186. Slicing through our Stories with Queen of Swords
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In our journey around daring to get our hopes up, how can we begin to tend to the feelings of worry, anxiety and overwhelm that can often arise? Queen of Swords can be an extraordinarily helpful and bolstering Anchor Card for the kinds of invitations that Nine of Cups brings to us, inviting us to slice through our painful stories, get closer to the heart of our emotions, thoughts, and feelings, and invite us to tend ourselves in loving ways.
Air date:
March 11, 2022
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About the Episode
In today’s episode, we dive into the heart of Queen of Swords, and I answer a listener's question about navigating projections around our Tarot pulls.
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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: Trauma, pregnancy, grief
The content in this episode contains references to trauma, pregnancy, and grief. 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, just a very quick announcement before today's episode. Just want to give all of you a heads up that there are only a few more days left to sign up for Tarot for the Wild Soul course. In just a little under a week, enrollment will close for the year and will not open again until next year.
Tarot for the Wild Soul course is a more advanced Tarot mentorship for folks who desire to deepen their connections to themselves and their decks, opening to the next level of their Tarot practice. This offering is totally self-paced and is framed around the Wheel of the Year. So the material will explore the Tarot through a spiralic, seasonal, nonlinear framework where you'll be invited to lay your life down next to these incredible archetypes, exploring each of them through the lens of Tarot Anchoring, looking to them as invitations that can help to draw us closer to ourselves.
So for anybody who's really desiring, hungry for an incredibly rich, incredibly heart-centered, very spiralic, very holistic way of plugging the Tarot, specifically, into our feelings, our emotions, situations, seasons of life, literal seasons, this is definitely the offering for you. It's so incredibly special, and I'm so excited that this year, rather than having to follow it on sort of a timed, weekly model, all of the material will just be there for you.
You can—actually, it starts on the Spring Equinox—you can actually follow it through the whole year, or you can devour it all at once (Lindsay laughs), or however you want to go through it is great. So if you'd like to learn more about that you can go to tarotforthewildsoul.com/courses, or you can go to Soul Tarot School and look up Tarot for the Wild Soul course there. Thank you so much for listening, Wild Souls, and I can't wait to dive into today's episode with you.
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(Instrumental intro music)
[00:02:30]
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 Loves and welcome to a brand new episode of the podcast. So happy and excited to be gathered with all of you, as always, in this shared virtual space. Today, we're going to be diving into our supportive, mid-month Anchor Card that is really showing up as a bolster and a root system to help us to actually peel back the layers of our card of the month, which is Nine of Cups—even more, right?
So we're always, on this podcast, weaving in this idea of Anchor Cards, which essentially is really allowing all manner of combos of the Tarot and of cards in the Tarot to really braid together, to come together—in many cases, unique and personal weavings—to see how we can draw upon more support. And in this case, you know, we're going to be looking at a card that I think really pulls this beautiful and important thread about Nine of Cups open so that we can explore what's really going on underneath the surface and get some real, kind of next-level, solid support.
So I'm excited to talk about our card of the day and how it connects to Nine of Cups and to our theme for the month of March. I think it's really going to be very sweet. And then as I always do, I'll answer a listener question, and then we'll come to a close.
[0:04:30]
So our supportive Anchor Card for our work with Nine of Cups this month is Queen of Swords. And this one was really still kind of deciding itself until very, very close to the record date of this episode because there are many, many with different ways Nine of Cups can take us. But in the end, this really felt like the most present Anchor; the Anchor with its kind of hand up the highest (Lindsay laughs), out of all of them. And so I think it's good that we're sort of exploring it through this lens. But with all of these, you could pick or pull any number of cards—really, any of the other 77 cards of the Tarot—and it would be its own unique story, which is really nice.
So in order to dive into how we're going to look at Queen of Swords, and how we can work with Queen of Swords, and layer this card into our work with our theme for the month, which is “Daring to Hope,” daring to sort of get our hopes up, we're going to go back and just refresh a little bit about what Nine of Cups is bringing us.
So we talked two weeks ago, at the last episode, about how Nine of Cups is one of those cards that sort of everybody—there's a tremendous… it's really all cards are mirrors, but I think Nine of Cups is a really giant, unique mirror (Lindsay laughs) because it really does bring up a lot about hope and wishing and sweetness and good stuff. And that's why I think, for some people, this card is kind of like, “Don't get too greedy. You're not sharing. You have too much.”
