192. What is Spiralic Tarot? + Working with Justice
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Today on the pod, Lindsay dives into the tenets of Spiralic Tarot, exploring it as a Soul Tarot concept that can help to liberate our Tarot readings, bring them more into the present moment, and allow them to pivot from the conceptual to the deeply personal. Lindsay also answers a listener question about Justice, and how we can clarify what it is inviting us into when it comes up in a reading.
Air date:
August 31, 2022
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About the Episode
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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: postpartum, parenthood, mental illness, trauma, depression, medical emergency, and labor/childbirth
The content in this episode contains references to postpartum, parenthood, mental illness, trauma, depression, medical emergency, and labor/childbirth. We have done our best to identify difficult subject matter, but the labels may not be comprehensive for your personal needs. Please honor your knowing and proceed with necessary self-awareness and care.
Transcript
[Introduction]
[0:00:05]
Welcome to Tarot for the Wild Soul, a podcast that explores the Tarot through an inclusive, soul-centered, trauma-informed perspective for growth, healing, and evolution. I'm your host, Lindsay Mack.
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Hello Loves and welcome back to Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast. I am your host, Lindsay Mack, and as always, it is a total joy to be gathered here with all of you. In this episode of the pod, I thought that I would actually talk about a concept that I have talked about a lot, has been in a ton of my offerings, I've taught workshops on it, it's the name of my new offering (Lindsay laughs) that is a channeled Tarot download for the season, the seasons ahead, and the Wheel of the Year. It's also, again, a concept and one of the structure points of Soul Tarot, and I've never actually sort of endeavored to explain exactly what it is. So, I thought I would do that today, and that is Spiralic Tarot.
So essentially—well, I'm actually going to pause there and bring up like, why is this useful and why is it important? Because I think when we are willing to work with and look to Tarot spiralically, it can lift quite a bit of pressure and worry and intensity off of the mantle of our practice. And I also believe—with humility—that Tarot, actually, innately behaves sporadically. And when we can kind of understand that, at least are willing to consider that, it can really, again, offer a very deep sigh of relief to our practice in places that it might feel a little crunchy or a little crunched, and it can allow our natural process and a more, much more natural, nurturing dialogue between us our decks and Spirit to emerge.
So what do I mean by reading Tarot spiralically? Essentially, what I mean is that we are coming to the Tarot with exactly what is happening right now for us, the deep, internal, heart core of the moment; not what's up over here, not what's up over there, but what's present. We're reading Tarot for what is, “is” with a capital I. What's going on inside of us in the grittiest, clearest, truest sense. It's more challenging and more uncommon than you might realize to spend attention and energy getting down into what that core is because a great deal, at least in the past, of the way Tarot was taught, where it was focused on, like, what's coming, how can we read for the next cycle—we do some of that. There's a sense of Monthly Medicine, like we're looking at the month as a whole—but if you notice, with my Monthly Medicines, the only thing we're ever really talking about is the invitation. I'm never talking about what's going to happen, what's going to occur, what might happen, because we don't actually know; the future is not fixed, period.
[0:03:54]
There are some things that might come in, that we might get a very strong sense on, personally or collectively, and that is so valid, and it's still not fixed—nothing is fixed. The only thing we've got in this whole world is what is present. That's it. And if we are willing to come into that, the spiral can start to move, then it can open us up to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. If we are willing to come to our decks with what is, we will get really honest responses. Here's an example of what I'm talking about, and again, I will relate this to why the spiralic. I will explain that, and I believe I've offered an example related to this either on this podcast or in a course and forgive me because I just simply can't remember right now.
But if I come to my deck, and if I'm learning, like, what is Tarot and what is all this? What does it mean to me? And if I'm coming to my deck and saying—and by the way, this question is wonderful, so I don't want anyone to think like, “Oh shit, should I not be pulling with this question?” because like, yes, yes, of course, you can. This is just to offer a gentle example about the difference if we're talking about reading Tarot spiralically.
