188. Solstice Magic + Welcoming The Chariot
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In this special, impromptu episode of T-WS podcast, we dive into the energetics of the Solstice, Cancer Season, The Chariot (our Anchor for the upcoming cycle), and so much more. Sending big love to everyone from postpartum/baby land!
Air date:
June 21, 2022
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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/birth, postpartum depression and anxiety, capitalistic structures, emergency surgery, and challenging medical experiences
The content in this episode contains references to pregnancy/birth, postpartum depression and anxiety, capitalistic structures, emergency surgery, and challenging medical experiences. 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 gentle heads up that from today, June 21st, to June 23rd, we will be having our annual Wild Solstice Sale that will get you 20% off of any workshop that we have on the website as well as select courses. It's only available to my newsletter subscribers, so if you'd like to take advantage of the sale for the next couple of days, you can sign up for my newsletter by going to my website tarotforthewildsoul.com or by clicking the link in the show notes for this episode. Thank you so much for being here and I hope you love it.
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(Instrumental intro music)
[00:00:43]
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 back to the podcast. And it is a huge joy, very exciting to be with you. I'm not officially back. This is sort of just a special one-off thing, because I felt like connecting. Because I felt like I had something to say about the solstice and about Cancer season and The Chariot that might be of use to us in the next kind of season ahead.
And also, just because I've missed this community. You’ve all been on my heart. It's been such an intense, heartbreaking, challenging year, just continues to be for so many of us. And so again, I've been thinking of all of you with a lot of love and care, and hoping that in spite of these times you are as well and as nourished and as supported as possible.
[0:02:02]
Yeah, since the last time we spoke, I had a baby (Lindsay laughs). And she's amazing and perfect, and I love being a mom, which is a huge statement, given my own relationship with my mother and what parenthood meant to me before having my daughter and yeah, I'm still very much in postpartum maternity baby world, so there's not… This is a little peek, a little step out of the cave for me, a little step out of the garden, but it felt really, really good to do.
So today, I have a lot to share about that journey, that process. My postpartum has been, to put it mildly, hard (Lindsay laughs) for multiple reasons that have included some pretty heavy duty postpartum depression, anxiety, and a number of, actually, emergency surgeries and ER visits. So, it's been quite a bit to juggle while getting used to being a mom. And so, you know, I'm sharing with you sort of a general overview of how I am, but even inside of that I feel grateful to be where I am right now. Definitely way too complicated to put into words, complex to put into words right now, as I'm still in the middle of it. But that's a tiny slice of my world right now.
Yeah, and whenever I come back, if I come back to this space in a sort of regular way, I may have more to say about that. But for today… Yeah, I just wanted to honor really, first and foremost, the fact that we're now in The Chariot season, right? And The Chariot is big. It's a big deal. There are infinite amount of layers to this card and how we can lean into it, understand it, work with it, see it as the profound ally and Anchor that it is.
[0:04:34]
And also because it's Chariot season, we know we've shifted into Cancer season because today is the Solstice. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, it's our Summer Solstice. For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, this is your Winter Solstice. So, a day, today, and on and around December 21st, that is capable of such a vast and profound both/and, right?
As human beings we love to, you know, the brain, the mind loves to find all of this meaning and, you know, what does this mean? Are there absolutes here? Is it one way or another? When usually in nature, it's sometimes straightforward, a lot of the time pretty multi-layered. And I love equinoxes and solstices, and cross quarters, of course, but especially today, because in the Northern Hemisphere, we are embracing and bowing to a day where there's more sunlight today than there isn't any other time on the Wheel of the Year.
We have our longest day and our shortest night, and yet at the same time, across the world, they're having their shortest day of light, and their longest night. So it's a pretty profound both/and that we can lean into, bow into. We're capable of all of these things. So there is both on the solstice, no matter where you happen to be, whether summer or winter, whatever you've got today. On the solstice, it holds a really big energetic invitation around what's being revealed and our relationship to rest. What we can see, what we can perceive, what's being revealed to us. And where we have to kind of sense in what we don't see, like, where, what's visible, what's invisible right now?
