212. Opening to Visible (and Invisible) Community with Three of Cups
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Our Anchor Card of the week is Three of Cups, a beautiful invitation to open our heart to richly supportive community connection, both visible (from other folks in our lives) and invisible (from our well ancestors, beloved dead, and Guides).
Air date:
January 26, 2023
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About the Episode
Our Anchor Card of the week is Three of Cups, a beautiful invitation to open our heart to richly supportive community connection, both visible (from other folks in our lives) and invisible (from our well ancestors, beloved dead, and Guides). We also answer a listener question from Danielle about how to sense into some of the differences between The High Priestess and The Hermit, as well as what to do when our sense of the card meanings feels too broad.
Lindsay’s Links:
Purchase the entire Soul Tarot 101 course (or just the Digital Book for $22!)
Sign up for The Threshold: our channeled guide around 2023 and The Chariot card!
Download your Ultimate Soul Tarot Card Guide here!
LINKS TO HELP IRAN:
Thank you to Ariana (@azadi.times.three) for sharing these with us!
1. Center for Human Rights in Iran (based in NY, provides news and in-depth reports on human rights abuses in Iran)
2. How to Talk About Iran (a living document from the Iranian Diaspora Collective on Instagram)
3. Persians With Purpose (Educational content, news translated to English, and other Iran resources on Instagram)
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: parenthood, chronic illness, and illness
The content in this episode contains references to mentions of parenthood, chronic illness, and illness. 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]
—
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 the pod. It's so lovely to be gathered here with you. As always, thank you so much for your presence. I'm very excited to kick off our episode today. So we're going to talk about our intuitively channeled reading of the week, our card that's coming up for us, how we can work with it, how we can engage with it. And I think this one is so important to talk about and to center because it has… Three of Cups is our card for the week ahead. It has such strong reputation around it being fixed to something visible, tangible: other people, community. And while it's not not about that, it's not where we have to anchor it. So we're going to talk about sort of the visible and invisible possibilities with regard to this card, and how to hold ourselves if that strong community focus is actually what we want, but we can't have it for any other reason, for some reason or another. So really dig into that, and kind of anchor that to our general theme for the month of January, which I can't believe we're almost finished in January. I can't believe we're almost to February. It's insane. And then I'll answer our listener question of the week, and then we'll get out of here.
I was… You know, I don't really do this just because I don't think about it, but I did think about it this week. So upon reflecting, it felt like it might be useful to invite y'all into this and to just share my own experiences, which is that very often when I pull a card for the week, I sort of hold it in my heart the whole week. But I don't often go back and reflect on like, what was I doing in that card? How did it come up? Usually, it's very clear; I just don't go back and think about it. But because our card for last week was Nine of Pentacles, which is very often kind of associated with luxury, and fanciness, and getaways, and all of these different tiered things. I don't know. When I was sort of half-awake one morning, I thought, “Well, I wonder how that card showed up for me, and whether or not I stayed open to it even without realizing it.”
[0:03:00]
And I just wanted to share my experience that my… It's been an incredibly, incredibly full time with balancing…I have many many, many professional irons in the fire right now—some things I can talk about, some things I cannot talk about, but will eventually be able to talk about. And with a… It would be a lot to hold with a child— without a child, rather—but with a child, it's definitely like a different level of organization, and of delegation, and of balance, especially with a partner who also works on their own stuff. And it's been very full, but so far we've been able to juggle it. And we were able to sort of have this week and this weekend, and it was busy. It’s been, again, very, very busy. And my daughter, on top of all these things, has been sick and cutting teeth.
And none of those things immediately would put anyone in mind with Nine of Pentacles, but this is why I think the whole emphasis and the core message inside of my work is we can't rely on those ideas of like, Nine of Pentacles means a luxury vacation, or it means hanging out, or it means this or that. It means that we find and savor the fruits when we can. So I just wanted to share that when I really… Because you know, when I really thought about it, I thought, “Goddamn if I haven't been doing that.” Like on the days when I'm with my daughter and my partner is working, usually, when I'm with my daughter, I'm completely present with her during her wake windows. And then when she's napping, I tidy up the kitchen, I might make something for lunch, I might whatever. And on the days when I've been with her, I've been like, “I'm not doing a goddamn thing. If it's my night to clean, I'll do it later (Lindsay laughs). But right now, I'm just gonna sit and I'm gonna, like, read because I have a daughter who's under the weather, and probably, I'm going to be under the weather soon (Lindsay laughs). So I need to just kind of rest. I need to chill. I just need to be.”
