the second column Vertical Line of the Majors to pack a sack and go exploring your own intuition.
For countless reasons, many of us can feel intuition should look, act, and feel a certain way. Lindsay shares about the less-discussed and so important blank-feeling phases of exploring your intuition. There are places in our stories,, in the journey, where we just don’t have any clue what’s going on or where we’re going anymore. Does this mean you’re not intuitive? (Hopefully you already know the answer is a resounding NO.) Lindsay unpacks this very common experience in this Tarot podcast episode.
As always, we thank you for exploring this Tarot lesson and invite you to explore the next episode to conclude this series on the second Vertical Line of the Major Arcana.
In this episode, we talk about:
How to work with The Hermit in conjunction with spiritual and intuitive expansion
Why this card can often bring up frustration or feelings that we’re getting it wrong
How to lean into the invitation that The Hermit brings, and so much more.
Cards mentioned in this episode:
The Hermit: [0:02:08], [0:16:29], [throughout]
The High Priestess [0:07:07]
Seven of Swords [0:11:56]
The Tower [0:38:51]
The Magician [0:19:13]
The Hermit reversed [1:04:32]
Related Episodes
In case you missed Part One of this three-part series, we invite you to review The High Priestess and the Vertical Lines of the Major Arcana.
If you’d like more insight into The Hermit card, check out this legacy episode, Monthly Medicine: October is Trust the Timing.
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, pregnancy
The content in this episode contains references to birth and pregnancy. 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 am your host, Lindsay Mack, and as always, it is such a joy, such an honor to be gathered with you in this virtual space. Thank you so much for being here with me today and always.
Wishing everybody a very blessed New Moon in Aquarius. It's definitely such an Aquarian, liminal, strange, electric time where there's just so much. Just... there's so much Aquarius (Lindsay Laughs) right now. It's a lot. It's great, but it's — woof, that's a lot of energy, a lot of energy, and a very interesting feature of this time, especially leading up to this new moon, has been really about a kind of a review, a reflection.
There have been many things that have arisen in the past week that, for several folx I know, including myself, have been pretty unexpected at times, quite unpleasant. Like revisiting very old things, having wounds pop up or crop up that feel really raw and painful that we might not even be remembering or aware that we have still, that we're carrying.
So just as a gentle reminder to remember that anytime we move through Aquarius energy, we're working with The Star, we're working with The Fool, we're working with The World as well. Uranus and Saturn both have, depending on the school of thought that you follow, acknowledge, that makes sense to you, both of those planets have their hand in rulership of Aquarius. It can be pretty powerful to remember and kind of reflect on those things.
It can be really, really powerful to remember that, at the heart of this, it is a time for healing. It is a time for processing, for letting the waters flow, for letting there be a gentle movement in the stream of your life, clearing something out, taking a weight, taking a heavy stone out of the knapsack that you may be wearing.
[0:02:48]
And because we're in so much Aquarius energy and because it's as liminal and strange and unknowable as we could ever imagine in this time, collectively on the planet, of such immense transition and such immense evolution and change, such necessitous change, we don't always really understand all of it. Which, you know, you're not alone. If you're like, “I don't know what the fuck is going on,” nobody knows what the fuck is going on right now. We're just taking it moment to moment.
So just as a reminder to touch back in with that Star energy anytime the Aquarius feels really big. Remember that we're both in The World, in that Saturn piece of things, closing some really big doors and with Uranus opening and leaping into some really big new spaces. And you know, how can we take the time to reflect, to literally put feet on earth, to be in the bath, to be in water, to drink water, to, you know, just as much as we can to really just be so gentle. Really just so gentle.
It's definitely a great time, right now to talk about The Hermit, which is our card in question today. And we're talking about The Hermit in conjunction with speaking about the second of the seven vertical lines of the Major Arcana and exploring within this one, within this particular line over the next three weeks.
[0:04:34]
Last week, we looked to The High Priestess to kind of initiate us into this line of intuitive reclamation, discovery, autonomous intuition — how we intuit, how we're being asked to use those gifts, our particular inner rhythms, our ways of tuning in, our methods, our natural gifts, right? Our tidal pulls in and out, our lunar rhythms as it pertains to our way of connecting with that deeper channel within us, reclaiming that, rewilding that, acknowledging that you are intuitive, really, kind of whether you believe it or not. (Lindsay Laughs)
I'm not here to convince you of that, or “light the lantern for you,” as my teacher, Michelle, would say so brilliantly, but I am here to hold a space of what's true which is that you are intuitive because everybody is intuitive. What we do with that intuition, absolutely, is going to be completely different from person to person. What we move through, unpack, heal through that journey of intuition is really unique person to person.
But rewilding our intuition starts with acknowledging that we are intuitive. Full stop. The end. Where we start to let those flowers grow, start to let the land come back home to itself as it pertains to our inner voice, our connection with Spirit, that kind of natural, beautiful... I guess, “connection” is the best word for it — that natural and beautiful connection that is there, that you were born with, to, kind of...
How we let that flourish is to acknowledge that, for many of us, we've been trying to make our intuition something it's not. We've been trying to make it more steady, more reliable, more linear. We've been trying to get it so that we can always just literally, like, snap our fingers, check in like it's a radio station. We're expecting that we need perfect quiet, perfect calm, perfect whatever to even be worthy of checking in, we need to be clean or pure — and none of that's true. And in The High Priestess, that's actually where we get to reclaim some of that.