[0:6:46]
Where do we kind of have to trust inside of the night time, and where are we really kind of starkly seeing what needs to be seen, what's being revealed in the day, right? Again, no matter where we are in the world, those two questions, those two things are really what is being opened to us. And I do think rest is a huge part of the solstice, especially because it has to do with, again, night and day.
You know, gosh, I mean, I don't even know what this means anymore (Lindsay laughs), but what is our relationship to rest, to care, to self tending? How can we take that out of the commodification and weave it back into what feels natural and good for us? That word, that concept of self care, has been so kind of marketed, and it's so driven by capitalism now that it can be very hard to sense into, like, what even feels like self care to us? You know, and rather than looking at it, like, “Oh, I'm taking this moment for self care.” You know, how can there be moments through the day that feel nourishing and good, you know, rather than one thing or another.
So I think all this comes up for me during the Solstice. And Cancer season, that's another really powerful thing. You know, we have four cardinal zodiac signs and all four represent a pretty huge shift in terms of energetics and invitation, like what they're bringing. We're just moving out of our Aries Cardinal Fire spiral. And with Aries energy, it's all… You know, we've essentially spent since March, our time, in the energy of The Emperor, in the energy of, you know, who am I? What is my place? What do I have to say? What do I want to do?
[0:09:02]
There's been, collectively, a pretty huge invitation, especially when we weave it into the idea of The Lovers card. You know, The Lovers has everything to do with how we make contact with the collective, everything to do. What's our work? How do we serve? What do we say? What do we teach? How do we embody that role? And what have we been doing that has not actually been working, that's not really felt true for us?
For many of us, you know, we can apply it to a Lovers year, so many people are asking that question. I mean, again, I'm a new parent so of course, I'm asking those questions. I don't know anyone, there is no one in my life –parent, not a parent– who has not been deeply, sometimes frighteningly so, questioning. What is it that I do? What do I like? What do I enjoy? What? You know, those of us who, even those of us who don't really have the privilege or the ability to kind of not do what we're currently doing, it doesn't mean we're not asking those questions.
So while there might not be an opportunity to change it, there's certainly a lot of confronting with like, how are we, you know, how are we engaging with the world? How do we take back some of what we've given away or some of what we've, yeah, engaged with? It doesn't really feel like ours. So all that to say that the last few months have really been rooted in this deep questioning.
[0:10:49]
The Emperor is the energy to ask those questions in. It has to do very specifically with who we are– who we are, how we're rooted, how we're expanding from that root system, you know, how we use our time, our energy, our bodies, sort of in the world, and our voices in the world. So the fact that we're moving out of that and into Cancer, and thereby The Chariot, is a really big deal. It's a really big deal, and Chariot is a really, really big deal anyway.
So while we will, of course, move out of The Chariot, move out of Cancer into Leo, and then Virgo, and etc., we will still—until we shift into Libra season, which is our next Cardinal energy—we're going to be kind of hanging out with The Chariot for the entirety of the next season. So, The Chariot. Again, we talked about The Chariot a lot on this podcast, but when we think about what it means to be in The Chariot for a whole cycle, and this is a great thing to start thinking about, because guess what 2023 is. A Chariot year. And we'll talk about that a ton on the next Threshold, of course.
But yeah, there's just such power and enormity in this archetype. In the invitation of this card, the first big thing is that The Chariot closes and finalizes Line One of the Major Arcana. Rachel Pollack has wonderful teachings about looking at sort of the three lines of the Majors with The Fool sort of separate. Obviously, other people have also (Lindsay laughs) had great things to say about it, but Rachel Pollack was one of the first to really talk about those three lines.
[0:12:53]
And when we think about the idea of something completing and rounding out Line One, we want to really think about what Line One of the Major Arcana means when we take it out of the idea that these are just cards and look at it mapped onto a larger framework of our lives. Because Tarot isn't really worth a damn, to me anyway, unless we are able to apply it to our lives as medicine, as nourishment, as companions on this life, or in this life.
