179. Imagining the Possibilities with Seven of Cups
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Seven of Cups is our card for the month of December, inviting us into some beautiful and necessary work around our own self tending and care. When this card arises, it can feel like nothing is clear, and can really spin us out -- especially if we are really pushing to have an answer or to know what's coming next. In truth, this card is an opportunity to release the pressure to "know," and open to the medicine of daydreaming, imagining all of the possibilities for our next steps.
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About the Episode
In this episode, we dive into the heart of Seven of Cups, chat a bit about today's New Moon Total Solar Eclipse in Sagittarius, and I answer a listener's question about how to understand the cycles of expansion and contraction more clearly.
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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: capitalistic structures and pregnancy
The content in this episode contains references to capitalistic structures 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]
Hello, Wild Souls, I have two exciting announcements at the top of today's episode that you are definitely not going to want to skip or miss. The first is that pre-enrollment is officially open for The Threshold, which is my beloved end of year offering. And in case you haven't engaged with this offering before, The Threshold is a channeled download around the themes, invitations, and opportunities in the year ahead, as well as the Tarot Anchors that will be showing up as support systems to us in the process of moving through a new yearly cycle.
This offering, I've been doing it for the last several years and it truly is such a beautiful way, even for me in doing it, to root into the medicine of the coming year. And this year, we are focusing on the themes of The Lovers card, which is our Tarot card for 2022, The Sixes, which are sort of Minor Arcana Anchors for 2022, and the Knight of Swords, which is ruled by Gemini in Soul Tarot, and many, many more.
So this offering comes with hours of pre-recorded audio downloads, as well as a beautiful workbook packed full of nourishing Tarot spreads and rituals to close out our current year and open to the new one. So as I said, enrollment is open. Material drops on December 15th. So if you would like to sign up for that, you may do so at the link in the show notes.
The second very exciting announcement is a reminder that I'm going to be offering some really, really lovely holiday bundle sales and discounts on some of my courses for a really limited time next week, from Monday, December 6th to Thursday, December 9th. I've never, literally have never, discounted my courses before. I've never done a bundle deal. It felt right. I'm so excited to offer them. I will probably start offering that every year. Feels great.
So if you'd like to be the first to receive the announcement about those being open, since that deal is only available for an extremely, just a couple of days. So once it's gone, it's gone. So if you want to be the first to know about that when it's happening, the best way is to sign up at the link in the show notes. And you'll get an email in your inbox on Monday morning, letting you know that those are open letting you know what the bundles are, and hopefully you love them and will enjoy them. So thank you so much for listening. Now onto today's episode.
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(Instrumental intro music)
[00:02:42]
Welcome to Tarot for the Wild Soul, a bi-monthly podcast that explores the Tarot through an inclusive, soul centered, trauma-informed perspective for growth, healing, and evolution. I'm your host, Lindsay Mack.
Hello, Wild Souls, and welcome to a new month, a new episode of the podcast. So grateful and overjoyed to be gathered with all of you in this virtual shared space, as always. We have a really nice, rich, full episode today. We're going to talk, of course, about our Anchor Card for the month of December, our final month of 2021, which I literally… is astounding, (Lindsay laughs) is astounding. It's so welcome, both the longest year and the shortest year of all time.
So we're going to look at the medicine of that card, how we can open to it. We'll look at the gifts, the challenges of it, the sort of theme that we can work with it around to sort of try to make it a little bit more accessible and present for us as we travel through this month ahead.
We'll also, of course, talk about today's Eclipse, how it's sort of bringing the Eclipse portal that we've been in for the last two-ish weeks to a close, what that means, how we can sort of open our inner senses to what might have come up for us during this season these past two weeks and how that might offer us a little bit of a clue as to what it's preparing us for for the next year. And of course I'm going to answer a listener question. So I'm very excited to get started on this with you.
[0:04:24]
So our card for the month of December is Seven of Cups, which feels maybe, oddly, really perfect to me. Seven of Cups is nothing if not a card of profoundly bountiful, abundant, sweet liminality. It's The Moon card without the intensity, without the Piscean swirl of emotion, without the echo. It's like a lazy river on a really sweet summer day and we're in an inner tube. Now, do we actually respond to this card in this way? (Lindsay laughs) No, not at all. In fact, usually Seven of Cups can greet us in moments when like lazy inner tube river rafting is the absolute last thing on our mind. And yet, that is the gift it brings. That is what's possible.
