236: Mailbag Mondays - Missing the Medicine and Living with Chronic Illness
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We're back with another Mailbag Monday segment on Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast, where I answer some of the lovely Q's that come through the Ask Lindsay mailbag!
Air date:
July 24, 2023
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About the Episode
We're back with another Mailbag Monday segment on Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast, where I answer some of the lovely Q's that come through the Ask Lindsay mailbag!
Today, we answer two beautiful listener Q's, one about whether we are capable of "missing" the medicine when we don't take action on something (and what happens to that energy), and ways to lean on our intuition and practice when living with chronic illness.
Lindsay’s Links:
Sign up for Lindsay's new offering, The Court Cards, coming out on July 28th!
Learn more about Lindsay and dive into all of their courses, journal posts, and free resources here!
Got Q's for the podcast? Ask them here!
Download the (free!) Ultimate Soul Tarot Card Guide here
PODCAST EDITOR: Chase Voorhees
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTIONISTS: Meghan Lyman, Terri Wanjiku, Annelise Feliu, Valerie Cochran
PODCAST ART: Rachelle Sartini Garner
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: childhood trauma, difficult relationship with a parent, challenges around parenthood, Covid-19, illness, physical pain, death, loss of a loved one, grief, economic and systemic marginalization, chronic illness, autoimmune disease, childhood trauma, PTSD, capitalistic structures, and environmental degradation
The content in this episode contains references to childhood trauma, difficult relationship with a parent, challenges around parenthood, Covid-19, illness, physical pain, death, loss of a loved one, grief, economic and systemic marginalization, chronic illness, autoimmune disease, childhood trauma, PTSD, capitalistic structures, and environmental degradation. 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]
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(Instrumental intro music)
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 hope that this episode is finding you well and greeting you well, and I hope that you're hanging in there, staying cool with this wild heatwave that a lot of the world is experiencing. Sending tons of love to all of you and to our planet. So we have another Mailbag Monday episode, but this one is more of like a roundup. There were a couple of questions that I thought would be not enough to fill one whole episode but… I don't know. Maybe they would be. Obviously, they're all incredibly beautiful questions that are deserving of really long and languid responses, but I thought I'd just kind of combine them all and go for it. Okay, so the first question is from Anto and Anto asks,
Hi, Lindsay. Thank you so much for your medicine. I have a question that tends to bring up a lot of dense feelings. Can you speak to the idea of “missing” the medicine that you channel? As in, if June was “Breaking Away”, and there were things that I knew I had to break away from but stayed, what happens to the medicine? How do you interpret that in a helpful way? I tend to get anxious as I look back and wonder, is it possible to miss the invitations of whatever's coming up in your life? And what happens to that energy? Thank you.
Aw, what a beautiful question. And I just want to remind everyone that I am but a mere… I am a mere mortal (Lindsay laughs). That's the thing is like, I do really mean it when I say that I am appreciative and humbled by the trust you place in me with these questions because I'm learning too. I'm right there with you down to the ground. And so I'll do my best with what I think, but know that someone might know better, probably does. And you might know better, you probably do (Lindsay laughs). So yeah, I'll do my best with this.
[0:02:32]
I’ll wax poetic for a moment and just offer up a gentle reminder that most of life, I think, is very mysterious, certainly very spiralic, certainly very, again, nonlinear and chaotic in many ways. We don't really know much of anything in this life. There are some things we know and some things we don't. And so you know, understanding the whole totality of what happens to things when they're not necessarily…when we don't take action on them in a linear way is… Who really knows? But again, I wanted to sort of start there because I think we… I want to encourage you… I feel inside of your letter an element of self-blame or like “should-ing” yourself, which, you know, I'm not here to tell you what to do. That's okay if you need to move through that, but I just wanted to name that what you're experiencing is very normal (Lindsay laughs). And there's no performance review. Like, we're not letting Spirit down. We're not letting…
Of course, it's possible to let ourselves down. But I think being patient with our processes and just naming, like, “This was one exit on this particular highway, and I didn't take it.” And if you've ever been to places where the… You know, if you're driving down a highway, there will be an opportunity to take another exit, go a local road, double back, take an exit, go on the other side of the highway, get back on the other highway, and take the exit again. I think that that's what happens to the energy. That's one way of looking at it, is just the highway metaphor is just like there's just other options that open up. There are different parts of the highway that materialize in the journey of our life because things aren't written. So, there's just other options. It's like, “All right, well, now we’ll… Another option is presenting itself here,” or “I no longer have this choice. Okay.” Right?