Now, I understand not everybody has that privilege or that opportunity. I'm just talking about my own experience. I'm not trying to advocate or say that, like, “Oh, this is what parenting should look like.” I'm just flatly naming my own experience. I'm absolutely aware of the privilege of being a work-from-home parent with another parent who works from home, and having 50/50 equal moving. You know, us both co-parenting our child equally and equitably. Definitely not escaping me. Just, again, talking about my own experience. And then even last night, we take turns at the end of the night with one of us does the cleaning, the other one puts her bed. And it was my night to clean because I had had her all day. And after we said goodnight and read stories, I was like, you know what, normally, I would finish the cleaning and then settle in for watching something, or reading, or taking a bath. But instead, I opted to get right in the bath and watch my stories with my partner, and then cleaned. And I got to bed a little later, but it was fine.
[0:07:01]
I mention all this because it's like my deepest, again, not vision, but passion for people to know that these cards can come with them through anything. And they might not initially look like what we think they look like. We have to be… It's like being in a marriage with these cards. Like, a healthy, beautiful, thriving relationship. Maybe not a marriage, but a beautiful relationship that's absolutely collaborative, and that we stay open for learning new things about these cards. I mean, that's the whole point of relationships, right? That we're always learning new things about each other. We can change. We're capable of so many different things.
So even though it doesn't look fancy, I have definitely seen this week where for one reason or another, in this week in particular, there's been a little bit of a gut knowing, a little bit of a knock at the door to put the pleasure and the priority on filling my cup up, versus getting the chores done, versus kind of having a clean slate. By the way, really want to normalize that a lot of parents are doing this by themselves. A lot of, like, keeping a clean house, sometimes that is the thing to go. And I want to just really honor and normalize that. It’s different for me and my house and that's…again, I think it's okay. So I'm not advocating that anyone should be doing it this way. But I wanted to share that that was my experience with Nine of Pentacles.
And I wonder if we could play around with… I'd love for y'all to write into Ask Lindsay and tell me, after hearing the way that it showed up for me, maybe that will help to spark something off, and center, and inspire you to honor your own anchoring experiences with these cards, because they can show up in different mysterious, kind of unexpected ways. And when we're willing to kind of consider that and get curious about it, then, again, so many different things can bloom open in our awareness and our understanding. But that's the way that we can work with the cards sort of off the mat, so to speak. We can take something away from the reading and kind of look at it through a lived experience. And that's how it showed up for me this week. And so far, so great, you know (Lindsay laughs). It's really helped.
And it probably won't be where my emphasis is all the time. But it honestly could be, you know, depending on the season of my life. It was pretty great to be able to live that way, and to be able to make those kinds of different choices. And again, it might not work all the time, but it was really helpful then. So, hopefully it's useful. Always nice to go back and reflect on sort of how the last month or the last week, whatever card you pulled showed up for you.
[0:10:30]
And this week, we are taking that kind of beautiful invitation, and we're weaving it in, and we're kind of creating a new branch on this larger tree. And this week, our anchor that we're working with is Three of Cups. So before I get into that, just want to remind everyone that our theme for the month of January is Trust. And again—I've said this every week, and I promise I'll keep it really brief, but I do think it's important to always keep the larger picture in mind. It can help when we kind of zero in on the minutiae—that Trust is a big theme for all of 2023. That we are moving into a time where it's going to be way more heart first, way more gut first. Way more emphasis on that. And that option is available to us, and it might be that it's a little harder to get to than the next person. But we don't really want to compare. Whatever we're going through is what we're going through, right?
