246: Connecting the Majors and the Minors, Part Two
Jump to:
Listen | Show Notes | Transcript
Today, we are wrapping up our exploration of the connections between the Majors and Minors, thanks to one of our amazing listener questions about this topic!
Air date:
October 9, 2023
Find this episode on:
Apple Podcasts
Stitcher
Spotify
Listen
About the Episode
Today, we are wrapping up our exploration of the connections between the Majors and Minors, thanks to one of our amazing listener questions about this topic! Today, we are traveling from The Hierophant to Wheel of Fortune, examining the relationships that each of these cards has with their corresponding Minor Arcana groups.
Lindsay’s Links:
Learn more about my upcoming soul-led intuition course, Intuition as a Spiral!
To apply for a scholarship to Intuition as a Spiral, click here!
Got Q's for Lindsay to answer on the podcast and beyond? Ask them here!
Learn more about Lindsay and dive into all of their courses, journal posts, and free resources 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: capitalistic structures, hypervigilance, trauma, parenthood, death, birth, labor, grief, loss, illness, and chronic pain
The content in this episode contains references to related to capitalistic structures, hypervigilance, trauma, parenthood, death, birth, labor, grief, loss, illness, and chronic pain. 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]
—
(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.
—
(Instrumental intro music)
Hello Wild Souls, and welcome back to Tarot for the Wild Soul podcast. It's always a joy to be gathered here with you. We are going to be diving into our Part Two of our exploration of the correspondences between the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana. We dove into that a couple of weeks ago, then had our Monthly Medicine—so this is the wrapping up of that discussion, which is in response to a wonderful listener question and I think helps so much with feeling into both the Minors and the Majors and how they sing and talk to one another, how we can learn more about each of them from one another. So I think it's a useful point of learning and offers up maybe some different ways to look at both the Minors and the Majors. And before I do, I have both a request and an announcement. So my request first. First of all, always be sending me your questions; I always want to hear from you. I always want to get—for Ask Lindsays—I would love to get your questions on all things Tarot, all things practice all things intuition, all, all, all. I'm doing a very special super secret thing (Lindsay laughs) that really isn't that big of a deal, but I'm going to be announcing and launching it on Samhuinn, and would love to have some questions as a jumping off point for folks inside of that little offering. And you'll know all about it on Samhuinn when it goes live. It's honestly, I don't want to get anyone's, you know, like I don't want to pump it up too much. But it is exciting for me and I think that many of you will love it.
But specifically, I would like your questions about intuition. So it's October. We’re leading up to so and the Veil is very thin, we're in Libra season, we're moving into Scorpio season. So I would love from October to November to kind of take questions sort of one by one and answer and speak to different aspects of where folks are either getting stuck with their intuition, where they've hit sort of a rough patch with their intuition. They feel maybe betrayed by their intuition; they want a little support. They don't know if they can trust in their intuition, they're confused about some aspect of it. I would love, love, love to support you and to offer some kind of gentle coaching? I don't know some answers to those questions, and that is both because I want to honor the season and two, to sort of ring in and celebrate the fact that I have a full-length, live, and guided course coming out for the first time in two years. It's totally brand new and it's called Intuition as a Spiral.
So, Intuition as a Spiral is designed to help folks do the following: to gently offer an alternative spiralic way of approaching intuition—one that I believe is infinitely more supportive and holographic than more standard ways of considering intuition. It's here to teach folks how to learn to open more fully to and trust in their inner channel, allowing it to guide them through the flow of their life. It offers folks the opportunity to learn some really kind of down-to-the-ground, very easy-to-understand ways to begin to tune in with our Spirit helpers and actually learn what Spirit helpers are (Lindsay laughs) and what they might mean to you and who might be a part of your Spirit helping team, and more importantly, actually start to understand how to receive information from your Spirit helpers back to you. So it's one thing to float the question up. It's another thing to understand how it is that it's floating back down and in. And we'll talk about how to start to build the muscle up to do that. And then finally gently feel into and help to dissolve some of the blocks, fears, witch wounds, points of resistance, and you know, sticking points around all of our relationship with intuition so that you can feel more confident, trusting, and at home with your inner guidance system.
