250: MONTHLY MEDICINE: December is Shift
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December is a bridge month, helping to usher us from 2023 -- a Chariot year, full of questions, liminality, and unknowns -- to 2024 -- a Strength year, full of illumination, clarity, and empowered, heart center action.
Air date:
December 1, 2023
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About the Episode
December is a bridge month, helping to usher us from 2023 -- a Chariot year, full of questions, liminality, and unknowns -- to 2024 -- a Strength year, full of illumination, clarity, and empowered, heart center action.
Our theme for the month is Shift. A big shift is happening for us right now, personally and collectively. Our job will be to surrender to it, work with it, and stay connected to our hearts in the midst of it.
Our Soul Tarot Reading for December
Card for the month ahead: WHEEL OF FORTUNE
Deepest lesson for the month ahead: EIGHT OF PENTACLES
What can we offer and devote our attention to? TWO OF CUPS
How can we tend to ourselves best this month? FOUR OF WANDS
The card helping us to shift from 2023 to 2024? SIX OF CUPS
Lindsay’s Links:
Learn more about Lindsay and dive into all of their courses, journal posts, and free resources here!
Got Q's for Lindsay to answer on the podcast and beyond? 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: challenges around parenthood, illness, pet loss, grief, death, trauma, anxiety, challenges around navigating neurodivergence, and hypervigilance
The content in this episode contains references to related to challenges around parenthood, illness, pet loss, grief, death, trauma, anxiety, challenges around navigating neurodivergence, and hypervigilance. 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
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[Introduction]
[0:00:00]
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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, welcome back to the podcast. So lovely to be with you, as always, just so thankful for the sweet community, and the opportunity to gather with you for our last Monthly Medicine of 2023. It was the shittiest year; I'm happy to see the back of it to be just frank (Lindsay laughs), right out of the gate. Yeah, glad we won't see another Chariot Year for nine years. That's something to be thankful for. Love Chariot energy, love Cancers, but not cool. Not fun.
Yeah, I just wanted to start by acknowledging, it was not my intention to take all of November off (Lindsay laughs) and I apologize. It was one of those months where—I can't get into all of the specifics… eventually, I will—but the end of August had like a huge, like professional thing happen that took an enormous amount of energy and, like it was a very big thing that happened. And it was, you know, very anxiety-producing and really exciting, like a lot of a lot of different, (Lindsay laughs) like emotions. And I learned about that on like November 1st and then like, I just tanked. I just tanked. I was so tired. I was so burned out; it was a lot of energy. It was like October was a lot of work. And then in November, my kiddo got sick, three separate times and I was doing my first ever long-form course since having my kiddo. And it just took, like so much work on top of the other work. Like, it's still pretty easy peasy, but… and then, when I was planning to come back to the podcast, my beloved, beloved, beloved cherished beautiful kitty, WeeWoo—who was around 17 years old, and who we had for 15 years—died very suddenly. Just about two weeks ago.
[0:02:36]
So it was almost like I couldn't even get here to tell y'all. I couldn't get here. You know, so sorry about that. Wasn't planning to have just a month with no episodes. But that's, that's why there was a lot going on. Now I’ll also share with you—I very rarely share, kind of how the sausage is made in this way. This is my third intro that I've recorded for this podcast. Number three. And it's because number one, the theme for the month of December is Shift. We'll get into that in a few minutes. It’s aready clearly, like I've had multiple big shifts in what I'm doing, what I'm (Lindsay laughs) what I'm promoting and creating for the holidays, like what I'm—it's been so many super quick changes just based on like, getting more information about something, whatever. So yeah, I mean to y'all, it'll feel like nothing. It’ll just feel like I'm here with you. But it's been wild. It's, yeah, it's been a lot. (Lindsay laughs) A lot.
So I'm so excited though to be here. We have a nice full month of episodes. Our episodes this month are going to be, I think, really sweet. There's been a bunch of stuff that I've wanted to teach about and share for a while. So we'll we'll dip into some of those. We'll do Q&A episodes. We'll do probably a nice episode for 2024. I don't totally know, but cooking something up and hopefully, it'll be really sweet. But yeah, just once more, I'm just so thankful to be here with everybody. (Lindsay laughs) Thanks for your presence.
