167. We're Back + New Season Preview!
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Hello Wild Souls! I am so delighted to share that the Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast is going to be returning from it's hiatus with today's preview episode! Our first full length episode will be next Friday, September 3rd!
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About the Episode
In this minisode, I share some huge personal updates, the unexpected medicine of the hiatus, our newish format, and what to expect going forward!
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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: pregnancy and birth
The content in this episode contains references to pregnancy and birth. 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]
[0:00:05]
Welcome to Tarot for the Wild Soul, a weekly podcast where we explore the Tarot through an inclusive, soul-centered, trauma-informed perspective for growth, healing, and evolution. I'm your host, Lindsay Mack.
—
(Instrumental intro music)
[00:00:21]
Hello, Loves. I cannot even tell you how sweet, how good it is to be back, to be reconnecting with all of you in this absolutely cherished space. I'm wishing all of you a very happy Virgo season, and I hope that this episode is finding you and yours well nourished– as supported as you could possibly be.
I didn't know how long I would be on hiatus with the podcast and was really prepared for it to go on a lot longer or be shorter. And this was the time that it really wanted to come back, and in the hiatus, I had a couple of really surprising, and delightful, and just kind of big life things happen (Lindsay laughs) that sort of helped me to understand the why of the hiatus. And so this is going to be a much shorter episode than usual, because it's our sort of new season podcast preview, and the podcast will officially start up with new episodes on September 3rd.
There's definitely going to be some pretty significant shifts in some places to the usual format and in other ways. I think there's going to be really lovely and exciting new shifts to the format of the podcast that I hope you will love.
And yeah, so I'm gonna take time in this preview episode –again, shorter than usual– to share a little bit about those changes, what you can expect, and sort of what's been going on, and kind of why –now, in retrospect (Lindsay laughs)– I guess the hiatus happened, because I just heard to pause and definitely didn't understand why necessarily.
[0:02:13]
I knew that I had sort of said everything that I wanted to say, at that point. I definitely feel refreshed in that area. But yeah. I, first of all, taking a pause on the podcast really helped to allow me to sink fully into the brand new Tarot for the Wild Soul course, which ended in late July, and it was without question, the deepest, most powerful, beautiful iteration of that course I've ever had the privilege of working on. It was so powerful.
The work and the course material was so rich and so deep. As some of you know, what the Tarot for the Wild Soul course used to be is kind of now Rewilding the Tarot, which is an evergreen course that you can purchase on my website at any time. And Tarot for the Wild Soul wanted to shift into a really different incarnation, which was a huge leap of faith that I trusted, and I'm so glad that I did, because it was just a gorgeous group of people. And we had such a wonderful opportunity to go so deep.
And the material, it's always been… Course creation is a really big, comprehensive, huge, kind of all-consuming process, especially the way it tends to happen in my neck of the woods. And so, it felt like a real gift to just be able to devote myself to that, because typically, I'm podcasting and course creating at the same time. And because our podcast episodes are typically like an hour long, it's kind of like creating a workshop every week.
And after all the recording and all the creation I do for the courses, it was an unexpected gift to be able to just devote myself to that. And so that was sort of the first gift of the hiatus, was that I really found that I had so much more room to breathe.
[0:04:17]
The other gift of the hiatus is that it's offered me time to kind of reflect on new directions in the work and definitely have been increasing in other areas. I have a rebranded Lindsaymack.com website coming out that's fully sort of devoted to just intuitive courses and soul-guided business, you know, Spirit-led courses and work.
It's going to launch in early September. So in just about a little less than a week, and I'm excited to share that with you. Heart of Service, my course that is fully devoted to soul-led, Spirit-guided business for artists, creatives, folks who consider themselves to be of service. You don't need to have a business to engage with that course. That's coming out in October. And it's offered me the opportunity to work on that as well. And so that has felt like a gift.