If we come to the Tarot, and we say, “What's my card for the week ahead?” and we pull The Moon. That is incredibly valid. That's the way many of us read, and it's great, and there is medicine in pulling like that, right? Because we can think, okay, this is an Anchor that I can work with. It's an invitation, doesn't necessarily mean the whole week will feel like The Moon, or maybe it will. But usually what happens is that we can be in a place where if we're learning, we can go to a book and read about it and think, oh, my goodness, like, okay. And it can feel not super personal sometimes. It can feel like, “Well, this is what this person said about this card, and I don’t feel that way. Is something coming that's gonna change, or is my experience…?” It can bring up confusion, and it can seem sort of at an arm's length, right? Sometimes not, sometimes it is so resonant and so clear, and so beautiful. So, you know, not at all.
[0:06:30]
Here's the difference: and really, actually, I think both of them can exist independently of each other, but if we pull them in like that, there might be a spark, there might be some gorgeous clarity there for us, and it might click and create intimacy and relational depth between us in this card by pulling it around a little bit more of a wider angle lens, sort of, in terms of our question.
But let's say we're just having a moment where nothing feels clear, we sort of feel like we're a bit in the void, and it's tripping off our nervous system. It's making us feel like we're not safe. We're having all of these weird memories of another time where this happened, and everything went to shit, and it feels the same. If we go to our decks, and sit with that feeling, rather than asking what the next week will bring, or what the next thing is that will come, or asking around the feeling, or trying to calm the feeling down so we can somehow get to the heart of the truth, reading Tarot spiralically means that we start with that feeling; that we actually talk about it, before we pull.
We say something to the effect of “Higher self or Spirit,” or just speak or think, “I feel so triggered, and I feel like X, Y, Z and this is my sense. And it seems like something old is coming in, and it feels kind of scary. How might I tend to myself through this feeling?” If we pull a card and we get The Moon that really opens up a plethora of opportunities to build a much, much deeper and more intimate connection with the Tarot as a whole and that card, right? And if we pull that, that's not saying, “Oh, you're in The Moon, or this or that or this will happen.”
What is the medicine of working with The Moon? We float in that ocean in the middle of the night. We don't know if we're near the shore, we don't know if we're out at sea, we don't really know where we are. We're just floating, we don't really know what's under the surface. It is, in and of itself, pretty uncomfortable to the nervous system. Now if we really want to dive in, we can quite literally dive under the surface and go into the subconscious and go into dreams and go into those deep, Piscean waters and explore with a trusted processor, or friend, or by ourselves. It's an invitation to understand that we have the opportunity of floating above a great depth within ourselves, and we can explore that.
[0:09:45]
How might we engage with that in the moment? Maybe it brings us into a place of incredible grief and incredible acknowledgment: “This is really uncomfortable, and it's unknown, and I hate this feeling.” It might bring us back into some things that we reclaim and uncover for ourselves that are hugely beautiful. It might help us to acknowledge—you know, Michelle, who is a teacher that I've, you know, worked with for a little while, she speaks about a lot of the time how the mind—obviously, this is not just her, many people have said similar things, but in a very different way—that if we think of the mind or the brain like a filing cabinet, it doesn't actually have a lot of folders in that filing cabinet. So the mind tends to put things in places that it doesn't necessarily belong.
So if something “feels” like a past time, we might associate the two, when in fact, it's totally different. We might have a completely different life, set of circumstances, set of friends, or support systems that we didn't have before. So The Moon can actually help us to dive in to where the mind might be placing two things together and creating echoes of the past where that's actually not true, but the feeling is there. So we can tend the feeling, right?
