215. Lighting the Way with Three of Swords
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Our Anchor Card for the week ahead is the magnificent Three of Swords, a deep balm for the heart, and a strong invitation to drop into greater intimacy and presence with ourselves in spiky, tender moments.
Air date:
February 16, 2023
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About the Episode
Our Anchor Card for the week ahead is the magnificent Three of Swords, a deep balm for the heart, and a strong invitation to drop into greater intimacy and presence with ourselves in spiky, tender moments. Together, we will explore different ways to work with and approach this card in the coming week -- we also answer a listener's question about how to overcome waves of fear and worry upon pulling The Tower card.
Lindsay’s Links:
Tarot for the Wild Soul course is BACK and opening for enrollment soon! Learn more here!
The Rabbit Listened (book Lindsay mentioned on this podcast)
Purchase the entire Soul Tarot 101 course (or just the Digital Book for $22!)
Download your Ultimate Soul Tarot Card Guide here!
Help Turkey and Syria:
https://www.akut.org.tr/en/donation
Defend the Atlanta Forest and Stop Cop City!
https://defendtheatlantaforest.org
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: illness, inherited generational patterns, systemic/economic oppression and marginalization, violence, racism, capitalistic and patriarchal structures, environmental degradation, and physical death
The content in this episode contains references to mentions of illness, inherited generational patterns, systemic/economic oppression and marginalization, violence, racism, capitalistic and patriarchal structures, environmental degradation, and physical death. 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 quick heads-up that Tarot for the Wild Soul course is back and opening for enrollment very soon for a very limited amount of time. If you don't know this course, Tarot for the Wild Soul is one of my signature Soul Tarot courses. It totally transformed in 2001 and is currently an extraordinarily unique and beautifully crafted Soul Tarot offering, perfect for anyone who wants to take their practice out of the conceptual, away from other people's interpretations, and truly live their Tarot practice and come home to their own knowing. It's for folks who are both at a beginner level and very, very seasoned readers. It contains in-depth audio and video lessons, and teaches folks how to read the Tarot in a really nonlinear wave. So not going from The Fool to The Magician to The High Priestess, but instead framing the cards up around life experiences. So again, we take it out of the conceptual and move it into the practical, into the useful, into the deeply felt.
There are audio and video lessons, there are beautiful workbooks, there's a very robust Q&A database with all my answers to folks’ frequently asked questions. As of this year, there are now bonus workshops which are wonderful, and we will have eight Q&A roundups for participants sprinkled throughout the year, so you can ask me your questions about your practice, your deck, where you might be getting stuck, anything that might be coming up, and receive my support in real-time.
So here are the important dates to mark on your calendar so you can join us for this course, if it calls to you: from February 28th to March 3rd, we will be having an early bird sale for newsletter subscribers only, that is incredible. Like, close to 50% off tuition. We have sliding scale. So if you're part of the newsletter, if you really want to join this course, if you really need the early bird to be able to do it, February 28th to March 3rd is your time, and you will receive that email if you're already signed up for the newsletter. If you're not sure of what your notification preferences are, just email us at info@tarotforthewildsoul.com. If you're not signed up and you'd like to be, you can sign up at the link in the show notes.
From March 6th to March 20th, Tarot for the Wild Soul enrollment and a bundle sale will be running at the same time. You can opt to purchase the course on its own, or you can purchase it as a bundle with one or more of our excellent Soul Tarot courses for a very lovely discount. Enrollment for the course will close at the 20th of March at midnight Eastern Standard Time, and it will not open again until 2024. So to learn all about the course, learn all about our bundles, pricing for all of the above, answers to any of your frequently asked questions about the course, just head to the direct link in the show notes to find out all of the goodness. And again, if you have any questions about any of this that you can't find on the website or through this very, very long (Lindsay laughs) top-of-show ad for my own work, you can email us, again, at info@tarotforthewildsoul.com. Thank you.