[0:05:00]
Most folks, even if they are profoundly gifted, teach intuition as a very linear construct. We ask a question, we set down an intention. We get what we want. That's not the way that it happens, period (Lindsay laughs). And for those of us who have a live a little bit more on spiral time, we're sick, we are disabled, we're chronically ill, we're chronically in pain. We're parent to a very young child or we're all of the above or whatever it is—we're going through something pretty acute. Holding to any kind of linear, intuitive process isn't going to work even if you're not living on spiral time. And if you're more of a spiralic person, it's really not going to work. And we can even feel like, “Oh, I'm doing it wrong. I don't have Guides. They don't want to talk to me,” you know? So this course is a love letter, really, and an invitation, a very gentle one, not to make any of the other ways of connecting with intuition bad. It's not even, honestly, that much of a profound exploration or like, “Oh, there's a whole different approach.” It's a different approach, but it's not profoundly different (Lindsay laughs). It's a way of helping folks to tune in with their intuition and feel like their Spirit helpers are with them, even if their brain is noisy, you know, when they are having a flare, when things feel really unclear. And to start understanding a little bit more of the true rhythm of how intuition tends to flow.
Um, so yeah, it's going to be a really powerful, beautiful, intimate, lovely exploration and offering, and I'm so excited to be able to be doing it live with a closed cohort. So Intuition is going to open on October 17th with an early bird, and it will close on October 30th. And today, literally today starts our full scholarship application for this course. So if you do not have the funds to take part in either one of our sliding scale price points for this course, and you really want to be a part of it and really calls to you, we would love to make it possible for you to potentially join us. So if you're looking to be a part of something like this, this really calls to you if you want to travel through this and move through Scorpio season basically, and just Sagittarius season the on the wings of this material, this subject matter—I would love to travel with you through this. So you can click the link to apply for a scholarship to this offering in the show notes. You can learn more about this offering in the show notes. And even if you're like, “I don't really want to do a course right now, but I would really love to ask a question about intuition.” Send it in. So that's my request and my announcement (Lindsay laughs). I'm so excited about it. And again, pretty curious to see how all this is going to happen with a baby (Lindsay laughs), with a, you know, a pretty big addition in the house. So. Now that my kind of business is past us, this actually a perfect jumping-off point to move into the subject at hand regarding the podcast episode of the day, and where we last left off in the previous podcast episode was The Emperor and The Fours—we're picking up at The Fives.
So how do The Hierophant and how did The Fives connect with one another and why is that useful to examine? So The Hierophant is just to put it really bluntly and frankly, one of the most just wildly misunderstood and underplayed cards in the Tarot. A lot of the time this card is really reduced down to the idea of it being about a teacher, seeking out a teacher, which isn't bad. It's just really missing a lot of what's actually under this card and what this card actually is inviting us into most of the time that we're working with it. This card is very multi-layered and I'm not going to go into it, frankly, in this podcast right now, but I've talked about it at length in many different ways. You can check that out, but a bare-bones view of it in the lens of Soul Tarot is we look at The Hierophant as a signal and an invitation to become our own teacher and guide through life.
[0:10:11]
This doesn't mean we don't rely on the guidance of other people. We don't do anything by ourselves (Lindsay laughs), right? We learn so much from others. We're so influenced by others. But if we don't have a really sturdy center, it's very easy to be influenced by someone in a way that is not of value, not aligned in a way that kind of strips us of our own identity. And most of the time, if we feel an internal shakiness or lack of sturdiness within ourselves, it is really, really easy to feel like, A) we want someone to tell us what to do, which I'm I feel so much compassion and empathy for. I totally get it. But even the most well-meaning, wonderful, wise person can't ultimately be that crutch, can't ultimately be that route for us, can't be the replacement for that. And sometimes when we rely on people like that, it winds up being really harmful, you know, because we're believing in things, doing things, buying into things without really thinking about it, right? So if The Hierophant has to do with “teacher” at all, it's actually a gentle invitation to examine the people that we prop up as teachers or the people that we place on pedestals. Which is one of the most reductive, you know, like the less we can do that, the better (Lindsay laughs), to any person. Because everyone's a person, everyone makes mistakes, everybody fucks up, everybody's learning, and it's not going to give us anything to place anyone up higher than we are—that's over there.