So we're going to talk about that. The title of this episode today is “Imagining the Possibilities with Seven of Cups.” So I want to first talk about how we can begin to look at the invitation of this card through a Soul Tarot lens. So first of all, in Soul Tarot, we look at The Sevens as all of them bringing a very, very specific invitation. Typically, when we pull a Seven or work with a Seven in the way that we are this month, in some way, shape, or form, whether very subtle or very overt, we might be kind of waiting for something external to make itself known to us, for some answer, for some clarity.
[0:06:21]
And there might even be a little bit of panic underneath the surface as we feel like time is running short, time is not… You know, time is of the essence. Like we don't have a ton of time to spare. If we don't make a decision, we're going to kind of get stuck in what we're in or make the wrong call. Kind of all of those things can be happening at the same time. When we work with Seven energy, it looks like, seems like, a situation where if we just have that external clarity, if we have the external, like if the thinking mind and the ego are satisfied, if things look good, feel good, if we're able to sort of sign on the dotted line, click, checkmark the box, then the belief is we'll have some kind of relaxation internally.
And The Sevens really come forward with some powerful medicine to recenter that belief because it's not true. Are there times when a hundred percent, like, we get a letter in the mail, we get a phone call, we get clarification and it provides relief? Absolutely, those situations can occur. But the Tarot is so big, it's so vast. It's both sort of very beautifully minute and subtle, and of the present moment, but it also doesn't deal in the earthly day to days.
So let's say you're waiting for a phone call, whatever it is, you can apply a Seven to that. You can apply what we're about to talk about, sort of how to reframe it, but in general, it's a larger thing. You know, it's a larger invitation, but it can work both in a really small earthly sense and sort of in a larger sense.
[0:08:25]
What The Sevens call us to do is to flip that story, to flip where we're placing our attention. Most of the time when we get a Seven, we're placing our attention on how to get an answer, how to understand, how to speed something up, how to know, how to… They're very liminal and often come up when we're just trying to like, know whether to go left or right.
But The Sevens say there is no decision right now. Like there is no clarity as to whether to go left or right. Or The Seven might be saying it's not even time to make the decision yet because you still have business at the crossroads. So then where does our attention go? It naturally points back to us.
How are we tending ourselves in the midst of that frustration, when we want to know something and there's no answer? How do we tend ourselves in the midst of the worry that we might miss something? That's very painful. How do we tend ourselves through impatience, through hypervigilance, through… Gosh, any myriad of things, right? There's so many different ways to feel into the energy and the flow of The Sevens, but all of them are a call to shift the way we're engaging with our action, our extension, extending ourselves into our decisions, what we do, and how we do it.
And before we do it, before we go left or right, it's a crucial pause at the crossroads so that we can really clarify: what energy are we going into this choice with? Are we doing so with a lot of, again, hypervigilance, and worry, and fear, like, “I got to do it now (Lindsay snaps) or else?” The Sevens will pause us. They will say, “Hey, that's not necessarily true, and I highly recommend that you pause here and you check in about that.” Is that true, right? Is that true?
[0:10:39]
If we're just waiting and waiting and waiting—waiting for something to sort of blossom and come into its full form, it's hard. (Lindsay laughs) It's hard work to wait. It's hard work to not jump the line early. It's hard work. And so how do we tend to ourselves in the midst of that? That is the medicine of The Seven, shifting something that feels like an externally rooted situation and tending to what we actually can control, which is our internal response and our internal caretaking in the midst of it.
So again, the title of the episode today is “Imagining the Possibilities with the Seven of Cups.” So Seven of Cups in particular holds this energetic theme, right, the same thing that we're talking about. The classic image of Seven of Cups that you may have seen before is we're seeing the back of a person who's looking out and sort of like gazing upon these seven cups that are kind of up in the sky, and there's some archetypal image or some thing in each one of the cups.