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(Instrumental intro music)
[0:03:26]
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. As always, such a joy to be gathered here with all of you. Thank you so much for being here. I cannot believe that we are coming up on the end of Aquarius season, moving into Pisces season. I feel personally for me, like the start of Aries season on the Spring Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere is really the start to my year energetically. This whole time, like January 1st, moving through, again, like Capricorn season, Aquarius season, and then eventually Pisces season, all of that feels to me like this wonderfully interesting middle space, right? (Lindsay laughs) That certain things carry over into the new year, but we're clearing them and we're building new things. But I feel like everything sort of launches forward starting on March 22nd somehow. Maybe that's cause I'm an Aries. Maybe I'm alone in that. But it definitely feels like there's just so much coming up to be cleared and to be processed, and that's sort of the theme of the times in general.
So today, in just reflecting on all of that, we're continuing to explore our theme for the month of February, which is Uncertainty, through the cards that we're pulling for each week. And this week, our card that showed up as an Anchor, and a teacher, and a helper to guide us through the coming seven days is Three of Swords. And the title of this episode this week is Lighting the Way with Three of Swords. So, I'd love to invite all of you to think of the Three of Swords card as handing us this beautiful lantern. And I'd love for you to just have the perfect lantern pop up in your mind's eye, or in your inner knowing, or to imagine a lantern that you love, and just really trust that. Lanterns do not light up the whole forest. They don't illuminate everything in the path ahead. They really help us to see what's here. This step we're taking, and perhaps the next, perhaps even the next, if that lantern is particularly bright. Lanterns are something that we hold in our hand. They can be there as a kind of a support system, but they're helping to illuminate the next natural step.
That's an analogy that we use a lot with The Hermit card. So, The Hermit card is a really strong Major Arcana energy that essentially asks us to surrender to a totally different pace of living. And in that card, there's not so much–in The Hermit rather–there's not so much that we're being asked to do there. In fact, our work in The Hermit is kind of to stop and be with what's coming up in this particular moment; to really kind of dive down very deeply into what is asking for our attention at this moment. It's being devotional to the moment. So the spirit of that idea can really help us with what Three of Swords is going to be aiding us with this week, and how I think this card… Again, this was what I got from my guides and in my knowing around it, that we want to look to Three of Swords as being a lantern-like helper this week, helping to light and illuminate the way, the path forward.
[0:07:41]
We are continuing, again, to work with this overarching theme of Uncertainty for the month of February. And, like, uncertainty is plain and true. It's everywhere. It's absolutely, totally present existentially in a larger way in our world right now: environmentally, systemically, everything from environmental disasters, to humanitarian crises, to police brutality, to water, to food shortages. Like, on every level globally, there's utter and complete uncertainty as to…because we know these systems are failing. They've been completely corrupted by capitalist structure, and by patriarchal structures, and greed. And they're broken. They've never… Some of them are working the way they were designed to, which is to oppress and suppress. And they're not helpful. Some systems, they're harmful systems. We know they are broken. We know this. How we are…how they’re going to be taken down, how new things will be built, what we will do in the interim, how we will seek to be a part of that movement, if we are seeking to be a part of that movement, because a lot of folks are, for their own personal reasons, unwilling to see this as the reality. It's all uncertain. Every bit of it is uncertain.
So we're living with a level of uncertainty that's profound. And then I think there's a lot of personal uncertainty. We're coming out of a time when the whole world shut down, where a lot of enormous tumult occurred. We're still suffering the consequences of that on every level, many of whom are… Many folks are still going through difficulty related to that financially, with their health. It's a truly intense time, to put it mildly. And so the uncertainty is profound, and maybe even on a personal scale. Like, there's total uncertainty in my life right now. And it's not like my life is a problem. My life is wonderful, alongside challenges that I deal with. But there's a lot to be thankful for, and a lot of blessings in my life, and a tremendous amount of uncertainty on a small scale and on a large scale. And nothing that we do, really, in our spiritual practice, with our Tarot practice can really help to resolve those kinds of large moments, seasons of uncertainty. A Tarot practice can help to clarify when we're uncertain; something that can turn on a light, switch on a light, where we go, “Oh my God, I know what to do,” or “I'm shifting in this way. And now because of that shift, the answer or the way forward is clear to me, or it's at least clear what I'm not…what's not in alignment for me.” But this general experience, it's challenging to be with.