So in Soul Tarot, we look at Line One as kind of being the line that really sort of takes us from, you know, the energetics of birth to a coming of age. We leap in The Fool, which is not quite in the world; It's in the world and not in the world. We make that decision. “Yes, I'm going to say yes to this journey.” And we initiate something that starts with The Magician and goes all the way to The Chariot. And the point of Line One is to create a foundation and a structure for your life. This is where we form identity. Who are we? What do we feel passionate about? What's our true name? You know, how do we want to express ourselves? What's our truth in terms of embodiment and who we are?
That's what we learn in Line One. That's the point of this, is that we get to discover, and each and every one of the cards in Line One is a crucial part of that. And I want to be really clear, although I'm kind of applying it to, you know, birth to around 18-21 years-old, whatever. We look at societally as a “coming of age,” knowing that coming of age, in some cultures, is it's certain ages that are totally different from that. It's when we go off and are sort of on our own.
[0:15:04]
That can happen, you know, putting it inside of that cultural context. But we can be in a Line One season when we're fifty years old, when we discover, like, “Oh my god, my identity is completely different than I thought, or oh my gosh, I'm discovering this ability, or I'm discovering that my gender, my sex, is completely different than I thought it was, or my sexuality is totally different than I thought it was, what I want to do is completely different. Oh my god, I never knew that I was intuitive. I never knew that I wanted to pursue a career as an artist or as a lawyer, or whatever.”
When we go from kind of being on our backs and organizing our bodies in the world to struggling to find our way onto our side, and then on to our tummy, and then we're crawling, and then we're walking, and then we're running. It's a very raw time where there's no way to shortcut that. We have to just kind of roll and struggle and kind of figure it out. And so that's the point of Line One.
We learn in The Magician that we can create, we can weave. We can bring things into being. We learn in The High Priestess that we have our own way of being and embodying and living out whatever it is to us, whatever it means to us, to be intuitive. We learn with The Empress what it is to be open and available to receiving, which is building a muscle to be sure. It's often very uncomfortable when we first start engaging with it.
We learn in The Emperor, you know, when is it my time to take up space? What does it mean to take up aligned space that doesn't crowd anyone out, that is sensitive to all kinds of different things? You know, in The Hierophant a crucial lesson around not giving our power away, around knowing our own impact around serving, and realizing how impactful what we say is.
[0:17:30]
I've definitely used The Hierophant so much as a teacher and have certainly made mistakes with this, but I'm very aware of my, you know, of the hierarchy. You know, what it is to be working with students, what it is to perhaps even be working with folks who are really sort of in a season of their lives where they want so desperately for someone to tell them what to do, what to believe, what to think. And that can be very challenging to have someone put you up somewhere when, you know, that's not what you're going for.
But certainly, as a parent, knowing the impact that I'm having on my child just by kind of existing is formidable (Lindsay laughs), you know, and like, it's big. So in The Hierophant, we learn to be humble and we learn to be aware.
We also have the opportunity, if we're willing, to notice where we've given our power away. Because all of us have done that, where we've desperately wanted someone to tell us what the answer is, are we going to be okay, like, you know, and sometimes that can be really harmful and scary. And other times we have to sort of fly from the nest. That's the point.
[0:18:54]
With The Lovers, we learn to undo some codependency. We really learn to critically think like, “Oh my gosh, how am I engaging with the outside world? How is it? You know, am I giving myself away? Is it easier for me to give to others? Is it easier, you know, than it is for me to receive from myself? Very important season, very important window of time, that has to do with us coming back home to ourselves. And, of course, loving ourselves and beginning to you know, even begin to grapple with what it is to look at ourselves in that sacred mirror the way we do others.
And instead of reaching outside of us for the things that we think will make us happy, will make us secure, will make, you know, whatever. We often find them from within. And all of us go on different journeys with that. We're in a Lover's year this year, so in a very big collective way, we're sort of going through that or resisting it, depending on where you're at. And then we have The Chariot.