[0:07:11]
The High Priestess, at its core, lets us know we have our own way, we have our own dance, we have our own rhythm, our own way in. And when we start to say “yes” to that and listen and observe and enter into that state that The High Priestess occupies of active receptivity, which is a very, very specific state that is very particular to channeling, to what we call just listening, tuning in, feeling into that, when we can get comfortable with, quote-unquote “hearing,” “perceiving” nothing at all, and just hanging out in the listening, we start saying “yes” to ourselves in new ways.
And when we start saying “yes” to ourselves, things start to change.
They may not start looking like they're changing externally yet. This is the movement from Line One. Line One is all about identity, labels, foundations, crucial — think about a child from birth to seven years old. “This is mine,” engaging with boundaries, engaging with power and noise and all kinds of different child development... crucial pieces of child development, right? The foundation of child development happens pretty much, some of the most significant of which, happens from birth to seven years old, actually, with children.
And with that, ideally, in the most perfect sense of the world, we're getting to figure out who we are. Children get, ideally, again, this is ideal — many of us did not have this — but we're exploring what we like, what we prefer, what we don't prefer. We're testing boundaries, where you know, in Line One of the Major Arcana, it's not really an accident that all of those cards, pretty much all of them, have to do in one way, shape, or form with a title or a label. I am The Magician, I am The Empress, I am The Emperor. That's really important. We have to build that and really it's sort of all egoically connected but it's important. There's nothing wrong with the ego, like it’s really important that we feel like we understand, over time, we're always unpacking it.
[0:09:46]
Our roots in High Priestess, that we have a right, a birthright... We are always the moon, right? We talked about this last week. We may see different reflections on the face of the moon, we may see more of it or less of it. We are always the ocean, but our tides are constantly moving and shifting. We're honoring the fact that we're our own unique being with our own unique rhythms and we have a gateway into our spiritual intuition, connection, no matter what. It's just going to maybe look different — every time.
The way that we connect with Magician is going to be all our own. The way that we have a connection with Empress is going to be all our own, right? Foundational work. Once we start saying “yes” to the soul on that foundational level, in High Priestess, things begin to change.
And what begins to change is that we start to travel a little deeper, we start to look a little more, we start to unpack, we start to realize, “Oh my gosh, I used to believe this... now, I'm not so sure anymore.” “Oh my gosh, I used to think this was what I wanted... now, I'm not so sure anymore.”
The biggest thing that starts to happen when we start to deepen our intuitive center is that we start to not know. It's something I don't think people speak about often enough who've traveled down that path that, really, and I did mention this last week, that the more I say “yes” to Spirit and give my life over to service in that way, I don't know anything. (Lindsay Laughs) I don't know, a fucking thing about what I'm doing — supposed to be doing a course in a month. I don't know shit about that course. And even last night, they were like, “You have things to do before you get to that course. Do those things and then we'll talk to you about the course.”
[0:11:56]
This morning I pulled Seven of Swords — which, for some people, I know their opinion of Seven of Swords is that it's very problematic and that there's some sneakiness involved. That is not in any way, shape, or form the truth of that card. It's not my relationship with it. But, it absolutely was a reminder to me around this course when I pulled it of: “Oh, whoa, like, I already have five swords in my hand. Why am I trying to look back at the other two, take care of the website and all of the podcast episode, like all of the different things that need your tending and care before this?” But there's that little part of my mind, my ego, my humxn-ness that wants to be like, “Yeah, but like, I feel like I'd really be able to concentrate on what needs my attention now if I knew a little bit more about what you want me to do.” No dice, right?
And I would say the only thing that's changed between now and like three, four years ago when I used to tantrum and fight and tear my hair out over that is that now I'm a lot more neutral. I'm just like, okay, whatever, like something will come, right? It's taken me many years to get to that place of slightly more neutrality in the face of some of those situations.
But what does start to happen when we start to engage with High Priestess, and this is how we begin to journey from an energy like High Priestess to Hermit, is that the more we start saying “yes” to the soul, the more we start saying “yes” to a connection with our helping spirits — we could say our ancestors, we could say our Guides, our angels, Spirit, the Holy Mother, anything and anyone that you connect with in your own way, right? It could just simply be your higher self, you’re enough, too, right? So whatever feels good to you there.
But it's an interesting thing, because in order to really allow for highest and best, for spiritual support to flow into our lives, the ego has to move back a bit. And that's typically when we start getting really tantrum-y, really contracted, really upset. That is, sometimes, when the ego and the mind really wants to be like, “Fuck no. I'm in charge here.” And that's when really interesting things can start to happen on the intuitive or spiritually expanded path where we start to get invited into a really old behavior that doesn't serve us, and we know it doesn't, and yet it's there or distraction that's really profound or wanting to rush things (*raising hand*) or, like, (Lindsay Laughs) whatever it is — it's when contraction can start to come up or resistance or whatever. None of that's a problem. It's actually an awesome sign.
[0:15:03]
The mind — I learned this a long time ago from my teacher, Michelle: the mind does not fight — the mind only fights things when it feels threatened by them. And what I mean by that is that the mind, often, will fight things that are wonderful for us, that are very expansive, good for us. Because when we're expanding intuitively, that works better for us as a whole person. But the mind doesn't have quite as much control over us as it might like. The mind isn't trying to be bad or nefarious. The mind, the ego, really just wants to be in control of things because it wants to make sure we stay safe and alive. At the root and the core of it, its intention is quite good, although I know living with my own brain, my own inner divergence, my own mental illness, it is not welcome.
Sometimes the way that my mind will attempt to protect me or divert things or switch the record, and in some moments when certain things will come up, and some of those things were probably born or genetic, some of those things are because of various things where those programs are sort of developed, right?