But the other thing that Hierophant does is in order to establish more sturdiness within ourselves, The Hierophant invites us to interrogate our beliefs, and beliefs feel like truth. Like if we have a very strong belief, it's very hard to interrogate that and actually even consider that it is a belief rather than a fact. Because again, we have really—you know, beliefs, have a kind of a different charge than other things do. So The Hierophant looks simple on the onset. It looks like an authority figure, a teacher figure, and in some cases it is. Even though that's not, it's not so binary as to say like, “Oh, go out and look for a teacher.” It's about being in right and wise relationship with our teachers not being the end all be all for us, being a lot more easy and in the flow about like our teachers are allowed to be human. I'm allowed to have my own preferences. I'm allowed to use my critical thoughtfulness, you know, my common sense here, and to think about the things that we are being invited to believe and have been invited to believe through the authority figures in our life.
So Hierophant really represents an interrogation and a liberation from the shit that we were told and taught and immersed in when we were really young. A lot of us have inherited beliefs about ourselves, about the world—some of which match our truth and a lot of which do not. So Hierophant is very, very challenging. Honestly, I would rank it up there in terms of spikiness with like Tower. Sometimes I think Tower’s a little simpler (Lindsay laughs) because Tower, at least it's very clear what's going on. It can be devastating. Towers not always devastating. The Hierophant is often, it's because you're not expecting it. It's very, very intense. It does everything it does to help to align us with a truer belief system, one that is much more aligned with, again, our truth. It wants us to divest out of worship culture and out of pedestalization and out of the realm of patriarchal structure. It actually wants us out of that and it wants to break us out of complacency. It's ruled by Taurus and that's the interesting thing with Taurus, right? Taurus is, wants, and it is so connected to sensuality and beauty and ease and comfort. And yet there are moments when that's Taurus’ biggest challenge. It’s like, “Okay, I'm comfortable here. How do I break out of that comfort and move into a space where, you know, I'm less comfortable but I'm way more free?” And although I bristle at the word “authentic”, I know I've used it a lot. But, blech, you know something that feels, at least to this moment, more “authentic”.
[00:15:30]
So Hierophant can be very, very contractive. And it requires us to to establish a different, sturdier root system, to hold ourselves through that really big. Like if we have a belief in us that we're bad, right? Like inherently bad, not good—it's probably worth interrogating, “Well, who told us that?? You know? Did we hear that from somebody? Was that modeled—if we didn't hear it directly? Were we just constantly made to feel like we were no good, we couldn't measure up, or that we were literally bad, flawed. So, that feels like truth. And when Hierophant comes up, it may be here to help us to interrogate, to go into some of that wounding and say, “Yeah, where's the origin story of this belief system? What's the truth here?” We need to do that in order to be ethical. Parents, friends, therapists, teachers, guides, counselors, religious figures, (Lindsay laughs) you name it, I could keep going, judges—if we're coming in with so much belief bias, we're not going to be able to be effective in our role or we’ll pass down different things. I think Hierophant really does invite us to look at the relationship between the power that we hold, the influence we all have, and who it is that's listening to us. You know, so that being said, we can't attempt to, you know, we can't be perfect at it, but coming in with an energy of humility, making sure we're really thinking about what it is that we're saying, I think is important.