And I also want to reframe the idea of like, breaking away. So I thought that, for what it's worth, I really thought breaking away for me, when I channeled that down for Monthly Medicine, was going to be about a couple of very specific things. And I really got kind of, in a gentle way, like egg on my face (Lindsay laughs) about it. It was just not what I not only thought it was going to be, but had actively planned for. All of those things really upended themselves and the markers on the GPS, if we’re using a metaphor of getting off on a highway, changed radically. And so I was like, all right. It was a weird and hard thing to adjust to. But now looking back on it, there were other things that needed to be broken away from that I actually think I did; I just didn't center. And there are other things that I look at and I'm like, “Uh, well, eventually this thing or this situation, this relationship or whatever it is will have to be broken away from.” It just wasn't meant to happen in June.
[0:06:47]
So sometimes we have ideas as human beings about what is center focus, what's the most important thing, and you know, sometimes life has different plans. Sometimes the timing of something shifts and again, the energy… Because the other thing I wanted to share along with sort of the highway metaphor is again another truth of life, which is that death is not ever really the end of the whole essence of a being, right? There is obviously the completion of… If we’re talking about a beloved person passing away, there is a massive loss and a massive ending in the form of the incarnation of this person, the way that that soul and the way that that body was illuminated in life. That is a massive loss and there is no way around that. And yet, the energy of that beloved pet, or friend, or human being lives on. That energy doesn't die. That energy is present, if we lose a beloved parent, in the way we parent our own kids, even if we're doing completely different things than our parents did. I just read, actually, an Instagram post of somebody who was talking about their beloved mom who had passed, and who said, “She still parents me every day,” and she's been gone for a long time.
And so it's certainly maybe not the most graceful of comparisons to compare a task or an ending that we didn't do to the loss of, like, a beloved figure. But the essence, the cellular makeup of it is similar enough that I wanted to draw a conclusion—which is just to say that if we don't get off on a particular exit on the highway, nothing is lost. We just have different options and choices ahead of us. And when one option dies away, or when one energetic inroad dies away, that thing isn't lost. I mentioned the element of someone passing away to illustrate the point that I don't think energy dies in that way. I just think things start living on in a completely different way, from a completely different standpoint, which is both really challenging and really… Well, it is just challenging, straight up, when it comes to the loss of someone.
But yeah, as far as our situations go, I would just say that you made a choice that, while might not feel like it, makes sense. It might feel like, “Oh, I blew it,” or you know, whatever. Those are very human, valid feelings. It’s just to really be gentle with yourself and know that there's always another option. It might not be the same option with the same circumstances, but it will always present itself. And I think that June was honestly an invitation to be open to what wanted to actually be broken away from, rather than what we thought we needed to break away from. Because I definitely was served that humbling (Lindsay laughs) reminder. So I don't think it's possible to miss the invitations that come up in our life. Of course, it's possible to “miss things”. But I just think that other highway exits arise. Maybe not the ones that were initially planned on but again, life keeps spiraling, right? We keep finding a way forward. So I think the energy just continues on in a different form. So again, that's just my two cents. Who knows if I'm right, or who knows if there's anything to it, but I hope that was useful. Thank you for trusting me with that question.
[0:11:22]
And then our last question is from Kim:
Dear Lindsay, thank you for your spiritual transmissions that have been a huge source of guidance in my life over the years. My question is about chronic illness because I have a serious and relatively uncommon autoimmune condition. I've gone through phases of thinking the Universe is punishing or that I've done something wrong in a previous life, and now I'm really feeling lost. I don't know if it's possible to heal or whether I'm supposed to endure this for the rest of my life. I feel like there is a spiritual lesson in all of this, but I'm missing it. If you have any guidance on how I could use my intuition to explore my healing process, that would be great. Thanks so much.