So why the hell am I getting into all this? I’m getting into all of this because The Hermit, and I say this often on this podcast, is not necessarily what you think it is.
What most folx think The Hermit is, and I'm not saying it's not this or it can't be this, it's just not completely that — what The Hermit really isn't is a sort of like a warm, wise, elder figure who possesses elder wisdom. Again, I'm not saying that The Hermit cannot be this or isn't this, but it's about, like, 3% of how The Hermit typically presents itself.
[0:17:14]
And especially in conjunction with this three card vertical line journey, it's really important, I think, to start with what The Hermit isn't just so we don't have any unmet expectations.
First of all, the cards are not representative of something that is — Do we all have access to the sacred, elder wisdom? Absolutely. Do we all — some of the folx listening to this are in that stage of their lives where they are connected to their elderhood and that's beautiful. So I'm not taking that away from anyone. What I do want to bring forward here though, is that in the realm of how The Hermit shows up in a reading, can really be quite a changeable experience.
The Hermit is ruled by Virgo, this is mutable Earth. So this has to do with... how does one stay in one’s center while the ground beneath them is moving? How do you stay in your center when things tangible, intangible, in your life, around you are moving around or in the midst of change? What do you do? What do you do when you want to engage with things as you always have and you can't? What happens then, right?
So Virgo is all about service. It walks the path of the seeker, walks the deep, deep, deep path. Hermit’s ruled by Mercury. This is really high channeling, high energy, it's a lot to be connected to Mercury in this way. It's a lot. Mercury is about — it rules The Magician. It's about having your physical body, your nervous system, your hands, you're — be a vessel for creation. You're letting creation come through you. It is a lot of energy.
[0:19:30]
And yet we have — in many depictions of The Hermit, this very steady, very slow, very wise energy that seems to not be in need of any worldly possessions. Many Hermit cards are, you know, a humxn with basically, literally like a backpack on or somebody just carrying a walking stick and a lantern or a variation in that way. Why The Hermit?
Why does The Hermit follow The High Priestess if we’re looking to this vertical line and what does The Hermit really have to do with intuition?
So, again, can The Hermit be a symbol or a signal from Spirit, from our — from some part of ourselves that says, “Hey, you know, sit down, tune in, go within. Travel maybe a little bit slower. Drop in maybe a little bit longer. Hang out in what you're doing.” Absolutely.
Can The Hermit be an invitation, an initiation into some very important, much needed, more solitary travel? And I don't mean travel out in the world — I mean traveling, traversing the roads of your life, the paths of your life. Absolutely. It is very much about inward looking.
So when we are in Hermit, you're gonna be invited to spend a lot more time focusing on yourself and, interestingly, that's the beauty of the parallel of Virgo energy, right? It’s that there has to be this willingness, there has to be this invitation to look at one’s self in order to serve collectively. Virgo is so connected to humble service, really about serving in a way that's not always in the spotlight — sometimes, absolutely.
[0:21:45]
But, Beyoncé, while perhaps an expected choice, is an amazing example of this. Beyoncé is a Virgo and we know Beyoncé’s incredible, prolific projects, music, movies, films, projects that are extraordinary acts of visioning and collaboration and, absolutely, offer a collective healing on multiple levels. And we know that Beyoncé requires a lot of time not — where nobody knows what she is working on. And all of a sudden, bam! There's a thing that gets dropped. That's very often the rhythm of a Virgo if they're really connected, if they're able to be, kind of, connect… there's a lot of need to go in and reflect.
Now, how we travel from High Priestess to Hermit: this is a very natural progression in intuitive expansion that we connect with ourselves on this very potent, very deep level.
In High Priestess, we're starting to explore this and then, all of a sudden, our relationship to our everyday life starts to change. We're not as able to fuck around as much as we were... we know too much. And when I say “fuck around,” I mean, make choices that we know are really not serving us. Once we know, it's very hard to un-know it. Once we feel into “Ooh, this person does not feel good for me to be hanging out with,” and we really make that soul, heart, full connection about it, it changes things. It’s really hard to keep doing it once we know.
[0:23:41]
So Hermit is about occupying the liminal space of not knowing. It is the archetype, the teacher, the Anchor that shows up when we are in a profoundly important cocoon/chrysalis moment on our journey of spiritual and intuitive surrender.
Once we've started to say “yes” to ourselves, to Spirit, to our intuition in this way, we can't quite do the things we used to be able to do. It's much harder to check out. It's much harder to unconsciously reach for things. I mean, it for sure happens. It happens to me all the time. But it's harder to do it for as long and it's harder to stay unconscious about it. It's really hard to escape when we're in Hermit. What I mean by “escape” isn't like a legitimate fleeing of circumstances that are either dangerous or unwelcome. I mean, “tapping out;” I mean, dissociating; I mean, where you might have been able to say, “Oh, I'm a little uncomfortable with where I am. I'm going to bop off and do this or do that,” The Hermit kind of makes it harder to do it. It kind of fixes us in place and offers us a pause to our normal life rhythms in order to sink in a little further into what The High Priestess establishes, which is this place of active receptivity.
Now what The Hermit does is it takes what The High Priestess lays out in its foundation, where we're choosing to do that, we're reflecting, we're saying “Oh, I'm going to choose to go inside. I'm going to choose to reflect, to tune in with High Priestess and that's happening on my inner landscape;” The Hermit takes that and extends it to everything.
[0:25:49]
So how you know if you're in a Hermit space is if you're where I am with my course right now (Lindsay Laughs). If you're like, “Where the fuck is it?” and nothing's coming and Spirit’s just like, “I got nothing for you today. Sorry. Like, just hang out in this. Hang out. Ask yourself: why do you need to know?”