So let's break down The Chariot as we see it, again, in the Soul Tarot framework. At the end of each line, we have an opportunity. We can either stay fixed where we are, or we can expand. Essentially, in the nicest way possible, blow open the little cocoon that we've built for ourselves. In the case of us at the end of Line One, this is often where a lot of people just kind of stop.
[0:20:44]
Because when you reach The Chariot, things look kind of okay. They look okay, right? If we look at the Smith-Rider-Waite Chariot card, it looks really good, right? Everything is kind of very symmetrical, which is important in the Tarot, and usually means that there's a sense of balance there. Not perfectly, but there is a sense of real symmetry to that card. The charioteer looks very robust and vital. They're sort of poised and ready to go. We see this chariot that looks very, you know, you know, that looks really snappy. Like, it all looks really good. If you maybe walked by that chariot, the charioteer, it might catch your eye for one reason or another, because it looks good.
But if we just spend a moment or two longer than the briefest of glances, we'll start to see some things that might make us think twice about that. The first is that that chariot, while really beautiful, is not really going to take us very far. It probably will not be very good on anything but really smooth paved roads. It's kind of got concrete wheels. It’s not even being pulled by horses, they're sphinxes. So I don't know how well sphinxes will do with, you know, pulling a chariot.
It doesn't look, actually, all that supportive. When things get, as they always will because this is life, a little bumpy, a little rocky, that chariot is also a protective mechanism. We have to grapple in this card, it's not called the charioteer, it doesn't focus on the person. It focuses on the container that holds them. And when we move into a Chariot time, a Chariot season, a Chariot year, that is the question that we have to grapple with.
[0:22:55]
What containers are holding me appropriately and what containers are constricting me? What identities? What, you know, ways of identifying myself and defining myself are really serving me and what ones are now choking me, are actually taking me out of the places that I'd really like to go? You know, are there oceans and wild woods and sort of much more impassable pathways that we’re actually a little drawn toward, but we can't really turn in that direction, because it's not going to suit the chariot that we have so carefully constructed?
So Line One is crucial. It's crucial, crucial, crucial work. We will all move into Line One multiple times in our lives, you know, depending on where we're at, what we're learning, what we're, you know, exploring in this particular moment of our lives. And it is just as important to move out of it. Because the longer we're in Line One, the longer we run the risk of limiting ourselves and playing it a little bit too small and constricting when some part of us even if it's a very small part is kind of whispering, tapping us on the shoulder, “Hey, there might be more that might not be possible to touch into if we're tucked into this chariot that can't really go or be the ideal vehicle for where we want to go.”
Yeah, so that is what Cancer season and this Solstice, and certainly The Chariot season, and, you know, our work with The Chariot, that's what it has to do with. What are we-? And the point of The Chariot, ultimately, is to move away from it, is to bow to it, to thank it for everything it brought us, everything it taught us, all the ways that it helped us navigate Line One, and that we are ready to shed that particular shell, that particular exoskeleton, that we have grown too big and it is time to let it go. It's time to release it. We cannot move into Line Two without it.
Now, some folks kind of get dragged into the Line Two, right? I can think of that myself, where my mind is like, “Absolutely not (Lindsay laughs), like I do not want to move away from this. Hell no.” And that's alright. We get there how we get there. And then there are times when we willingly move away from The Chariot. We might be terrified, but we do it, right? So however we get there is how we get there. Sometimes we don't know what's going on and, you know, we're just sort of in the mix. We can't move into Strength without it. It's not possible, right?
[0:26:30]
So the symbolism that I think fits so perfectly, that I've always taught the three lines and The Majors with, is that Line One, we're really in a caterpillar line. We're born and we're kind of getting delicious and fat and juicy, like we're just consuming and growing and, you know, taking in, digesting all of this information, and then we're called to create this cocoon. We might not know necessarily why, but it's an evolutionary thing. It's a part of the soul calling. We have to grow. We have to keep going.
For some of us, that nervous system desire to keep it real small, real contained, real safe is very strong. And eventually the soul will come knocking and it will kind of like kick us out of The Chariot in some ways or, you know, whatever it might be, or our chariot experience might be a little different. Who knows? But the cocoon is Line Two. The chrysalis is Line Two. Important, crucial to have this time. Absolutely crucial.