Oh, Kim, I'm so sorry and I'm so deeply sorry that you're going through that. I have a couple of autoimmune conditions that unfortunately really run the rhythm of my life even still, but they're more common. So again, dealing with an uncommon anything must just be such a difficult thing, and I just want to say how sorry I am. And I want to just come in not hot, but warm. You did not do anything to deserve, or draw in, or manifest this autoimmune condition. Nobody does anything to bring about any illness or any injury. Nobody ever does anything. It's not because of what you did in a past life. It's not because of anything you did in this life. And what the fuck do I know? I'm honestly just some person trying to figure it out the same way everyone else is.
The Universe, I do not believe, is punishing. There is a neutrality to the… In my opinion, God and the Universe don't do anything. They're a force of love and spiritual support that we can draw on to help us move through the things that pop up in life because they do. Nobody does anything to deserve that. If that were the case, I don't know that there would be these billionaires running around, trillionaires actively destroying the planet with nothing being done about it. This is not necessarily… We create the justice in this world. It's not about waiting for justice to be served by God or by this idea of the Universe. We as humans create that. We strive for that, we reach for that, we fight for that, right? God didn't do this to you. The Universe didn't do this to you. You didn't do anything to deserve this. This is a very, very tough thing to say and to share, but think about any child who, God forbid, has some sort of illness or really hard condition. That child didn't do anything to draw that in. That's not their destiny. It happens. It happens because of a million genetic factors or other mitigating factors that a doctor would be able to tell us more than anything.
[0:15:10]
It, of course, makes sense that human beings—we are very prone to blaming ourselves—would want to say, “I must have done something to cause this. I must have done something.” And the truth is you didn't. The truth is that, like anything else, it's here. So how can you lean into your intuition, into a practice to help you to explore a healing process? I would say that probably, which I trust that you're doing, the most important thing, if you have access to this, because I know it takes so much time, it takes resources, it takes energy. And that's really hard for sick people or people dealing with chronic conditions to cultivate. You know, if we have autoimmune disease, if we're on disability, if we're going through a period where we cannot work, there's no funds, so it's very hard to afford care, especially care that doesn't gaslight, that listens to us, that isn't fat-phobic, that isn't…you know? It's not easy to navigate these incredibly broken and harmful systems. And so I would say the first thing is, whatever resources, whatever support you can call in that can help you to navigate whatever system feels the most helpful and the least harmful is obviously one of the best uses of your time, your energy, your intuitive capacity.
I know for myself—I'm only speaking for myself—that sometimes it can feel like… (Lindsay sighs) I know for me, I can feel sometimes like… When a solution is brought to me in the form of whatever it might be, a helpful attempt to try something new, sometimes I am resistant to trying something because I don't want to add more confusion. I don't want to add the potential of something that could confuse things, or have me not know whether something's me or a trial or a medication or this or that. And sometimes I have to do a lot of work intuitively to tease between what is going on in my protective mind and what's really an intuitive call, and it can be very hard to prise those two apart. So I would say working with a wonderful space holder, working with a really sturdy space holder who can witness us as we feel into that is really helpful and really important.
And I would say community is really important, even if it's really intimate. Knowing that you're not alone in these things, knowing that these things are not your fault, knowing that you did nothing to cause these things are really important things to reach for. Because the truth is what feels like healing for you, the path to it is going to look really different for you than it might look for another person. So whatever your journey is with this condition… And I mean, I pray that you feel better soon. I absolutely pray that you feel better soon and hope that you feel better soon, and that you see differences soon, that you have ease in your body and across the flow of your life. But I would say having really sturdy sources of support to help you—and you may have this already, Kim, so please forgive me if you do—having those really sturdy sources of support are really going to be your best bet here.
[0:19:44]
I don't necessarily know if… I'm only... You asked me, so I'm just speaking for myself. I never had an issue with a condition of mine that was not helped without supplementation, whether that be a prescription medication or an actual supplement that helped to support the medication. My practice, my spiritual practice has been a balm not to heal and get better. It's been a balm to help me be with what is. It's been a balm to help me be with some kind of loving presence when I feel despair. I just got COVID and got over COVID. Thank God for Paxlovid, Jesus Christ, for real (Lindsay laughs). But just got COVID again after only three and a half months of having it prior to this, which is not what you want, but it's what happened. And I was very sick. And, you know, lying in bed while the sun is out with the shades drawn, in pain and sick is just about my top trigger for despair. And I was so grateful for the only thing that I could really do. I didn't know how soon I would feel better. I took my Paxlovid and was so incredibly grateful for it. I'm lucky to be eligible, lucky I got it as a prescription, lucky I have insurance. I'm so lucky and privileged to have had that. And I am also eligible for Paxlovid because I have major underlying conditions, and I'm susceptible to a very bad case and a long case of COVID.