But on the personal front, I had a really big surprise, which is that I'm pregnant (Lindsay laughs), and due in early March/late February, with a Pisces babe. And that was a complete rock to my world in the best way, and has already kind of shifted everything in my life, and my priorities, and what I'm working on. It's helped me to really look into the future, into the cycles ahead in terms of like, what do I do? How do I do it? What kind of time and what kind of care do I need, you know? What will be sustainable in terms of being of service to my audience, and being a parent, which is something of course, I've never had to think of before.
[0:06:14]
My first trimester journey was probably the most intense thing I've ever gone through, and definitely plan to write about it one day, because I know for myself, I found the lack of kind of supportive material about what that time is actually like, how intense it can be, and –you know, no question, it's a blessing– but wow, is it really an intense threshold. So I feel like the more that can be spoken about (Lindsay laughs), allowed, the better it is for all of us.
And that news came just a little bit after my hiatus was engaged upon, so it was kind of, it was a perfect aligned thing that happened that allowed me to really be sick, and digest that news, and get used to the idea of this huge life change. And yeah, just really be like, not, you know… my course was a huge thing to be in service of in the midst of kind of, again, being so sick and all that stuff, but was manageable, because it was one thing– a big thing, but one thing.
So I have a feeling that I was told so strongly to go on pause, what felt like so quickly, that I have no doubt that that was a part of it. And so I'm glad I heeded the call. It's, I think, just further proof that the more you start to devote yourself to really trying to honor as best as you can your intuition as you hear it, as you receive it, as you touch in with it, the less you know the why, but the more when we sort of honor those whispers or those shouts, later it's a little bit easier to look back and go, “Oh, I'm so glad I listened to that.”
And, you know, I don't share much about what I'm going through personally, but this is such a big thing, that I wanted to share it with this community just so we're on this journey, not together, but so you're aware that I'm on this journey.
[0:08:32]
And because it's likely going to have quite a big effect on the work I do. Already, for the first time since I created Tarot for the Wild Soul, I don't actually know if I'm going to do that course in 2022, just simply because of my leave and time that I'll be with my baby or whatever.
So yeah, we'll definitely be on that journey together, but it certainly inspired me to think about ways that this podcast could become more sustainable in terms of my time, my energy, and more delightful to do (Lindsay laughs). And so I am going to sort of walk us into, move us into, sort of what you can expect when the podcast officially comes back this week– some of the changes, and some of the ways that I think, yeah, I mean, I'm excited about the changes.
So we'll see. They're not too wildly different, but different enough that I wanted everyone to have a sense of what we were journeying into together, should you feel a call to continue to listen to the pod.
I also just want to say I try always to be... Part of the reason I don't share things, personally, a lot of the time is because when you are serving in a collective way, you can only really speak for yourself. You can only really speak from your perspective, but I also try to have a full awareness that I'm speaking to a very large group of folks who are going through all kinds of different things in their lives. And I want to name that.
[0:10:13]
I know that pregnancy and becoming a parent is one of the most fraught, devastating, things for folks who've been on this journey of trying to conceive or become parents for years, and for other folks in different intersections. And for other folks, it's the most glorious thing that's ever happened to them. And to hear me say that the first trimester was super intense and very difficult might come as like a shock, and how could you speak about that?
And so I want to name two things. My experience of pregnancy is not meant to be a reflection of yours. I can fully… the totality, the enormity of the spectrum of experience, and the fact that all of us have a worthy place on that. Mine is just as worthy as yours, as the next person. So I'm just expressing my own experience. It's not meant to be a reflection of yours. And it's okay if we don't agree. It doesn't mean because I'm not speaking directly to yours that I'm not holding it in my heart and naming it now.
And the second thing is, I'm likely not going to talk about this too much (Lindsay laughs) because, you know, while I may name things that come up here and there, I don't know that it honestly impacts my day-to-day. It's just a big piece of news. If there is a shift, if something changes, or if there's something significant to share, I certainly will let you know when I get closer to leave, so there's a sense and an expectation of when I'm out versus on.