Now, Hierophant is connected to the number Five. So Five is where this card lives. It lives and hangs out with The Fives. And The Fives are all contraction cards. So Fives have to do with the mind—really with all The Fives being invited into a particular experience, typically one of contraction or stress or high emotional state, one that is specific like Five of Cups. I've gotten Five of Cups about business stuff where we feel like, “Oh my God, I missed it.” You know, we're clinging on to something that's already kind of lost and gone and I've got Five of Cups. I've gotten Five of Cups around circumstances of just pure grief and loss that have nothing to do with anything but, you know, mourning the loss of something. So all The Fives have to do with how we hold ourselves through difficult times and how we interrogate our beliefs around those times. So with Five of Swords, for example—which is typically a card, when we get Five of Swords, not always, but often when we get Five of Swords, there's usually a belief somewhere in there that we fucked up. That we fucked up. Maybe we did fuck up because fuck ups happen.
Usually, we have a story in Five of Swords that's a lot harsher than the reality of the story. It might be that we messed up a little bit, but repair is possible. Or we really messed up and repair might be possible, but we can make our lives a living amends, right? Not to simplify the process of harm, but we actually learn in Five of Swords to—instead of wallowing or completely getting swept away in regret or guilt—to think really critically about like, “What is the truth here? Because my brain is inviting me into the story that like, ‘I'm the worst.’ What's actually going on?” And from there, we're able to respond a little differently than we might. So Fives are contraction cards, and that is also because Hierophant is highly contractive. We have to contract in order to dilate and expand. It is the way, you know, like we see it in labor, we see it in death processes, birth processes across the board. So there's no way to expand without there being some kind of contraction, some kind of spiral process, some sort of cyclical process where we're growing a little bit more expanded with every contraction. Right? So that is the connection point between The Fives and The Hierophant is that they help us to work through our stories about what's going on and come to what's actually going on, honoring the experience and the beliefs and checking in as to whether or not they match the truth. So hopefully that's helpful and useful.
[0:20:39]
And then we have Lovers and The Sixes. So The Lovers is a card that's ruled by Gemini that's not about lovers-romance, sexual attraction—it's also not not about that but you can say that about every single card in the Tarot (Lindsay laughs). We can have The Hierophant come up for some big relationship issue we're having. There is no relationship category to the Tarot. There are a lot of teachings that assign it to relationships but that's just not true at all. So it's just an attempt to simplify an art form that's much, much more vast and multifaceted. So Lovers is about interpersonal stuff. It's also about interrogating our beliefs about what makes us lovable and worthy and acceptable. Like what did we get into? Or what did we opt to do? Or what did we choose to pursue because we thought it would garner us approval—maybe from our parents, or it would be the best thing to do, you know, be the most secure thing to do or whatever it is. None of that's, you know, necessarily a problem, but it is not also necessarily what it is that we're actually drawn to or desire to do. So Lovers represents a really big, important time when we're coming back home to the heart, where we're being invited to really reflect, review, interrogate, and come back to some sort of deeply heart-centered alternative way of being. It's looking at ourselves in the mirror, coming home to ourselves, really reflecting on why we're doing the things that we're doing and anything that we've outgrown in some way. We get to change it and then we get to go back out into the world and connect with people in a different way.
So because this card is Gemini, it's about the self and it's also how we have relationships with other people. It's how we're we're in all sorts of complex relationships, interpersonally. So I think that's really important to define here and to really lay out because The Sixes are all about the interpersonal. Obviously, there are so many more decks and so many more ways to view the miners outside of Pamela Coleman Smith's interpretations. But it's helpful to remember that there really were no kind of intuitive or artistic depictions of the Minors before Pamela Coleman Smith. Not really, you know? So we have Pamela to thank for those interpretations and ways of viewing these cards. So that being said, it is really powerful to think about and consider like, okay, if The Lovers is all about shifting the ways in which we show up in the world, work in the world, reach for certain things in the world, relate interpersonally to other people—it also has to do with what we have to clear out in order to pivot and move into that new thing.