In one cup, there's a spirit, there's a ghost figure. In one there's typically another person, and another one there's a skull. Like it changes from deck to deck, and all of them represent options, ways that we could go. Like we could do this, we could do that. Now the truth is (Lindsay laughs) with Seven of Cups, the disappointing truth, is that usually out of the options that we have available to us when we pull the card, it's none of those options.
[0:12:39]
None of those options, at least not in the form that we know of them today, are really it. And if we're being honest with ourselves, we know that that's true. We do. There's something in us that wants to just have the satisfaction, the relief of like having made a decision, but we know that there's something left incomplete here. We know that there's something that hasn't quite gelled. So even if we reached for cup number two, let's say, up there in the sky—it's not formed enough yet for us to have a really clear picture of where it's taking us.
So the really helpful, really smart, really beneficial thing to do when we come across this energy is to pause, is to actually not make any decision right now. But it's not just a card of non-doing. In fact, it doesn't need to be about non-doing at all. It's not a card that takes away our agency, our empowerment, our free will in any way, shape, or form. It's not a card that even says, “Oh, wait forever.”
It's a card that invites us to imagine all of the possibilities of what our next steps could be. It asks us, invites us to consider that there could be avenues that want to open up to us that we have never, have never even crossed our minds. That could be so much more supportive, medicinal, loving, sweet, beneficial, and abundant than we've ever even imagined.
[0:14:30]
And I think that that's very much a human nature trait, right? Like we are, in the words of a beloved friend of mine, Paola, we can either take the hard bus or the heart bus, right? And so many of us are conditioned to get on the hard bus. We think like, “Oh, I gotta like hurry up and make this call, otherwise nothing better is gonna come and I got to make a decision now.” And very often we don't actually have to make the decision now. Sometimes we do.
Those moments... Sevens don't come up as often, in my experience, and if they do… Oof, it can be really challenging (Lindsay laughs). It really can be, but they tend to pass a little quicker. It can be a very fast shift, right? Very quick. Where we can have the realization like, “Oh, I'm pushing this, and I'm forcing this, and I'm trying to get at something. How can I loosen up? How can I open? How can I bring this to maybe a processor or supportive ear that would be able to see maybe some clarity in this that I can't?”
We can take those actions when we really need to do something, but part of the gift of Seven of Cups is that it actually says like, there's nothing to know right now. What the next thing, that like the next step, the next cup you'll take, is still forming itself. You are still deciding what it is that you even want. You are still dreaming in all of the options, all of the possibilities. All of those possibilities are still finding you. So in the meantime—between this moment where you really feel like you need to figure it out, make a decision, know what you're doing, and when you actually take the first step or make the first move on this new path—what do you do?
[0:16:31]
So Seven of Cups offers us a pretty radical invitation, especially in light of our, sort of, capitalist driven culture. It asks us to daydream. It asks us to imagine, to float, to be, to think about all of the ways that something could form itself. To, dare I say, actually think about what we’d really, really, really like—if we have the privilege, if that's accessible for us, if we're not in a space of kind of desperation around something, this is especially important.
Obviously, life happens. We have to make important decisions, sometimes very quickly (Lindsay snaps). This is something to bring to a situation where we have the spaciousness to practice this idea, where we have this ability to say, “Yes, this is something I'd like to do, right? If I didn't try to plan it, or grasp at it, or figure it all out now, and if I was courageous enough—because it is an act of courage to dream about what was possible—what would that cost me? What would that do? What would that bring me? And what benefits would it offer?”
For most of us, we don't daydream about shit, because we don't want to be disappointed. We're not going to daydream. We're so used to just grabbing what we can, because we're too terrified that it's all going to go away if we don't, you know, again, grasp it. This card calls us to something very, very different and it can be really challenging at first, because it can bring up all that stuff, like, “Well, I have to do it, I have to hurry.” And this card really says like, “You don't. There actually isn't a decision to even be made right now.”
[0:18:34]
One of the… You know, when we make decisions where we kind of know in our gut it's not time, it's a little too early, usually we get some kind of signal, right? The body sort of tells us, “That was a little too quick. Meh, it’s survivable.” Right? But a lot of the time, if we make a decision that's not really rooted in the highest possibility, there's always something to kind of undo. It's, you can think about knitting something, doing a tapestry—and I'm all for, like beautiful imperfection—but it's like getting to a point in some kind of weaving or creation where we realize, “Oh my god, I have to go back and like take that apart and start over again.” Right?
