189. August is Go Your Own Way + New Season Preview!
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New season alert!🚨 The podcast will be back with regular episodes on August 31, and it feels divine! In this special preview episode, we dive into our Anchor Card for the month of August, and talk about the invitational theme for the month ahead. We also dig into Lughnasadh/Lammas, Leo season, the medicine of Strength, additional Anchor Cards to support our work this month, and a question from a listener about how to move through blocks around our spiritual practice.
Air date:
July 29, 2022
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Soul Tarot Courses + Workshops
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, anxiety, surgery/operations, abuse, trauma related to parenthood, oppression, ancestral trauma, chronic illness & pain, loss of life, environmental degradation/climate crisis
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 Loves, just a very quick heads up to let you know that my intuitive business course, Heart of Service is coming back for enrollment in the next month for the month of August. And for my newsletter subscribers only, there's going to be a very, very special, early bird discount for the course from August 1-2. And then from August 3-5, we're going to have a Heart of Service bundle sale where it's going to be kind of bundled up with complimentary courses at a very generous discount, and at some sliding scale prices. And so if you've wanted to participate, if you've wanted to engage with Heart of Service, this is a wonderful opportunity to do so.
Heart of Service is a self-paced, again, as I mentioned, intuitive business course for artists, creatives, and entrepreneurs that opens for enrollment only once per year. The material is centered on spirit-guided service, intuitive business design, and spiralic rhythms of life and creation, presented through audio and video lessons and beautiful workbooks and Tarot spreads and journal prompts and all that goodness. Each week of materials centers, and focuses on, particular Tarot Anchors that will serve as support systems for participants on their course journeys.
It's a really lovely course that I love doing, and I'm very excited to offer again. So I want to encourage anyone listening to this, if you're interested, to sign up for my newsletter at the link in the show notes, if you want to take advantage of the early bird for Heart of Service. I also want to mention that I've started to do early birds and bundle deals for almost all of my offerings this year, and the only people that get access to them are the ones that are on my newsletter. And so if you're interested in such things, I have a bevy of new offerings coming out this year, in the next year. So if you're interested, you can sign up to take advantage of that, and if not, that's fine, too. So, to learn more about it you can go to tarotforthewildsoul.com and just sign up for my newsletter. You can go to the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here.
—
(Instrumental intro music)
[00:02:39]
Welcome to Tarot for the Wild Soul, a 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 Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast. I'm your host, Lindsay Mack and I am just so pleased to be back here with all of you who have missed this community. This is our new season podcast preview. We'll be back officially for regular episodes on August 31.
It does feel so wonderful to be here. I, honestly, when I said goodbye, sincerely didn't know if I would ever be back. I did the same thing with Instagram, and I don't actually think I will ever be back in that space. We’ll see — never say never with me. But wow, does it feel just lovely to be here.
So yeah, I don't actually have much for you in the way of a true preview (Lindsay laughs) of what's to come for the new episodes of this podcast. What I thought I would do, which I think would be so much more welcome than, like, a litany of what we may or may not do, what you may or may not expect with the upcoming season of the podcast, what I thought that we would do is just wade back in the waters of the format that we were kind of leaning into before I left, and talk about the anchor card for the month of August, and answer a listener question, and just really draw in lots of good supportive resources for y'all for the month ahead. And then when we're back for regular episodes, we'll dive into that and all kinds of different fun things. So yeah, I'm happy to be here.
[0:04:37]
For those of you who don't know — I'm pretty sure all of you do — I had a baby over the last few months and have been navigating the kind of unimaginable joy and delight that I feel with becoming a mom and how much I adore my daughter. It feels like those words don't even come close, honestly, to how I feel about her and how it's feeling to be her parent, and how beautiful it is to be co-parenting with Chase, and it's been an enormous joy, and also, for sure, the hardest thing I've ever done.
And how my postpartum in particular has been, as of late, a little less rocky, but for a good several months there included pretty debilitating, postpartum depression, anxiety and OCD, as well as multiple emergency surgeries and complications to those surgeries, and yeah, that were incredibly traumatic, and that were added a wrinkle to parenting and the postpartum flow that was, you know, difficult really doesn't begin to describe it. And I am still — things are so much better now than they were — knock on wood — but I am showing up fair very much in the joy and in the contraction of being in process right now.
