The Blossoming Season: Tarot for Big Feelings

The transitional month of April, where some of spring's youthfulness has grown up but summer's vigor has not yet arrived, is an intense period of growing and harvesting and making and planning for me. While I continue to expand the shady pockets of the land I live with, I know that when the dry, golden heat of summer fully emerges, many plants will whither and die back, so the opportunity for harvesting spring herbs can be swift. After January's softness and winter’s retreat as spring pours out across the land, I'm met with April's uncertainty of what seedlings are going to make it through fluctuations in weather, hungry bugs, busy wildlife, and other challenges. It's a bold and blossoming season full of feeling and heart, uncertainty and possibility. 

I find the expansiveness of late-spring, not-quite-summer to be thrilling and exciting and frightening. I love the verdant quality of the air and light, but I'm never quite ready for the intensity of our long summer heat. I love the abundance of remedy-making, stocking my apothecary shelves for the rest of the year, but I've found myself met with an increasing intensity around preparing as cold and flu seasons get more intense and the weather becomes more unpredictable, affecting the growth of my relied-upon plant allies.

Then there is the realization of just how much there is to do and wrestling with what new projects I want to take on or what needs to be reassessed or set aside. I can find myself struggling with the bigness of everything - during the intense transition from spring's crescendo and summer's return - in ways I don't experience at other points of the year.

There was a point when I would try to think my way through these weeks of big feelings, trying to assign feelings to logical meanings and easy to spot patterns. I'm sure many of you already know that trying to think your way out of a feeling only gets you so far (and too often in a less than helpful direction). While there is plenty of use in being able to ground and center by connecting with one's current reality (it feels like the sky is falling but it is, in fact, not) and shifting perspective with some logical clarity, getting through a feeling often requires feeling our way through it.

Over time, I've learned to let a feeling blossom, observe its color and shape as I would any other bloom familiar or strange in my garden and recognize that while it might have my attention for a while, it's certainly not the only feeling I carry within me. Observation helps me expand the boundaries of my perception, allowing me to spot what other flowers might exist within me, letting there be greater choice in what it is I hope to feel and even think is possible.

When I am met with these large looming feelings on my emotional horizon, I like to use self-reflective tools like the tarot to help set up a path by which I can more explore the emotional landscape I find myself in. Tarot is a tool that points out all the other tools and skills that I have at my disposal, learned from my own experiences as well as time with therapists, wise elders, and good friends, helping me to find an emotional foothold when the path ahead feels too murky (or stormy or super exciting but overwhelming).  While tarot is never a replacement for the evidence-based emotional and mental health support, it can be useful part of your practice for emotional wellbeing and stability, drawing us into a place of curiosity rather than criticism for the ways we feel in the world helping us to bloom.

While my blossoming season is the time between the Spring Equinox and Beltane, your blossoming season might appear to you at any time of the year. I encourage you to find your season of blossoming and I hope the following tarot spread helps you find emotional wisdom within all the big feelings you might be experiencing during this period of expansiveness.

View fullsize

Tarot for Big Feelings

The following tarot spread is helpful for reflecting on and untangling a big feeling that you're experiencing. It’s best for those feelings that we find ourselves meeting again and again and are interested in how we might shift energy around them. While it's not a spread for tackling crisis level emotions (and no tarot spread is ever this), most reflective tools like tarot can be helpful tools for exploring our emotional landscape alongside mental health services.

 ✨ Card 1. The Big Feeling

A card representing the big feeling that you're grappling with. Before you jump into trying to interpret the card pulled here or open a book to read its meaning, let yourself gaze softly at the illustration, noticing what images or symbols in the card speak to what you're feeling (even if you don't know why just yet). You can either look up interpretations for this card after you've spent some time letting your feelings and intuition have time to come to the surface or choose not to read interpretations until the end of the reading (or at all, it's ok to trust your intuition).

 ✨ Card 2 & 3. Spotting Contraction

These two cards help to highlight the ways that this big feeling you're in the midst of is causing tension and how that tension is showing up in your life - whether slowing things down, causing overwhelm, confusion, excitation, and so on. These cards point out the areas of your life that this big feeling is affecting you most. Try and let feelings of judgement that may arise about these cards flow through you, letting them act like helpful guiding lights instead of an interrogating spotlight. 

 ✨ Card 4 & 5. Finding Expansion

These two cards illuminate opportunities to expand beyond what you're currently feeling, often offering a new perspective, helpful context, and hopeful reminders. These are the cards that can help coax us into our own blossoming.