So those things happen in life where we make a call or we jump into something and it's a little bit too premature, and we sort of have to go through more work to course correct and this card can help us to avoid that, which is really great (Lindsay laughs).
So as an Anchor, this card is, is showing up as our as our helper and our guide through this last cycle of 2021 and I think it's bringing forth a pretty fucking powerful invitation, especially in light of this being the end of a year, and we're getting closer to the beginning of a new year. Very often, it's all about goals. What are we doing? What's our year ahead? Like, what are our plans?
And I don't know about you, but that—I feel like that has its roots in capitalist structure too and like, there's nothing to do. This year has been fucking hell. All of us, all of us are tired. We’re exhausted. We're burned out. There's been such a level of constant trauma that we don't even know what to do with ourselves. And certainly this energy, this idea of the liminal, of the not knowing, of things not being clear is pretty ad nauseum at this point, right?
[0:20:56]
So what would it be like if we could—to the degree that we can, to the degree that is accessible and reachable for us personally—what would it be like to just turn the heat off on that stove, turn the burner off completely, and just say, “You know what? Whatever this new year's gonna be, whatever it is, I would like to dare myself to imagine something even more supportive and more nourishing than I ever could have dreamed.” Right?
And it doesn't always mean that we'll have what we need in an earthly way, or this or that. It could be that we no longer apologize for the space we take when we need a break; we just take the break. It could be that we move away from a toxic environment that has not been serving us for a really long time.
Can we dare to not take any cup? If, even if, there are seven options in front of us that don't work, that don't actually serve, that none of them are really a yes, at least not right now. I'm going through this right now around something in my life and it's been, not a hard or bad thing, but I, there's a part of me that really wants to know (Lindsay laughs) how this particular thing is going to happen and go down, and none of the ways that I have control over it, which are minimal, are a yes for me right now.
[0:22:40]
So the only thing I can do is just be in it and open to the idea that there could be a road, an avenue, for the way that this thing is going to go that is maybe even more supportive and easeful than I'm imagining, and maybe my thinking mind’s sweet and helpful desire to help me to avoid as much pain, and difficulty, and trauma as possible, is actually sort of getting in the way of a more supportive process.
So it also allows us to root a little bit more into our parasympathetic nervous system: the part of us that is rooted to rest and digest, that's not working from a hypervigilant, you know, fight-flight-freeze place. This card can actually, well some of the things that we can do inside of the invitation of this card, can be very useful when we think about the idea of like, how can we make decisions from as much as we're able to, to the degree that we can, from a place of rest-digest rather than fight-flight-freeze?
So it's a powerful invitation, right, to think about that. Like what would it be like to approach it from a space where our nervous system had time to decompress, where we had time to tend the worry, where we actually listened, made space for the part of us that wants to know, wants to know right now? Rather than giving it that answer; giving it and offering that part of us the space to express why it wants the answer. Why is the answer so important to us? It can be such a gift, a huge gift to the spirit, right?
[0:24:39]
The theme for the month of November, or December, that we went into on my Monthly Medicine Missive that goes out to my newsletter subscribers, which if you missed, you can sign up for that at the link in the show notes and you'll just (Lindsay snaps) automatically get that missive delivered to your inbox in real time. But the theme for the month ahead is, or the month we’re in, is “Opening to the Mystery”. You know, we're in highly mysterious, highly liminal, highly unknown times.
Really, that's always the case, but it's so amplified now, obviously, for a million reasons. And when we open to the mystery, it's not so much about flinging ourselves into the void and being like, “Well, here we go.” (Lindsay laughs) It's actually thinking about what and how do we resource ourselves within that?
Like, what roots us, what nourishes us, what brings us back to a sense of sweetness, and not necessarily calm, but regulation? What helps? Because very many of us can get so hooked into a cycle of panic and of burnout, myself included, that it can be hard to even take a quick bite of something that helps to slow us down a little bit, because it can feel really overwhelming to slow when we're going super fast.
And so Seven of Wands can really help with this idea of opening to the mystery. There's nothing really to know right now. There's nothing really to do. Where we are and what we're doing is so exemplary. We're living in highly unprecedented times, times where there's no end in sight to what we're moving through, and in many different ways right now. Meaning there are possibilities, there are solutions, but not everyone is taking those solutions. Not everyone is saying yes to them.