And we spoke at the February Monthly Medicine about how, really, the best way, the most successful way to be with wildly present uncertainty is to be really, really present. And to not let ourselves get dragged in here or out, you know, like hither and thither. To really be here. So if we're working with the idea of uncertainty as a root, then Three of Swords as an Anchor Card for the week is a branch on that tree that is blooming from that root that's helping us to navigate uncertainty. And we can take this kind of work and map it to different later seasons of our life. Like, if you happen to stumble upon this episode five years from now and you're like, “Fuck, I’m going through a time of real uncertainty,” this is evergreen for you. Three of Swords is an Anchor for uncertainty. That's part of the gift of these episodes is seeing like, oh wow, Seven of Swords can come up when we're dealing with an issue of love. Like, Two of Swords can come up around business. They have to do with everything. They're not in certain buckets, these cards, that can't be flexible or mutable.
[0:12:40]
So what we're being invited to do, and it’s a lofty invitation (Lindsay laughs), is to see what it would feel like to witness our internal landscapes as a sort of personal adventure. To see the invitations, the experiences, the big emotions as mountains that we're traversing, as paths that we're moving through, as rivers that we're trying to figure out how to cross or how to flow in, how to kind of sail those waters. These internal invitations can take us, and often do, to totally different landscapes within ourselves. We can learn things about ourselves constantly through moving through like, “Whoa, there's a tremendous amount of,” let's say, “jealousy here.” When we don't buy into the jealousy and let it sort of like take us away, when we can notice the invitations, notice how it feels to be in our body as a result of that experience, it actually changes the ways that we respond. It can change the way we respond to ourselves, the way we greet those emotions. We can get caught up in like, “This is not an okay emotion or experience to have.” Like, we want to be happy for this person. And we can push those experiences aside before we have really listened to them. It could be that our inner kid maybe believes, like, “There's not enough for me.” And there might be some ancestral trauma underneath that to really be with, to not let it impact how we congratulate that person, or how we might find it in our heart to celebrate that person, or to take a little bit of a break from that person if we need that.
The wound underneath still requires tending. When we tend the wound underneath, those big experiences, it actually changes the way we externalize our response, the way we respond externally. And very often, can help us respond in a way more…I don't want to say aligned way, but aligned in a way that is way more of a response rather than a reaction. And that is really what Three of Swords helps with the most. Three of Swords comes up when something arises that we might be tempted to react to. There might be a reaction. We might want to say something, we might want to call someone out, we might want to… And by the way, those responses can also be responses too. A callout is a response that is sometimes, and often depending on the situation, is incredibly important, or may have been something that there’ve been many call-ins, and then a public call-out is necessary. So I'm not saying anything about those situations.
But sometimes with life—and this is not even true just off this moment. It's always been true—sometimes we can move into blame. Believing that blaming, or screaming, or calling out, or ignoring, or blocking is going to give us something; is going to be the thing that really shifts the dynamic of our pain into a place of acceptance or of okayness. And it might, but usually it doesn't. And what winds up happening is that we wind up with a hole, we wind up with a wound, we wind up with a place within ourselves that is screaming out for tending and attention. And while we may be just really coming from an incredibly wise place, like, “Fuck, yeah, this person really wronged me. I'm gonna fucking say something about it.” Three of Swords says, absolutely say something about it. Like, call in. Call out. Say something. Let someone know how they've affected you. Say your goodbye. Say that you know. Say… Like, whatever you want to say. Absolutely. But you cannot forget that the wound, the hurt, the pain of the experience is the first thing to tend to.
[0:17:46]
And many of us bypass that, believing that external reactions will in some way soothe that wound when rarely, if ever, is that true. So we're not ever saying… I’ve taught Three of Swords for forever, for years, and this has been my motto the whole time. Expressing our feelings and telling someone how they've hurt our feelings, how we've been harmed, or acknowledging how something is making us feel is crucial. However, in my personal experience, every time I am in a Three of Swords way, whether that be very, very minimal, very subtle, very personal, or whether it be much more big and tangible, and maybe even interpersonal. Every time I'm in one of those situations, the same sort of track follows: Something happens, it's like an arrow to the heart, and I want to immediately respond. I want to tell someone how I'm fucking furious, how they’ve wronged me, how they’ve betrayed me, that I know what they've done (Lindsay laughs), that like, their comment was so inappropriate or so unfortunate.