So I don't have any, like, not that I ever did before, but I don't have any polish right now. There's no, like, slickness to this podcast (Lindsay laughs) — not that there ever was — but there really isn't, especially for this season and probably from here on out. It's, you know, I'm learning what my work is, what my work as an artist is, what my creation process is like being a parent, and like, even just sitting down to write an email is so different than it was before. And what this podcast is, is, I'm sure, gonna be similar to what it was before, and yet different because of that. And so, I'm just excited to be on the journey with all of you, and to just sort of show up in a lot of honesty, you know.
There's so many things that I'm absolutely loving about being a parent. And as a survivor of childhood abuse at the hands of a parent, well, nothing could have prepared me for how much trauma comes up in the face of my care for my child. And I knew it was going to be hard at my age with the amount of chronic pain I have to move through pregnancy and birth and postpartum, but I had no idea (Lindsay laughs) how hard it would be to navigate chronic injury, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, with a little baby; I just didn't. So I thought it was chronic pain before. Now, it's very different.
And so yeah, there's just, I, again, I'm showing up with a great deal of humility, in total, middle-point process, and probably will be here for the rest of my life, but especially now, because this transition, this identity shift is so new. Yeah, it's just, it's wild. So anyway, I've said this 90 times now, but excited and also curious to, to be in process with all of you in real time. So thank you for being here (Lindsay laughs), and I probably won't talk too much about my experience with parenthood and motherhood, but also might. So we'll see. We'll see. So it's a little bit about what's been going on. But for now, for this moment, we're kind of going to transition into the flow of the episode and just dive into all the goodness because there's a lot of it.
[0:09:45]
So the theme, the Invitational theme, for the month of August is “Go Your Own Way.” So beyond it being just a great song, it popped in very quickly after pulling the Anchor Card for the month ahead, which is King of Wands. And I feel like there's a multi-pronged approach to how to look to this theme as a helper for the month ahead.
So “go your own way” doesn't necessarily mean that we're shunning support, that we are turning away from community. What it means, the spirit of this invitational theme, is trust and honor your own unique flow. Trust and honor, as best as you can, the pace, the rhythm, the ideas, the again, flow that you want to organically move on.
Now, let's be realistic here: do all of us have the opportunity to, like, sleep in when we want to? No. Do we have the opportunity to sort of, like, not engage with the things that require our attention, things that we are attending to that we are responsible for? Many of us do not have that option to sort of put those off of our plate, to offload them to someone else, nor do we even maybe want to.
Going our own way means that, in the best way we can, understanding that it's a moving fluid experience, we are being as present as we can with where we're at today, with regard to what we are tending to, working on, responsible for. So what that means is that this month, especially, we have the opportunity to nourish and nurture a deeper relationship with ourselves and our bodies as the month progresses. We don't need to love and be in love with our bodies to do this. I'm not, and I try to honor this as much as possible, like I'm nowhere near that.
[0:12:11]
Sometimes it's normal to not like it. It's normal to want to do something, and to kind of have our bodies say, “No, thank you.” It's normal to kind of have our bodies say, “I would like to do this,” and have us go, “Ugh,” right (Lindsay laughs)? So it's a co-collaboration, and we're allowed to have our feelings about that, right? It's not about, like, some ridiculous, unattainable idea of like, we're going to be in perfect, sacred harmony with the body ,with whatever. It's just gentle, super gentle, super, super present, as best as we can, doing the best we can. Right?
So again, we're not turning away, we're allowing ourselves to go our own way, trusting that where we turn in those paths and forest, the resources, the support systems, the inner wisdom that we need, we can call upon it. It doesn't always mean that it'll drop right in; might mean that we have to ask for it. It might mean that we have to be very direct about what we want.
How might you give yourself the opportunity to play with this? So here, here's some of the ways that this might look for some of you: if you are somebody who takes everything on, who does it all, who's maybe a little uncomfortable, asking for help, or admitting that you feel a little overwhelmed or a little scared, this month might be an opportunity for you to ask for help and to be honest about how vulnerable that feels and maybe to be willing to explore a little bit about when that started for you. You know, where did you first maybe remember or observe identifying more as somebody who helps, rather than someone who has helped, right?