I have a couple of just, I think only one frankly big, big announcement. It's not even that big. Next week from December 4 to December 8, I'm having my beloved very popular annual Wild Soul Holiday Sale. We're moving from Teachable to Kajabi, it looks like. There'll be more information about that for folks. Honestly, the way things are going who knows you could hear from me a week from now being like we're not moving. Who fucking knows, it's bananas. But it does look that way. And so we're doing this sale on Kajabi. And because we're in the middle of porting everything over, there's only like three things available, (Lindsay laughs) like for sale right now. Soul Tarot 101, which is my like fabulous workshop, like super robust, amazing workshop for beginner folks, like people who are really new to Tarot or are new to my style of working. It used to be evergreen, now it is live. So it's going to open for enrollment, the material will drop in mid-January, and then you'll get a two-and-a-half-hour live, q&a and practice call with me on Saturday, January 20. So that's very nice. There's an amazing like discount on that.
[0:05:51]
Doing Spiralic Tarot again, which is kind of microcosmic astrological channel downloads for again, all of the astrological seasons, and it's going to be for six months. So I usually do it usually drop Spiralic Tarot four times a year, this will just be twice a year. So this one will be from Capricorn Season/Winter Solstice here in the northern hemisphere to the Summer Solstice. Summer Solstice will be a part of the next round. But it'll go from Capricorn to Gemini season. So we'll be together for six months, you'll get these really juicy downloads for each of the Astro seasons ahead, you'll get little rituals for all the eight sabbots. And there's a really nice discount on that. And then of course, last but not least, we have The Threshold for 2024 and your year ahead. And I always say this, because it's never not true but this threshold is like really big and wants to be like bigger than the other ones. I can feel the message and the medicine, even in writing the description for Threshold is complex. Sometimes it's very straightforward. Other times it's a bit more complex. This one is layered. It's layered. And also, in some ways, like a breaking of the chains that we've been praying for basically since like 2020. And before that, and you know, there's some energetic ties that are breaking in 2024, especially in 2025.
So that's on sale, that will be on sale from the fourth to the eighth, you can bundle all those together in a bunch of different combos. And the link will be in your show notes. And yeah, we'll probably record a little mini reminder on the podcast on Monday. Or I'll have another episode come out Monday, depending on what I can do. But yeah, that's happening. And then from the 11th to the 13th, we have a 40% off sale for all of our workshops, which is really nice. And then week after that, week of the 18th, I'm going to be opening up my books for Threshold readings for 2024. So it's a full couple of weeks. And those are the announcements (Lindsay laughs) as far as that goes. So yeah, I think that's all, if I remember anything, I'll tack that on to the back of the episode. Please send me your questions. I always love to hear from y'all. I would love to have a fresh—there's so many questions I haven't answered. But I would still love to have a fresh stack of q’s (Lindsay laughs) to work through in 2024. So yeah, just excited to be here together with you. I’ve said that eighty times, but I really have missed the space in this community. So thank you for being here. So now on to our channeled reading for the month ahead.
[0:08:41]
Our theme for December is Shift. And like all aspects of 2023 so far, the shift is not going to be very concretely or very externally felt. We have to remember—as I've reminded everybody ad nauseam (Lindsay laughs) 600,000 times this year—2023 is a year marinated in Cancer energy, because it is ruled by The Chariot. We must remember that. This is a Cancerian year. This is an onion year. Many layers. Many layers. And our job, above all things, in Chariot years is to slough off the layers that cannot come with us into this new cycle. And make no mistake, yes, all new years are a new cycle. 2024 is a start of a new cycle. Number one, it's the beginning of a Fire season. Because Leo is connected to Fire, and 2024 is a Strength year. Or a Justice year, depending on how you look at it. But whether you connect it to Justice or Strength… I work with a Strength ordering, and that's what The Threshold will be centered in. Although I will probably make a little space to talk about Justice too, because I'd be remiss if I didn't, in that download.