If I have to take time, and you know, if my body is asking me to move in a different direction, we're just kind of going to be in that spiral together. But I just want to assure everyone, this is not going to become a pregnancy podcast (Lindsay laughs). Again, because I know that this is such a sensitive thing to so many, and I'm just bowing to everyone on their journey, as far as that's concerned, and feel both very excited and delighted to be able to share this news with you, my beloved community, and also very aware of my privilege inside of this, and as well as the challenges that are coming with it.
[0:12:32]
So that's my little note. So I think that's just about it for the sort of update portion (Lindsay laughs) of this preview episode, and now I'm gonna actually get into a little bit of what you can expect from this slightly shifted format. And the first thing that I'm going to share is a really big and beloved part of the podcast that will not be returning, which is our typical Monthly Medicine episodes, which I know is probably a really sad piece of news for a lot of folks. I know people loved those.
So there's a couple reasons why they're not coming back. One is that they take a tremendous amount of energy to do, and I don't have that energy to give right now (Lindsay laughs). It's just being spread into many different areas. We've done it. It was beautiful while it lasted. And now, for this moment, it feels complete in terms of what it's been.
The other reason is that by nature of the Monthly Medicines, they have to be done very, very, very close to the first of the month, just energetically, so that I kind of have the largest possible understanding of what we're moving into, which makes it a lot harder to get them up on time, to get them edited in a timely manner, and certainly, they're almost never transcribed for y'all when they go up, which I am attempting to start to get way better at, is to make sure things are transcribed when they go up. And so for all those reasons, logistical, energetic and otherwise, it's sort of time that they shift into a different form.
[0:14:15]
That doesn't mean that we won't be working with a Monthly Medicine theme in the podcast. We're actually going to be still doing that, which I'll explain in a moment. But I first want to say that a delightful thing that has been happening for me in this podcast hiatus is that I've been playing around with offering a written form of the Monthly Medicine, what we would typically do on the podcast, to my newsletter subscribers and I personally am absolutely loving it.
It's a joy to kind of sit down and write them instead of channel and communicate them. It feels really different, much more useful. It takes way less energy than it used to. I also think the idea of it being in a written, more concise, more digestible format is lovely. So I want to let everyone know that the Monthly Medicines are not leaving your life, they're just leaving the form that they've been in.
So first and foremost, there's a link in the show notes to this episode for you to sign up to receive those. They'll probably go up about a day or two before the first of every month. This month, they're going to go and be sent out on Tuesday morning, on August 31st. And it's just again, like a really lovely written form of what we used to do in audio form. And so they still exist. They just exist in a different form. And again, my newsletter is the absolute only place you can get it, so do sign up for that so you don't miss those.
And now in terms of sort of where that leaves us in light of like how we're going to weave in this sort of Monthly Medicine theme and how the new format will kind of flow. The new format for the podcast essentially consists of my pulling a card to represent the medicine of the month ahead –which is what I used to do anyway– so that'll be represented both in the Monthly Medicine and on our podcast, but instead of going into like a whole thing with other cards and the bigness of the theme, we're going to instead do a deep dive on the card.
[0:16:27]
So I won't reveal September's card yet. But rather than having our Monthly Medicine theme be sort of the front-facing piece on our first of the month podcast episode, instead it'll be devoted to that card. And we'll actually be talking about kind of what is the invitation of this card, what is the medicine of this card, and then every week after that, we're going to spend the entire month working with anchor cards that help to bring us deeper into that theme.
So we're actually taking the heart and soul of Monthly Medicine, and kind of infusing it
into our flow in a way that I think is gonna be really, really powerful, and actually will help to continue the theme forward in a way that can move with us through the whole month. And I'll give you an example of what that will look like in a moment.