For some of you, for some of us, that might mean acknowledging, like, “This was a survival response for me, because I didn't have appropriate caretakers and enough caretakers who were present or in their right mind.” For others of us, this is a generational thing. This is a huge community trauma. This is something related to an inequity, to, you know, whatever it might be, you know. How can we hold that while gently beginning to even consider that we might be able to feel into something a little different? Maybe we can play with it.
[0:15:18]
I think in wellness, there's just like — and I've been so guilty of this, by the way, so I’m calling myself out — there's such a like, emphasis on “clear out the old, evolve into the new, and then like, never look back” (Lindsay laughs). Like that, I don't know, I've been realizing lately like that, I don't know that that's truly — maybe with some things — but it's all a spiral, right? So we can be gentle, we can try something, we can be like, “Oh, I was good at asking for help here on this day,” and inevitably, it's lifelong work, right? It's lifelong work. And I feel like we owe it to ourselves to be gentle inside of that. So that's one way it might look.
Another way might be that it's about opening up to the fact that we want to go and create, or date or be social, or do something else maybe more than what we're used to. And like, that's great, too. We can go our own way, that way, too. Right? Going our own way does not mean that we're alone; going our own way means that we honor the deeper call — the call of the heart, the call of the body. It means that we flow with our rhythms. If that means we're going a little slower, a little softer, whatever feelings come up around that, we can acknowledge and hold them. But can we honor the fact that the slowness, that desire for slowness, is present? Can we honor that? As best as we're able to, if we want to go a little faster, if we want to really move into that place of expressing ourselves, existing in the world, as much as is safe or as we're able to, how can we honor that, as best as we can, in a way that feels appropriate and tangible and accessible to us? It's about really honoring how we want to flow and how we want to go.
[0:17:32]
If we can start with that, you know, kind of linking up to wherever you might be right now, the King of Wands, and by extension, this invitational theme, can really be of some great benefit, because it can add a little bit of gentleness and take a little bit more pressure off to kind of have it all done and all figured out. We're just feeling into, like, what do we want to do? And how are the ways in which we kind of shrink or kind of don't do, because maybe we're afraid, maybe we don't want the attention, maybe we don't want, like whatever, right? Like I'm in it with you, right. We've all got our things.
King of Wands. King of Wands is, first and foremost, a trailblazer. And let's simplify that, because the idea of a trailblazer, I feel a lot of like pressure and intensity with that. When you think about like blazing a trail, I think about like, you know, I got to try to do it differently from everyone, I got to try to like, ugh, and it's a lot of pressure, it is, to kind of like, you know. That's a go your own way that I felt like it was very laden with expectations that I'm not available for. So for you, it might be interesting, but I'm not into it.
So let me break down what I mean by Trailblazer: I believe that somebody who actually blazes a trail is just somebody who is brave enough, courageous enough — because boy, does it take courage — to be able to say, “This is what I do. This is how I do it. This is the rhythm that I do it at, and you can come and be a part of it or not, and that's okay,” right? It's someone who is willing to do and flow with what actually feels good.
Now again, we're like living in the world on planet Earth in 2022. Do we all get to do what we want to do and every moment of the day? Absolutely not. So again, accessibility, we're talking about what we have access to and for, we're talking about the place in our lives that, really, this kind of clicks into, make sense for us.
So for example, I obviously know not everybody dates, feels romantic or sexual attraction, and or whatever. Meaning some folks experience romantic attraction, some folks experience sexual, some do both, some do one or the other. So when we think about like, an example of dating, a King of Wands Anchor might, if you're somebody who you're like, “I don't want to online date. Like, I'd like to meet somebody, but I don't want to do it.” King of Wands can be someone, can be an Anchor that you call upon to trust in the fact that you don't want to do it.
So play around with not doing it, and acknowledge that underneath that desire to not do it, there might be a lot of panic and a lot of worry, like, “Should I? am I going to miss out?” What would it be like to like, sit with the feelings, rather than try to bypass them by doing what you don't want to do, and kind of moving away from the discomfort underneath it? And the opposite is true. If, you know, if you feel like, “Well, I really, really want to meet new friends. I really want to meet someone or a partner or a lover or whatever, you know, how can I? How can I lean in, maybe? If there's a desire to do so, how can I trust in that?”