And what I realize I really need first—before I can find my words, name how the behavior or how the situation, whether intended or unintended, made me feel—the first thing that I need to do is tend to the bruise, the wound in my heart. Because whatever that happens to be, I'm hurting. I'm aching. I'm wounded. And the heart needs my attention, and in a much more sort of broad sense, the mind and the brain. We're dealing with a Sword card. The mind and the brain want to keep us out of discomfort, no matter what. It's a protective mechanism. The mind does not want us anywhere near discomfort. So when it comes to an experience like Three of Swords where we are invited to sit in, like, “Oh God, like, this feels horrible,” there's a desire, a very smart and beautiful desire on the part of the mind and the nervous system to be like, “Tell this person so you can clear all this up and go back to feeling okay.” Like, it's ABC. Just let them know, or close this book, or close this chapter, or block this person. And in some cases, all of those things are the right thing to do. What we’re being… Like, first things first, you know? So I'm not saying like, don't do those things, or don't do those things immediately. Because sometimes Three of Swords is about doing those things and then being with the experience.
This card is basically saying whether you respond to a situation first or post kind of heart tending, the heart tending can't be skipped. We can't skip that part. And we definitely don't want to believe that any kind of external response is necessarily going to be the balm that soothes the wound within us that only really we can do by just being with it. Not cycling into blame, not cycling into story, not cycling into what we're going to do. All that will come. It's about being present with ourselves and saying, “Oh my God, this hurts. And I feel this way, that way about it. I feel, you know, foolish. I feel upset. I feel betrayed.” Like, whatever experience.
[0:21:50]
Sometimes Three of Swords doesn't have anything to do with that. Sometimes we can be ready, sitting down to do work on whatever we're doing and we can't quite get to it. And we might pull a card to help clarify what's going on. We might pull Three of Swords and we sit with it for a moment. And maybe there's something on our heart that we've just not been giving our attention to. We just have thought, “Well, meh, it’s no big deal,” or, you know, whatever it might be. And by being with that, saying what we have to say, or being with that moment, or whatever the medicine is that we need in any particular situation, by acknowledging, “Oh, there's a wound here. There's heart pain here. There's heart hurt here. There's a part of me that has emotion. There are tears here to cry. There's something here to acknowledge.” By acknowledging it, it illuminates that lantern, that soul, that (Lindsay sighs) deep, wise part of ourselves that we're always trying to get closer to, always calling upon. It illuminates that part of us and helps us to see a different part of the path than we might have originally seen. It helps us to see a bevy of options, rather than just one.
Sometimes the option for response or for moving forward after tending to that part of ourselves, sometimes even that is… Like, on paper, it's not different. But it might be the energy with which we go about responding. It might be the way we respond. It might be… It's so different. It can be so completely different once we've softened into the heart. So we're lighting the way forward for ourselves, clarifying what might feel this week like a super uncertain situation. Anytime we're feeling uncertain, unclear, like there's something really dense going on and we don't quite know what it is, we are invited to come back to the heart. Anytime we feel a sense of like we've been misunderstood, like something doesn't feel very clean, if we feel like, “Oh, wow. Like, I'm sure that person didn't mean to hurt my feelings, but they did,” we want to be with the heart. We want to be with that and just say, like, “Ooh, I see you. That felt hard. That felt hard to receive,” you know? And from there, from that willingness, the path that is really obscured and feels super unclear becomes much brighter, much clearer. And the way forward becomes far more known than if we attempt to fumble our way into that without taking our heart with us. So Three of Swords really shifts the narrative. We can't really move forward in alignment if we're not taking that internal landscape with us. And I would actually say, letting that internal landscape dictate, and shift, and change, and make more solid and clear the action that we take on the other side.