And this is really seen, reflected in the fact that we're in a Chariot year, which is a very organic birthing; shedding out of a skin, a container that we have grown too big for. I've already seen—at the recording of this, it's January 24th—I am already seeing certain things that for years, I've sat sort of on the tarmac around being like, “I don't know if this is ever going to happen. I wonder. I wonder.” And all of a sudden (Lindsay snaps her fingers), it's happening. All of a sudden. That's The Chariot, too. All of a sudden, something's gone. All of a sudden, something's in. All of a sudden. And it's not abrupt. It's like we've been working at this, we've been toying around with it, we've been in and out. And now it's just done. So that's The Chariot, too. Sometimes The Chariot is very, very gradual. But we're leaving Line One. We're leaving the exploration of identity and foundations for the line of releasing all those things, and opening to a much vaster aspect of ourselves, and sort of how we can begin to center more of the soul, rather than the mind or the ego’s whims. And again, ego is great. Mind is great. Not always appropriate for them to be driving the car.
So I have really noticed that January kind of feels like a mini 2023 in a way, in that there's a lot of intensity, and a lot of ups and downs, and a lot of big experiences, and a lot of shedding, and a lot of renewal. And so if you've had the shittiest January, I'm not saying you're gonna have a shitty (Lindsay laughs) 2023, at all. I honestly think there's been other things about this month that I've thought, “Well, whoa,” like that feels like it's coming in really hot and hard to just kind of get cleared out. And so for some folks, that's feeling a lot more intense right now than others. And if you've been going through that, that sense of like, it literally cannot get more stressful. It cannot get more intense. It cannot get… It is not forever. There are some very big changes going on very, very quickly. So that's one of the most important things to keep in mind.
[0:14:11]
This week, our focus—and we can weave this idea of trust into it—our focus is on the communal. Our focus is on connection, it's on community, and it's on the way that we let those things come into our lives to nurture us. So, Three of Cups is an invitation to come into oneness with other people in a way that feels really good. In a way where whether or not that's spoken or named specifically, where the focus of the meeting or of the gathering, or of the coming together is on celebration. It's on joy. It could be a retreat, like some sort of movement retreat. But you may not hold or carry the movement away with you. What you might carry away with you is scream laughing at dinner with your fellow participants. That's Three of Cups. And that kind of example of like a retreat coming together and then sort of bowing away is very Three Of Cups.
It doesn't mean that we don't form lasting, rooted relationships with folks. But it might mean that even inside of those lasting, rooted relationships with folks, we might have very special experiences with a group of people, or in oneness with one or two folks that are just really treasured. And where the… It's not like a positive, happy-go-lucky. It doesn't need to be happy. We can be crying in Three Of Cups or, you know, we can be really grieving something. That's okay. But we're coming together for kind of a beautifully unified experience and bringing all of ourselves to that.
So it's about sharing, it's about witnessing each other, it's about openness, and it's about trust. We have to be willing to be in intimacy to be in this card, period, full stop. We have to be willing to lean a little bit more into our edges, to let ourselves be witnessed, to witness others. It's scary. If you've ever gone on retreat, it brings up a lot of stuff. Like, we're leaving home. We're in uncomfortable, different environments. That can just bring up a lot. Even if we're getting together for dinner, and all coming together and sharing a really sweet experience, that can bring up a lot, depending on where we're at or if that's even possible. We can do this kind of thing over Zoom. We can do this kind of thing in person. It doesn't need to be any one way. We don't actually have to be drinking anything. Of course, it's not necessary. It doesn't exactly have to match. It doesn't have to match any card or any card’s description. It's just about coming together with visible and/or invisible community.
[0:17:18]
Visible community is just exactly what it sounds like: it's coming together with other human beings. I think a branch of this card that is not really discussed but is a huge part of the Soul Tarot framework of this card, is that our Guides, ancestors, beloved dead count. It counts with this. So Three Of Cups can also be viewed, and can also be deeply and richly utilized as a card that can invite us to come into celebratory oneness with our spirit helpers. I have come into tremendous oneness with my beloved ancestors, my well ancestors, my beloved dead, my Guides, just sitting in ceremony with them.
Ain’t nothing special or fancy about my rituals or ceremony (Lindsay laughs). So if you find yourself being like, “Well, how does Lindsay do that?” Lindsay just sits and says, “I'd like to be with y’all. I'd like to pull cards and I'd like to, like, feel into what you have to say.” I'm a free writer when I channel, so just kind of writing, I find… I have fibromyalgia, so my hands are… I just cannot hold and use a pen for very long. I like to free-write on my Notes app, and then I'll lock them if need be or whatever just for my own privacy. And we can do that too. There’s nothing not sacred about typing on our phones what messages are coming through around that, and just kind of playing around and letting it flow.