Whenever we show up to the Tarot, with what we've got, with what is, the spiral really opens up. And what ultimately does the spiral represent? I mean, it's one of the most, if not the most ancient symbols in a cross-cultural way. There are examples of spirals on stones, and in burial sites, and on sacred sites, literally, all over the world. And it represented so many different things to so many cultures, obviously. And I am not educated enough to speak on that, so I will not. But what do we come back to with a spiral? Life moves in a spiral, it does not move in a straight line. Labor is not linear, we don't go into labor and immediately have a baby. There are, we push, there's an expanse, and then there's a contraction, right?
We contract, and then we expand a little bit. We move into a different season, we have bursts of, you know, from moving from summer to fall, with bursts of incredibly hot days before it might ultimately get colder. That is spiralic. We don't go from one thing to another thing, into another thing, in this sort of linear, clear path. There's mystery. There's curves, there are things that come up along the way that kick off the next curve, and the next and the next. It's things that we don't necessarily see that might take us by surprise. The key is that we only are where we are in the spiral. We're always at that center point, always building the spiral around us as we continue to stay in that center.
So reading Tarot spiralically and the qualities of spiralic Tarot mean that the Tarot evolves and curves along with us, that we actually don't necessarily go with the Tarot to “What is the answer to this question?”, and then the next and then the next and then the next. It's: what am I moving through right now? How can I tend to that? We pull a card. How might I deepen into that card? We pull another card. How might that card deepen into the next one? And we're just curving around and building this beautiful web of support, growing and evolving and tending to ourselves through our pulls. It means that we're starting with what is and allowing both the small and the larger picture of our Tarot practice to expand from there.
[0:14:05]
So one, we can only really sense into what's here because it's quite literally the only thing that is, and it's the only thing we have really any control over. And both the Tarot—and Spirit, by extension—typically only really give us stuff on a need-to-know basis. So some of us might get a very clear picture. There have absolutely been times where I've gotten sort of a heads up about something and then other times where I have not, and other times where I know something that's very challenging isn't quite “finished yet”, and that's very challenging to live through, and yet I don't really have details. So all I can really do is be in the spiralness.
We're not trying to make Tarot make sense. We're not trying to cut through that spiral and straighten it out. We're not trying to get Tarot to tell us how to bypass that discomfort or that evolution or just what is. We're using it as a tool through what's coming up. Really, how I think Tarot can be its most spiralic self is by acknowledging the fact that life is spiralic. We don't grow in a straight line, we don't live linearly. We live, grow, heal spiralically.
Everything is a spiral: the weather, the seasons, life, birth, death. Everything is a spiral, there is nothing that is not. Nothing. And when we attempt to read linearly, read the Tarot linearly, which is, I think, most of the way that Tarot has previously been taught, which is perfectly fine, that's, you know, that's okay. But very limiting, as a tool for our growth, for our evolution, for our continued understanding.
What about those of us who are often sick? What about those of us who are going through a huge life transition and regular readings don't feel hugely accessible? What if we're going through a time where we don't really want to be with our decks? All of that is an example of reading spiralically.
Linear means we go to the deck every morning, we journal, da-da-da, or maybe not. Maybe you have your own version of this. And again, that's cool, that's beautiful. But chances are, there's going to be a moment where you're not going to do that, or there's going to be a time in your life where you're too busy, or a season of your life where you can't bear to pull the same fucking card, again and again and again (Lindsay laughs), when you cannot receive the Tarot one more day. So you say, “Fuck it, I'm not going to my deck.” That's reading spiralically, too.
[0:16:58]
When I was in the depths of my early postpartum, the absolute, deepest valley of my life, I never touched my deck, because I was tired of pulling The Moon reverse every day, every goddamn day. And I was tired after hospital visits and after mystery health problems that were so intensely scary and painful, of pulling X, Y, Z. Instead, what was helpful for me and how the Tarot accompanied me through that valley, was that every day, every day, whether I was in the dark rocking my daughter, or I was sitting on my couch, or I was eating or whatever, in a way that I can't truly explain to you, every day The Tower, The Star, and The Moon showed up. Every day, I was reminded. Every day we talked about—Chase and I, my husband—that what we were going through was exactly that: Tower to Star to Moon. For some reason, even talking about it, I find myself getting emotional for reasons that I don't understand. I wasn't pulling—I was pulling The Moon a lot—but I wasn't pulling those cards all the time, and yet they were there. I didn't have to pull them. That's also a part of Tarot Anchoring, which is really just being able to plug into the Tarot in a way that is deckless.