We are literally transforming and changing in Line Two. That's a part of what it is. We're not caterpillar anymore, we're not butterfly yet. We're in the middle. It's what we're meant to do. It's sort of an Underworld Journey where we don't quite know what's going on, we don't know the deal. And at the end of Line Two, when we reach Temperance, we crack out of that and we shed the chrysalis, and here we are, with wet wings. We've completely changed. Now we’re needing to learn how to fly and what the hell that means. And then we're on a Line Three journey. And on and on it goes.
[0:28:23]
The Chariot is so powerful and it's ruled by Cancer, which connects it to many, many different things as helpful sort of branches of the tree and Anchors. So because The Chariot is ruled by Cancer, there's some connective tissue there with The Moon, which also links The Chariot to The High Priestess.
So as an Anchor to this kind of work that we're doing, The High Priestess can be a pretty profound helper, ally, for those of us who are seeking to redefine, rewild, our personal definition around what intuition means to us. So, the High Priestess is often touted as this card of like deep seeing and intuition, but it goes way further than that– way, way deeper. And for any one of us who even remotely (Lindsay laughs), like if you're listening to this, likely you have experienced, or are experiencing, what all of us do and have at some point or another, which is that you've likely questioned, “Am I an intuitive? Because my intuition doesn't look like XYZ. It's more quiet or it's softer. I don't know.” Or we've struggled to define kind of like what kind of intuitive am I.
The High Priestess really takes us into a space where they remind us, the ocean lives in you. You are in the ocean. When we consider this idea of being connected to the moon, to the tides, you know, the tides change every day. Sometimes the tides are high, sometimes they're low. Sometimes our intuition feels and looks like one thing, sometimes it looks like the other.
I was just talking about this with my teacher, because as I mentioned earlier, I had a couple, unfortunately, of multiple ER visits and a couple of emergency surgeries. I was processing with my teacher, Michelle, about how angry at Spirit I was, how I was basically like, “Fuck you. (Lindsay laughs) Fuck you, Spirit.” Which if you felt like you were the only one who felt that way sometimes, you're definitely not.
[0:30:50]
But we were also talking about how different –and Michelle really illuminated this for me– how different Spirit feels in the channel when you're in crisis. And so I was saying, like, “They abandoned me. I didn't feel anything.” And Michelle was inviting me to consider, and when I really reflected on my experience, I was like, that's a hundred percent true. They were there, but because my nervous system was so heightened and activated, and because my field got so narrowed, I wasn't hearing them, perceiving them as expansively as I do when I'm not in crisis.
So I say all this because there are all kinds of different places that we can we can be coming at Spirit around. When my postpartum depression was at an absolute extreme, I needed my pendulum because I was not able to reliably… I had too much fear, you know. I couldn't receive things in my channel. So my pendulum was such an important helper to me during that time, because I was not able to receive and perceive as I normally do.
So I believe The High Priestess—I've always taught High Priestess this way, but feel even more impassioned about it now—it's such an important teacher around being really compassionate, really spacious, and giving ourselves permission to ask the question, “What kind of intuitive am I today?” Not in general, not as like this rigid definition. Where am I this moment? It actually brings the spiralness back to the intuitive rewilding process.
[0:32:47]
There's been so much capitalistic, weird structure, rigidity, put on to what it is to be an intuitive, what kind of intuitive we are. That's very important for many of us and there is absolutely a time where it is important to drop it in service of looking at where am I. So The High Priestess can be a helper with The Chariot, because in The Chariot, we're asking the question, like, “Do I keep sort of hiding behind and kind of trying to make this chariot that looks really good, but actually isn't really that helpful of a container and a support, and a vehicle, an energetic vehicle to me at this time? Am I brave enough to trust that inner whisper?”
You know, and how do we relate to that part of us? How do we trust that part of us? You can't do that without branching out, reaching out to, I think, The High Priestess. And I believe that archetype has their arm, their hand, you know, outstretched to us and in help, you know, in allyship and support, you know, during that time.