So this week, that's something to pay attention to, whether it's really, really subtle or very overt and clear. There's nothing to be afraid of here. The grief, the hurt, the pain, the memory of being misunderstood, it's already right here for us. Even if you're going about your day in a super happy mood, your mind isn't even there, there's something that can come up, something right there under the surface that all of us can pull up with very little effort (Lindsay laughs). And Three of Swords isn’t a sudden shock to the system, although like all cards, it can be. It is really just a revealing of, like, “Whoa. Okay. This is… There's a big feeling here.” It's really an invitation for us to get closer to the heart and to really listen.
[0:21:50]
There's a lovely book that I read to my daughter called The Rabbit Listened. And inside of that book, a child builds this lovely structure with blocks, and it gets all torn down. And different animals come to this child. Like, there's a chicken who wants to talk about it but the child–Taylor is their name–doesn't feel like talking. And a bear comes in and they're really angry, and they want to really get mad about it, but Taylor doesn't feel like getting mad. And then an elephant comes and wants to rebuild the whole thing from memory, and Taylor doesn't want to do that. And on and on these animals come. And this bunny just kind of comes in and sits next to Taylor. And Taylor doesn't want the bunny to leave, so he says, “Please stay with me.” And then the rabbit just listens as Taylor talks about it, and yells about it, and talks about wanting to knock someone else's tower down. And once they have actually spoken about it, felt heard, they feel sort of organically excited to build a different tower, to build something totally different. But they have to be heard.
Taylor, that child is, for all intents and purposes, the heart when our structures are knocked down whether by accident or on purpose, or as a joke, or whatever. And we get to be that rabbit. We get to have the privilege of sort of quietly coming up and just staying with, listening to the heart. We don't have to do anything. Three of Swords teaches us that… shows us what's possible when we give ourselves that kind of gift. That just like Taylor, that child, there is a natural moment where we say, “Oh, it is time for me to speak my truth to this person. It is time for me to be really clear about the experience I've suffered. It is really clear to me that I need to rebuild or I need to…” Sometimes there's no response necessary. It's just a moment that we experience. But it's not about what we do, although that's a big part of it. It's about how much we can let ourselves be like that rabbit who listens, rather than needing to try to figure something, because it doesn't help the pain.
The truth is that when our towers get knocked down, it's really… It brings up a lot. So how can we really be there for ourselves in that moment? And in those moments, something in us needs to bubble up in order to clear the path for us to move forward. We don't always think of Three of Swords as being kind of like a path clearing or a road opener, but I believe it is. Because it shows us there are times in life where we will not know the way forward, unless we are willing to be with something that is requiring our attention, that needs to be acknowledged. We might not feel clear on what to do next, but actually being with the heart and being with our emotions without that agenda of what to do next will, paradoxically, help us to know what to do next (Lindsay laughs), just by being there. So it's acting as a kind of a lantern that really can illuminate something that might just require us giving ourselves a little bit of tenderness, and time, and loving care, and attention in order to move forward.
[0:30:49]
Like if we're feeling stuck in our business this week… I was just sharing about this with my friend or… Well, she is my friend, but my business coach, Amy. And I was feeling a little bit blocked related to something in my business. And while I was talking to Amy over Voxer, I got emotional and tears came up, and I thought, “Oh my God, I would never have thought that there was grief inside of this.” And it made me realize that I don't necessarily need to know what to do to clear the block. I need to be with the feelings. If I'm with the feelings, the block will likely dissipate a little bit, or there’ll at least be some room around it where I'll know what to do next.
So Three of Swords doesn't say, “Don't react or respond immediately.” It just says, “Take the heart with you.” And if we do want to respond or react immediately without touching in with the heart, we may find that our response isn't quite as rooted as we might hope and wish. It might not give us what we're looking for, essentially. I know for myself—I know I don't speak for everybody—but again, in those moments where I've been like, “I'm gonna, like, really let this person fucking know,” (Lindsay laughs) like, “I know what they did, I know what they're about and how they made me feel,” it never, ever has given me what I've wanted, which is to feel better. To feel better, to not feel hurt, to not feel pained. To feel better. And it's not like we are looking to make all of our emotions go away or disappear. But we do give ourselves the gift of that possibility of soothing and repair when we can be with ourselves first, or at least as a part of it.