The Tarot follows you, it's spiralic, it's flexible, it's not linear. It doesn't have to be connected to something, you know? And it can also plug into a system like the seasons, like the astrological wheel. It means that the Tarot is free to follow us anywhere, but it means that we have to let it take different forms. There is no question that the souls of those cards, that that particular journey from Tower to Star to Moon. Now I feel like I'm finally in The Sun part of the journey, which is really great. There's a lot more perspective, there's a lot more of I'm in a different part of the landscape, and I'm sort of looking back at the valley and going like, holy shit, you know, like I moved through that. That's really intense.
So there's something about that, that they come to us, absolutely. These cards come to us, certain cards do. We don't necessarily have to pull them. I hope that makes sense to folks. If you're like, “I don't fucking get it.” I invite you to think about a time when without pulling a card you kind of felt like you were in a card, felt like you were in a season with a card, or maybe you were pulling and pulling and pulling and pulling the same card over and over, and maybe were like, “I don't understand this. Like, why? What are you trying to tell me?”
Do you think you could maybe look back on that time in general or even the card in question? Do you have any more perspective now, today, on why that card might have been showing up for you in that season of your life?
[0:20:29]
Spiralic means flexible, it means unpredictable. It's wild. The Tarot is wild. There's a reason that this shit is called Tarot for the Wild Soul. It's not some hippie-dippie—not that that's a problem—totally New Age sense of like, wild is intense, it is rugged, it is untamed, it's fierce, it's complex. The soul is the truth of us. It's the part of that deep whisper inside of the larger hole of who we are. It's Tarot that nourishes and turns up the volume on that part of us. And that part of us is innately spiralic.
And anybody in this, anyone listening to this, who has experienced illness, trauma, depression, anything, we know that we have really hard days, really okay days, hard days, again, good days, hard days, good days. Sometimes the bad days come most strongly right before there's more perspective on something. Sometimes there's just bad days, and we don't necessarily know why—that is also a part of the spiral. It's not because we're going backward or we did anything wrong. We are continuing to go forward; it's impossible not to when you're in a spiral, impossible.
So because we can only be with what's here, when we pivot to what's here and let the Tarot come along with it, it naturally opens us up to a different rhythm and a different potential of connection with our readings and the cards that we pull. And again, spirals are the rhythm, they are the patterning of growth, of seasons, of the nature of the life-death-rebirth cycle, in and of itself. And when we tap into that rhythm with the Tarot, when we let the Tarot ebb and flow with where we are, whether we're pulling or not, we come home to that sense of innateness and wildness and also greater support with, again, there is no wrong way to read the Tarot. Unless you're causing harm, then that is harmful, and we should not do that. But if you have a structured practice where it's like you pull a card, you journal a little bit about it, you put it away, you never really work with it in this way, I think that's fucking great. There's no problem with that at all.
And there, again, will be a time, whether your car breaks down, whether there's, you go on vacation, you forget your deck; something happened where you won't be able to do that. There'll be times when you're too exhausted, you're too devastated, you're too excited. So how might the Tarot come with you through those seasons as an Anchor and a support? That is the root system of spiralic Tarot reading, that's it: when we let what's happening be the basis for how we pull, and we let the Tarot change shape along with the natural ebb and flow of our life.
I was also saying this before, that we start from where we are and allow that to unfurl into the next thing. And we're really primed to come to the Tarot with our hopes of where we could be or might be, or with an inquiry that's maybe a little bit more objective or more general, which I think, again, is fucking great. This is a very specific way of reading. So we're speaking to that.