[0:26:51]
And there are places in life right now where there is no answer, where things are still being formed and it can feel incredibly challenging, incredibly stressful, incredibly scary. We're not bypassing that, but we are bringing ourselves back to a space of personal tending and empowerment.
If there's nothing to know right now, then there's nothing to know. So that means that we might be invited to open to something even different, you know, something totally different than what we perceived or thought of as an option. So how can we make space for that without crowding out any of the other possibilities that might want to come forward? How can we just let ourselves dream and be? How can we let this last month of this hellscape of a year be a testament to the rest, to the deep—yes, work, of course, that we're all doing in our own way—but to the kind of nourishing care that every single one of us needs now more than ever?
How can we really let that be and put the high emphasis on knowing what's coming next and knowing what we're doing and you know, going “ta-ta-ta” down the line? How can we practice just being? That's one of the ways that we can plug into Seven of Cups as a really delicious Anchor that can help us, again, to imagine more possibilities than what we're currently seeing or are able to perceive in front of us.
[0:28:36]
So I hope that that serves you. And again, if you want to go a little bit deeper into the other cards that we covered for the month ahead, you can do so by signing up at the link in the show notes for the December Monthly Medicine. All of this dovetails quite nicely into the fact that we have our New Moon Total Solar Eclipse in Sagittarius today, which effectively brings about a close to the last Eclipse portal of 2021.
As I mentioned in the last episode that we did, Eclipse portals are real accelerants and really, if anything else, kind of our giant excavators. So the stuff that comes up in an Eclipse season, we really want to pay attention to that, because typically it unearths something, be it very subtle or very obvious—that we're being invited to gently detangle ourselves from. We're being invited to process it, to look at it, to clear it. That's the point, is that it wants to get it up and out of the bedrock and of the soil of our being. Those are one of the most useful ways that the energetic property of an Eclipse can present itself to us.
So today marks again, kind of the Eclipse season happens typically in a two week cycle. So we had our last Eclipse about two weeks ago. This one is sort of completing that. So what came up for you? That's really the question. Can you pay attention to what's been coming up in the last couple of days really close to this new moon? What might it be like to sense into what that's preparing you for for the year ahead?
As I've always found for myself, I know not everybody honors the New Year at, you know, January 1st and of course, I have nothing but total respect for that, but for those of us who do or do kind of plug into both maybe, I've always found it very interesting and very significant that typically we have our eclipse portal like right (Lindsay snaps) before the New Year happens in terms of January 1st, that new year.
[0:31:06]
So I think that it's a beautiful way to prepare us. And I think that there's a lot of information that can be gained in that, right? If we have a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear come up about a specific area, that doesn't mean that the worst case scenario is going to happen. What it can mean is that we're getting ready to expand in some enormous way and there's some part of us that knows, there's some part of like… Our animal intelligence is so great in terms of thinking mind and, and nervous system and soul and body. These parts of us know.
We have sensors very often about big cycles. For most of 2019, and especially the last six months, I kept saying, “Something's happening, like we're going into something in 2020.” I had no idea what it was. I didn't know whether it was a specific event or something in my life or the collective, but I even mentioned that in The Threshold for 2020, like there's something coming. There are things coming to be sure. There was something measurable. I could feel it in my nervous system.
And I knew a lot of folks who felt similarly, they didn't know what it was going to be. You know, obviously, but there was a, there was something and I just chalked it up a little bit more to the fact that I was moving across the country, and that was really big. And it was a part of that. But for a lot of us like, right, there's a feeling that we can get.
So if that's what's coming up for you during this Eclipse, that's really powerful. If there's some like really old, like, let's say, deep like middle school wounding, like friends and being chosen being left out, it could be that doesn't mean that your 2022 is going to involve, like getting left out. It could be that it's a year for you to massively open up in terms of how you're seen and witnessed and how you share your work with the world.