That is blazing a trail in your own life. We don't need to leave big, giant legacies, we don't need to have all this pressure, we don't need to live our King of Wands-ness in a way that is like for everyone to see or that is palatable for everybody. We're doing it our own way. And when we're able to click into that — and again, this is lifelong work, so this is just an invitation — the doors are open this month for some solidification and deepening in this area. But trust and believe that we'll be doing this work beyond August 2022 (Lindsay laughs) for some time.
But I say all this because that's what it is to blaze a trail: a controlled burn, a controlled blaze. In the forest of our own hearts, that's what it is to lean into this work. Right? That's what it is to open to this. So it's about allowing ourselves that, just the gentle, the gentlest waves lapping up on the shore, noticing the flow of the currents, like how can we just let this currents guide us, and be with what arises from that level of willingness, right? That's what this month is really about. That's the invitation of this month. That's what we're being invited, encouraged to explore a little bit.
[0:23:07]
So again, King of Wands is a Court Card and Anchor Card for those who really do desire to kind of move into a place of, of courageous play, of sovereignty, of being themselves, and of finally permissioning themselves to do the thing they kind of have always wanted to do but have been afraid to do; have been afraid to fail, have maybe been afraid to shine too big or too bright, to be afraid of whatever, right? To try it, to try the thing, to just be like, “What if I just didn't pretend I didn't give a shit about this at all, and just tried to do the thing?” Right? As long as we're not harming anyone or ourselves, and as long as we are holding fast to the truth that lives within us to that to that deeper rhythm, why not try, right? Why not try going our own way following our own path?
One of the ways that I really love — because we're not doing any follow up episodes of supportive Anchor Cards to kind of hold the intention of our work with King of Wands — one of the most supportive things for me, personally, if I pull a King for myself, and if the question I've asked is sort of how can I Anchor into this King, or how can I Anchor into something, and I pull a King, when I think about what I'm doing with the King, it really helps me to call upon the Courts that are surrounding it — not below it, but surrounding it, because I don't really believe that there's like a hierarchy in the Court Cards. And I'm actually I'd be doing a course about this near Samhain, near Halloween, that I'm very excited to do. It's brand new. Yeah, so to be a King of Wands, to really embody that sense of willingness to kind of let be, let ourselves be a living embodiment of the willingness to kind of do our own thing, we need Queen of Wands, we need an access point to our own magic.
[0:25:35]
There is a lot in Queen of Wands that is pretty intense, that involves us decoupling from kind of being in the root system of other cultures, that involves us moving away from any kind of appropriation, that involves us feeling slowly, slowly back into our own magic, our own sense of connection with Spirit that's felt differently from from person-to-person, and is, again, fraught with a tremendous amount of trauma, especially for those of us who don't have direct access to our ancestry or where our ancestors came from. And there are a whole range of reasons why that might be, most of them painful in nature.
So for those of us who do have the privilege of having some sense, we can feel more fully into that. For those of us who don't have a direct or linear sense, we can start kind of nosing our way into the feel of it, into the sense of it into calling upon, you know, the helpers, that can bring us a little closer to that sense.
Queen of Wands is about honoring and believing in our own magic. This is, you know, the Witch of the Tarot, and a lot of us have a lot of stuff, a lot of material around that word. And I know even for myself feeling like, “Well, I'm not magical enough. I'm not intuitive enough.” Like, those wounds are very great, and very deep for many of us. And Queen of Wands is a balm for that.
Queen of Wands says that you are. Like, you are magical enough, you are intuitive enough, you you have these things inside of you. How they are meant to be expressed through you might be different than the person next to you, than the person that you see, like, on social, than the person that you're comparing yourself to. What's your way, right?
[0:27:57]
Knight of Wands helps us to feel into the compass of movement that's sovereign, right? Knights are all about movement, very specifically about rhythms, a pace that we occupy ourselves in, that we kind of sink into. And Knight of Wands is very much like: do you live how you want, embody yourself how you want, exist how you want, flow how you want, to the degree that you have control over and are able to do so?