[0:24:12]
And, you know, to offer sort of another alternate example to the example I offered before, if we are concerned about hearing back around an application, it can be really helpful to go to the deck and say, “When will I hear back about my application? What am I being invited to know about my application?” That's absolutely beautiful, valid, lovely. When we think about spiralic Tarot, reading Tarot can really get to the heart and can travel through with us, can actually offer us true medicine about where we're at.
What we might consider as an inquiry or a touchstone with the deck to the effect of, “Spirit or higher self,” or just, in general, speaking aloud, “I'm feeling really contracted and really anxious about my application, I want to hear from them. I want to know, how might I attend to these feelings, as I continue to wait.” Here's what we're doing when we try this alternate example, that is transformative:
One, we're naming what we're feeling—I'm contracted, I'm anxious, I want to hear from them. We got to allow ourselves to go to the Tarot with messy shit, with dirty hands, with hands that are caked in whatever's going on, with a heavy, heavy heart, with a jealous heart, with an angry heart. There's nothing that Spirit cannot hold. In fact, our spirit helpers are like, “Please, motherfucking God, come to us with these things. Don't try to get clean and calm. Don't try to get centered. Come to us with the feelings.” Feel the feelings through the pull. Let the Tarot help you with the hard stuff. Don't try to get calm before you pull. Go right to the heart of what you're feeling and let the medicine bubble up. It can help you with that. Right?
So if we pull for that anxious, contracted, “I want to hear” feeling ask: how can I be with myself? How can I not leave myself? How can I be present with myself through that?
Let's say we pull Four of Wands. It might be a totally unexpected pull, it might be Spirit or your heart’s way of being like, “Go out and like, have a good time. Go out, get an ice cream cone, chill with a friend, take your dog out, go to the park, like go for a swim. Like, leave this for a little bit, delete your email app off your phone, and just try for a couple of hours to just be. To just be.” And from there, it might loosen you up so much that it frees you up to ask another question, or it frees you up for something else, or it might be that that time away is an opportunity to get really clear about like, “Wow, I don't really allow myself to have easeful moments when I'm feeling like super tense about something,” right?
There's big, beautiful, personal tending available to us in any of that. It doesn't need to be some performative—not that it's performative—but we don't have to create that work. It's just there, right? We might get something totally different, like, how can I tend to myself while waiting for this application? We may get a totally different card that might pivot us in a different direction. Really, just being with the feelings, rather than trying to figure out what's going to happen with the application itself; that is the key. And that's what it is to read the Tarot spiralically.
[0:28:05]
Another example that I have definitely talked about on this podcast before is my example with reading, like having something really urgent on my heart, and pulling a card that does not pertain to the urgent question—but sorry, let me back up. I do recall one time, and this has happened in other ways, but it was very impactful, this one particular time it happened, where I was very anxious about something, and I wanted to know, like, it was something related to work.
And I wanted to know, like, what do I do with this work? Do I go this way? Or do I go that way? Or do we do this? Or do I do that? That was a little bit before I was comfortable being in like, “I don't know, I'm not gonna worry about it right now,” or “I'm going to make a decision, and if it changes, that's okay.” And I had not eaten breakfast and was like, two cups of coffee in and that's not good for my particular body, just like I'm sensitive and sensitive to caffeine, and it just does not work, and it's now something I would never do but then did it all the time.
And I was asking and really checking in and really communicating, and I pulled Queen of Pentacles. And when I tapped into what the message might be they were like, “Go eat,” and that was all they said. And I was so upset, but I did it. I was grumbly, and after I ate because again, I'm just talking about my body, not making a comment on how anyone eats or breakfast or anything like that, your body is your body is your body. It's beautiful. But because my blood sugar is extremely sensitive after I ate some of the inner conflict and anxieties sort of lifted and dissipated a bit. And I was able to get more clarity, without even needing to pull.