And I think for some folks, that's a strong belief system around that. And I think, for some folks, there can be a feeling of, like, spiritual bypassing, like we're just sort of floating along, which I don't personally see. I think there are other cards that can draw us a little closer to that, but not this one. And there's, weirdly, a third way of looking at it, which kind of is bypassing, which is just like, “Everything's great. Like, your wishes are being granted. Everything's awesome!” And we all know, like, that's great, but life doesn't typically work that way.
[0:07:13]
And we certainly can't really hook any Tarot card’s meaning onto a certain, external attainment or a feeling or an emotional state. Like, there has to be something right? There has to be something rooted in a universality, right? Like, not everyone is going to experience that. So we talked about that, but I think it's important to come back to it.
Because one of the strongest root systems of this card—and I think one of the reasons this is so true with the Tarot, in general—that when the meaning of the card, at its core, kind of soul, root-level, is really intense and really confronting, there tends to be this kind of, like, a little bit of a bypassing, a little bit of a projection. Like, it'll have to do with a great thing coming in or another person or something because it, unconsciously, I think over history and over time, has sort of, brought us a little further away from the inner work that can be so confronting with regard to this particular card, or with any of them.
And what we explored in our last episode was that Nine of Cups is really an invitation that invites us to be willing to get our hopes up. It's an experience where, whether tangible or sort of still in the invisible realm, we're cooking something. We're building something, we're nurturing, incubating, gestating something—whether it's a wish, a hope, a prayer. Sometimes even to wish something, even to hope it, even to pray for it, is such a huge step (Lindsay laughs), like, such an act of courage, such an act of willingness to look in that mirror around what we desire, and what we long for.
And for some of us, Nine of Cups is like, those eggs are physically in front of us, and we're warming them and spending time with them and working on them. And it can be anything from, literally, having a baby, to writing a book, to creating a project, to making an app to, you know, —and they're not comparable, but we all have our own thing, right?
And usually, when you get that little sense of like, “Oh my god, this is like, really vulnerable,” that’s when we're in Nine of Cups territory. So it's a huge energy: we're daring to hope for something better, for something really rich and meaningful to drop into our lives. We're being, you know, again, brave enough to consider getting our hopes up, which for a lot of us, I’d say most of us—is pretty daunting stuff. Right?
So we also spoke about how the theme for March is “Daring to Hope” and like how really the whole month is structured around this idea: what are we longing for?
In this last, you know, in this particular case, certainly, but when we were talking in really early March, as well, or in really early February for the month of March, like we're in Pisces season, preparing to go into Aries season. Energetically, that's a movement into a completely new cycle. It's really clicking us into the energy of 2022.
Like, what are we daring to hope for? What are we longing for? What do we want to bring through, and what needs to be cleared or honored or tended to, in order to make that space, right? That's really what this month is bringing up for us so strongly, you know? The invitation is there, certainly.
[0:11:36]
So, when we work with Nine of Cups as an Anchor, especially over the course of a month, if we’re, really, kind of in a season of our lives where we're getting into some really deep territory with this card, a couple of things start to happen:
One is that we really start to observe like, “Okay, these are my reactions to vulnerability. Here's how I tend to clam up, close up, try to tear everything down, try to hurry up or push or force, or, like, totally root myself in an almost an artificial way because I don't want anything to change.”
For some folks, it's in apathy. It's actually, like, pulling away and, like, drifting away because the idea of potentially losing what we're hoping for is too big and too great.
No matter where we sort of notice our reactions, it's okay. It's just information. But one of the really telltale things that Nine of Cups, surprisingly, I think, for some folks, can often bring up is a tremendous amount of anxiety and worry; especially if we're prone to that, especially if there's trauma, especially if we're not—if we don't have a lot of bolstering within ourselves to be able to be with something—which I don't think is a judgment. I feel like this is most of us, like, certainly myself (Lindsay laughs); if we just don't have a lot of ability to ground and stay really calm or really even in our sort of mood or temperament, when things are really, really unknown. Because that's the thing with Nine of Cups, or with anything in life: it's like there's no guarantee.
Like, we don't know whether this thing that we're we're incubating and nurturing and hoping and calling in will take a couple months to get here or will take years to get here. And like how do we hold that? Like how do we hold ourselves in the midst of that? I think that's a question I ask myself whenever I'm in a kind of a season with this card.
