Tarot is a window into your life, your soul, the things that you are dealing with on a physical and spiritual level. We often look at this practice as a fortune telling device, media has made it into a trope that hardly explains the complexity of a deck or what it can show us about ourselves and our worlds when used properly and respected. I walk into a Tarot reading each and every time by clearing the space of energy that is not mine or my client's and asking my Guides and the Guides of my client to come forward with the highest and best intentions and help me to be a clear vessel for the messages that need to be conveyed to the client.
It is my personal belief that a Tarot session is a sacred thing and that most of the time when someone is seeking out such a session there is something that they are looking for within themselves whether they know it or not. Recently I told a nervous client that it isn't me they have to worry about, it's whether the deck is playing nice or not. I said that because messages can be given in so many different ways via the cards, difficult topics are able to be delivered in a quiet gentle manner or with an abruptness that sometimes I struggle to use as an empathetic person. However, it is my job, the reason someone has come to me, to deliver what it is that they need in the manner that I am being Guided to present it. In a respectful and thought out way, of course.
I don't typically read for myself. I find it difficult and that I have this very human tendency to over analyze, read what I want to and just doubt myself in a way I don't for others. I worry that my own knowledge of my life and the situations I am in are coloring what I'm seeing. It's something I clearly need to work on. I bring this up because this last week I had a client that I think helped me more than I helped them. This person was nervous from the start. They had a lot of difficult topics come up in their reading that we had to navigate together in our short amount of time and I genuinely believe that they left with more clarity and self empowerment than they walked in with.
What hit me so hard about the reading was that I was telling them things that I was resonating with as well. That one needs to learn to show up for themselves before they can show up for anyone else. That ignoring things that need to be addressed in our lives and within our own inner workings will not stop or delay the inevitability of consequence and judgement but will simply make it worse and more traumatic. That their power was not in being reliable and in service to others until they could be reliant and in service to themselves first.
Along with this reading that followed me for days after I had left it in it's space I remembered something I had heard years ago that I really liked but never actively put into practice. The idea of working for your Future Self and thanking your Past Self. This idea of real rooted self care that we as a whole don't take the time to acknowledge as self care or don't realize is self care because it isn't covered in chocolate or smelling like a rose filled bubble bath. The thought of doing simple tasks for ourselves right now so that tomorrow we have a lighter load.
A perfect example of this is my house cleaning this past week. I had a session in the morning and then a few hours after before I had to go to work. Normally that time in-between would have been spent scrolling social media or taking a nap. Instead I used it to get the house cleaned so that the next day, my day off, I didn't have to do anything even remotely adult like. I had the whole day to do as I pleased and I was SO grateful to my Past Self for it.
Other examples can be setting the coffee pot up the night before so it's ready when you get up, making lunch at night so you have more time in the AM, spending 15 minutes straightening the house daily so when you do go to clean it isn't an extra hour worth of weekly clutter everywhere, having the workout you're doing ready to go or your clothes pulled out of the closet, leaving yourself half of the candy bar for tomorrow, the list can go on and on. Allowing yourself to take pleasure in the knowledge that while you may rather be watching YouTube instead of washing the dishes right now, tomorrow when you have a billion other things to accomplish you won't have to worry about finding a clean spoon or beat yourself up over the smell emitting from the sink.
Along with the daily tasks that we can perform to help our Future Selves we also need to be checking in with our emotional selves. How am I actually feeling? What do I really want to be doing? Am I getting what I need from myself and my relationships? Have I been good to my support system? Did the reason I reacted like an asshole today have to do with the situation or is there something else there?
Self care is equal parts soothing and confronting. We can see the ease of allowing ourselves a day to veg out (which is totally amazing and needed sometimes) and do nothing. We can appreciate the usefulness of pre-making lunch for the next day. However we struggle with giving up our comfort right here and now for when we'll need it in the future. We shove things to the side both physically (see my laundry pile for example) and emotionally because it's hard or inconvenient in the right now. But what about the tomorrow when you've shoved all of week's worth of stuff to the side and now you have to do it all on the one damn day you have?
Show up for yourselves. Now.
Blessed Be and Stay Safe,
Alyssa
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