Sometimes true repair can't really happen until we've involved someone else. But it can be very hard to speak about what's going on sometimes when we at least don't have a sense of like, “This hurt me, you know? This hurt my feelings. It made me feel this way.” So we're being asked, in spite of—or despite, rather—how we externalize a response or a reaction, we're asking to take the heart with us and to center the heart, no matter what it is. And in doing so, by centering the heart, by making it essentially that light or that flame in the lantern, it's going to help with our next steps. There's a kind of an alchemy that does occur in Three of Swords experiences that I can't explain. But it is absolutely true that the more we are willing to be with ourselves in those moments; the clearer the choice, the response, the path becomes in one particular area of our lives.
So I'll be really interested to see how this card shows up this week. I definitely know that it's not always the most fun experience, Three of Swords. Sometimes it feels like nothing. But I do know that it has helped tremendously in moments where without being with it, I probably would have responded in ways that I would have regretted. So yeah, always interested and curious to hear from y’all, so do drop me a line on Ask Lindsay and let me know through the week how this card is showing up for you, and how centering your heart has or hasn't made a difference, and what you've discovered.
[0:34:35]
Okay. So now we're gonna move on to our listener question, and this is from Anonymous. They ask,
Dearest Lindsay, I've been a longtime listener of the pod and just want to genuinely thank you from the bottom of my heart for your wonderful teachings on Soul Tarot, and my strength in connection with my deck.
Thank you so much for saying that, and I'm happy to have you.
My question revolves around overcoming that instinctual, gut-wrenching fear and anxiety whenever I see The Tower appear in a reading. I've done four separate readings in the past month and in every one, The Tower has unfalteringly appeared. I've done my fieldwork, I’ve journaled and I've tried my best to “surrender to the invitation of this beautiful, divine card” as you mentioned in your The Tower episode, but all I seem to be able to evoke is pure fear and worry. Perhaps the dissonance of the card and what appears to be a season of joy and peace in my life is what's triggering me, but I can't help but wonder if I'm missing something. It's, quite honestly, a little maddening to wonder if I'm missing something or not paying attention to something going on. You mentioned in your The Tower episode that this card only ever comes with a personal cognizant invitation for change, but it's hard to reconcile that “the cards are for me, not to me”, and that no card potentiates any outcome. But it's hard not to worry, given the precedents for deep transformative change and radical shifting of foundations that this card name seems to represent. Is there a way I can surrender to the Tarot without anxiety and worry? I apologize for the long-winded question and thank you sincerely for all that you do.
No need to ever apologize. You're perfect. Okay. So, beautiful inquiry, and I'm honored to speak to this. So, I'd love for us to wonder together about this, even though we're responding to this out of time with one another. Like, you've asked me and now I'm answering at a different time. I see two different things here. I see a question: how do we overcome the instinctual, gut-wrenching fear that we get when we pull certain cards? Like, how do we work through that? And two, essentially—and this is my paraphrasing—like, are you missing something, and what…? How can we work with a card like The Tower? Right?
[0:37:08]
So I want to start with the second piece, which is that you have mentioned that you've done four separate readings in the past month, and every one The Tower has unfalteringly appeared, and it's been a time of joy and peace. So I want you to really let that sink in. The Tower does not need to mean chaos. It just doesn't. It doesn't. A lot of the time it comes up, you can barely feel it. It’s a sweet time. It’s a sweet day. Sweet season. The Tower is about uprooting something that's not quite on the sturdiest foundation it can be. And sometimes that involves something very big. Sometimes it's about realizing something we need to realize if we have a long-held belief. The Tower can sometimes, like, uproot all the things to have us be like, “Oh my God, I am stronger than I thought I was,” or “Whoa, I've always thought like I was so fragile, but now I realize I'm so, you know, I'm so strong, I'm so sturdy,” or the opposite.