And with the presence of, you know, delight and excitement, and feeling into the warmth and the expansion of Nine of Cups is, absolutely, as I mentioned, the presence of—or the possibility of—a lot of worry and a lot of anxiety. And when we have really big feelings and really big thoughts, there is usually one Tarot card that will show up when we are swirling in those particular regions.
When the thinking mind is swirling, when our emotions are swirling, when we aren't quite sure whether something is valid to worry about, is important to be anxious about, when we're sort of walking around or moving around the world with a lot of what-ifs—like, “What if it goes like this? What if I lose? What if I fall on my face? What if I fail?”—one of the cards that typically does come real close to the center of the wheel with us is the card that we're going to talk about today, and that is Queen of Swords.
[0:15:21]
So our theme for this episode is “Slicing Through Our Stories with Queen of Swords.”
Queen of Swords, obviously, is a court card, and in Soul Tarot, we look to Queen of Swords as having a dual elemental ruling of Water and Air: Water, as a rulership over the Queens themselves, and Air for Swords, which is traditionally ruled by Air. And when we fuse these two together, we have, quite literally, the depth and the breadth of the water, of the waves, of the mutability of the water, that the water can be as smooth as glass, or it can be so choppy and intense, and so kind of whirled around by storms or by wind.
And the same thing with Air: very mutable. It can be super calm, very soft, like a breeze, or it can be enough to blow down a house (Lindsay laughs), or a tree. Like there's tremendous force and power in both of these elements, and really, in all four of them, certainly. They can be utilized in all kinds of different ways.
But we might think of Water as being centered in the emotions. Of course, I think, emotion exists in Fire and Air and Earth, but let's just say, like, to really simplify, that Water really is the representation of this deep, inner, emotional realm, and Air is really the seat of the mind; how we think and communicate, how we sort of stitch or tie our thoughts together.
And when Queen of Swords comes forward, we typically see this energy, at least in the Smith Rider-Waite, we sort of take an homage from that. The Queen of Swords’ sword is at a 90-degree angle, which is significant in that it typically does signify that there is a kind of a directness and a kind of structure. Like there's some kind of really clear sight happening here, and there's an ability to sort of slice through, very cleanly, any confusion, any sort of whirling or swirling or density that might be there, to expose sort of, the beating heart of the matter.
[0:17:58]
Now, when we are in the kind of worry or anxiety or discomfort or contraction that can come up in an energy like Nine of Cups, when the vulnerability feels too great, when it feels like too much—Queen of Swords is a great energy to call upon to help with those feelings. It's also, again, an energy that will very likely come anyway, regardless of us sort of calling that in, you know (Lindsay laughs)?
We always have the opportunity to sort of conjure up or to think about the sword within us, and how we're using it. Like, what is accessible to us? What do we have available to us? What are the resources? Who are the processors? What are the places that we can turn to? Who are the people that we can turn to help us make sense of this and to help us to develop a little bit more of a sturdy framework to be in the potential excitement and unknown and beauty of what we're building and what we're moving toward?
Like, how can we hold a really soft space for ourselves so that when disappointment happens, if it happens, we can be held in it, rather than turning kind of hard and brittle, and, you know, just saying, “Well, fuck it. I shouldn't have tried.” Which, you know, I think those feelings are completely valid, but they're usually a start point, not a stop point, right? There's some folks who will feel that way, and they'll literally shut the door, and they'll never, ever, ever try again (Lindsay laughs), you know, in what they were doing. And ideally, we don't want to do that, right?
Like, we want to make space for possibility, we want to make space for grieving, we want to make space for all these feelings. And Queen of Swords is just, it's a very intense energy like it's very—I don't want to say harsh, but um, there's not a lot of softness in Queen of Swords. It's very direct, and it lets us know, it reminds us that we have the power to slice through some of the stories that might be taking up a little bit too much air time in our lives as we embark on our Nine of Cups journey.