So The Sixes, in the Pamela Coleman Smith's artistic interpretations in the Smith-Rider-Waite Tarot, all have a person, all have more than two people on them. It's about people in relationship with others and nobody is alone in The Sixes, even if it's just one other person. So all that being said, there is a really beautiful thing to take from this, which is like, we don't have to go through these things alone. We get to come back to the heart—all of The Sixes have to do with some heart-led shift in some way, where we used to do things one way, and now we're opting to do them in another way. And I think there's a really good and sturdy relationship with going from Hierophant to Lovers. You know, with The Hierophant, we're learning how to be that root, be our own teacher, and shift the ways in which we put, we pedestalsize other people. I think Hierophant is also about individuation from our parents, honestly. If we're looking at the first line from 0 to 18 years old, which I do, this is about the time when we have a couple processes of individuation over the course of our lives from 0 to 18, and I think The Hierophant is a big one to be able to be like, “I don't, I don't need to do things the way my parents did them. I get to do them the way I want to do them.” So that's over there.
[00:25:50]
And I think The Lovers is about actually reaching out and establishing ways that we want to do things. So it changes. It brings more people into the mix. It's also, I think, really powerful to connect how deeply Gemini energy is—is not necessarily in astrology, it's not connected to the heart in any concrete way in terms of like Leo is connected to the heart. But I think that Gemini is so heart led because all of the Sixes are really heart led. It's really like deep expressions of truth and like, you know, Gemini is ruled by the lungs which cushion the heart. So like, what kind of cushioning do we put around the heart in The Sixes? It's like all about moving closer to a heart led life. And The Sixes are about balance and support and rebalancing and sharing and community contributions, community support, like mutual aid—all about that. So I think that both flow into one another and inform one another quite nicely.
Now The Sevens—I'm going to start with The Sevens themselves. The Sevens are (Lindsay laughs) and this is actually really useful to connect to the fact that we're in a Chariot year and Chariot is connected to the Sevens, by virtue of the fact that Chariot is number Seven. So I want to start with The Sevens themselves because it's I think, a good inroad and also hopefully will help anybody who is also moving through this (Lindsay laughs), the themes we're about to talk about, in the past you the year that we've been moving through 2023. Sevens are tricky. So when we're in a Seven energy, usually, we're moving through some version of the following. We are thinking or believing that if we just had X, Y, Z, everything would be better. And in some cases that's true—I'm not taking away from that. In some cases, literally, if we just had what we needed, more support, an answer to something, like there would be tremendous relief or tremendous weight off our shoulders or whatever it might be. That's truth. Just straight up. And there are times when that's not the case. There are times when we have stories about what that external would give us, and it's not necessarily the truth. And when it's not necessarily the truth, Sevens tend to float up into the readings that we give for ourselves or we're reading for others. Sevens actually arise when the issue that would bring about the greatest degree of relief or support or clarity, is actually an internal thing, not an external thing. So the Sevens are deeply about internal processes. When we typically think if we just had that answer, that thing, blah blah blah, we would totally feel better. We learn in The Sevens how to discern when it is an appropriate time to act, to reach for something, to move forward, to call something in and when it's actually much more appropriate to kind of just work more internally.
[00:29:47]
So, that is connected to Chariot and informs so much about the work that we do in The Chariot. The Chariot is not called “The Charioteer”. The chariot is The Chariot. The Chariot is about the vehicle, the persona that guides us through this life and world. It's not about the person in that chariot. It's about the vehicle, it's about the publicness, it's about the persona, it's about the constructs and the egoic weaving, the tapestry that we present to the world, all of us. It's not fake. Ego is a huge part of the world. Like, that's okay. You know? Even those of us who are in like, spiritual, (Lindsay laughs) you know, professions that profess to be like “ego-free”, like we have, we have it, you know, it's and it's okay, right? So, those two are connected because both of them seem like they're external things, but they're really internal things. Right? Like, Chariot does have a tendency to birth us pretty profoundly out of things that don't work and into new things. And it usually, when we're in a Chariot process, it's tricky because we want to kind of grip onto the things that have been here—which make total sense because they are what is known and familiar. And we don't want to be outside of things that we don't know. That, again, makes total sense.