It's not always rooted in this idea of like, “Oh, I've been going about this all wrong, and I need to have my whole life blown up to be…” Like, it's not about that. You know, it can be about that, not… I wouldn't use the term “wrong”. But it can be about like, “I've been living a life that's not really in full alignment for me, and there needs to be a change,” right? What I believe The Tower is here to help you to do–and you're free to disagree because you'll know yourself better than I ever will–is I actually think The Tower is here to help to uproot your perceptions about The Tower, which cards sometimes do. Some cards will come up again and again, almost meta. Like, as a comment on the moment itself to say, “I'm going to pop up so that the response and the expectation that you have around my presence can be looked at directly.”
So what I think that… And sometimes this happens with me. It's happened with other people I've taught many, many times. Sometimes some cards come up not because they're bringing anything in or because they're about a time of personal work. But they can come in essentially to say there's a belief that we're holding somewhere about the card itself that we get to work through, like, that moment (Lindsay snaps fingers). Sometimes I'll find—I've actually LOL’d at this in my life before—where I'll pull a card and think, “Oof, that can't be true.” And then I pull a clarifier and I pull The Devil, which is, to me, a way like almost lightning quick, like lightning speed, the Tarot being like, “Hey, I'm gonna pop The Devil up as a kind of a signifier of the doubt, and the worry, and the invitation into brain stuff that you just had about this lovely card that came up for you. Trust it,” you know?
[0:40:50]
So I'm seeing that your Tower work is actually about you realizing that The Tower does not need to be destruction. It can be an unearthing of a belief or of an idea that has never been true for you. And it can be the root system of transformation around how you are regarding and believing The Tower to be or to… The kind of impact it can have when that impact truly is way more holographic than we might believe. So that's… Hopefully, I’ve rooted that into something that made sense. That's my sense of why it's coming up. And the proof that I feel that I have, the evidence that I'm working with is the fact that you pulled it four times in a month, and there hasn't been any of what you might consider like the classic Tower symptoms, right? There's no upheaval, there's no… Yeah, there's… It can be that. It sometimes can be that. The Tower can definitely pull us into that kind of experience if it's very big. But a lot of the time, it's very subtle.
Sometimes it can come up, like if we have some feelings about our personal appearance that are maybe not what we'd like them to be. Sometimes we get such a beautiful, bright response from someone about our own beauty, or about our own intelligence, or about our own grace, or ability or strength that we can pull The Tower and it can be like, “Oh my God, that story I've been telling myself forever how nobody sees me is not true,” right? So sometimes The Tower is very bright and very positive and…but those realizations are still really impactful, right? So I think The Tower is doing something kind of meta with you, is taking you on a little bit of a masterclass right now and showing you how it can show up in really different ways. So I'd love to hear back from you to let me know like, “Actually, Lindsay, all this shit went down later. Wow, that makes sense,” or “It doesn't,” or “I need a little bit more clarification.” So, do let me know.
The second part of this is how can we work through the fear that just like, boom, comes up when we see a card? There's a lot of really, really in-depth exercises that I have about this very thing in Rewilding the Tarot. I would say that's the course of all of my courses that are most about, like, how do you literally work through those things step by step? And I think that one of the practices that I like a lot with this kind of thing are what I call the Four C's. And the Four C's are Compassion, Critical thinking, Common sense, and Curiosity.
[0:44:03]
And when I pull a card, like let's say my card is… I have like a range of cards that sometimes when I pull, I just get so activated by. But let's say I'm having this response about Death, right? So if I pull Death and have this just drop of dread, and terror, and anxiety about all the different things it could bring, I pull in first curiosity maybe. And I would say, I'm gonna get curious about these feelings, first of all. So there's a worry that something might happen. Okay. That is my nervous system, my mind doing everything it can do—what it does best—to protect me from harm. To protect me, to put me on alert, and to make sure that I'm being as hypervigilant as possible in the face of potential discomfort, danger, pain, suffering. So I know that my nervous system is essentially in working order here (Lindsay laughs). You know, that's a normal response. Like, it just is. We're…you know?