The need to know is 100% ego and that's part of the thing that The Hermit is here to help us break from. Remember, the ego wants familiarity. It wants to know what's going on. My ego wants to know what's going on. It wants to make sure we're taken care of, that we have things to do, that we know what the fuck is going on. We're — she's a survivor part of me. You know, she's the one that got me out of my mom's house. Like, she needs to know and I have total respect for that. And when there is an opportunity for me to hang out in that liminal, in-between space, and we are certainly in one of those right now, collectively, where the ego has to know, it wants something, it needs something, it needs some kind of thing to grip onto, hold on to, it wants to help us escape, to get out of the void of not knowing...
And the soul really says, “Hang out in this. There's an old way that's being undone here. You're not finished in the chrysalis. You're not finished in the cocoon. There are things to unpack, to resolve, to take care of before you step forward. There are literally things on the to-do list.” If you're in a feeling like that, you’re in Hermit. Full stop. And it's a really — I don't think it's spoken about enough for intuitives.
[0:27:34]
I think most people think they get here and they did something wrong. I'm in this energy most of the time. That's really the truth because I'm constantly evolving and constantly changing. And as such, my brain, my mind is constantly uncomfortable and constantly inviting me into distraction, dissociation, numbing out, whatever...
And by the way, there's nothing wrong with any of those things. I'm not saying that those things aren't utterly and totally not just acceptable, but, like, welcome, especially when they're coping mechanisms that are crucial for our survival and our happiness in moments when we're not able to do anything else. Those are still beautiful resources to lean on.
And there are times where we don't actually want the coping mechanism, that there's some part of us that wants to dive in a little further. When those times present themselves, especially when the coping mechanism or, you know, the place that we would normally divert to doesn't really work, we can't quite access it.
For me, it used to be travel. You know, whenever I would feel kind of uncomfortable or in this little rut, I would always want to go away, somewhere else. It never worked. It was always a horrible experience. It took me many years to learn that when I'm in something like this, travel is the last thing to do. And I'd always pull Hermit for it because Hermit says, “Hang out. Hang out. Where you would normally go off and do this, where you'd normally go off and do that, where you'd normally make an earthly change, to try to bring about less of this uncomfortable feeling, hang out. Wait.”
[0:29:29]
Hermit also dissolves, is part of the, you know, it's literally the chrysalis line, Line Two. Line Two is the line where we take all that beautiful caterpillar-ness that we learn in Line One and we sort of break it down in order to fly, literally, in Line Three.
The Hermit invites us to make peace with not knowing and it asks us in little ways, in big ways depending on where we're at, to be with ourselves when we want to check out — to notice, to take notice, to take really compassionate notice of where it is that we want to hurry past something.
And again, I use myself as an example here, because this is so real for me and I also want to say this: you can want to hurry past something and not be in Hermit. I'm not saying that this is a blanket statement on all experiences where we want to check out, numb out, whatever. And again, I'm not a therapist. So this is not saying, and this is never therapeutic advice, I'm not saying like, “Oh, if you're checking out, you're not really doing your intuitive work.” What I'm saying is that it's actually a really common part of the process and that, really, we would — we just want to bring a sense of curiosity and witnessing to all of it.
And there are moments on the journey where we will go to, kind of, kickstart something in the external we want. Hermit, very uniquely, is the experience of wanting something external to come in, so fucking badly, and nothing's coming — where we want to kickstart something and we just can't. It's a very, very important time where we're in-process, we're in transition, typically, we're doing a lot more work inside that chrysalis than we want to believe. It's just that normally, typically, we're not seeing the work in Hermit. We're not physically seeing it.
And this is a big part of what my teacher, Michelle, always speaks about that — if we are desiring to get to a place where we have some kind of external change happen, if we want to move, if we want to change our job, we want to have a child, there's a million steps to walk internally before that external thing can happen. There's a lot of clearing and releasing. When we initiate a “yes” to something, it's a long journey, very often, between that “yes” and the physical thing.
[0:32:29]
And sometimes that physical “yes” doesn't yield to the thing we were looking for. Sometimes it takes much longer than we think, sometimes it's a completely different road. Sometimes it winds up yielding to a completely different thing, where we really, really want to leave our job — and then a pandemic happens and we can't do that right now. Where we want a child and the journey to get to parenthood is devastating and involves so many more steps than we think.
So it's a moment where The Hermit really honors the internal journey piece, on the road, in the middle ground, between that “yes,” in between the external presentation, whatever it may be, of that journey. It is quite literally the chrysalis between caterpillar and butterfly. Sometimes that butterfly emergence is different than we thought it would be. Sometimes it's better. Sometimes it's not quite — it's just one step on the journey of where we're going.
So what do we learn in this? Why go through this at all? Because we're learning not to feed the ego when it demands to be fed because it's not really hungry. We're learning how to work with discomfort in a different way. We're learning how to acknowledge the ways in which we've helped ourselves stay slightly out of our soul work, slightly out of our soul truth, the way we've taken care of ourselves, taken care of things when — we're learning how to expand our capacity to be in discomfort. Evolutionary discomfort. Discomfort that's actually going to initiate a kind of a growth process, rather than just uncomfortable for uncomfortable’s sake.
[0:34:29]
So it's a very powerful place to be and can yield tremendous wisdom. That is really where the wisdom piece of Hermit comes to fruition. This is a path of great simplicity. It's very hard to be in Hermit work when we're trying to, like, have all these different earthly things happening. It's really hard.