But either way, no matter how you consider Eight, number Eight is the beginning—honoring Rachel Pollack here—of our work in a Line Two cycle. So for the next seven years, we're going to be working with Line Two cards. And that is big. That's really formidable. Line Two is big work. It's important work. It's very big. We've been in Line One since 2020. We flipped from Line Two. 2019 was a Line Two year. We were in a Tethered One year. Then because of just the numerical difference between 2019 and 2020, moving from Twelve to Four, it was a shift back up to Line One. If we look back on the last four years, it's all Line One themes. It's all been about identity, foundation, who we are, what we state, what we're communicating, what we're doing. Line Two work is the undoing, in some ways, of anything around that that we may have outgrown, that may have changed us to the point, in positive ways, that we're like, “Whoa, there's no way that all these other aspects of my life that are out of date as compared to all these evolved parts of me, everything has to come with me.”
Line Two work has to do very strongly with undoing in order to continue to create the life, the environment that we want. It's a year of big surrendering. It's also years that promote huge creation, real expansion, because we're not building towers on shifting sands, which can happen in Line One. Line One work… Again, we've been in it since 2020. A lot of it is like, “I do this because I want to do it. I do this because I demand it. I do this because I'm forcing it.” Line One, the whole point of it is permission to explore, permission to create, permission to expand. Line Two is way more about like, we do what's in alignment, ideally, right? There’s still life. A lot of people just shirk that. But if we're willing to be lined up and synced up with those invitations, it can be incredible. It can really be remarkable. There can be just so many beautiful things that can unfold from there.
[0:13:03]
So, December is a bridge from this year to next year, and the theme is Shift. And again, all that to say that we've been in, and are continuing to be for the next month, a very Cancer colored, Cancer flavored situation. So when we talk about shifting, we're doing so in a way that is big and profound, and valid, and worthy, but we may not feel it. We may not be feeling into it in a linear way. We may not be experiencing it in a linear way. It may not be so clear to us. And as a matter of fact, it likely won't due to the cards we've pulled. So, understand that where we are in December, we have the opportunity to be somewhere completely different in January. If even in feeling only, if even in experience only, there is change coming. There is change coming. There are shifts coming. There is a kind of a soul migration of sorts that's happening right now. Not literally like souls migrating away, but meaning the call that animals, and birds, and geese do every year to begin to shift and to move from… Like, we're seeing them all the time right here in the Pacific Northwest. So many delightful collections of geese going to warmer spots for the winter. It is a time when we understand like, “Okay, where I've been, it's time for me to shift. It's time for me to flow in some way.” And we are heeding some kind of call, even if we don't necessarily know why, or we don't necessarily know how, or we don't necessarily know where it's taking us. It might not feel like the perfect time, and yet it's kind of happening and we're like, (Lindsay makes a sound of confusion). And it doesn't mean we don't have control over it.
The card that we're working with for this month, the card for December is Wheel of Fortune. Basically, all the cards that we're going to talk about after Wheel of Fortune have to do with how to work intelligently and gracefully with Wheel of Fortune. Wheel of Fortune is a very specific energy. Wheel of Fortune seems enormous and vast, and fireworks, and boom! And it actually feels, when we're in this card, like nothing's really happening. And sometimes the perception of what this card should look like based on the image of it, or what it should feel like based on the lore of it can seem like we're missing something. And in truth, we're not.
Wheel of Fortune just really is a very interesting, odd energy that is delicious. It's ruled by Jupiter, connected to Sagittarius because of that ruling. And it does mark… I don't think Wheel of Fortune ever brings unfortunate change, right? I think that's a really old paradigm treatment of it. Wheel of Fortune, it's a Line Two energy in terms of the Major Arcana. Wheel of Fortune has to do with trying… Like, the cold winds helping to blow those leaves off the trees. Wheel of Fortune is here to help to kind of, one, blow the leaves off our trees that are already dead, that are stagnant. It's trying to blow something through and shift something. Wheel of Fortune also, I believe personally, always tries to upgrade us in some way. It's the beginning of something that happens in Line Two, where from the start of Line Two, be it Strength or Justice—I think both apply—through to The Hermit, through to Wheel of Fortune, through to Justice, through to The Tethered One, into Death, into Temperance, we're going from kind of like, “I'm willing to go on a journey of the heart here.” There's a lot of energies in Line Two that have to do with kind of being rooted in place so that as a human, our human tendencies and the stuff that we have conditioning to do, the ego doesn't get the better of us, and doesn't take the wheel of the car.