Page of Wands is really the root, the seed of all the work we do with the Knight, Queen, King. It's really the root system that holds the tree up. That's how we can look at the Pages. Page of Wands says: I want to do things with all parts of me. I don't want to live and create an and take action in the world without my body coming with me. I want to live in a way that honors what's in my energetic cup today and not try to force, not try to go too far. I want to check in before I move forward.
I've always felt, really, a great sense of helpfulness in, for example, the Smith Rider-Waite Court Card image of the Page of Wands. I like the fact that the Page of Wands, in that deck, it's the first being, the first human, that's actually looking at the wand and regarding it with some kind of co-collaboration, some kind of willingness to collaborate. Because Wands in Soul Tarot are really representative of like, our energetic capacity, like what we what we are doing with her energy, how we're working with our adrenals with our body, there's something very powerful to me, very much.
I think there's a huge, there's a very big bridge from the Ten of Wands to the Page of Wands that, because we move through the journey from Ace to Ten of Wands, we're able to move much more gracefully into the realm with the Page. And I think the Page really sets a different tone and says, “I want to do things with all of me. I don't want to work against, I don't want to work in spite of, I want to be with.” So there's an embracing, right? There's an embracing that happens with this card that I think is very powerful. And without it, without all of these Courts, we can't do the kind of blazing of trails, so to speak, that we do in the King, you know.
So I would recommend this month, as you navigate this invitational theme, if it resonates with you at all, and working with this Anchor Card, and what this Anchor Card, you know, the King of Wands means to you, personally, which might be very different from what I'm speaking about, I would encourage you to feel into your relationship with the subsequent Courts, with the other Wands Court Cards around it and see: like, are there any gaps here for me? Like, are there any places where I sort of spoke about a little bit of the Courts that feel harder, that feel more challenging, that feels like maybe a little bit more bumpy, rather than smooth? And if so, how can we turn our attention to that with a lot of compassion and care, you know.
[0:31:46]
So, a lot to be said for this invitational theme, and some of it is because there's a very big, there’s a pretty big blast of energy that we come into the month of August with Lughnasadh, or Lammas, which we sort of honor and acknowledge around the first of August. This is the harvest festival. There's a huge amount of fruit and of, you know, kind of a bounty of late summer food and, you know, the harvesting of the grain, traditionally. And again, traditionally, on Lammas, some of that grain was left uncut, some of that grain was left as an offering in many ways.
But there's something really powerful about Lughnasadh. There is a teeing up, not just where it's the depth of summer, the highest point or the deepest point of summer — for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. It's also, symbolically, a really strong, like pulling back almost on the slingshot. We're getting ready for something, we're harvesting something.
This is an indication of an opportunity for us to enjoy and cherish and feast upon what we've toiled and worked so hard to create. So some of it is a relief, like when we get a really much needed haircut. We just feel like, you know, like a million times lighter. There's a beauty in being able to cut and clear. There's some of that, that we're going to cut and clear that's going to go on the compost pile, inevitably.
So when we think about this idea of going our own way and leaning into King of Wands, I know for myself, I don't know whether or not it's postpartum, being a parent, having my priorities be very shifted, there are just certain things I cannot believe I was doing before. Like, I can't believe I cared about, I can't believe mattered to me. And then I simply don't have any bandwidth, any space to take on anymore. So those are certain things that are gonna go on the compost pile for me this month. And you might feel the same way, even if you're not a parent? It might be that you're like, “Oh, my God, I can't do this anymore.” All of us are so exhausted and burned out from the last few years and most of us from way beyond the last few years. These are hard times right now.
So what does not serve? What can go on that compost pile? What can we thank, you know, and appreciate and clear up for ourselves, you know? That's also a part of going our own way, so we don't constantly try to turn back and go someone else's way, or the way that someone else is going, or the way we think we should be going. So, a lot of power in that, right? There's that.
And, obviously, with harvesting, we get to feast, we get to enjoy, we get to prepare. What are some seeds you want to set in the ground now for yourself, for the months ahead? What are some things that you can relieve yourself of? What are some things you can say, “Hell yeah, I want to do this. Let's do it,” and not even just give it a shot, you know?