[0:20:38]
So some of these ways are, you know, for example, if we are feeling just all of the anxiety because our thoughts are swirling and whirling around a what-if, like, “What if this happens? What if there's a problem here? What if there's…? What if I fail?” you know, whatever. When we call upon an energy like Queen of Swords, what we're essentially doing is we're bringing about a kind of a really strong pause to those thoughts. We're not saying, “Hey, you can't come here.” We're not attempting to control them, but we're remembering, “These thoughts don't define my experience. They're here, they're loud, they're uncomfortable. But there is also some part of me, I don't have to identify with these thoughts. Essentially, I don't have to believe them. I don't necessarily have to believe them. I can investigate them if I'm able to.” Sometimes we're not able to do this by ourselves. So doing this in an appropriate way for you—doing this with a processor, if it feels safe doing it, with an Anchor like the Tarot—doing it in a way that feels like it's not going to overwhelm your capacity to cope is really important.
So we might, some people might move to like, “Well, what's the worst thing that could happen?” Right? We fail. How do we actually define failure? What would failure look like to us? And then we pull that apart a little bit. We slice that, and we say, “Okay, failure would be if I messed up in this way.” Okay, if we mess up, what could we do to make amends? What can we do to shift, to change, to remember that we are human? We don't have to get it all perfectly right. And then we might go in another direction.
Is there some part of what we're doing or creating that we feel like we're kind of walking around, a little bit fumbling, in the dark? Can we bring some kind of resource in to help flick the light on? Can we reach out to a community group? Can we touch in with a business mastermind that we're a part of? Can we reach out to our therapist? Can we reach out to a psychiatrist? Can we reach out to our doctor, our nurse?
Like, wherever we are, is there any way to bring in some kind of other eyes, some kind of other perspective, to just hear us, to just witness us in what we're going through, right? Even if we were to call upon a trusted friend to read our latest draft, or hire somebody to do a really, really hard proof of any potential insensitive areas of what we're doing, and saying, you know, “How would this land with this community?” Or we can do anything, really, as long as we stop trying to spin the wheels.
[0:23:47]
And the Swords really show us, teach us, remind us, again, and again, and again, when we get overwhelmed, when we get scared, when we get anxious, the mind tends to want to, like, isolate, right? It doesn't want to bring in a ton of stimuli, I think, because it—you know, the mind, our thinking minds—can get pretty overwhelmed, and then we can feel overwhelmed.
So, when we consider this idea, we can move into a space of shifting out of that pattern, because it can bring us into a sharing space, a community space. It can help us to be vulnerable in a moment when we may feel like something is completely impossible and to another person, it's so doable. They might be so happy to help us. They might be so happy to help us now—if we don't have the money to pay them, later when we get some capital from what we're doing. Who knows, right? Like it may be it. That could be it (Lindsay laughs), could not be. It really depends.
And it's the same thing with emotion. When there's huge emotion, when there's, you know, anger and frustration, and we're just feeling so combative, those feelings are valid on their own. Like, they don't need to come with anything, but very often, those feelings are covering up fear. They're covering up grief, they're covering up how hard it is to hope for something, wish for something, hold a space, be in the unknown, which is a lot of what Nine of Cups brings us into.
So we can see a couple different ways that, you know, Queen of Swords can slice through some of the mental stories. How can it slice through the emotional stories? It can help us to say, “Okay, let me pause and be with this anger. There's anger here, and that's important. I don't want to bypass that. Let me be with that.” And we might be able to touch into, “Well, I'm fucking sick of this. I'm tired of not knowing, I'm tired of being worried. Like, all this is gonna go to hell,” you know, whatever.
Whatever the feeling is, most of the time, if we can hang out with our emotions with our feelings, exactly as they are, they start to shift—not that they have to, but they do. And that is when the tears start to come. That is when the truth starts to crack open. That is when the complexity starts to be seen; a little bit more starts to shine through. That is when we can hold, “I'm frustrated, and I'm exhausted. And there's so much fear here. You know, I'm frustrated, and I'm anxious, and I have all of this emotional intensity in me because I'm so afraid that I'm going to get my heart broken by this situation, or it won't go the way I so hope it will.”
[0:27:03]
And at the end of that, at the core of both—and, really, all of what we're talking about because I'm just citing a couple of random examples for both places within us—the core of it is when we can get to the center of our stories there is usually some part of us, usually the little one, that is frightened, that is scared, that really has a concern, that is worried.
The thinking mind has a concern, has a worry—our little kids want to know that, like, we, as the inner adult, have them. So when we're scared, they get scared is something that my teacher Michelle has really just so importantly and beautifully kind of, illuminated for me in our work together. That was something she shared with me, and it really resonates as truth for me. It might not for you, but yeah, I just share what works for me.