And Hermit doesn't mean you have to be physically alone. You can be with your partner, with your children. You can have too many people around you and Hermit can be calling, calling, calling, saying, “There's something inside of you that's wanting your attention. Before you can move into this next external phase of your life, there's something here, something here to journey to reclaim.” That's really important.
And a lot of the time Hermit can put things in our path: put people, processors, therapists, podcasts, courses, tools in our path, not to fix or solve, but to help us walk this path of discovery and of curiosity and of checking in and of looking deeply and of noticing, “Whoa, I really want to check out here... what might it be like to not, for 90 seconds? What might it be like to observe that desire to check out rather than act on it? And how can I be with the tantruming? (Lindsay Laughs) How can I honor this tantruming?”
[0:36:01]
I, you know, in my work, in my intuitive process, all that stuff, my relationship with Spirit, there's so much more tantruming than I think anyone would ever imagine happens. I'm smiling so big because — woof! If you only knew! Hermit is not pleasant. A lot of the time, it's not pleasant, because we're humxns and we want to know what the fuck is going on and we want to have a satisfying sense of what it is that we're doing, and when we're really, really committed to Hermit work, we're asked to seek, we're not asked to know. It is not a path of knowing. It is a path of seeking.
There is a reason, in many cards, that The Hermit carries a lantern. There's, of course, so many things we could ponder on, look at, explore, research… what is that star inside The Hermit in the Smith-Rider-Waite represent? What does — it's a call back to the to The Star card. You know, there's a million ways that we could connect and explore this, right? And there's also the willingness to look very deeply at Hermit, in general, and acknowledge when a humxn being holds a lantern on a dark, snowy night, you're not going to see 10 steps ahead and 10 behind. You're likely only going to see where you're at and maybe the next step.
You're not privy in Hermit seasons to a whole ton of information. And that's both wildly frustrating and very triggering and super uncomfortable to us as humxns… and also amazing. Because you can't see. It is one of the most powerful opportunities in one's lifetime to go very deeply into what's here before we have a sense of what's to come. The Hermit says, “I want to shine this beam so intently on you and let you know, like, the next hour, the next day, the next week of what's going on...” Typically, it's more like the next hour. (Lindsay Laughs) “But we're gonna unpack what's here. We're gonna hang out as long as we need to at this step. Maybe for a couple months we'll be right here… and yet, we're working.”
[0:38:51]
In this journey of traveling from High Priestess to Hermit to Tower, we are moving closer and closer to living in co-creative alignment with Spirit where we're actually saying, “Spirit, I would love for you to help me,” to the point where we're actually in a kind of a Tower relationship with Spirit where, if something's not in alignment, Spirit can help us clear it out. It doesn't need to be that we have to fight or work so hard to clear it ourselves. It can get to a point where we're doing what we're doing, and then, we know that it's not in alignment anymore.
Sometimes that can be one of the most painful parts of spiritual work is that, all of a sudden, we're going, going, going, going, going and all of a sudden we're in Tower and realizing, “Oh my gosh, that doesn't align with me anymore. Holy shit.”
And we really learned that it's never about doing things perfectly with Spirit. It's always about having the full experience. It's not about being superhumxn. It's about being as humxn we can possibly be. And with Hermit, this card teaches us to redefine what it means to go deeply into something and what it means to, again, deepen our relationship to ourselves, to our intuition, to Spirit. We typically believe that that's very much about kind of knowing what's to come.
And obviously, that's an artform that I fully bow to. It's just not one that I'm meant to do in this lifetime, to be sure. So — and it's also not one that's particularly reliable because the future isn’t fixed. It's always, always changing. So we can have a profoundly gifted sense for the cycles that are to come, of course. Are they absolutely fixed? No, they're not. Right? So there is something to be said, for going very deeply into what is here, unpacking what is here, honoring what is here, honoring what we've been carrying.
[0:41:04]
It can be remarkable, you know. Where we're fixed and paused and rooted and placed by Hermit, we can think, “What the fuck am I supposed to do here? I'm ready for the next thing.” And yet, if we were really ready, it would be coming. I mean, truly, we can absolutely be like, “I am ready,” but if there's even a shred or a threat of something to unpack, to clear, to process, to confront, The Hermit doesn't want us going into the butterfly phase of our life with any of our caterpillar-ness coming with us.
So we do lots of different things with Hermit. We are absolutely, absolutely checking in, asked to really make connection and contact with the part of us that moves much more slowly, that is willing to be paused, and sometimes tantrums about being paused, but kind of pauses anyway. And sometimes we don't — sometimes we can bounce right out of Hermit. It's really hard to bounce out of Hermit, though, I'm going to tell you that — like The Tethered One, it's really challenging. That shit holds us in place (Lindsay Laughs) in a big way. It's really hard.
But it's here to help us to, again, sort of undo our relationship with intuition as it connects to knowing what's to come. It can rewire, rewild and create, groove, kind of, a new neural pathway in many ways.
Our perception and our relationship with intuition, it can completely transform it in this card, because it can show us that there's so much to know right here that we don't have to know what's to come. We can channel, we can live from moment to moment, we can be in the moment-to-moment work. That actually — it keeps us so much more flexible in life. It helps us to really be with life as life is, which is, ultimately, really unknowable, pretty chaotic, you know, like, a pretty wild existence that we try to make a lot of meaning and understanding from and yet is very hard to do, you know?
So The Hermit really says, “Can we be in the journey of it rather than in the need to know of it? Can we be with us? Can we see this whole journey as an active — this whole life that we live — as this beautiful way to journey?”