So spiralic, again, is the idea of letting one thing flow into the other. That was an example of spiralic Tarot reading. I showed up with what I thought was the most important thing, the deck reflected a truth for me, it curved my path from what I thought was important to what the invitation was. I took the invitation, it shifted the whole reason why I went to the deck to begin with, and not only allowed me to sort of give my body what it needed, but gave me the clarity to kind of get a sense of what was going on in the first place.
So that is an example of spiralic Tarot reading; it’s starting with what is and allowing the answers to sort of help us to be with that. And eventually, it sort of leads us into what we were generally looking for in the first place, even if it wasn't what we asked about.
[0:31:11]
Like, if we're perpetually asking about like, “When am I going to hear? What am I being invited to know about this relationship?” If we're a little green to our deck, and we're sort of still asking about, which is just really not the most ethical thing to do, like, “how does this person feel about me?” Or whatever, you know, whatever—what we're looking for is clarity, what we're looking for peace, ultimately, inside of that. We cannot possibly get that from what another person is feeling, thinking, doing. So if we're willing to read spiralically, if we’re open to the idea, because again, the Tarot often flows spiralically any way. We attempt to straighten it out, but it's really impossible.
So what I am proposing we explore today, or what I am exploring today is essentially, considering, again, the Tarot already flows spiralically. It already is a very different rhythm than we are typically used to living and working in. And if we are open to that rhythm, it can lead us into some really fantastic places, and can really blow our minds and help to connect us with our own intimate understandings and relationships with these desks.
That's the whole idea: we don't want to read like how other people read. We don't want to do it the way another person does it. It's great to honor our teachers, and it's wonderful to be like, “Well, I love the influence of this person.” But ultimately, this is a tool that you, yourself, are connecting with, sometimes in really tough moments. Why shouldn't it feel like a bomb? Why shouldn't it feel like it can come with you, no matter what you're going through, even if it's not, again, super linear, right?
[0:33:05]
The final thing around this to consider is that card meanings are flexible, and we can expect them to change. My card interps have changed a billion times. The way that I work with a card for myself might change. Sometimes things come out of my mouth on these podcasts that are absolutely things I've never even thought of before. They come through based on what I'm pulling around, or what we're working on, or whatever it is, right? And then sometimes they stay the same, but intonations and flavors change. That is also a way that Tarot is spiralic.
We might have a really strong feeling or belief or sense or root system of what, let's say, The Empress means to us. But the more we explore it, and if we're open to The Empress, showing us what they really are, it's going to change. It can't not because the Tarot wants and longs to be brought alive through our own unique perception. Right? So it's going to come to us differently than how it might come to another person. We're going to understand it differently than another person might. That's great.
So that's another way that the Tarot is spiralic: it's always—our ideas of it, our work with it—it's always changing. We might go away for a long time and come back, and it might be there a lot, and it might be a bigger part of our lives. And again, you know, I was just sharing on this podcast that during my postpartum—without question, the most challenging time of my entire life, and that is really saying something—I never, ever pulled. I couldn't bear it. It didn't really give me what I needed, and yet it was there with me. It was there with me.
That experience was really what the Major Arcana is all about. Major Arcana is big, external change, shifting our inner world in a big way. It's working with huge, energetic, external themes, and how they relate to our internal life. It's slow and massive. It's like tectonic plates moving under the earth; it's very big. And there was no way that I could do little pulls around that. And yet, there might be a lot of people listening to this who are like, “Oh my god, I pulled every single day during my postpartum. It was a fucking lifeline for me.” And that's how Tarot is spiralic. That's what's so remarkable about it.
If we're willing to let it, it can travel with us through anything. And by extension, this is related to my new offering that's about looking at the framework of Tarot for the Wheel of the Year. It's a beautiful tool for the astrological seasons, it's a beautiful tool for the seasons, for nature, for the natural life-death-rebirth cycles of the year, for anything that might be happening externally around us. It can help to root us in. Everything is a spiral. So why shouldn't Tarot be a reflection of that, right? Can we rewild the Tarot, quite literally, and allow it to be more spiralic? That, ultimately, is the question and what I hope this lesson endeavored to just sprinkle a little food for thought onto the plate today.