And it could be no longer hiding, no longer worrying about whether or not people accept you and focusing way more on the people that do love and support you unconditionally. So sometimes we have to be able to, and it could also mean that nothing like that is going to happen. And it's just an opportunity for you to re-parent and tend to your inner little one who's still carrying some of that wounding. Now not just because that's enough, but all of those things are always to look at what's possible in an Eclipse portal.
[0:33:59]
And what I think, I do think it can offer a bit of a window into what we're being invited to devote ourselves to, pay attention to, look at, clear, open so we're not holding it, we're not taking it with us into the New Year. So I encourage you to, if it feels right and supportive—like spend a little time journaling about it. See what comes up and sense into like, you know what came up? How did it make you feel? Where did it draw you into?
Sometimes we can fool ourselves a little bit (Lindsay laughs) and think like, “Oh that thing came up and it really wasn't important.” And I guarantee you it was.
So wishing everybody a really, really supportive, gentle New Moon Total Solar Eclipse today. I know that those are not joking around, and hopefully it really accelerates us to where we are preparing to go next, where we're ready to go next. I think it fits in so beautifully with Seven of Cups. There's a sense of preparing here, which is subtle. It's not the first thing that we see in the month’s energy, but there is a preparing that we're being asked to do, not in a scary way, or like we're preparing for another thing, but preparing for where we're going in 2022.
2022, for better or for worse, is a very different energy than 2021. So it at least will bring about some different feelings, some different energies. So thank goodness for that (Lindsay laughs).
Okay, and now, to wrap up this episode, I have a question, which comes from Anonymous. So Anonymous asks,
I have a very basic question for you. You use a lot of language around expansion and contraction, specifically in application to spiralic living in cycles. I was wondering how exactly you define a moment of expansion and a moment of contraction. Sometimes for me, these seem to occur at the same time. Overall though, I was hoping you could provide more guidance on what, about what exactly you mean, when you use those terms, and how they apply to everyday life.
[0:36:20]
Certainly, I will share with you what I know today. And first, I wanna deeply honor my teacher, Michelle, who brought these terms into my life, like six years ago, seven years ago, when we first started working together. I know that other folks certainly use these terms and these words, but that is who really modeled them for me, that's who really taught me about these cycles. And so I just want to honor my lineage of learning before I talk about what they mean to me and how I've internalized them over the years.
So I will try to simplify this. First of all, I think they happen, they do sometimes happen at the same time, or they'll happen in response to one another. So we can expand and then have an experience of contraction (Lindsay snaps) that follows the expansion, because there's some part of us that wants to like clam up a little bit, protect a little bit, go inward a little bit, because that expansion felt a little bit too intense and, (Lindsay laughs) you know, a little bit scary. So they can occur at the same time.
Hopefully, this is simple. Hopefully, this is simple. So essentially, and this is something I've talked about before, we are always having a dual experience in our lives. We have these miraculous nervous systems, these thinking minds, these brains that can sometimes be a lot. But they're always trying to help. They're just trying to keep us safe, keep us familiar, keep us in the familiar, keep us in what we know, keep us in what the thinking mind has established as like the known and therefore safe areas of life.
[0:38:19]
And then we have this soul, which is really the true essence of who we are, that wants to do the exact opposite: treasures evolving, wants to expand, wants to leap into, not in an impulsive way or in a way that bypasses the experience of the mind and the nervous system—but that's the gentle whisper, that's what's contained in The Fool, is this part of us that says, “You're not happy. Even though all of these things look really good, they're not giving you what you want. Do you have the courage to shift, to move away, from what's...” You know, let's just say in this example, “Safe and known, and slowly with respect—make your way to something that is unknown, but is calling out to you.” Right?
So inside of this dual experience that we have—where our human, sort of, thinking mind, nervous system selves are just trying to keep us alive out here—they're not interested in us growing and expanding and evolving at all. So they just want us safe and alive. The soul wants us expanding and evolving. That is growing through discomforts, learning and changing, and moving into the unknown. That's what it craves.
And the thinking mind craves familiarity. So we have this dissonance that's, kind of, always humming in the background. Sometimes it reaches this huge fever pitch and sometimes it's very quiet. When we reach for the soul call; that deep call to move into something exciting, something that really moves us, something that feels really like a yes. When we think about literally dilation, when we reach out and say yes to some form of support or receiving that feels a little bit out of our comfort zone but we do it any way (Lindsay laughs). When we give and we're not used to being in that, kind of, vulnerable state.