Another really big branch of support as we unpack Chariot work is The Moon. And The Moon is ruled by Pisces, so there's a little bit of a different energy there, but when we think about just this card that's called The Moon, The Moon—without, you know, going into a whole thing about it—really teaches us what it is to sit in the discomfort of the absolute unknown. This is a level, it's a level on the video game (Lindsay laughs) that's like the big boss world.
It's a very, very big deal to sit in a true Moon experience where you just don't know anything, and where you're desperate to know. And inside of the void that we're in when we're in a Moon situation, the mind can project all kinds of different things on that blank space. So then we've got that to contend with. We've got echoes, we've got invitations from the mind that are often very challenging.
[0:35:05]
We can get, because we're so uncomfortable with the unknown, we can get pulled into all kinds of bullshit that, you know, we're picking fights, we're doing this, we're afraid. There's also a huge piece in The Moon about endings and echoes. It's connected to Pisces, you know. So very often, when we're in a Moon experience, it can feel like “Oh my god, I've been in this before, what if, what if, what if?”
That's a big part about The Chariot, too. What if I leave The Chariot and everything falls apart? Likely it kind of will so everything can be rebuilt on a much, much more sturdy foundation. We build foundations in Line One so that we can pull them apart and rebuild them. We're not losing anything, we're further strengthening. We're going even further. So I think a lot of the time, when we contend with what it is to be in our own personal Chariot experience, a lot of what-ifs, a lot of unknowns, a lot of brain noise and mental noise can come up.
And that can be really upsetting, can be really disorienting. And so I think it's important to acknowledge that that's a part of this time, too. And to know that it's uncomfortable, but not inappropriate. We're not always supposed to know. We can't always know. It doesn't mean that we leap into any old thing without thinking about potentials and consequences, but it really acknowledges the fact that we don't know with life. There's a lot of things we don't have answers to, to put it mildly. So that's another huge, you know, part of this card.
We can certainly, with The Chariot, look to The Eights as huge Anchors. In The Eights, we are transforming. We're moving out of where we've been, moving into something different and usually way more supportive. But we have to be willing to leave behind what looks really good, but doesn't ultimately serve. We have to be brave enough to enter that forest where the chariot, you know, the road ends and a different path begins, right?
So those are just some of the ways to connect with The Chariot. Of course, because The Chariot is ruled by Cancer, connected to Cancer, we have this, you know, the energy of the crab. We have the energy of this creature that dwells on land and sea that has incredibly tender flesh underneath a hard shell. And that is often kind of a really important and potent way to look at sort of what we're doing in Cancer season, what the Solstice helps to illuminate the work, the great work, we do in The Chariot, right?
[0:38:11]
We're looking at the protective shell. I want to go on record. We're human beings in a world that has a lot of dangers, and there's a lot of things to be frightened about and to be vigilant about. The protective shell helps to keep us alive. We're not talking about shedding the shell, the shell is important. With Cancer, we learn what parts of the shell are crucial, actually important, for our own preservation, for our own retreat.
How do we honor, bow to the shell, and acknowledge that as humans using a crab as a symbol for this idea, you know, what are some parts of the shell that are actually preventing us from moving into much more expansive, supportive territory? You know, what places are we being asked to sort of curve, you know, in, go more within and what places are we being invited to move up and out?
It's not an accident to me that Cancer is the season that we move into winter around in the Southern Hemisphere. You know, that's pretty powerful, because it's absolutely a deep winter energy, one hundred percent. I think it's also really helpful for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, who are going into summertime, summertime and hotter days, there's a lot of reason to sort of curve in and retreat and (Lindsay laughs) not necessarily be up, out, and in it all the time, especially as temperatures rise in many parts of the world to dangerous levels.
[0:40:05]
But energetically, such a powerful archetype. It is a transformer. It births us from one place into another. And I think probably, of all the cards in the Tarot, is one of the most important, because again, it doesn't have the properties of The Tower. The Tower is going to kick your ass out of The Tower (Lindsay laughs), whether you want it to or not, and very often, with The Tower, it's often change that you might not choose, that happens that we have to sort of grapple with, like, “What the fuck and, you know, I didn't want this. I didn't, you know, whatever.” That's sort of part of the makeup of The Tower.