✨ Card 6. The Change

The final card in our spread points us in the direction of relief from the more challenging aspect of our big feeling, offering a glimpse at the ways we might take steps toward helpful change in our life. This is not a card of giant, radical steps, but more often than not reminds us to use the tools that we already have at our disposal to bring about needed change.

🌸

While you are invited to visit my complete archive of tarot spreads, you might also be interested in creating your own oracle of care using your favorite tarot deck. If you think your big feelings may arise from a heightened level of sensitivity that you’re interested in exploring, you might like Solace. You can also check out the first post in this series of tarot spreads exploring how to find clarity and inspiration in the soft season of your life.

Wherever the seasons take you, friend, I hope your big feelings unfold into knowledge that one day blossoms into wisdom.

This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎

The Soft Season: Tarot for Clarity & Inspiration

January is a slow month for me, soft around the edges after the solstice's bright sparkle. Having already celebrated the new year at Samhain, January is less of a starting place as it is a slowing place. But, truthfully, January hasn't always been like this for me - I arrived here after spending a lot of time connecting with the seasonal rhythms of the land and my own internal seasons.

Which is all just a poetic way of saying that a few years ago I burnt out so hard that finding space for radical slowness in my life was the only (slow, soft, steady) way home again.

During this period of burnout, I found myself lying on my back in the brambles of the untended hedges of my personal boundaries, watching the seasons pass by. Getting out of that tangle took time and a lot of listening to where it was the slowness that I needed lived in the cycles of my year. The pace that I was used to moving at was no longer an option and, as the dense speed of the year rushed past me, January stuck out with its calm. It was during this month between sabbats that I started to rebuild my energy using the unfamiliar-to-me tools of softness and ease. In the process, January has become my soft season, my Quiet Moon, and the time of year where I linger between rest and reconnecting with my community practice.

Even though it was an uncomfortable and strange land to be moving through, I have come to treasure softness as the soil where the seeds of inspiration and clarity are planted. As an herbalist, tension is one of the energetic states I see most often in the clients I work with, not least of which because we are living in demanding times of ever increasing stress, and many of us are taught to overly rely on tension to prove our productiveness or as a "reasonable" way of getting by. But it is from softness, letting go of tight and narrow thinking, that possibility arises, and we can feel where it is that inspiration is calling us to.

While my soft season is the time between Midwinter and Imbolc, your soft season might appear to you at any time of the year. I encourage you to find your season of softness and I hope the following tarot spread helps you call in the energy of softness for clarity and inspiration in your life whenever you need it most. 

View fullsize

Tarot for Clarity & Inspiration

The following tarot spread is all about slowing down and softening your gaze so that you might dissolve the edges of whatever it is that is blocking your vision to better spot where inspiration is trying to guide you.

Witch tip! I recommend calling in the physical qualities of softness before casting this spread, whether it is lighting candles or soft lamps, changing into soft and comfortable clothing or perhaps building an altar to softness, gentleness, and ease.

✨ Card 1. The Querent

A card representing you (or the querent if you're reading for someone else) and your current state of being. You can see this card as something like a personal energetic snapshot or simple emotional weather report.

✨ Card 2. Less Of

A card showing you what you need less of in your life. This card might reference experiences in your past.

✨ Card 3. More Of

A card showing you what you need more of in your life. This card might refer to new habits, beliefs, and/or activities you're trying to incorporate into your life to draw you towards future goals.

✨ Card 4. Inspiration Calling

An inspirational idea, concept, and/or practice that is calling to you that would benefit from your attention.

✨ Card 5. The Cradle

Something (an idea, proposal, practice) which needs more time being sheltered, resting, and growing before being shared with the world beyond yourself. A card that helps us to invite clarity in, instead of trying to figure everything out all at once.

✨ Card 6. The Coracle

Coracles aren't the steadiest form of water craft, and represent how we might ride the current of inspiration whether or not it is a fully formed or stable idea just yet. This card is about letting yourself ride the current of inspiration and points toward the place to jump in and follow your flow.

᠅

While you can peruse through my complete archive of tarot spreads, you might be interested in my annual review tarot spread or how to incorporate tarot into your healing practice if you're journeying your way through burnout or similar experience. If you’re looking for more herbal inspiration for the season of softness, come this way.

May your journey ahead be full of inspiration, ever nourished by a wellspring of clarity!

This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