And with the thinking mind, the thinking mind only ever wants to protect, and it can be a little bit of—at least my thinking mind, I love my thinking mind—it can be a little bit of a jerk sometimes. And I feel really comfortable in my relationship with myself saying that (Lindsay laughs). My thoughts are sometimes not very kind. It doesn't mean that I don't love and caretake that part of myself, but I am aware. Just like I can be kind of jerky to myself, or maybe a little snappy with the people that I love in moments when I feel tense and scared, probably, just like you—that my mind is often a mirror for that. And so when my thinking mind is scared, it's a moment for me when I can take that inner sword that wants and desires so badly to get to the heart of what's really going on. There's a softening all around.
So this Queen of Swords figure that can feel so intense, and sometimes, for some people, very cold, is really all about the heart. This archetype just wants us to be coming back to that gooey center (Lindsay laughs) of like, what's actually going on here. What's really the story? What's really going on? Let's investigate.
[0:29:46]
And, you know, one of the other ways, of course, to work with Queen of Swords is as one of the finest cards in the Tarot for boundary keeping and sort of creating really sturdy guardrails within ourselves or with others. And I think that both of them are quite linked, right? Like, when we have the ability to go so deeply within, to touch, like, we can't… It's very, very challenging to sense into, enact, and hold a boundary if we aren't really sure what's going on.
And when we hold a boundary with somebody who typically is challenging our boundary—is difficult, is guilt-tripping us—it's going to stir up a lot in the mind and in our emotions. It's going to stir up a shit ton of worry, sometimes of guilt, like sometimes like, “Oh, am I pushing too hard? Is this too strong a boundary?” Sometimes it can bring up sadness. Like, we don't want to always hold the boundary, but like we have to, in order to keep ourselves or our families, sort of, within that zone of safety. Whatever that is for us, whatever that brings up, we need Queen of Swords. That's actually how Queen of Swords helps us with our boundaries. It's not…
Like, we can think of Queen of Swords as this incredible, like, you know, thorn on the rosebush, that, you know, we can be as inviting, as open, as sweet as we could ever wish to be, and know that those thorns are in place to be real fucking clear about, like, “Hey, this is what happens when you move out of line. This is really clear. The boundary is gonna go up.”
We can think of it as like a circle of nettles, or the way that, very often, poison oak develops in places in the forest that have been a little bit too over-harvested. There's a rebalancing that can take place, that can be so kind of innate after a while, that we don't even go there. Or many other people don't even go there because it's felt, or there are structures in place that are very, very clear, you know? And it can take years to get to that point.
But it's impossible to do that. Like, if we were to imagine that—I imagine Poison Oak has its own sentience and its own brilliance and some wisdom, but if we can think of ourselves as poison oak, we have to know that a boundary needs to come up in order to grow in a certain area, right? Like, in order to plant that nettle, in order to let that nettle flourish, we need to know, “Nettle is required here.” This is really important. And how do we proceed through life with respect to that? How do we really communicate that while staying really soft and open?
Nettle provides so much nourishment and medicine, obviously—and will sting (Lindsay laughs), you know, really badly if mismanaged and sometimes even managed with total awareness. I've used stinging nettle on my achy joints for a while now, you know? So all that to say, that we get to decide, and that's a big part of Queen of Swords, too.
That's a really big part of this card, is like, we got to know that feelings, emotions, all the kind of senses that are totally valid are going to come up in the face of those boundaries: “Am I too boundaried? Am I not boundaried enough? Should I be more boundaried? Am I letting too many people in? Is this okay with me?”
I think, honestly, for many of us, it takes a long time to sense into, “Whoa, this didn't feel okay for me. This did.” And then to actually have the structure and the sturdiness inside of us to say, “Hey, this didn't feel good, and, you know, here's the nettle. Here's the rose. Here's the thorn on the rose. Here it is,” you know? We can't know that until we get to the heart of the matter; until we get to the core of what's really going on inside.
And when we slice through our stories, “Oh, I shouldn't be doing this. Boundaries are mean. I'm going to fail at this. I'm never going to be successful. I should just give up,” slice through all of those and just investigate them. They don't have to go away. We're just investigating. We’re just seeing. Just noticing. Like, what's going on here, and what's the belief underneath that?