You know, Temperance ending Line Two, it's a big decision. It really is. We can stay sort of stuck in Temperance. If we think about all the folks who, you know, not thinking truly of anybody in particular, but if we think about like the archetype of the spiritual teacher, and somebody who really holds themself in a place of importance and of great wisdom, we never really see them, you know, going through it, you know, dealing with their own stuff, questioning, wondering. Like, it's all very polished.
And, again, truly not judging anybody. I have a lot of compassion, actually. I don't think there's a whole lot of grace for people who are teaching to look like they don't know, because there's an expectation placed on a lot of folks doing that kind of work to kind of like know it all. I don't know what good we're doing to anyone that we are working with if we're not going through what we're going through and sharing about it, but I get it, you know.
And with Temperance, we can stay a little stuck in that kind of up above the head place, wherein Line Three is really the line that'll change the way somebody serves and communicates, sort of taking it out of the conceptual and moving it into the lived in certain ways. But with The Chariot, it's got another flavor and another energy to it. That is, it's very important, very important to go beyond what like looks good, but doesn't work to us, it's not going to look good, after The Chariot for a long time (Lindsay laughs).
[0:42:53]
Like we think, “Oh I’ll go, I'll leave The Chariot. Sure, I'll go into this like, Line Two experience.” It gets real messy before it gets kind of a little bit better looking there. And that, ultimately, that's a part of the soul experience that we're all on, you know. It's not a romanticizing of it. I think that's the reality is that, like, we can say yes to things and then all of a sudden be like, “What the fuck did I do? This was working. Why on earth would I have, you know, moved away from this thing?” That’s sort of all part of The Chariot, too.
And doing so, in the long run, it's usually something that we look back on and think, “Thank god, thank god. I can't believe how much I was giving away. I can't believe how unwilling I was to expand or to branch out of this.” And we don't know it when we're in it. We're just following a whisper, right? But it's so huge to, again, move on that journey and play around with what that looks and feels like to us.
It's a profound moment, to make the decision to leave The Chariot in search of something else, something wild or something broader, something much messier than what we're in currently (Lindsay laughs). But it's a good thing. It's a mess that begets creativity and exploration and so many different things that we might not be in a place to open up to if we didn't have that deeper calling. The Chariot helps us to keep going. It's also, by the way, a profound archetype for personal rediscovery.
[0:44:51]
So yeah, I think that's pretty much all I have to say about this (Lindsay laughs). Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I love talking about this time on the spiral of the year. It's always a really big, important time for me. It might be for you too. It might be nothing for you. It might be way more potent at other times on the Wheel of the Year.
No matter where you are, what you're doing, what you're moving through, how you're getting through this particular day, I hope there will be something inside of this that will be of benefit. I hope that it can be a gentle reminder that we don't need to be pulling Tarot cards every day. We don't need to be engaging with the Tarot in any kind of rigid framework. We don't need to necessarily pull The Chariot to lean into it like a trust fall and let it buoy us, let it help to guide us from where we are to the next destination of our lives. Tarot is with us whether we're actually working with our decks or not. It's medicine and it is here if we choose to lean into it.
So I'm wishing all of you a really beautiful season, a really beautiful Cancer season, Summer/Winter season, a really beautiful Solstice. I don't really know when I'll be back (Lindsay laughs), but you can definitely keep up with whatever new things might be going on on my newsletter. That link is in my show notes.
I mentioned at the top of this episode, there's a little 20% off sale happening on my website. That was planned out a long time ago, a little Wild Soulstice Sale that's happening for the next few days. I think until the 23rd. And I have a new course that, again, was made a while ago about The Court Cards that is coming out in August. And then Heart of Service will be in September and yeah, I might be back before then, might not be. But yeah, sending lots of love to all of you. Please take care of yourselves.
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[Conclusion]
(Instrumental exit music)
[0:47:46]