So it's letting yourself be richly witnessed and held in this card, regardless of what might be coming up or how it feels. Sometimes our time in Three Of Cups can feel bittersweet, can feel intense. There can be… Again, I use the framework of a retreat. In a retreat, I have gone from literally weeping my eyeballs out because of what someone has shared, and feeling such solidarity and closeness with them, or love, or respect for them, and then like an hour later again scream-laughing and/or feeling upset, or triggered, or contracted, and needing to move away for a little bit, kind of decompress and come back to the fold. As a teacher of a couple different retreats, there's a lot of movement when you're holding that kind of space as well.
[0:19:56]
So I say all this because this card this week offers us the invitation to look at our relationship to relationships. How are we longing for this kind of thing? How are we perhaps seasonally, perpetually, maybe even totally unconsciously not able to let this kind of connection in? How have we maybe pushed this kind of connection away? How have we tried to find this connection through—there's no fault of their own—but just the wrong folks? And I'm not blaming us either. We only can do what we can do, you know? If we always choose the wrong people, people who cannot give us this, and yet we center them, we give them our time.
Chariot years are a really, really good time to clear that out. Chariot years are a very good time to sense into those patterns, to get really clear, to open up, to really look very, very deeply at it and just say, “What am I really longing for? What kind of community am I seeking? What kind of community do I want to be a part of? Maybe I need to actually create this community. Maybe I need to be behind the creation of this kind of gathering space.” Or “Maybe I need to be transparent about what I'm looking for. Do I have boundaries around what I'm looking for? Can I be a little bit more, perhaps, flexible about what I'm looking for, and recognize it's… Am I looking for this with friends when I really want a relationship, or vice versa?” So obviously, those are a lot of hypothetical questions (Lindsay laughs) that I just posed. You don't have to go through all of them. But it is a good opportunity to reflect, like, what's our relationship around this?
And I think the idea of trust can come in and up around a lot of areas in this. Trust, for some folks, might be trusting in showing up for or to this kind of situation. So if some contraction’s coming up, if some feelings are… like, if the community is there, and if the loved ones are there, and if you're like, “I just can't do it. I'm too afraid,” then we want to be with that and open. And if it's truly an unsafe situation then, of course bow away. But if it is that you're afraid, then we just may want to…we want to hang out in it for as much time as feels appropriate, and be willing to just consider that it could be a really transformative experience for us.
[0:23:01]
It could be that the trust has to do with trusting that your intuition—which all of us have access to and all of us have, and is richly beautiful in all of us—your intuition is enough as it is right now to open to your Guides, and your well ancestors, and your beloved dead. You do not need a formula. You do not need a structure. You can get that if you really are like, “No, I do.” That's okay. But it's when we let it stop us from just playing around and trying that we potentially can really rob ourselves of a lot of beautiful experiences. Eventually, you may get there, but why not today? Why not just play around with it?
If we're feeling alone, and if we're feeling starved for this kind of thing, begin with the internal. Begin with the inner voice. Begin with opening and welcoming the unspeakably profound love that moves with us, no matter what we do, no matter where we go through life and death. So opening to that and just asking for questions, asking what they'd have you know. Asking for how you can continue to do the work to heal the legacy that some of your not-so-well ancestors have left. Opening to the things that they're rooting you on and cheering you about. Opening to your Guides’ wisdom and just asking them, “What would you have me know about this?” We are surrounded by support. So, opening to that kind of love can be profound, and it can open the door to a lot more of it in the visible realm, you know, with friends, and kin, and with community.
So, trusting in this kind of collaborative spirit. Trusting in, you know, if this week something pops up and you think, “Hm, maybe I should check it out,” follow your own knowing on it. But Three Of Cups is very much rooted in the spirit of, like, get together, be yourself. If it's not a match or not a perfect situation, then don't sweat it. It's not the last social engagement you'll have in your life. If it's amazing, just be present for it. Just be with it and bless it. And when it's complete, it's complete, you know? (Lindsay laughs)
So we're being invited open to both visible and invisible community, connection this week, and to examine how those things show up in our lives right now. Like, where we're at with that, and how we feel about those things, and how those things land with us. Do we feel like we're starved for those things? Do we feel like there's almost like no time to breathe inside of those things? Do we want to lead some of those things? Do we want to be in a vulnerable, deeply receiving space with those things?