[0:34:41]
So this is an incredible card, again, for our work with Nine of Cups because Nine of Cups—no matter how sunny and bright people try to, like, make this card out to be—it does bring the major, like, knee-buckling vulnerability (Lindsay laughs) the way very few other cards really do or can, because we're engaging with what it is to nourish something that's just, again, incredibly daunting, and really makes the heart, like, we feel all the feelings with that stuff. Like, you know, our willingness to get our hopes up, like that's just about as vulnerable as we can get.
So we can call upon Queen of Swords to help us to slice through and investigate the feelings, the thoughts, anything that's coming up in us around that. Like we're super worried or super anxious—let's investigate that, right? We don't have to fix it, solve it, make it go away. It will shift, ebb, flow on its own. We can call in people to help us, to be with us, to witness us in it.
I think that this card really reminds us of the importance of that. Yeah—we can make space for deeper caretaking. Like, we don't have to ever bypass anything. We don't have to ever, frankly, gaslight ourselves into being like, “Oh, this is supposed to be a happy time.” Bullshit. If you're struggling, in the midst of something, absolutely reach for the resourcing you need. And that starts with acknowledging what's here. Like, “This is supposed to be a good time, so I've been told, and I'm really not having a very easy time with it.” (Lindsay laughs) You Know?
Anytime I've ever done that and reached out for help and support, I've been so pleasantly surprised with the amount of people who have really mirrored back to me, affirmed to me, like, “Yeah, I felt that way, too, and it was really hard for me, too.” Right? So slicing through our stories, talking to folks, sharing, expanding that willingness to be vulnerable by actually talking about how our work in Nine of Cups is affecting us, is landing with us, right?
So I think that that can be extraordinarily helpful for you, for us, as we continue to flow through the remainder of this month, our last week or so—or a couple weeks, I guess. I’m not sure. Maybe a week or so in Pisces season before we get to Aries season. And then in Aries season, the work will continue with this, but it'll likely feel a little different inside of that lens of the sun being in Aries instead of Pisces. So yeah, really just curious, curious, curious, seeing how Queen of Swords could be a really helpful Anchor for you inside of that container and inside of that incredible, brave, and courageous work around daring to hope.
[0:38:20]
So now we're going to move into our listener question, then we'll wrap up for the day, for this episode, and for the day (Lindsay laughs). So Haley asks—this question is from Haley:
Hi there,
I'm wondering if you can speak more to the process of allowing the cards to speak for themselves, versus projecting what we might want them to say. I find sometimes when I'm pulling, that I struggle to perceive whether I'm really listening to Spirit, or just looking for confirmation for what I want to hear.
So there's not really an easy answer to this. It's easy and also, totally not easy (Lindsay laughs). So, um, that is that the process of allowing the cards to speak for themselves versus projecting what we might want them to say or what we might want them to, like the message they might be bringing to us, is one that is, I would say, like, probably lifelong. It's really a dedicated effort and one that will absolutely shift our relationship with the cards in a million different ways and will be so exciting because there'll be so many things that we never even imagined a certain card could bring forward.
And yet, when we sort of intentionally move out of the way, or acknowledge, like, “Oh, yeah, this is my perception, this is my preference, and I'm going to honor that. Now, if I get out of the way, and I open to what might be here, whoa, like, there's so much here. And maybe it's even richer and better than what I thought, or maybe it sucks, and I kind of have to be with that, too,” or, you know, whatever it might be.
So the first kind of answer to that, I would say is just like, really understand that this is a process of untying a very large knot over time. Slowly, but surely, you will start to notice a change where it will organically be that you'll pull cards, and they'll just be a real, wide-open space for anything that those cards might want to tell you. You'll notice your preferences, you'll notice your desires for what the message might want to be, but then it won't rule the reading. It's a practice, and it does take a little time to recenter around.
So I would say the process of it is starting with what you're noticing. So starting with observation: we pull a card, “Oh, I'm observing that this is my feeling around it, this is my preference, this is my desire around it. Cool. That's great. Let me really kind of note that, and then let me see what might happen if I open a little wider or a little further, and just ask if there's anything else that I'm being invited to know that I don't know, or that doesn't fall into the category of those preferences or of those desires.” It really isn't a button you can push; it's really kind of a practice that gets woven into the practice of reading, you know? It's like a practice within a practice.