All I could do was in the dark, be… I didn't know how soon I would feel better. I didn't know if it was going to be a bad case. I didn't know if it was going to spiral out and complicate. I didn't know anything, and there was no way I could have known anything. There was nothing that I could eat, or drink, or do. There was nothing that was going to take it away faster that I could do. And maybe that's different for someone else but it hasn't been true for me. As a chronically ill person, I've really found that there just… I am very humble. And, you know, in the face of some of my experiences with pain and with illness, that I am very grateful for the modern medicines and the modern interventions that help me get better faster, or feel better, or have some kind of sense of…you know? So we don't know. We don't know what's going to happen. We don't know where certain things are going to take us.
The only thing I did know was that my inner kid was really activated and scared, and that I don't have anyone to call on in those moments. Like, I don't have parents to call. So I stroked my own hair, which is very comforting to my inner kid, and gave myself, like, a squeeze in the dark with my eyes closed, so sick and nauseous, and just said, “I'm right here and Spirit is right here, even though it doesn't feel like it,” and let myself really cry and be so upset that I was sick, and miss my daughter, and let all the traumatic feelings of being a daughter, as I was, with a very chronically sick mom wash up over me, and have all of these fears come up that “What if my daughter feels the same way?”, when I'm a completely different human being than my mother was and have completely different capacities for communication, and have a beautifully present partner, which I'm so privileged to have, explaining things to her when I'm too sick to do so. You know?
[0:24:25]
And I share this with you because it's very fresh in my mind how in these moments, when we are sick, when we don't feel well, the only thing that our intuition…the deepest balm is whatever helps us to be with what we are going through in this moment. Whether it be prayer, or meditation, or a particular song or songs, or maybe for you it is like the sound of the ocean, or a singing bowl, or maybe it's a goofy podcast. For me, it's way more of a goofy podcast than it is like a singing bowl, but I'm not you, right? So you know, you have to find what helps you in the depths of those moments and to know that in the… Ram Dass, whose work I don't necessarily… I, of course, know of Ram Dass, and never read any book of Ram Dass’ other than Be Here Now. But I love—and I'm sorry that he went through this—but deeply appreciated the story of Ram Dass talking about when he had his stroke and woke up covered in the hospital and hooked up to every machine. And he said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that he could not find his center, he could not find prayer, he could not find God. And he very famously said, “I flunked the test.” And that was his way of saying that in those moments when we feel sick, when we're off our center, when we've been injured, when we're thrown wildly out of our known and felt experience, it is very hard to sense into the depths and the void and feel God and feel a—you know? And he said eventually, he found his way back there through remembering his beloved mentor, his beloved teacher.
That is a kind of an anchoring process that can be very helpful. When I mentioned like, you know, touching my own hair, that is a sense of connecting to a mother figure. I had to do that a lot to myself when I was really young, because I didn't have anyone comforting me when I didn't feel well as a kid. Which is part of why feeling sick feels so traumatic, because it was just a really hard… I was always alone and there wasn't really a sense of support, or mothering, or parenthood, or anything.
I offer up that story about Ram Dass to tell you that you didn't do anything, we don't do anything to deserve these things or to call them in. That is an incredibly harmful and very pervasive story around New Age culture, and it deserves to be eradicated and picked apart because it really just comes and stems from a fear of losing control, and of death, and of a belief that we're somehow supposed to be superhuman or that… It's just another offshoot. It really does come from a sense of puritanical, you know, guilt, trippy bullshit. And so (Lindsay sighs) I share all this to say that we're in good company here. Ram Dass had a practice that was, like, decades old and was very storied, and still found himself feeling like he flunked the test in the moment.
[0:28:28]
So I encourage you to think about what are the Anchors that help you to be with yourself, and to feel close to benevolence, to grace, to comfort, to ease when you don't feel well? And how can you begin to witness rather than believe the story that says, “What did you do to cause this? It's because of this.” I know my brain does that too. It will blame all manner of things about the way that I've opted to live my life, or the way I look, or the way I'm embodied. And those feelings are very painful, but they're not true. It's my brain attempting to kick me into making changes, or it's safer somehow than just feeling like I'm in a body that is in pain a lot of the time, and that's not my fault, you know? But from accepting that there is the medicine that you're seeking to find in there, because what really can help is just offering yourself radical compassion, calling upon any figure that feels comforting to you in that moment, calling upon whatever resources.