So, Lughnasadh, I'm not obviously diving into too much historically, or even in terms of the folk traditions of Lammas and Lughnasadh, but it's a really powerful, as all of the cross holidays are, it's a very, very powerful way to sort of honor the coming into, you know, this month that I think really sets us up for a pretty strong, again, cycle ahead with all the work that it's inviting us into.
[0:35:59]
Also, in the month of August, you know, we move from Leo to Virgo. We moved from Strength to The Hermit. And Leo season, while very powerful in a number of different ways, ruled by The Sun, obviously, August is a very, I think it's a month that holds a lot of activation for those of us, especially, since, in so many parts of the world in August now, there are enormous heat waves, there's tremendous loss of life and forest fires. There's definitely in, as we continue to move further and further into the climate crisis, there's a lot, I think, about Leo season in August that can actually be pretty impactful in terms of activation, and in terms of our relationship with The Sun and with heat. I just feel like there's an opportunity to acknowledge that, so I'm going to.
So moving from this idea of the Sun to Virgo of Leo to Virgo, of the Sun to Mercury, it's a pretty big one this month and pretty strong. And our work, really, in Leo season is to turn toward the lion, the symbolic lion; to turn toward the thing that feels maybe scary or challenging or difficult, that feels like a bit of a burden, that feels like something that we, traditionally, maybe kind of want to avoid. And in doing so, there can be a transformation. There typically is a transformation because, really, all that lion wants is to be tended to and paid attention to, straight up. All that lion within us wants is to be acknowledged. We don't have to fix it. We don't have to solve it. We don't have to make it go away. We just need to say, yeah, there's a lot of fear here. Yeah, I see you, I'm willing to see you. How can we move forward together in respect for one another? That's all we have to do. And in turn, that lion within us feels safe to say: I am scared. Here are the reasons why.
For me, the “lion” is me. It's not something outside of me, it's me. It's part of my mind or my brain or my little kid. It's a worry that I have or whatever it might be. It usually does go back to my inner kid being afraid of something, or it's something that feels kind of monstrous that once I actually am willing to turn and face it and sit with it for a bit, I'm realizing it is a fear, is something that is the little part of me, or is something that my mind has built up because it's so worried about protecting me in some way; protecting me from failure, trouble or whatever that it deems as “problematic.”
So we just want to be really gentle with that, and that is some of the work that we do. The Sun shines a lot of light on that. It's like a magnifying glass that can help to burn away quite a bit. And so we want to be gentle. We want to call upon some cooling anchors here. We want to go slow. We want to honor, right? It's um… and it doesn't mean that we can't kind of, like, be intense, that we can't be quick, that we can't be blunt. Gentleness looks and feels different for all of us. So we get to, we even get to reclaim that as well. So, just a little bit for the month ahead, hopefully it resonates. And if not, and even if it does, I encourage you to just continue to dive on in, and feel into what's true for you.
[0:40:22]
And then, to wrap up our episode, I'm going to answer a question that was that somebody named Sunny wrote in with. So Sunny asks:
How can I come back to my practice?
I find myself so easily distracted, torn asunder by even the smallest task. I feel most whole when I turn to my deck or my faith, but it can feel a lot like trying to make it to Oz.
How do you manage to integrate it all? How do you stay on track?
Thank you immensely for your consideration.
I love you for asking this question, Sunny, because I feel like you're asking it for all of us. I don't have, it’s the same thing for me. Really, it truly is. And I think for most of us, this is a deep… I know I feel deeply seen by this question (Lindsay laughs), and I'm sure other people do, as well. So I want to start just simply with that, with letting you know you're not alone, and letting you know that that feeling of like trying to make it to Oz, that, you know, almost like swimming upstream, you're so not alone in at all. And, you know, seeing you, acknowledging you, bowing to you in that because yeah, very, very universal, I think.
I will share because you asked me, specifically, like how do I manage to integrate it all, and how do I stay on task, I'm assuming you want my experience. I'll share my experience with you. I let my relationship with God or Spirit or whatever works for you, my faith, and my relationship with the Tarot, conform to where I'm at today. Like, I don't try to… There are times where certain aspects of a Tarot practice or an alignment with Spirit, a relationship with Spirit, is out of access for me. It's not sustainable, it's not accessible.