[0:36:52]
Now, having moved through all that, I'm going to answer this question from Bea, that I think really, who’s a listener, and I think, really ties in quite beautifully to this idea of letting Tarot be more spiralic. So Bea asks:
I'm always thrown off by Justice. I've read interpretations saying it signifies balance or even making a decision. But a lot of time when I get this in a spread, I cannot see where it fits in. Is there another angle to approach this card from?
So absolutely get it. Justice is one of those cards that is so big and so vast, and so kind of multidimensional, that it is really hard to Anchor it into the moment, very hard. And I think, in some ways, Justice behaves and shows up a little differently, if we’re thinking about it from the larger, theoretical perspective versus when it shows up in a reading.
So I can say, from the larger, theoretical perspective, Justice, without going into detail about it, speaks of the long-term process of repair and of reparations and of acknowledging what is harmful, what is unjust so that we can be a greater agent in changing it. I don't personally find that it has to do with making a decision because well, I'm just going to be honest: I don't A) think that it's true and B) I don't really, honestly, think like that's all that useful. That's one of those things we have to be a little careful, a little bit critically thoughtful about.
Like, if Justice indicates that a decision needs to be made, that means that every person who's ever pulled it or ever will pull it needs to make big decision which I don't know if that's true for me. I don't know if that resonates as truth. But if it does for you, I think that's awesome, truly. Balance? I don't know, maybe. But really, what is balance? I don't know that that exists. So I think that it's very overt and not super helpful, a lot of the time.
[0:39:24]
So Justice can really have to do with a process of acknowledging what is not balanced, fair, in alignment in order to enact change. If we try to tell ourselves like, “Oh, this is just the way it is,” or “oh, it shouldn't be this way,” you know, that's absolutely valid. But in the eyes of Justice, it might be true that it shouldn't be that way, whatever. It is and yet it is that way, right now. So then we have to say, “Okay, great if it is that way right now, and it shouldn't be that way, what do I need to do? Or what do we collectively need to do in order to change that?” It's a large-scale question of Justice and of what it means to move into a more just world—and this is really paraphrasing it. I've talked about it in detail on this podcast a couple times. So you can tuck into those if you have an interest in that.
Now what, how it shows up, though, more granularly, often, in a reading, if we're just pulling it, not always, but I like to start here as an anchor point. It usually helps me. I usually pull Justice, when I really, really want something to be different than it is. And I feel that it should be different, I feel I should be further, and I feel like things should be whatever. But I'm actually being invited to come in, you know, and root into what is here, rather than trying to jump off and be somewhere else. And again, that's really different than the sort of bigger understanding of Justice. But what we have with, again, the more personal, granular understanding of it, is that it's an opportunity for us to sense into: am I out of this moment in some way? And if so, how might it come back into this moment? Is there a reason? Is it safe for me to come back into this moment?
I have found through the readings that Justice comes up in, that I have given readings for folks around that sometimes this does relate to the larger extension of justice. Other times, I'm reading for folks who are really, really convinced that what they're going through right now they need to get out of it, it should be different, they should be further. And the key is to actually come home to why they're in what they're in in the first place. And actually, from there, they become much more free to change it, if that's really what they want.
Hopefully, that makes sense. It is a trickier card. It's funky. It's funny, but it's a good start point. It’s a good anchor point. Where are we believing we should be somewhere different than where we are and why? Right? We're not meant to judge that, we’re not meant to be like, “Well, I am.” That could be true, but can we begin there?