[0:26:23]
I have definitely been so far from myself and a lot of folks that I know. This year so far has been pretty strong with relationships, and we're very early in the year. So, there's a lot for me and there's a lot for, again, most of the folks I know already coming up about, like, if something isn't working, if a friendship really isn't mutually supportive for whatever the reason, if there's some weirdness or lack of equity in the relationship, then let's bring it to light, let's talk about it, let's work it out, let's go our separate ways, let's come together differently. There's a lot of cleaning, and patching, and good review going on about relationships right out of the gate, and being really clear about what we do want. And sometimes leaning into the heartbreak of what we've tried to get from a relationship, but it just hasn't really matched.
So we're being invited not to beat ourselves up about it, and to really trust that if this kind of energy, Three Of Cups, is as far away as you could imagine for yourself right now, you can lean into the invisible support. It's there; it's so rich and beautiful. The more you lean into it, and the more you sow those seeds of desire to kind of have this sort of connection, the closer you'll get to it. So it'll be really interesting, if I think to do it, to reflect on how this showed up for me this week, and I'll always be happy to hear from all of yous. But, yeah, being open to this kind of touch-in, to letting Three Of Cups come in and just show us what it wants us to pay attention to right now will be monumentally supportive, helpful, and I think very nourishing.
[0:28:37]
So, yeah, that's our card of the week. That's our guidance of the week. And then I'm going to answer…now I'm going to answer a listener question from Danielle. So Danielle asks,
Hi, Lindsay. When pulling and studying the cards recently, I've been feeling like so many of them have the same message at their core: to look inside yourself and follow your intuition for your own answers. For example, The High Priestess and The Hermit are two cards that seem to communicate this, and I'm having trouble distinguishing any differences between them. Any thoughts on learning how to pick up more of the subtle differences between cards? I keep coming back to the same broad message over and over. Thank you for reading.
What a phenomenal question, Danielle. You are absolutely not alone in this (Lindsay laughs). I think so many people go through this. I want to start with a broader answer and then kind of zero in. For a long, long, long, long time it's going to feel this way for you, most likely. I actually don't want to say that. What I want to say is it could feel this way (Lindsay laughs) for a long, long, long time. I don't want to prescribe anything because it's not true that it will be. It could be, and that's totally normal. It's totally normal.
These cards are… When we look at the physical cards, right, they are human grasps and attempts to contextualize and try to make visible something that is both very practical and of the moment, but also enormously vast and profoundly soul-centered, which is to say the archetypal soul or spirit that's embedded in every card, right? So even with my own work like Soul Tarot, that I'm doing my best to interpret or present something that has come through to me about a much more soft and helpful way to view the cards than some of the more traditional meanings. Sometimes some of my ways of looking at the card aren't even that different from the next person. Even with that, there's still going to be a broadness to what I can go into with a card, because it's almost impossible to spend the time to articulate some of the subtleties.
[0:31:17]
And for me, because I've been reading for like 20+ years, I can say that there are still some cards for me that are just more broad than they are specific. We, throughout our lives—I'm talking life, if we're lucky enough/whatever enough to live until we're very deep in our elder years—we're learning new shit about these cards every goddamn time we read with them. So I don't say that to be like, “Hey!” I say that to champion you and normalize this, that, yeah, (Lindsay laughs) they are a lot of the time super broad. We refine, we chisel, we get more clarity on what they can be, on what they often can morph into, or shift into, or change into as we read, and just with time, with years and years and years of repeated experience. And even then, there are some cards that are just more broad, and then that will change. Right?