[0:40:33]
Maybe someone cannot like what we're giving, which is always fine, but it's, you know, it's an act of courage, of vulnerability. When we choose to expand, that's typically because we've said yes to some deeper call of the soul in a way. So when we expand, the thinking mind goes, “Oh, this is way too open here, like you’re in like an open field right now. You could be hit with an arrow, so I am going to invite you into some contraction to try to close that up.”
And usually how contraction feels is we're invited into old stories, old... typically not maybe our favorite story (Lindsay laughs) about what could go wrong or about, you know, whatever. Sometimes it can show up physically, like we'll get a big headache or nauseous or we have a stomachache or sometimes it's emotional. We're just in a fucking dreadful mood or we feel maybe down or anxious or worried or scared. And it can sometimes feel connected to the expansion and sometimes it feels completely disconnected. Disconnected.
If you've ever had an experience where like, you had an amazing date, or meetup, or a meeting and then all of a sudden your thinking mind crashes in with like just the shittiest thought (Lindsay laughs), like, that's an attempt to invite us into contraction because it's scared. It doesn't want our feelings hurt. It's nervous. It likes to temper expectations, not because it's a killjoy. Again, it's just trying its best to keep us alive. So contraction is typically a response to expansion in some way.
[0:42:25]
And expansion itself can feel really uncomfortable. Expansion for me is not typically an experience of like soaring on eagle's wings. Usually, it's like, “Whoa, this is really, like, intense.” You know, it's big. So I don't want to say that like, both are uncomfortable, but both are sort of, you know, we're not always in contraction and we're not always in expansion. I think there are middle points to all of it, you know, and sometimes expansion can feel very slow, very, very subtle and we can have sort of regular low volume contraction throughout the process.
I notice in my journey of pregnancy, that every time I take a particular action—I'm not going to get into detail about it, not because it's personal but just because it doesn't really matter—I have a huge contraction, and it's not even like an action that you probably expect. But it triggers off my inner kid. It triggers off my thinking mind. Like, there's a lot of energy that comes up for me. But the thing that I'm reaching for isn't, doesn't feel particularly expansive, it just sort of like feels like a thing to do as I continue in my pregnancy. But it's very, it does bring up a lot.
So I've gotten so used to it that now I'm just prepared. Like, when I do this kind of thing, I'm probably going to have some really big fears, really big what ifs, going to be worried that my hopes are going to be dashed in some way around this and like you know, the more it comes up, the more I have the honor of sort of holding it when it does. So, you know that's so—I would define a moment of expansion as a moment when we are saying yes to the soul’s deeper whisper in spite of the thinking mind's attempts to keep us a little smaller, safer, familiar, not too high, not too low.
[0:44:38]
And I would define contraction as the thinking mind's attempts to pull us back into a little bud of safety. Because it feels like a lot to be going through the, you know, the experience of expansion. And sometimes they can happen independently of one another. Sometimes we can just be really moving through some contraction about something, we get triggered off, we see something that really hurdles us (Lindsay snaps) down and out. And I've learned from my teacher, Michelle, that when that happens, because it does happen with everyone, it's ideal not to attempt to make any big decisions in the face of it, to just tend the contraction, don't react from it, just be there, you know.
And when we are living sort of spiracally, then rather than linearly, expansion and contraction becomes sort of the in-breath and out-breath of the rhythm of life like that. We're always in that space, because especially when we start to rewild our intuition and live a little bit more in alignment with with that soul led call, it changes completely the rhythm of living that we do, and becomes less about staying, kind of, on the familiar path and becomes way more about, “Okay, you know, this is the desire to stay in the familiar, this is desire to move through it into something different and more expansive. So how can I honor both, while reaching for the expansion? How can I tend myself through the contraction?”
So hopefully, that helps. And I'm so glad you asked the question. Again, honoring Michelle for bringing those terms into my life, and so grateful they've become such a rich part of my own practice and such a felt part of my own experience that yeah, I'm pleased to be able to speak to it.
So thank you so, so much for listening to this episode, Wild Souls. I love all of you and until we connect again in two weeks, please take exquisite care of yourselves.
[0:47:08]