Your feeling, your concern like, “Is this really from Spirit, or is this what I want to hear?” I feel like I would need to know more about that in order to fully affirm either way. But I have a feeling that if you're nervous about it (Lindsay laughs), probably, you are hearing more from Spirit than you think. I often find with students, and I could be wrong, when—and I’m not necessarily saying you’re a student—but with the people that I serve and I am honored to teach, who come to me with questions during the course container; I often find that the more concerned they are, the more the practice is actually radiating through them quite powerfully. And it's really hard for them to, kind of, trust that piece of it.
The other thing with the way that… when we really let the cards flow, the messages are often… I don't want to say they're more positive because it's not positive/negative—there's so much more benevolence around them. They’re so much less fatalistic that sometimes it really can feel like, “I have to be making this up. Like, it can't be this, right?” So I have a hunch that you're probably doing great, but I totally understand the concern, you know?
[0:43:36]
What I would say is that—this might be a little, like, wild—but I don't really think it matters. There have been times I've looked back on readings I've done for myself and for other folks. I really trust that what I said in the moment was what I was meant to share. And I always know that I can drop it or take it; the client can drop it or take it. We don't have to hold on to what comes up in a Tarot reading, ever. But I can totally look back and think like, “Wow, my understanding of that card has ripened and matured so hugely that I trust that when that person came in that day, five years ago, what I had to say about it was what I had to say about it.”
And sometimes when I've read for myself, and I've gotten certain things that I've just thought like, “Oh, interesting,” you know, I can look back and think, “Oh my goodness, I can see with a lot more clarity how it probably was veering me in that direction, but I didn't quite have the understanding at that time.” I try to really model this and speak on this as often as humanly possible, but like we are—I don’t care who you are, how long you've been reading, if you're teaching Tarot, writing about Tarot, if you're a scholar of Tarot—you're always learning new stuff, especially if you're really living your practice. So I would say, where you're at, is a good place to start.
So as best as you can, I would invite you to trust that and to see where it takes you and to also start to build in this sort of practice within a practice where when you pull, you take a moment to observe, to just notice what comes up for you, to notice your preferences, your desires, the conditioning maybe that you've had about a certain card, and then call in your—we call this in Soul Tarot, “The Four C's”.
So we call in our curiosity, we call in our compassion, our critical thinking, and our common sense. And for you, I'd say, curiosity is really important to start with, like, where's this coming from? Is this something that I absorbed? Is it a story, a belief, a worry, a fear?
Always important to remember that when the soul is kind of in the driver's seat, the messages are like natural ripples. We may have responses to those ripples. Like, something might come up in a Tarot reading, and we might think, “Oh my gosh, this is like…” Or we'll receive the message where we'll understand, or there'll be some kind of transmission that occurs. And then we might have a really big feeling about that. We might be like, “Oh, fuck, like, really?” you know (Lindsay laughs), or whatever. That's typically like soul-to-mind. And that's fine.
[0:46:48]
When it's mind to sort of soul—way back in the backseat and not really getting a whole lot of attention—it's kind of like… it's almost like checking something off on a piece of paper. Like, “This means this. That means that.” It's very analytical. Analytical is great, but there's not usually a whole lot of, like, plunging into the waves and sensing into where they take you. So I would say, yeah, feel into some of those practices and know that you're not alone in this. Like, this is the work of being a Tarot reader, actually. And it's work that I think, honestly, most Tarot readers don't even realize it was important to do. Like, you know (Lindsay laughs)?
Usually, we learn about a Tarot card meaning, and the mind really loves to have a sense of right versus wrong. And we can have a sense of like, “Well, this is the meaning,” instead of being open to all of the different ways that a Tarot card can come forward and can actually want to be expressed and lived through us.
So hopefully, that sort of roundabout answer helps and can root you into some confidence in the journey of your practice. But I would say, start to just really intentionally build in that little pause, that little space for checking in. Don't let it get too, like, mental or too analytical. Again, analysis is great. It's great. I always talk about field research, that there's sort of an analysis with that. I just mean, like, just notice. Like, a little, gentle curiosity. Some gentle checking in, like, “Well, you know, is there a difference here?” And know that it will evolve with time, know that it will organically shift with time, and that's beautiful and perfect. So, thank you so much for asking me this question.
[Conclusion]
Thank you for being here, Wild Souls. Always such an honor to gather with you, and until we connect again. Please take exquisite care of yourselves.