But then we want to get a little bit more curious about it and see, like, “Okay, is there anything here for me that I need to brace for in the response, in the inside of the presence of this card, in light of the presence of this card?” And we can be with that. We can journal. We can pull more cards about that. But we want to get really curious. We want to maybe even ask the card directly, like, “What are you bringing?” Like, “What are you bringing at this point in the reading?” And then we can bring about some critical thoughtfulness, some common sense. Not saying that you don't have common sense or critical thoughtfulness around this. Those are terms that really help me.
You know, in all the millions and millions, likely billions of people who've pulled cards, you know, cards for themselves, or read for other people, or had their cards read too, if the Death card caused death or destruction, or if it was a terrible omen, if it truly was, then it would be not something relegated to, you know, a pop culture idea that pulling the Death card indicates like it's a bad sign. I would have heard about it from more people. There would be, like, threads on the internet devoted to like, “Wait, has everyone else lost someone (Lindsay laughs) or had this thing happen or that thing happen with this card, you know?” And there just isn't. Like, I'm sure there's some things like that, but there just isn't because the Death card doesn't indicate that. Even if we've had a personal experience, that doesn't mean that universally it will be like that.
[0:47:05]
I've seen other readers say, like, “I had an experience pulling this card after the death of someone or…you know. And people say that the Death card isn't about death, and it is.” And I say out of respect, yes, you had an experience that connected the Death card to a physical loss, and so that absolutely colors and shapes one's connection with Death. There usually is a letting go process. There is loss. Does that mean, though, that universally every time, as a rule, this card is about that? No. It can be. It's not always. Otherwise, we would have definitely heard about it by now, like if… You know? So it's not known. You know, it's not a fact. So we know that that can help a lot. And then compassion. Compassion. Remembering that these cards want to help as best as they can, right? And so letting us in on the fact that we're going through a much larger season as part of the gift of the card, it's not necessarily to warn. That's more of a religious idea, you know? So no, this doesn't take away from that.
What I can say is, long story short, the Four C's as a practice can help. And there's a way bigger expansion on that in Rewilding the Tarot, which you can learn more about on my website, tarotforthewildsoul.com. If you want to sign up for that, enrollment is evergreen for that. So it's open if you want to work more on that, or if you've been looking for an offering that can be sort of a reframing of the cards without fear.
Long story short, over time and over years, it changes. With repeated pulls, with continued work, it changes. It's not immediate. It's not overnight. It changes over time. And I can tell you, there are still cards when I pull them, I really hate to see them (Lindsay laughs). Like, I'm not happy to see them. Even though I understand the medicine they bring, it's not something I prefer. Like, it's bitter, deeply bitter, instead of maybe sweet or savory. And I don't particularly like the flavor of the card, and that's okay. Or I'm going through an extraordinarily sensitive time and I can't see things like that, because my mind is so responsive and reactive that it just takes a card like that and runs with it. So I just want to normalize that. Like, it's okay to have those feelings. It's just knowing that it's the mind trying to protect us, rather than the truth. And we don't… That can be it. We can just be like, “Yeah, okay, that's… Of course, there's a very normal response here that's happening.”
[0:50:11]
The key, though, is collecting evidence, like what I actually think The Tower is trying to give you right now. So because you are receiving this beautiful mirroring from The Tower around, like, “Hey, I can pop up for you and not cause all these things because you've pulled me four times in a month and nothing's ‘happened’, except for the panic and the contraction in the mind.” All that stuff has come up and forward to really be looked at and worked on. But The Tower of it all is the realization, like, “Oh my God, this card isn't about bringing all these different things, because I just experienced a whole month working with it and nothing horrible happened,” right? So that's one of the beauties of this kind of work, and that's how I think it changes over time. We collect evidence from these kinds of experiences. And we go, “Oh, yeah. I remember this time with The Tower, and I was okay. It was great,” you know?
So, I hope that helps. I just want you to know you're not alone. It's work we do over a lifetime. The Four C's can help. It's just continued gentle attention being brought to this, you know, but you're doing great. And it sounds like The Tower and you have been doing some really extraordinary work together. So write me. Let me know how it lands. And thanks for trusting me with your question.
All right, loves. Thank you so much for being here with me for this podcast episode. Have an absolutely glorious week. And until we meet again, please take exquisite care of yourselves.