My tarot journey & biggest lesson from The Moon

And why this card was the reason for me coming to Substack

It's september 2020.
All of our worlds have become incredibly small over the past few months.
That’s when I discover a whole new world in the tarot.

From the moment I held my very first deck in my hands, it felt like remembering; like wisdom coming back to me, instead of me trying to learn something new. I have never experienced anything like it.

This day fell a few weeks before the biggest Tower period I had seen in many years. It was dark and lonely and scary for quite some months and the tarot very soon started to feel like an anchor, a safe haven and a tool to help me come back to the here and now and keep seeing the little pockets of light in my days.

Letting the mind lead the way

I also, right away, had started reading for other people, so in the new year it seemed only logical to add the tarot to my business. Many people around me said the same thing. So I did.

All the while something within me was whispering ‘’no’’. Just ‘’no’’. No explanation. No screaming in my ear. There was just a very simple, quiet ‘’no’’ that I felt throughout my whole body, but was not able to put into words – and therefore started calling it fear (of judgement), which I decided I just had to push through.

Tarot became a part of my business and over the years it became a bigger and bigger part and then again a smaller and smaller part of it. And it never felt right.

Until The Moon showed up, earlier this year. And kept showing up. And kept showing up ... 🙃

It was during the creation of my digital toolkit for overthinkers, that every time I got stuck, The Moon started to show her face. At first, I had a hard time receiving her guidance, so I just kept on over-brainstorming, asking everyone and their mom for advice, procrasti-learning and perfecting.

Still, little by little, I started to wonder: Was there something I was missing? Because while I was trying SO hard to get out of those moments (or weeks) of feeling stuck, it was almost like quicksand; the harder I tried, the more I felt myself getting further and further away from the clarity I was longing for.

The Moon from the Light Seer’s tarot

I knew that after The Moon, The Sun is always right there to illuminate whatever was hiding in the shadows. But how do you get there!? Well, by actually moving through The Moon. It took me a while to figure out what that meant exactly, but this is where I landed on:

Stop resisting what you’re experiencing, because things like clarity and peace of mind cannot be found, they find you, if and when you are home - within yourself and the present moment.

To try to come home, I started doing two things:

#1 - A visualization

I started to imagine myself standing in the ocean, the water coming up to my waist. And instead of bracing myself every time a wave hit me, as to stay upright (which of course is very draining and exhausting, but also makes you feel more in control), I tried to visualize this wave of frustration and self-doubt just washing over me, taking me to the bottom of the ocean.

Practically, this surrendering to and being present with what is, often turned out to be: Doing the opposite of what I had been doing. And usually, stillness is the opposite of whatever we’re doing that is leading us so far away from our inner wisdom.

#2 - A simple action

So instead of meeting these hard experiences with more ‘’hardness’’, I started to meet them with (at first, very forced 😬) gentleness. Whenever I noticed the urge to push, please, prove and/or perfect, I challenged myself to do nothing for a few minutes (and I mean NOTHING, no podcast, no laundry – nothing).
Just a few minutes of nothing, of allowing myself to feel these less than pleasant feelings without trying to fix them. In other words, I surrendered to the wave, as to let it guide me to the undercurrent, where I could drop into my inner knowing again.

After doing both daily-ish for a while, it turned out that a certain flowchart and some videos just did NOT want to exist. And the moment I let them go, the creative juices started flowing again.

What came up too, after all these years, was that my love for the tarot simply wanted its own place to live and breathe and develop and bloom.

In all cases, there was an intuitive ‘’no’’ that I couldn’t hear clearly enough over the noise of everything I was doing in order to fix the uncomfortable feeling of the ‘’no’’, which I had labeled as fear or stuckness.

The Sun from the Light Seer’s tarot

So that’s what brought me here, to Substack – finally understanding the guidance of The Moon AND actually applying it to my daily life.

So, thank you, Moon, for reminding me that:

• whenever I feel stuck or an overwhelming urge to push, please, perfect or prove, the invitation is to do the thing that feels the most impossible or unhelpful (‘’Whenever you feel like pausing/resting is not an option, that’s when you need it the most.’’ 🙄) - to not keep moving forward, to not brace myself, to get still and be gentle with myself;

• and whenever I feel a ‘’no’’ that I unthinkingly label as fear, I also have to get still for a moment. It can be helpful to let my whole body, or maybe even the whole room fill up with this ‘’no’’ and take some time to get to know it. If it’s quiet, but firm, without offering any (extensive) explanations, it’s most likely intuition. Because fear uses a lot of words in order to convince, and intuition doesn’t need to.

👉🏻 Get still, and what you’re searching for will come to you, because you’re actually home to receive it.