[0:17:46]
We're kind of put on rest a little bit, or we're cocooned, or we’re suspended so that we learn how to work with what's in alignment. We learn how to work with Divine timing. We learn how to work with the soul. We learn how to trust that things may not look like how we'd prefer, how we might want, how we might have a desire for something different. All that's valid. All that's valid. I've never been more stuck and stagnant than I have in 2023. Wonderful things. Blessed things. I have a very privileged life. Hugely privileged. I have never been more stuck than I have this year around like, “We're doing this. We're not doing this. Okay. I'm going to wait. I'm going to continue waiting. You're not telling me. Okay. I have to figure something…” Like, it's been very challenging. I know I'm not alone. A lot of people have had that experience. You know, it's a Chariot year. It's like a part of it. Very liminal.
But there's something about Wheel of Fortune that is an assistant. In the journey of the Major Arcana, it's our first real brush with us doing the work we're supposed to do, and letting Spirit do their part. We get to continue on this theme in Temperance at the end of Line Two, which totally makes sense. Temperance is ruled by Sagittarius. Wheel of Fortune’s ruled by Jupiter, which is the ruling planet of Sagittarius. So there's a lot of crossover with Wheel of Fortune and Temperance on purpose. But yeah, this month Wheel of Fortune is blowing in. And when Wheel of Fortune comes to the door as a guest, your best… Like, these are my hot tips (Lindsay laughs) for welcoming in Wheel of Fortune, okay? Because Wheel of Fortune is not here to hand you a shitty deal. Again, that's old school shit. We can throw that in the garbage where it belongs, okay? 100%. That's not to say that life, we don't get bad hands or difficult things don't happen. They do, flat out. But no card is ever going to come with that. That's a human thing. No card is ever going to come in with that kind of hypervigilance attached to it. Because what can we do, right? We can't do anything. Wheel of Fortune presents a change and an upgrade in some way, if we're willing to allow it to happen. If we're willing to get out of our own way. If we're willing to trust that Spirit might have a different destination in mind for us than we do.
Wheel of Fortune actually has, on paper, a pretty simple request of us. It acknowledges, as it walks through our door with its, like, basket of apples (Lindsay laughs) and whatever gifts it has for us, “I'm here to bring about a change, a welcome one; one that you've wanted. But you're not going to know about what it is. You're not going to know necessarily where you're going. I am a continuation,” Wheel of Fortune says, “of The Hermit.” That is a part of Line Two. We release expectation, we release our attachment to needing to know what's coming next, and needing to demand or having entitlement around knowing that. We recognize that we're a part of a mystery in moving through this life. So Wheel of Fortune says, “I'm here to bring about change that's welcome, that's ready, that you've wanted. I'm here to blow through whatever has to be cleared in order to do that. So while I'm taking care of the really big picture stuff, your job is to be in the little picture. Your job over here, while I am redoing the roof of your house, your job is to be going through this big ol’ closet full of clutter, or this old…”
[0:21:57]
We just actually went through this, again with WeeWoo passing. It started with, after taking some time, cleaning his stuff out and giving some things away like his food, and treasuring some of the things that he had. And then it became like, “Wow, we haven't cleaned out this drawer in a while,” and like, “Wow, this whole area has been kind of behind a big clean for once,” and it was like the whole house (Lindsay laughs). But it has been really remarkable and really powerful. And that is sort of our job when we're in Wheel of Fortune. It seems so much grander, and broader, and more epic. It really isn't. It is in hindsight. But when you're in Wheel of Fortune, we are shifting but we're not controlling the shift. We're surrendering to the shift. We're letting it take us to the next destination of our lives.
That's part of our job. It's part of the work and the invitation of this card. It's not even something that, like, oh, we have to overcome in some way. It's part of the deal. We stay at the center of the Wheel. Spirit takes care of the tire. And that's part of the start, the spark, the beginning of a co-collaborative relationship between human and soul, between us and Spirit. Right? So, what we cannot control, we release in Wheel of Fortune. What we've tried, tried everything, attempted to do, think we should be doing that's just not budging, we lift it up and go, “Okay. What can I say? What's another way to do it? I gotta let it go.” That's a big shift right there. Really releasing what we can't change; what we've tried so hard to change and we just can't do it. And it's partly because probably we weren't meant to, or it's just not something—maybe take out, “we weren't meant to”. Sometimes we never know the meaning of something or the why.