But really, like now that we're in October of 2023, we've been moving through a Chariot for the past, you know, almost nine months and it's fucking brutal. Because as we can see, most of the work is internal. Most of the work is in ego death. Most of the work is letting things go and most of the work is surrendering to being like, “Oh my God.” Like, I can't tell you how many things I've been like, I don't want to do that. And that's exactly the thing that not only am I being guided to do, but brings about the most joy and relief. It's been a very humbling year for me intuitively, because it's been like, “Wow, I have a lot of impulses that are actually not in alignment at all with what my soul is calling out for.” (Lindsay laughs) And I'll just provide like, I didn't want a family. I didn't want kids for forever, which is valid. Nobody needs to need kids and it's beautiful if you are happy without children. And I didn't want children for a really long time. And then that changed and I had a lot of beliefs about how that was going to go. And absolutely every single one of those beliefs were categorically incorrect, like fully. (Lindsay laughs) And that's that's my story. That's not anybody else's. And that's not in any way, shape or form to say that anybody here who is ambivalent about children, doesn't want children, is somehow going to have a different wake up call. Not at all. That's not my thing at all. It's just to say, that's one example. I can provide many other examples.
I had very strong feelings about going back to readings—it's the absolute most favorite thing I've done all year. And some of that is Chariot work, right? Like that's wrapped up in Chariot work. And there's also Hierophant work in there too, like our stories, our beliefs and gently, you know, checking in on that and saying, like, “Is it true? Do we really know that that's true?” So Chariot work is quite similar, where we kind of have to sit in the dismantling of where the ego wants to take things and where the soul is leading us. And where the soul leads us we have to leave that chariot behind. There's some chariot, that when we're in a Chariot process has to get cleared away. Has to get cleared away. That cannot really support us in going the full distance. And so, paradoxically, again, that seems like an action-based step and we should do all this stuff and all The Sevens really show us that it's not about taking action. It's much more about being with our belief and our stories about how we should be doing something other than what we're doing or our own shakiness about like, is this something to trust? Is this not? That's Seven of Wands.
[00:34:38]
Seven of Wands is the pure encapsulation of intuitive terror and shakiness informed of our own hypervigilant responses from trauma: “Is this okay for me to trust? Is this not? I don't know. Is it okay for me to be on guard? Should I be on guard? Should I be relaxed? I don't know.” And a lot of the time how we figure that out is by sitting in it, rather than doing something really drastic or or pivoting in one way or another very strongly. Seven of Cups is like, we're looking into the sky and being like, “Oh, it could be this cup or that cup or that cup.” We see in the Eight of Cups, it's actually none of them. None of them wind up being the cup we choose. We get guided onto such a divergent path, you know? And then we're in Nine of Cups and Ten of Cups that are a total rewilding of where we thought we'd be. Seven Work is pivotal. It's when we—it's the collection of all the information that comes with building an identity in Line One and then destroying it (Lindsay laughs) basically like egoically. Because we can't it's not going to take us down the full journey that we're actually being led on. So we slowly, quietly allow for there to be a clearing away and a sloughing away of what's been and a moving toward—and the only way to really do that is to be more internal and less external. Hopefully, that makes sense.
The Eights are all huge transformation processes. We go into The Eights one way, (Lindsay snaps thier fingers) we come out of them another way (Lindsay snaps their fingers). And that's exactly what happens with Strength. We go into Strength probably scared, on guard, not totally sure what to expect, ready for a fight. We're reminded to open the heart. We're reminded to be willing to be witnessed and seen, to see others. That's Leo. Leo's the heart. Leo is the sun. Leo witnesses; it sees and wants to be seen. So when we can be in a space of witnessing and we can be in a space of radical compassion and wise discernment at the same time. There is a profound transformation that happens both with the person on the Strength card and the lion, both of which are aspects of us, I think. The lion is that part of us that longs to be loved and embraced but is really battle-weary, right? And the lion also represents, externally, the moments in which—and obviously this is not everything, but we won't get Strength for those moments that don't apply to it.