[0:43:45]
So the progression from High Priestess to Hermit in this second vertical line of the Major Arcana is: In High Priestess, I tune in with my own inner space. I connect. I get to know my intuition, in my own beautiful rhythm, within my own harmonic capacities. How do I intuit? And really exploring that. But, going into the inner space. And High Priestess is always available to us. It really doesn’t matter, kind of, what is going on. We can always access that place within ourselves to know that whether we're in pain, whether we feel like we're connected or not, we have the capacity to tune in and be in that state of active receptivity.
Hermit takes that commitment and stops the world around us a little bit more. It basically says, “You've said ‘yes’ to the point where we want you to go deeper. We want to help you have access to what you want, which is deeper, richer connections with yourself, with your Guides, and in order to do that, we're going to really, really show you the places where you're resistant to that idea, where you really want to know, where the ego really values knowing the answer or what is going to come.”
And that's typically when the work we're doing in this moment in ourselves is so powerful, that it makes the mind super uncomfortable, very contracted, and it wants to like, it wants to get the — kind of bounce out of it. It wants to recoil out of it. But, The Hermit says, “Can you just stay? Can you stay — there's nowhere to go. There's nothing to cling on to anyway, so, why not just hang out? Why not hang out in the discomfort? Why not see what happens?”
[0:45:57]
It also transforms our relationship with time in a way that I think I'm still learning about. Like the idea that I have a course that's supposed to come out in, essentially, a month and a week, and maybe that'll change. Who knows? But I haven't really gotten to do a whole lot of talking about it yet. I haven't really heard to do much about it. I have not yet worked on it in a tangible way.
I have material, but, I've been told to stay away from it, actually, and I've been told to concentrate on things that I don't feel are very related, which is my website, which is coming out in about a week and a half and is going to make everyone — It's so beautiful. I can't wait to show you. There are many things that — I can tell the course is moving around me. I can tell it's here because there are things happening in my life, and with me, in therapy, with my patterns, with — I can feel it. I can see it, like, “Oh yeah, I'm in something.” But I'm not ready to actually go to the course itself yet.
You know, courses are funny. Sometimes they really, like, take six months and other times they take a couple weeks. So who the hell knows what's going to happen? (Lindsay Laughs) Really, I mean, truly — I hate it. Like, I don't enjoy this. I wish I had a little bit more lead-out time. You know, it's not fun.
I'm sharing these examples with myself because, or with all of you, not because I need any advice, because I'm uncomfortable to the point where I think there's a problem with it. I know there's no problem with it. I'm sharing it with you so that you really see that, like, this is what happens. It's not fun. It's... it's awesome, and the perks are lovely, in a life that, you know, one of them being that you feel like you can really — it's an amazing thing to be able to serve Spirit. It's a beautiful thing...
...and you're sort of on call, and it's a little bit of a different rhythm of life. Sometimes you're doing something, doing something, doing something — then, all of a sudden, you're not. You're going one direction and, all of a sudden, you're not. It is definitely a very interesting way of living. And it also is completely maddening and frustrating and hard and brings up all kinds of different feelings. And sometimes when it does bring up feelings it’s just, again, annoying, or scary, you know.
[0:48:46]
And it's part of my job to be with it. And anybody who really is committed to their path in this way knows — and I'm not saying, like, if you don't know, you're not committed. It's — this is a humxn experience. The more committed we are to being a vessel, a humble vessel, for anything that wants to come through us, the more that we're really called to live this path. There's a reason why I'm probably, likely, in this with the course and that's because for this whole week, I've been marinating in Hermit energy in order to talk about it with you. So that's also something there, too.
We stop kind of talking, like, positing about things. We start kind of living them. It's a really, really interesting transition from kind of making the choice to tap into High Priestess to a year embodying it in Hermit. And again, the mutable Earth of it all — wanting different, external, earthly things to come in to help move it all along, right? To get us, kind of, out of Hermit and into different energies and spaces. All that's really important to acknowledge about this card because we are moving, it's just in the internal spectrum, not the external spectrum.
Tower is really where we bring it all together, when we internally, externally transform in an instant, in a way that is very unique, in a way that — where we're sort of given something from our higher self or from Spirit that basically says, “Bam! Here you go. How will you respond to this?” Right? So I share my story — I really cannot wait to be in a Tower week next week as I prepare to talk about this next week. I actually love Tower. Famous last words. So, we'll see. It'll be interesting to talk about.
[0:51:00]
But you know, Hermit, it invites us to embody this practice in a way that I hope I'm articulating, but — it does change our definition with time. What we think, how much time we think we need, like, the timing of something... the more we say “yes” to ourselves, to our intuition, to our soul, the more it is a complete — everything you thought you knew about time will change. How much, again, time you thought you had, time you thought you needed, you know, whatever it is. It's a really, really intense shift.
And Line Two is really where we make those shifts. When we were, again, we move from kind of ego being in charge, foundation, “this is who I am, this is what I do — “ In Soul Tarot, we speak about Line One as the “I am” line, you know. That's really important to feel like “I am High Priestess. I can be a High Priest- you know, High Priestess, like, I can be this being. I can be this gateway to intuition.”
And in Line Two, which is where The Hermit lives, it's the “Who am I?” line. Everything we kind of thought we were, this is the line where we start to say, “Fuck.” Like — these are the times where we would say like, “Oh, my God! Is the course like coming? Like, am I an intuitive? If I was intuitive, I'd know what was going on more. If I was intuitive, I'd know this or that.” Like, that's actually what starts to happen in Hermit.