I'm hoping for every episode I'll be able to answer a listener question about the theme, and so in a moment, I'm going to share a little bit –again, without giving too much away– about the questions that I would love to welcome from y'all now. And there's a link to write in your questions in Ask Lindsay, in the show notes as well. But before I get there, and hopefully everybody is sort of understanding. And if you're not, you'll get it once we start listening, if you choose to start listening.
But here's an example. Let's say our card for the month is The Emperor, right? So in Week One of the month, we will talk about The Emperor around whatever seems, sort of comes forward for me. These episodes would likely be much shorter than an hour, but not too short. And we would really talk in, again a really impactful, hopefully fruitful way. Like what is The Emperor? How can we work with it as an anchor for this whole month ahead? What's the invitation it's bringing?
[0:18:24]
Now the themes of The Emperor, right, are rooting into ourselves, sensing into the space we take up, the aligned space we take up when we’re in a room, when we're in a space, when we're on this earth, you know. And so we might, for Week Two, explore Justice to really look at like, well, what does that mean, to sort of be in a perpetual devotion to balance without ever trying to seek perfection?
We might look to, in terms of rooting into ourselves, one of The Fours for Week Three, like what is it to take time to honor boundaries? And then we might, for Week Four, explore something completely different. We might explore a King and we might explore a Page. But each one will be a deepening and a continuation of like how do we actually let the medicine of The Emperor and the themes that it brings forward sink into our bones?
And so every episode will feature a different Tarot card, will feature it around a kind of an anchor point that we can really tether to and work with, and all of them will be about themes that we go through in life in general –everyday stuff– which is really where I think the Tarot shines most beautifully. It's a wonderful tool to connect with the celestial, and go backward and forward in time, but it's really good for just the nitty gritty of this moment right now, I think.
[0:20:00]
So that's what we're going to be doing together. And I think the actual execution of it will probably be a lot more lovely and dynamic than what I'm explaining (Lindsay laughs), but hopefully it tracks for y'all. And certainly if you have questions, you can either just stay tuned and see it all unfold, or you can email us for more information at info@tarotforthewildsoul.com.
And yeah, I'm going to try to, ideally, answer a listener question every single episode. And so without giving too much away about the topics that we're going to be exploring for the next couple of months here, I would A) love to welcome all of your questions about your practice, about the Tarot, about your business, your service, your soul-guided work, like intuition. Anything you want to ask me is great. The shorter the better. Because that –and the simpler, the better– because that does help to prioritize your question, but the topics, loosely, that we're going to be focused on for the next few months are the following:
So the first sort of orbit, the first sort of theme, that we're going to be focusing on is completing cycles, beginning new ventures, moving through the doubts that come up around those kinds of huge cycles.
The second piece that we're going to be focusing on is what is it to love ourselves, to no longer give ourselves away or betray ourselves, healing comparison traps, you know, fear that, “Oh, someone's already doing what I'm doing, Why should I do it?” You know, all those places where we can get stuck. That's sort of like the second piece.
And the third piece is working with doubts and contractions, especially when things feel very, very heightened. How do we stay grounded and rooted in truth in the midst of really tough situations?
And so I know all of us experience stuff (Lindsay laughs) around those topics. And so if you have questions about those topics, and if I went a little too fast for you, just check out the transcript. The link to it is in the show notes and you can go back to those sort of little bullet points.
You can also check out, if you are signed up to my newsletter, you likely received something a little bit about this a couple days ago. You will again today, I think. There's another newsletter going out with some of these prompts. So anyway, they can be found.
If you have a question, again, about any and all of these topics, I really want to welcome you to share them with me at the Ask Lindsay button in the show notes. And again, if you have a totally different question, I encourage you to send that to me too. And again, if you want to receive that real sweet Monthly Medicine goodness, you can only do so by being a subscriber to my newsletter. You can do so by clicking the link in the show notes.
So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your presence through these years or just for today. And until we connect again next week at our big official comeback episode, please take exquisite care of yourselves, and until then, bye bye.
[0:23:36]