If we've ever had a situation where we've leaned in and stayed—like I see this with my daughter a lot that, like if she's having huge feelings about something, if something didn't go the way she wanted and we're a safe space for her to like scream about that and be really, really upset about that. The more that I remain warm, compassionate—which is not hard to do. I do have tremendous compassion for the fact that, like, she's a person who has preferences and wants, she knows what she wants. Sometimes she doesn't, but most of the time she does. And if things can't go or don't go the way that she'd prefer, she is allowed to have feelings about that. All the feelings. You know? The more we actually stand and hold space and normalize honor and say, “Yeah, you really want it, that that's so hard. I get it.” The more she has space to feel her feelings. And then they blow over like a storm. And what's left in the wake of that is renewed trust and love and a sense of sturdiness and safety in this relationship. That I'm not going to fall apart, I'm not going to distract, I'm not going to, like, be nervous or afraid in front of her enormous feelings. You know? That's sort of what we get to do in Strength. We get to see folks in their rawness, and there's a transformation that happens inside of our willingness to be with the things that feel a little scary or a little bit formidable because it winds up, you know, radically shifting us and the person receiving it, but mostly to those aspects in ourselves.
[0:39:37]
If you've ever had or been given the gift of someone hanging in there with you while you are having an experience of rawness, when you're feeling really upset and no one's offering you a tissue and trying to like get you to calm down and trying to get the raw feelings to go away. There is something really transformative that happens in that. So with The Eights, we get to take the distillation of that and weave it into that too. You know, with all of The Eights in the Minors, we're transforming, we're moving into them one way. We're moving out of them differently. And part of what helps to propel that is the heart, is the trust, is leaning into things that are maybe difficult to do but are wildly transformative. And by the way, I just want to reiterate again, not all lions are meant for us to lean in with, right? We've got to have boundaries, guardrails. Like we do not have to be available to face down every difficult thing, not every difficult person or moment or situation will be safe for us. So Strength comes up when there's something in us, something that feels accessible, in alignment to us, that doesn't overwhelm our feelings of safety or security in some way. Those are the things that, when we lean into it will be nutritive and rich, whereas some things are just simply not safe. And it has nothing to do with being strong enough to weather them. It's just we don't need to put ourselves through that. We can say no.
The Nines are about solo journeying. So none of The Nines in Pamela Colman Smith have anyone other than just sort of the subject in them. In other words, there's a person alone in each of those Nines. The Hermit is also alone. The Hermit is number nine and The Hermit takes us on a different path, a different journey, and slows down our pace so that we're not necessarily going kind of out and into the world as we typically do but we're going down and in. We're casting that lantern light very deeply into ourselves and going on a kind of an internal journey, a reflective journey, where we're getting a chance to explore a lot more of the scaffolding of our inner life than we typically do. When we're in Hermit work, we may try because it's very uncomfortable to be in that deep still space, to bounce out of it, to go on a trip, to do this, to do that. And we can try, but it usually kind of crumbles apart in our hands. (Lindsay laughs) And that's because, again, the whole point of Hermit work is to take us on a very important solo, reflective journey. One that will be essential for our next stage of expansion in some way.