And the more you hang out in Hermit, the more one hangs out in Hermit, the more we start to realize, well, that has never defined my intuition because the only thing constant that we know about life is that it's always changing — and that's especially true with Spirit. We're doing one thing one day, we're doing another thing another day. We never expected to want to do this thing — Congratulations! We're doing that thing.
It's... we really, you know, we can have a vision for years and years and years. “I can't wait to do this thing. I know I'm gonna do this thing.” And years can go by and we can think like, “What the fuck? Why hasn't that thing happened?” And yet, you have been on the journey of preparation for it the whole time.
And, by the way, you're allowed to not like it. There's plenty of times in my life where I think, like, I'm a little too — I’m a little tired of being on the journey. I'd like to do something,” you know? Lighting our own Lantern in this card. Choosing to hang out in what — in the unknown, in the uncomfortable. Choosing to be with the stuff that is really asking for attention.
[0:53:46]
Hermit is like, coming and getting your shit. I'm a Hermit birth card, so I know this energy pretty well. And last, well 2020 — I'm still in it, sort of, because my birthday is in April — but 2020 was my Hermit card year return, for me personally. It was an Emperor year, but I was back in my Hermit birth card energy for the first time in nine years and — because we are on those nine year cycles with birth cards and year cards. It was interesting to be grounded at home in a pandemic in a Hermit year. That was definitely like, I was like, “Oh, like, pretty spot on there.”
But I was — what did wind up happening is that it was one of the deepest therapeutic journeys I ever took with my literal therapist. It was the year, last year, where I did a lot of things externally and also went on a lot of journeys internally, into things that I never even knew were things to look at. And some of them were really confronting and other ones were really surprising and really delightful. But every time I wanted to be like, “I'm ready to make this thing,” it was really like — it was very clear to me that it wasn't, it just wasn't time. It wasn't even formed yet. I was still doing the inside incubation work to be preparing for that. Right?
Not knowing what the hell you're doing or where you're going is a key feature of living an intuitive life. Paradoxically. I know that may sound really strange, may even be, for some people, that it's like, “Lindsay's a shitty intuitive.” Maybe that's true. (Lindsay Laughs) That could be — I mean, how the hell did — I don't know, you know. I don't really — I'm not one to speak on such things. But certainly, if your ego expects intuition to walk, like, a certain way, talk a certain way, perform a certain way, if you're still in your journey of being like, “Well, this is what an intuitive looks like,” yeah, I could for sure look like “not a great intuitive,” quote-unquote. Sometimes I feel that way. You know, like, I'm not real because I don't know what's going on. You know, that's how deep that wounding goes.
[0:56:22]
That wound: “I don't know, so I'm not valid,” that is what we heal and unpack in Hermit. It is such an initiation into the spiral path, into the path of “exploration without destination,” into truly embodied, active receptivity, into hanging out, because we don't want to walk into the next phase of our lives with anything, anything — pushing anything, forcing anything.
The work that I'm doing with this course right now is so beautiful and every time I tune in with the course, it's like, “Don't fucking rush me.” I'm like, “I won't.” I don't want to start a relationship with this course where it felt like I had to hurry it. You know, that's my work to do, not the course’s. There's nothing wrong with the course. It's me that needs to look at — why do I need for this to come out at a certain time and be a certain way for me?
So again, like I have no — I'm always going to share with you the behind-the-scenes stuff about what it is to be an intuitive channeler for your work because this is the actual reality of it. And it's also a huge part of Hermit work. It's just like — you are just hanging out, not knowing what the fuck is going on, with no email, no prospect, like no clarity, a blinking cursor in front of you a lot of the time. And if you felt like there was something wrong with you for that, Congratulations! There's nothing wrong with you. (Lindsay Laughs)
Even if you feel blocked, caught, you know, all the things, that's all really valid and it also could just be that you're in Hermit work and being invited to really look at, “Do I feel like if I don't know it now, I never will? What's under this?” Hermit always wants to know what's under this. It wants to seek, it wants to understand. It's going to pause when it doesn't understand in order to know more. It's not about destination. That’s hard to language how much that is a part of the continually unfolding, changing landscape of what it is to say “yes” to your intuition and to serving through your intuition, that you just constantly are befriending not knowing. (Lindsay Laughs) And having a really good idea of something that you think is the best thing, and it is a great thing, but it just might not want to be born quite now or it has a different timeline than you do or your preferred timeline.
[0:59:25]
So The Hermit really brings us into this beautiful Virgo space of tending those fires, of really going quite deeply and checking in, tuning in, being willing to bow to what comes up so that we can unpack it and explore it a bit more.
So, Hermit is quite liminal and very often, really invites us to befriend the parts of ourselves that we very often think we're the only ones dealing with, which is feeling like we don't know what we're doing, we feel really lost and stuck, we “should be further by now,” we “should be moving right now”, “why is it that this thing hasn't come yet?” And we don't always know the answer to that. But the more we're able to hang out in Hermit and explore it, the more some different perceptions and ideas may actually make their way to us.
What I can tell you is that I certainly don't have an answer or an antidote to the very, very real and appropriate and valid humxn feelings of having to wait, feeling like things aren't happening fast enough, or when we want them to, as we want them to. But very often, we think we're the only ones this is happening to or if it's happening to us there's something wrong with us, or we're doing something wrong, or we need to fix it, unblock ourselves. And that's not always true.
Hermit is a wonderful support to call upon in those moments to be able to check in and say, “Is this actually true or am I being invited to drop in so deeply around my stuff about not knowing, around my need to know that I'm going to be okay? Is this ego, tantrum, ego, contraction because I'm about to wildly expand?” Line Two tells us, “Yes.” Like, we want to get the fuck out of that chrysalis and The Hermit is only the second card in our line of seven, in Line Two — it's like, we just got in there, (Lindsay Laughs) you know?