And I'm going to talk specifically about the two cards you mentioned. But just because I am a big fan, obviously, of transparency, and one of those cards for me straight up is Ten of Pentacles. There have been times I've even thought about going, because I have years, if not… I don't have minutes of work. I don't have months of work. I have years (Lindsay laughs) of written recorded material that I have created over the years, and content that I've made. And I've thought about maybe experimenting, if I have time—and you know, of course I have no time—to go back and see what I've written and spoken about Ten of Pentacles over the years, to try to see. Because I think somewhere I did have more information that came through to my knowing at some point, and then like lost it. It's very interesting. And there are times where I've really felt like, “Oh, this is it,” and then I lose it, which does not happen to me with other cards. I don't lose things that I gather. But Ten of Pentacles, it goes and it comes.
So while I can…I have my own way of teaching it, and I have my own way of contextualizing it. But I'll just be real, we still have not made that love connection. We just haven’t. It’s more broad. And I want to, again, normalize the fuck out of that. Because for some people, teachers, whatever, we're human beings. We can know the basic understanding of what we're talking about. We can even feel very confident about a broad foundation of a card that is absolutely wonderful. And we can still be like, “I don't actually know how this feels. I don't actually… I have not totally put two and two together about this card.” It doesn't mean, again, “I don't know what it means,” but it means that I actually think that my interpretation of that card is much more broad than some of my other ones. And I'd qualify The Sun as being a part of that too. I have specifics linked with The Sun. It's just still a little bit more broad for me. It's less broad than it was, I'd say, two, three years ago. It's just time.
[0:34:52]
I don't know why there are certain cards for me or for another person that feel so much more honed in, and why those two feel more broad. And I don't need anyone to help me with that (Lindsay laughs) because it's nothing to help with. I really trust that I'm in a partnership with all of these cards, and we're all going to get to know each other at different times. In fact, I'm excited because I feel like with all of the cards in the Tarot, I can map different experiences in my life to them, whether helpful, unhelpful, hard or lovely, that have helped me to understand them better. And so if for whatever the reason, I haven't sort of caught on to some of those, or if they haven't really fully been drilled down, we have to live these cards to fully understand them, and to take them from the conceptual and the broad into the specific, and refined, and lived.
And that is not that you haven't been doing enough practice. It's not that someone hasn't really been doing their work. It’s just a matter of the fact that you're however old you are. I'm almost 39 years old. I have, I mean, I hope a lot more life to live. I know what I know today, almost 39, you know? So I just want to normalize, normalize, normalize, validate your feelings, but also say like, this is a lifelong experience. And we're just trying to make sense of these things, but we can't know it until there's been that zap, that connection where we finally go, “Oh my God. Okay, I get it. I get it.” You know? And again, this is my career, and my life path, and my way of communicating with Spirit. It’s a wildly helpful and present part of my life. And to teach it also helps me to contextualize it in different ways than I might if I was personally just reading for myself or other people. So just keep going. Just keep going. And it's okay if things feel a little bit more broad.
Now I'm going to take a second and sort of, kind of sense into the two of those, and see if what I have to say about the differences between the two feel more helpful, and I'm going to use certain frameworks to help with that. So, the astrological ordering of the Tarot is something that, I just want to name, can be broken and changed. Everybody is allowed to do that. The way that we understand the Tarot or the Major Arcana to be sort of ordered astrologically comes from the Golden Dawn. And there's more history to that that you can look into. There's a wonderful Tarot facilitator named Davis Carr who did… I have not watched it, but it seemed very interesting, that is available on Kirah Tabourn’s website, The Strology. And Davis has sort of a completely different ordering of the Major Arcana astrologically. So I would consider that. I am personally very curious about that. I think Davis is absolutely wonderful. And I would say that they're a great example of somebody who's basically like, “We don't actually have to… We can change these things.” They were built on structure that can be broken and rebuilt. And the structure that we do have currently we can use as a jumping off point, so I'm going to do that right now.
[0:38:41]
So, one way to differentiate The High Priestess from The Hermit, The High Priestess is ruled by the Moon. The Hermit is ruled by Virgo. So we have the Moon; we have the satellite that ebbs and flows, and is connected to the tides, and is connected to the deeper intuitive. It's connected to the nighttime. And then we have Virgo that is very sensual, very of the moment, very much about service. Virgo gets—and I say this as a Virgo rising with love. I love Virgo energy—Virgo gets very critical and really snippy if it doesn't have someplace to put that devotion and that service. So, it can be really hard. There's a lot of enormous intuitive capacity with Virgo energy. It doesn't always get its due for that. There's so much going on for Virgos internally, and in their nervous system, and in their channel that, again, it can just come out as like, sometimes anxiety, and sometimes critical energy, and sometimes snippiness. And when that's channeled, and when that energy is utilized in the right way, there can be a tremendous blossoming. So that's, you know, one way of looking at it.