[0:42:31]
And then The Tens, to sort of wrap up here, we have The Tens and we have their connection point, which is Wheel of Fortune. So The Tens are all about a climax point, Full Moon energy. We reached the apex of a certain cycle of work, a cycle of time, and we get to harvest everything that we've sown and we get to really put it out on the table and look at it and be like, “Okay, what do I get to keep? What do I get to compost? What am I going to eat now? What am I going to preserve? What did I learn from this?” Right? And then a whole new cycle begins again. So that is very deep, reflective work and work that must be done before we are able to move into that new cycle of work. So there's a full closing down and reflection postmortem process before we can move into that New Moon energy, right? This is precisely helpful when it comes to our work in Wheel of Fortune. So Wheel of Fortune is, you know, it's it's a very multifaceted card, if we look at the Smith-Rider-Waite, there's a lot going on—which I've detailed in a previous podcast episode. So you can search for that and listen to it if you want to. But a couple years back, I did one on Wheel of Fortune.
But Wheel of Fortune, in the telling of it is very vast and broad—it's ruled by Jupiter, connected to Sagittarius, like it's all the things. But in the experience of it, it's actually quite humble and simple and very profound, really. And it has to do with us being in a wheel time. In a time of very big change, change that we are not initiating, change that is happening around us. And by the way, there is—it's total bullshit, the kind of old paradigm of Wheel of Fortune being connected to like, well, you either got a good run on the wheel or a bad run on the wheel. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, but I'm saying that we don't need to have that kind of hypervigilant approach with Wheel of Fortune. That's just fear based, fear based stuff that I take issue with. The change that's happening in Wheel of Fortune isn't like a roll of the dice. It's not like a gamble. It's just there's a really big change happening—usually, I think one that's very beneficial to us. The work we do, while that Big Wheel is turning, is not to try to turn the wheel because the wheel is turning without our help, it's to pay attention to the work that is on our plate while Spirit takes care of their end of the bargain. So it's basically one of our first tastes of working in alignment and co-collaboration with Spirit. And so there are certain things that are kind of our business to do and certain things that have nothing to do with us. And that is a really big part of life and living a soul led life is determining like, “What am I being invited to take like real concrete action on right now? And what is sort of way outside of the paradigm of my control or something that is in alignment for me to work with?”
So The Tens can help us with how we work with Wheel of Fortune because The Tens provide a great sense of clarity and and purpose for us around what we can pay attention to and do as that big wheel turns. So as all this change is coming together and oftentimes it's really unclear where it is that it's guiding us, where it is that we're going—we usually have a lot of shit to take care of to be prepared for that change once it comes. So this card is basically coming up to say, “Hey, while you're at it, you may want to call a moving company (Lindsay laughs). While you're at it, you may want to figure out insurance where you're moving, if you're moving somewhere,” if you're lucky enough to afford that. “While you're at it, you may want to take care of the boxes that have been sitting in the hallway for three months. Like, while you're at it, you may want to do these things that need doing, so why not do them?” And that's all wrapped up in the Ten: is like harvest, review, compost, keep, preserve, consume—and consume in a beautiful way. Like enjoy, feast, harvest—that something is wrapping up and completing itself. So why not take care of the things that are of—it's actually a lot of very practical day-to-day, like checking off the to-do list and not getting up into the weeds at all and up in the esoterics of it all.
[0:48:00]
Which I think is actually very attuned to Jupiter. And Jupiter is like it's many things, but I do think Jupiter loves and rewards work and that's where luck tends to come into it. And there are plenty of people in this world who work very hard and who have really unfortunate circumstances. So totally not trying to claim that like “hard work equals good luck”. But I do think in the case of the card, what we're taught is like, pay attention to what's on your plate and your take care of the business that you're meant to take care of and don't necessarily worry about the larger pieces that you will know about when it's time to take action on them. But for right now, like hang out, (Lindsay laughs) you know, take care of the stuff that's right in front of you. And that's Ten work, too.
So hopefully this helps and was useful. Thank you so much for listening. I'm so excited to receive your Ask Lindsay Q&A questions or questions—really just the Q’s part of the Q and A's and especially your intuition questions. So send them on in and thank you so much for listening. And if you want to apply for a full scholarship to Intuition as a Spiral, if you want to learn more about that course, pop into the show notes. So thank you so much.
—
[Conclusion]
[0:49:28]
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.