[1:01:53]
So we have a journey in there. We have a journey to take. There's a big journey, it's just a different one than we walked the first line, you know, so how can we respect that? How can we honor that while holding total fucking space for our feelings around it?
I talk about this all the time: We never have to like a card. We can appreciate what it does. We don’t have to like the experience of it just the same way we might not like pickles. But we can appreciate that they’re good food for the gut or whatever. I don't understand people who don't like pickles. No offense! I don't want to alienate any of my beloved listeners. My husband doesn't like them either. I'm not here to judge it. I'm just here to say that I don't yet understand why some folx don't like pickles. Although I do appreciate it because then I get your pickles when I'm eating out.
That's neither here nor there.
There's such a funny connection with me and pickles and I'm going to need to unpack this. Now I'm just like free-associating, but I used to talk about pickles all the time in Tarot for the Wild Soul course. It's very interesting. (Lindsay Laughs) Cracking myself up but yeah, like I don't understand why, but, you know, some people like them, some don't. Some people like certain cards and some don't like others. All of it's okay, right?
Like we can enjoy or not enjoy anything. We just want to, with the Tarot, remain slightly open and curious about why, even if, you know — the medicine that this card might be bringing, why this card might be coming up, what it might be inviting us to pay attention to here, right?
[1:03:46]
So I invite you to do your own, as I always do, exploration about where you're meeting The Hermit in your life right now. Because if you're alive on this planet (Lindsay Laughs), you are definitely hanging out, getting regular visits from The Hermit. Mercury Retrograde... The Hermit is present. It's — it's Virgo, Virgo is ruled by Mercury. There absolutely is a connection there and we can hold that connection from kind of Magician to Magician reversed to Hermit reversed. Where do we resist that?
That's what happens in Hermit reversed is that we resist, resist, resist. We refuse to look deeply within. We want to step out, pop out, and it's really hard. Again, Hermit is one of those cards when we try to kind of defy it and resist it and ignore it, it can have really strong, you know, it can really feel like it kind of comes back and really feels like it stings. So we want to really, we want to really pay attention to that.
So I also invite you to meditate and explore as you find your own meaning with these vertical lines yourself. Like, how does High Priestess flow into Hermit for you? And before we even get to the episode next week, how does The Tower fit into that? Right? What does that look like?
[1:05:27]
And yeah. This was such a funny episode to me. I don't often speak about myself in my own process so much in an episode, so, I hope you'll forgive me for that. It's what's happening, so I'm really trusting that it's meant to be shared (Lindsay Laughs) and that it's really important for folx to hear that sometimes this process can feel really agonizing and really uncomfortable and that it can feel that way and there cannot be necessarily anything wrong. It's just, we have egos, we have minds and the ego really wants to know. When we don't know, there's a natural dissonance there. But that's where all of that good treasure lies. And that really is the work. It's not just to know the answer, to be able to churn out the offering, the course, this, that. It's really like, “Oh, I'm a teacher. I'm a seeker. I'm here to learn by living.” That's really at the heart of this. So how do I learn by living and in this particular case, share my experience and allow it to assist anyone who wants to be assisted by it, who it resonates with, hopefully, in a positive way.
So I invite you to, it's a good time, all this Aquarius energy, believe it or not, it's a really good time to reflect on Hermit. We're very much in a Hermit time right now about just feeling this idea that something's coming, but we're not there. We're really still clearing out, being asked, I mean — the literal, the reality of this pandemic is Hermit energy in and of itself. We want to step out, go out, even if we're working, and even if we're out in the world, we're not out in the world in the same way we were. So yeah, it's a powerful time to reflect on it to be sure and I encourage you to do your own touch-in’s and reflections with it. Do your own field study.
[1:07:34]
Thank you so much for listening to this, Wild Souls.
Yeah, I'm gonna have so many more updates and exciting things to share with all of you in the coming weeks. It’s just such an exciting time of creation and the creation process also involves, like, sometimes gestating certain things and letting them gestate until they're ready to come forward and be seen and be played with. And so yeah, that's really exciting.
Website is gee-orgeous and comes out pretty soon. We'll let everyone know when that happens.
Have new podcast art coming. It's been absolutely wonderful to have Chelsea's podcast art up for so long and to match and align with the new branding. And really, the podcast kind of just keeps rebirthing and changing and it feels right that there's different art now. Been wanting that for a little while.
That's another example of like — you know, I've been feeling like the podcast really needed new art for quite some time and now, all of a sudden, feels like now it's coming. You know, why now? Why did it have to wait? Who knows? All that’s Hermit, you know, the inner journey, the inner work we do. If I had changed the podcast art before I met my absolute right website designer, which took years and working with people, having to let those folx go, and it wasn't just quite the right fit — they were brilliant, but for one reason or another, didn't work. It’s sort of all of that stuff. The full, spiral journey is really present in Hermit, the full journey rather than just going to the destination.
So yeah, lots of exciting things to share in the coming weeks.
And yeah, until we connect again, just, please take beautiful care of yourselves. You know, as always keep what works from this episode and leave what doesn't. Be well, do your own explorations of things, and have fun, and I will connect with you next week.
[Conclusion]
(Instrumental exit music)
[1:09:50]
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.
To support Tarot for the Wild Soul, please consider subscribing to the podcast on iTunes and leaving us a five star review. It helps people find us and it is greatly greatly appreciated.
Thank you so much for being here.
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