Virgo is Mutable Earth. The Moon, again, is connected to Pisces. So we have two sort of different ideas. They're both sort of mutable, right? Pisces is Mutable Water. And because Pisces is… Pisces isn't technically connected to the Moon—I mean, Cancer is—but I feel that they are… There is a connective point for me around all Water signs and the moon, but that's for another day. Virgo is connected to Mercury. So there’s different stuff going on. And maybe just you might immediately kind of feel a difference. Like, what's the difference to you between the Moon and the energy of Virgo? Right? Maybe even beyond what your perceptions are about them; just what wants to come through right now. So that helps to inform some of the invitations of these cards.
The High Priestess. The main objective of The High Priestess is to help us, to sort of initiate us into the realization, into the understanding that our intuition is highly specific to us, and that it changes all the time, all the time, and that it's meant to change. And this should be of tremendous relief to anyone who's like, “Well, I heard my Guides and now I can't,” and we want to look at like, what's going on in your life? When I was in the hospital, I was not hearing my Guides in the same way as I do when I'm having very calm days, and when my intuition happens to be a little bit more open. However, last two weeks, I have not been able to hear my Guides for dick, and I don't know why. I don't know why. I do know, because of The High priestess, that that's okay. That intuition, like anything else, changes. It ebbs and flows with the tides. It ebbs and flows with the moon. It's like the tides. It's like the moon. It changes. It changes.
[0:42:28]
So when we show up to The High Priestess, we are being invited to sort of go within and touch in with our inner knowing, with that part of us, that channel. But to be with whatever happens to be there today without judging it, without expecting more from it than what wants to come through. Just being there with it and knowing like, oh, we didn't lose anything. We're not… You know, we didn't mess up. We didn't not hear. It just might be that there's nothing to hear that day (Lindsay laughs), however aggravating that might be. So it's about just being willing to flow on a little bit more of a spiralic timeline, and sensing into what's there in that channel today. That's The High Priestess in a nutshell, in like the barest of nutshells.
The Hermit's objective is to fix and root us in place, and help us to go through our lives, through a particular season one step at a time. And while we're in the one step, we are not going to be clear about what's next. Period. Dot. It's like, taking a spotlight, taking that lantern light, it only illuminates where we are here. For Virgo energy, this is helpful (Lindsay laughs). We need this. We don't want to be off here or there, thinking about every possible whatever. That's part of Virgo’s superpower, to multitask and think about all the things. Virgo thrives when they are in the moment, when they are of highest devotion to this moment. In Hermit seasons of our lives, we get to figure out…we get confronted with times, and patterns, and typical habits that we get into when we want to kind of fly away, when we want to bop off, when we're like, “Oh, I'm uncomfortable. I want to go here, here, here, here, here.” If we keep pulling The Hermit, and pulling The Hermit, and pulling The Hermit, it's basically Spirit saying, “There ain’t nowhere for you to be but right here. Right here.” There's nothing to know. There's nowhere to go. There's a lot to take care of right here. Can you just be here?
And because it's a Major, and because it's a larger energy than what we're sort of doing…in other words, it's an energy to surrender to rather than to fix, or do, or take action around. We're being invited to surrender, like, “Okay, I'm here. I'm here.” There's nothing to do but be here, and to let whatever wants to come up, come up. I'm just here. Sort of like that phrase, “the wisdom of no escape.” It's the wisdom of no escape. We're just here. It teaches us how to be present, that card. It teaches us how to just be with what is. That's it. That's it. And it's a seeking card. So there's an element, again, of incredibly deep service and devotion. Incredibly deep. It's an opportunity for us to learn how to just be in our lives. Just be right here. Very specific pace, very specific rhythm, doing two very different things, right? Similar but different.