This month is really about coming back to a deeper connection with the quiet, with those inner whispers, with those deeper calls, and tending to the shit that has our name on it. Tending to the stuff that's part of our responsibility to be tending to, whether that be our grief, our needs, our boundaries, or whether it be a literal closet or house full of shit to go through, or whatever it might be, right? Doing our work and being like, “Okay, I don't know about all these other things, but I am going to write. That's what I know to do.” So, there's a big shift coming. A lot of us will not know the why, the how, the way, the what of that, but it is coming. 2024 is a really different year. Part of our job will be every day as a devotion, “May I stay at the center of that Wheel, focusing on, pouring my attention, pouring my efforts into what I can control, what I can actionably take care of, what I can do, how I can be of service without reaching up into that larger tire, without getting myself involved in a greater mystery that's unfolding right now.” That is the work. And that is a part of the shift, that's part of the bridge that's being built this month.
[0:25:29]
Our deepest lesson for the month ahead is Eight of Pentacles. This is not some magical, sweeping, beautiful ride of a change. It's not to say it's a grind, but Eight of Pentacles is a change and a shift that happens from a fuck ton of hard work. It happens through experience. It happens through repetition. It happens through showing up to the practice, to our craft over and over again. So for those of us who have been doing that… I think that's everybody who's been doing that, because I think all of us can identify with working hard at what we're working hard at. Remembering that again, it's not a magical thinking change. It's not a change rooted in like, “Oh, whatever. This is just an easy thing.” My former teacher, Michelle always used to talk about how we do the internal work first, then the external shift happens. It's very rare that we get the external shift and then the internal work happens. Usually, we're doing some manner of internal to greet an external change. Not always, but a lot of the time.
Eight of Pentacles, like all the Eights, have to do with… Their keyword is “change”. We start one way in an Eight, and we exit it differently as a different person, in a different way. Eight of Pentacles is really the only Eight that details and explains to us we become masterful, we come to a change through experience. We come to a change through practice. We come to this change through work, through repetition, through experience, right? I could never, ever be teaching my students what I do without lived practice, lived experience of many readings. I could never. I could probably talk about what I had heard elsewhere, but I just wouldn't have the experience to back that up. We don't always need that, depending on what we do, but experience is typically the greatest teacher. And so the deepest lesson for us this month is remembering that's a part of the tapestry work of Wheel of Fortune this month, specifically. So, that work that we're doing at the center of the Wheel has to do with repetition.
And I would extend that… It's very easy to think about that related to a craft or something that we're mastering practically. Soul work is the same thing. We may have to do something 50 times before we realize like, “Oh, wow, let me catch myself here.” I shared about this in Intuition as a Spiral in the lessons we were talking about, like, what is basically your toxic trait (Lindsay laughs) as it pertains to your brain attempting to protect you from intuitive expansion? And my brain weaponizes indecision. My brain will be like, “Well, you could do this, but you could also do these 50 things,” and fly off with this thing. And it's just being very neurodivergent, autistic, ADHD, pure OCD, intrusive thoughts. It's just like having a lot of noise up in the attic, you know what I mean? And so, a lot of different things I could do. And it often takes a lot of practice for me to get down to like, “What's the one avenue here?” And sometimes I have to try a lot of those things to come to like, “Yeah, those don't work, but this is feeling right,” you know? So I'm not saying any of that's toxic, necessarily. It's more tongue-in-cheek. Not meant to be serious, of course because again, I understand that that's a part of my makeup, a part of the process. It's a pretty torturous part of the process. I hope it's not always with me, to be frank, this sense of just constant overthinking and doubting in myself, which is also an OCD thing for me.
But yeah, I think that that can also be Eight of Pentacles. Like, this Pentacle, we're getting there. This one, well, we're a little closer. This one, ooh, that was a little easier this way. We learn, right? We learn as we go. That's the deepest lesson, to respect our process. To respect what it is that we're doing. And to understand that whatever the shift is, it's not frivolous. It's been earned. It's been earned. We've been doing the internal work for quite some time to get to the shift that we're about to embark on. So trusting that, I think, is really important.