[0:42:55]
The second part of this that I want to speak to, Bea, is that I encourage you to start talking to Justice, when it comes up in your readings and say, “Hey, I do not understand you. I don't know why you're here, but I'm open. I'd like to, so please talk to me.” I often talk about this concept called “field research” that I do. I’ve mentioned field research many times, and it's with the Tarot, specifically. And that's what field research is. It's like literally tracking like, “Okay, I pulled this card here, and I told it that I really wanted to hear from them, and I really want to understand more. So like my little Justice antennae are up and primed, and I'm going to be paying attention to see: is there something around me, some sort of external input, some sort of thing in a book that clicks it all together?” That's been a lot of my experience with the Tarot.
Yeah, Justice is really a perfect card because it can show up in so many different ways. Justice can show up at the center point of a reading when we're in the midst of a legal battle. And it could be an acknowledgment and an honoring of the literal kind of like, like super obvious, like we're embroiled in this thing related to balance or to justice or to something that was wrong, and now we're trying to make it a right, or a harm that was caused that then we're trying to, yeah, again, correct or enact, repair over. It could be something that's outside of the paradigm of the legal system that is just like we're inside of something where we're attempting to wrestle for some kind of repair or some kind of, yeah, just action to correct something that feels like a wrong. And then other times, it can come up and we are being asked to move through our own beliefs about how something shouldn't have happened, shouldn't be this way, and yet it is. It's really intense.
I will, if it's of use to anyone, I'll offer a very personal anecdote, which is that I am in a Justice year, personally, with my Tarot card of the year. And oh my God, has that latter statement that I made been: this isn't fair, this is bullshit, this is too much, this isn’t it. And yet, it is. Like there were many, many times—not to sort of, like, harp on a point, but it has been what I've been going through—where, eight or nine times in about a month I had to take myself either to the ER, or I got admitted to the hospital. And I would have one complication after another, after another. And, of course, I was like, “This is bullshit. This is not fair.” And it wasn't fair. It wasn't, there's no romance to put on it. It was bullshit, and yet, it was happening. There was nothing I could do to change it. The only thing I could do is take myself to the hospital, or go by ambulance, or whatever it might be. That was the only thing I could do.
[0:46:35]
Justice is the acknowledgment, the duality, living in the duality of the fact that what we're in isn't right, isn't fair, is bullshit, and yet, there's no arguing that it's here right now.
What do we need to do to face it? What do we need to do to bring about some kind of shift, or maybe not even shift it? How can we just be with the totality of the feelings? It's facing what is that, I believe, is ultimately Justice. Anytime I've been in a Justice year that's been the work; it’s like facing the brutality of, like, what is going on, and it's very harsh, at least for me. The juxtaposition of it is very intense. And yet, when I lean into what is, while simultaneously, honoring how much it sucks, I am… it changes. Something changes. It changes me in ways that are hard to define.
Justice can also be beautiful. We can be faced with something remarkable, lovely, magnificent, abundant and think, “Oh my god,” like, you know. I have that with my daughter a lot. That's just like, she's so magnificent that sometimes it freaks me out a little bit (Lindsay laughs). She doesn't, but the idea that I get afraid of things and that's Justice, too, I think, is like, “Oh my god, what is this?” Like, how, you know, it can flip the mind out a little bit.
So it's a big energy, and it can bring us in a lot of different directions, but ultimately, what I think it brings us into is our feelings about a situation that are valid, and an invitation to be in the situation as it is, and to start with acknowledging that; beginning to work with like, “Okay, it shouldn't be this way. I don't want it to be this way.” And that's true. That's valid. And yet it is. How can I be with it, and what might I do to bring about a change by extension? So hopefully that helps.
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[Conclusion]
[0:49:04]
Thank you for being on this Soul Tarot concepts ride today (Lindsay laughs). Hopefully, it was nourishing and helped. I've always had lots of questions about, like, what is spiralic Tarot, and hopefully, that helped. Bea, thank you so much for your question about Justice. I hope I did justice to it. And I hope that you enjoy the final episode of this week. And until we meet again, please take exquisite care of yourselves.