[0:46:16]
I might even rope in The Tethered One here because the description I'm giving of The Hermit is very similar to The Tethered One. The Tethered One is a kind of a suspension that happens, a cocooning that occurs specifically so we can completely transmute and transform inside of that experience. It's an experience that profoundly shifts the bedrock of who we are, and it is a crucial element of a death-rebirth process. The Hermit isn't like that. The Hermit is very much about centering and narrowing our focus in a very healthy way. Trusting the timing, trusting that there's nothing to do but just be with what's right here.
I have found for myself The Hermit and The Tethered One share some similar… They’re cousins in a way, because both of them really take us on very strong journeys within. The Tethered One is kind of like we're in this cocoon, but we can sort of move and travel and be, I’ve found for myself. The Hermit, like I was in… I'm a Hermit birth card, but every Hermit year I've ever gone through, I'm in one place (Lindsay laughs). I'm not going anywhere. I’m not doing anything. I'm just in what I’m in, you know? And it's more about what's coming across my eyes where I am, rather than me going out and finding something. Whereas I think The Tethered One, it's ruled by Neptune. There's a little bit more mutability. It allows us to just sort of move, and ebb, and flow inside of the container.
[0:48:00]
So it's hard for me to totally verbalize how these cards feel. But to me, because I've lived them and because I've cycled through them so much, they feel totally different from one another. So I would say beyond what I'm saying, which hopefully helps to create some sort of distinction—hopefully I succeeded in that—I would just say keep going. Continue pulling. Continue doing field research. Continuing on, like, just whenever you pull a card, just noticing what comes up for you, and how it feels and where they take you, and realizations you might have separate from pulling them. There have been so many times where I've been in the middle of something and I'm like, “Oh, this is like, whatever, Five of Pentacles.” “This is The Hermit.” This is it. I'm living it, and I didn't even need to pull it. And that happens all the time with the Tarot too because the Tarot is a language for life. So, life helps us to understand the Tarot too. We can work backward there.
So thank you for honoring me and trusting me with that question. Hopefully, again, I did some justice to it (Lindsay laughs).
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[Conclusion]
[0:57:53]
Thank you all so much for listening to this. Just a really quick word that Soul Tarot 101 comes out in one week. I can say hands down, truly, it is the absolute, I think, best thing I've ever done (Lindsay laughs). I can't believe we… Soul Tarot 101 is a video course with an epic e-book/workbook that… I'm thinking about actually self-publishing some paper copies of it because it's huge and is a great resource for the baseline of this work. And I'd be interested to hear if people are interested in that. I'm sure we're going to hear from like five people because whenever people ask me that on podcasts, I never answer, even though I'm like, “Yeah!” (Lindsay laughs) But if you'd like that, just shoot us an email. And it might be interesting to just get a feel for that. And that e-book is actually being sold separately for like 22 bucks. But the actual course Soul Tarot 101 is that e-book, it's an accompanying video course, and it's a Q&A database. It's not the largest database we've done, but questions that I think are specific to straight-out-of-the-gate beginners.
It's just damn good. It's really good. I look so good in the video (Lindsay laughs). I do. My hair is on another level. Chase did the video, and it just looks incredible. I feel like we've… I’m very proud of all of our offerings. But I do feel like with time and repeated practice, we just get a little better every time with these offerings. So for those of you who purchased it, I am really excited for you to dive in and experience it. And for those of you who haven't and you want to, go for it because again, it's really, really good. And again, it comes out January 30th. The material drops on January 30th. And you can learn more and/or purchase it by going to the show notes.
If you haven't purchased The Threshold, which is my intuitively channeled kind of workshop for 2023, could not recommend it more highly. It's still on sale for the time being. I'd say go for it if you're feeling called to it. And if you're not signed up to my newsletter, I highly recommend doing so simply because there's going to be a couple of massive new offerings coming up. And if you've ever wanted to sort of engage with my work for the most unbelievably low price you've ever seen in your lives, it's coming in March. And you're gonna want to know all about it in order to prepare and decide if it's right for you. So you can also sign up for that at the link in my show notes.
So thank you so much for being here. I love all of you. And until we connect again in just a little under a week, I think, for the February Monthly Medicine, please take exquisite care of yourselves.