[0:30:32]
What we can offer and devote our attention to this month. Like, where can we rest our gaze as we move through this time? Two of Cups. Embracing ourselves. Offering ourselves deep, rich, unconditional regard and care. Embracing the parts of us that feel very difficult to love. Honoring that we don't have to love all parts of us. We can just be tolerant of them. We can be willing to consider them. We can set the bar at a much more reasonable place. But we don't want to be at war with ourselves. We want to embrace. We can embrace. We can acknowledge like, “Even though this part of me, I'm still working on it, it's still tricky for me, I'm willing to consider that I could get to a different place. I'm willing to consider that there could be something inside of this part of me that I'm working on right now that's of benefit, or maybe is trying to protect me from something. I can see the good intention under it. I can see something.” And these are my words. They might not be yours. That is inside of all this work, all this shifting, all this clearing, all of these different things that are happening for us and to us this month that are guiding us from one year to another. We want to be loving of self. It's not selfish. It's not frivolous. It is the key. It is the way, the light, and the truth is that if there's any part of us that is in war with ourselves, that's punishing ourselves… It's not to say, oh, it's so easy to just drop all that. But we want to be in the pursuit of it, and in the willingness to consider tolerance, if not love, of these parts of ourselves. We want to be taking all parts of ourselves with us.
And in that, change and shifting is really scary, especially if we have trauma, if we have a sensitive inner kiddo, if there are parts of us that don't really work with change all that well, even if it's awesome and welcome. We don't have to explain that to anybody. It's okay if it's challenging for us. And I think that that is important, to also love up the parts of us that might be feeling a little overwhelmed by all of this change, by all of these shifts, and by what might feel like a year full of a lot of momentum and a lot of energy and a lot of stuff simmering, but nothing that's clear. Because again, this is Wheel of Fortune month, which is often about massive change that happens in the internal realm and in the unseen realm, that then all of a sudden (Lindsay snaps their fingers) leads and yields to something else happening. But we don't know that.
Again, that's the misperception of Wheel of Fortune is like, oh, change is coming in and it's sweeping us away. Change is coming and it usually is pretty sweeping, but we don't see that. It doesn't ride in like a Knight on a horse, you know? It's often very internal, very internal, very subconscious. And then all of a sudden, there's a sense of understanding once we've done the work that we're supposed to do as a part of the exchange with Wheel of Fortune. Because it is absolutely a collaboration, our work with Wheel of Fortune. We pay attention to the shit that we're meant to be paying attention to, and there can be a change happening for us as we do that. And we work with Spirit, and both of us move us. Both of those parts move us to the next phase of our lives. So really inside of that, part of the important piece about the center of this is Two of Cups, whatever that means to you, because that'll be different for all of us. Like, where are we at war with ourselves? Where are we often punitive with a part of ourselves? And how can we be just really radically loving, and supportive, and inclusive to all parts of us? That really can transform quite a bit.
[0:34:59]
How can we tend to ourselves best this season? Four of Wands. I loved that (Lindsay laughs). Four of Wands is finding celebration and play in the way that it makes sense for us. Fours are always in the realm and in the idea, in the general vicinity of a break, a retreat; some kind of time that is needed for digestion of some sort. And when we're in Four of Wands, Four of Wands is a different Four than the three other Four cards. Four of Wands is like, yes, take a break, but make it joyful, fun, playful. Make it something that we actually enjoy. Four of Wands is very sort of interesting if we tend to be about like, fun and play have to have some sort of purpose, or we need to be learning something, it needs to be spiritually good or whatever it might be. Four of Wands will often be like, “No, no. Just go out dancing. Just go to this convention. Just go out roller skating. Just go out. Or just stay home, or just read that book.” It doesn't need to be for anything. It just needs to fill our cup from a joy-centered place as an assignment. Not as frivolity, but as radical care. As essential, really. That is the best way we can tend to ourselves in the midst of all of this big shift surrender work, is loving the self, tending to the self with great care, and opting for fun and play wherever we can, however we are able to.
And the card that is helping to shift us, to move us over this bridge from 2023 to 2024 is Six of Cups. This is our third in a series of real juicy, Care Bear Stare heart cards. Six of Cups is interesting. It certainly has to do with inner child work. It certainly has to do with the inner child feeling like there's space for it to be itself; for that part of us to be open and free, and liberated, and available without being smushed or squashed. More than anything, though, Six of Cups is like an explosion of safe and consensual, heart-led vulnerability. It's not trauma dumping. It's not telling a stranger our whole life story. It's being vulnerable with the people that we love. It's being vulnerable with our community. It's being vulnerable with ourselves. It's letting ourselves speak something that maybe we've been like, “Oh, I don't know. Should I? Could I?” Six of Cups says, “Yeah. Yeah.”