And this could be because I am very busy. It could be because my family needs me. It could be because different aspects of my life are calling out for my attention. It could be that I'm, you know, in bed for most of the day because of an injury or whatever, or a flare. Or it could just simply be that I don't have the time, you know. And there are times where I'm too triggered, actually, to go to my deck in a superlinear way, or I'm too angry with Spirit (Lindsay laughs) to like, call upon them.
[0:43:21]
So I share all these different things, because every day I think is a little bit different. And what I think I'm sensing into, into your question, is that you may be — and only you can know if this is true. So if it's not true, just feel free to throw it away — you might be feeling this sense of frustration because you're trying to make a certain kind of practice happen for you. And it seems like when you can come to your deck and Spirit that it feels wonderful for you. So what I would encourage you to try to play with is just what would it be like to just let it be integrated right into the fabric of your life, that there would be no separation between how you're just living and how you move into oneness with those things, and maybe, here's an example:
You don't have to go to an altar space or to a separate room to like tune in and pull a card. What would it be like while, you know, the baby is playing, or while you're in the middle of a work day, or while you're busy doing XYZ, to just put a hand on your deck, close your eyes and just say, “What am I being invited to know at this moment?” And just pulling a card and, like, just being with it?
What would it be like in the moment, rather than excusing yourself or needing to kind of separate, what would it be like to just say, just tune in and say, “Spirit, XYZ. Spirit, I have a question. Spirit is it in alignment to do XYZ?” There are certain seasons of life where that is the way, that is the practice, that there is. Absolutely, it's just folded right in. It's just folded right in, into the flow of the day; there's no separateness. And then there are times where it is appropriate to like, sort of come to the practice, right?
So I would say, make it easier for yourself. Make it easier, because there is no right way to engage with whatever we might call Spirit or our inner self or our little kid or the Tarot. There is no right way. And as matter of fact, I do feel like sometimes — and I welcome a healthy disagreement, not to go back and forth with anyone, but totally fine if you don't feel this way. In other words, it's okay for us to disagree on this.
I actually think sometimes the overemphasis on, like, there's gotta be an altar, we've got to clear our decks, we've got to make sure we don't feel any emotion that's tumultuous or anything, it is actively pulling us away from where the real medicine is, with a relationship with Spirit, and with a relationship with the Tarot, which is like, we should be able to tune in with it when times are really choppy when, when shit is rough, when we've got no time, when we're just kind of like, there, right? Like, we're just, we're just here. We're where we are. We're waiting in the car while our baby naps. We’re, you know, waiting in line, we’re sick again, we’re you know, whatever it is like.
So maybe play with what it might be like to take some of the pressure off and see what it might be like to kind of rewild, reclaim, a practice and a sense of oneness with these things that you so cherish, that can just be a lot more casual, that can come with you in your distraction. Like, can you just let yourself what would what would it be like to tune in with your deck while distracted? I think that's okay. What would it be like to get really granular about it, and to go to your deck and say: is there anything I'm being invited to pay attention to inside of this distraction? Is there medicine for me in this distraction?
[0:47:49]
You describe yourself as being “torn asunder by even the smallest task.” I know, for me, personally, I feel that way when I'm really overwhelmed, right? When I feel overwhelmed, small things are like, “Oh, my God!” and I don't have space to click over into Spirit, you know (Lindsay laughs). And then there are other times where I have to actually say, “I'm turning all of these other things off, and I'm just going to sit with myself,” whatever that means.
So I would just encourage you to explore it, to play with it, but to know that you're not alone and to know that it is possible, I believe, for you to create a really nurturing connection with yourself, with your faith, with your deck. Even when you feel very distracted, like, how can you let those things come with you and be of support to you inside of what you're dealing with, inside of what you're living with right now.
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[Conclusion]
[0:48:51]
So I think that's it for today. Thank you, Sunny, thank you to Chase for editing this episode. Thank you to all of you. I'm very excited, looking forward to reconnecting with all of you on August 31 when the podcast officially starts back up again. And until that time, please take exquisite care of yourselves.
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(Instrumental exit music)