And just this is something—I bow to Michelle, who also lives with chronic pain and illness and has survived many enormous physical injuries that are unbelievable. That Michelle really taught me and helped me to see when you're not feeling well, when you're in pain, when you're sick: it's just this moment. That's very hard for someone going through pain and injury. You're just in this moment. Any time you feel yourself drifting off into the future, it's too much. So as hard as it is, I gently want to encourage you, permission you, to not think about this as being “the rest of my life”. And I just want to state: I do the same thing. When I have something come up, I’m like, “This is forever,” you know? And the truth is that things are very spiralic. And it can be very helpful to say, “Oh, wow, I don't feel as bad today. It's still a spectrum and I'm still on the spectrum of this, but today is a one. But five days ago, it was a nine.” And that's important to remember, you know?
I really hope that helps. I think that intuition and a spiritual practice for these experiences is really helpful when we can form Anchors, whatever the Anchor might be: the thought of a beloved teacher, the thought of a beloved mentor, the thought of the love of Spirit, a beloved child in our lives, or, you know, animal, pet, familiar, a card or cards. That's the heart and soul of Tarot Anchoring, that when we're in our own version of being, like, the-shades-drawn-with-the-sun-out super sick, a card can portal us into a place where we can just give ourselves what we need to move through that moment. I really hope that that helps. I really do. I'm just bearing witness to you with so much love and compassion, so much solidarity, so much empathy. And please write me. I would love to hear how this landed with you. Thank you for trusting me with this question, really. Hope I did justice to it; to all of them.
[0:32:35]
And I just want to say a humble thank you to anyone and everyone listening to this. Thanks for hanging in there (Lindsay laughs) with a teacher and with a practitioner who dares to be honest about mistakes and about gaffes, and dares to be sick and in pain without believing that there's anything wrong with me for being sick and in pain. It's not the most popular look, and I'm thankful that you're all here. Thankful to be here with you, and I love all of you.
Next week, I will be back with a Monthly Medicine for August. Talk to me about how the fuck we're in August already. I don't get it. It's madness. This year is flying. But honestly, it also feels like it's the longest year of my life, so I don't know. Also wanted to name that this week—yes, this week—my new offering The Court Cards goes live. It's under 100 bucks. It's audio-only. Lessons are extremely digestible. It's really to help to dispel and clear away old paradigms about Court Cards so that you can really come to the heart of your own knowing about them, and really diving into the essence of Soul Tarot-ing as it pertains to the Court Cards, which I think is a pretty big liberation with regard to the way that they're taught, in my opinion. Wouldn't be teaching it if I didn't believe it. Comes with a workbook, comes with a Q&A database. So if you are somebody who you do not understand the Court Cards, they've never connected with you, you don't get it; this offering, I believe, at least… I don't know if it's for you, you'll decide that, but I made it for you (Lindsay laughs). You are the person I made it for. So if you're interested and if you want to learn more about it, you can go to the link in the show notes. And yeah, thank you all for being here. Sending my love, and I'll connect with all of you next week.
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[Conclusion]
[0:34:50]
This podcast was edited by Chase Voorhees, podcast art by Rachelle Sartini Gardener, and this episode was transcribed by one of our absolutely brilliant and beautiful transcriptionists, all of which you can learn more about or read about on our website tarotforthewildsoul.com.
If you wish to dive into more of my work, learn more about Soul Tarot, work with me in any kind of capacity—I'm always creating new things for us to do together. But you can find all about our self-led courses and classes and new offerings on tarotforthewildsoul.com. And if you want to be the first to know about any new offerings, any new projects that I'm doing, if you want to benefit from discounts and early birds, and all kinds of lovely newsletter-only offerings, you can sign up for the newsletter at the link in our show notes.
And finally, if you have a question for me to answer at the podcast, or if you'd like to work with me live on the podcast, or if you'd like your question answered on the podcast, please click the link to Ask Lindsay and send me your Q’s. Thank you so much for being here.