And also, I will say this: that when we think about the Sixes, we can't not think about the Fives. Because the Fives and the Sixes go hand-in-hand with one another. The Fives and the Sixes, they answer one another. They're a call-and-response to each other. So if we think about Five of Cups, Five of Cups is not always the card that we want to call upon when we're in grief. It is more of a representation of grief. We're seeing three spilt Cups in front of us that are empty. They're done. We are complete with them, whether we want to be or not. The medicine of Five of Cups is really like, “Take all the time you need to be with those three spilled Cups. And know that when you're ready, there are two full Cups behind you.” So it's not like we're like, “Woohoo!” But for some people it might be, “Woohoo!” For some people, it might be all they need to be like, “Okay, I am complete with these three spilled Cups, and I'm going to pivot toward these two full.”
[0:39:30]
But a lot of the time when we're in that spiral with the Fives of grief and of loss and of… You know, sometimes Five of Cups comes up and it has nothing to do with loss or grief in the traditional sense. I've gotten Five of Cups, as I've mentioned before, with, like, business decisions I've made that have been a big leap in some way, and my brain’s like, “Oh my God, we're fucked. You screwed up. You're done,” whatever horror stories it puts out to me. Like, “You shouldn't have done that.” And then it all usually goes great. It's just different from what we've done before. Sometimes that's Five of Cups, too. But in general, Five of Cups as an energy, not the person moving through it, but the energy of it is very smushed. The view is extremely limited. Like, our peripheral vision soul wise and heart wise is super cut off. It's an experience of contraction. All the Fives are contraction cards. So, it's a big tightening of the lens.
Six of Cups is a radical opening. It's the heart opening, becoming luscious, and ripe, and juicy. Again, we want to share. There's joy. There's an experience of gratitude. There's the heart opening after a time of it being maybe blocked or cut off. And I don't know about all of you, but I do think that this year, for both personal reasons and collective reasons and shared reasons. I have found it, outside of my relationship with my family, my child, where the heart is fully open and expressive, my close kin, I have really found my heart has felt really broken and pretty closed in certain areas. And where there's just been a little bit too much disappointment, a little bit too many shifting sands for me to not feel kind of armed and guarded. I do think that some of this is not necessarily that changing naturally, but us choosing to reopen the heart again. Us choosing to take a chance and open up, and be heard, be seen. It's a really important part of this change.
This change is very interesting. Like I said at the beginning of this download, Wheel of Fortune is up at the top of this mountain. That's the North Star. It's the guiding light. It's very much like the light that guides from a dark night. It's the moonlight, right, that sometimes can feel so bright. And other times can be bright, but there's not… Like, we still have to take a flashlight, you know? The work we're doing is way more down to the ground this month, with sort of Wheel of Fortune up. And it's a really beautiful explanation as to the difference between the Majors and the Minors. The Majors are that large scale, sweeping seasonal energy where it's not so concrete, not so ABC. The Minors are much more about the on-the-ground moment-to-moment work. So even though there's really big shifts, really big energy working through us and around us this month, our work will really be sort of on that ground floor. And what is on that ground floor? Loving the self, opening the heart, trying new things, working really hard, tinkering, shifting, opting in for play and fun where it feels accessible and available to us. Four of Wands is always about accessible, personally-led play. Play for you will not look like play for me, and vice versa.
That is the invitation for this month as we leave 2023 and our Line One cycle behind that we've been in since 2020, and prepare to move into 2024: a Strength/Justice year, and our first year in Line Two. And I'll be so grateful to travel through it with you. Thank you so much for being here with me, Wild Souls. It feels really lovely to be diving into the medicine of the year ahead with you. Again, just a gentle reminder about that sale coming up on Monday. At the very least Threshold is without question like my best-selling most popular offering; it’s a full channel download for the year ahead. So if you're seeking that kind of thing, I would love to serve you in that way. So you can go to my website and go to the link in the show notes. And I'll catch y'all next week. And until then, till I do, please take care of yourselves.
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[Conclusion]
[0:44:49]
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.
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