alchemy

When we draw the Empress, the time has come for change and renewal in the sense that it is the right moment to dare to come out with our ideas, plans and insights.

Tarot as a Way of Life: a Jungian Approach to Tarot, Karen Hamaker-Zondag

The Empress connects us with this new dimension of awareness; for is it through her intuitive understanding rather than through masculine logic that the spirit leaps forth into outer space to connect with celestial insights.

Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, Sallie Nichols

The Empress – Part II

This is the second in a two part series on The Empress tarot card which has been appearing lately in various guises. These posts explore The Empress, her powers and how she is showing up for me right now as a guide.

In the first post, The Empress: vision, creativity and patience, we explored her appearances recently in tarot spreads and the symbolism of The Empress in various tarot decks as an insight into her meaning.

In this post, I’ll be sharing thoughts and intuitive writing on the messages of the Empress to help channel growth in creativity and healing at this time.

Activating heart energy

I’ve been working with gifted channeller and intuitive healer, Amber Adrian for the past six months as part of a transition process to focus on creativity as a way of life. Amber’s Activate program is about switching on your wisdom, power and light more, especially (for me) around creativity.

It’s all about connecting with our higher selves, integrating what needs to be integrated and showing up with what we learn and experience. It’s powerful and healing work, hard to describe, but my role it seems is to put my experiences into words.

In a session recently, guides stepped through for each of us with a message. For me, the guide was a woman with red hair, goddess-like. She was there to help me connect with my heart. She put her hand over my heart. With gold from her palm, she filled in any wounds with gold, so it was like my heart was made new again. She released shadows and energies, removed cords from my heart and filled the holes left by my heart wounds.

And she gave me a special message:

 Your heart is ready, put it on the page.

I am not sure who this goddess or guide is, but I am feeling the energy of both The Empress and Pele, goddess of fire and irrepressible passion who is guiding me this year. I’m feeling the power of both as they appear around messages of vision, creativity and passion. They are a couple of mighty female consorts with transformative energy I can tap into and channel creatively.

My superpower – writing

The guides in this Activate session also came forward with messages around our superpowers: how we want to be seen as we truly are. This included messages around learning how to mother and care for ourselves.

When anyone has ever asked what my superpower is, I would (and will) always say it’s writing. It’s a strength I rely on for so much: in my work role, in my personal life, strategising ideas, processing pain, capturing beauty and sorrow to experience, move through and on. It’s helped me navigate so much and words are my life-blood and heart.

So it was with a smile of recognition that I heard the words from Amber that the guides were activating channelling gifts as they come through writing. The gift being activated, once I cycle through some layers of self-care, is an ability to sit down and receive writing as a divine conduit to words – “beautiful, entertaining, what’s needed in the world.”

I am blown away by this but it seems right. It means opening up through resistance and fear to this and I note also, requires actually sitting down to write. Important.

Later we are encouraged to let our guides show us where they would like to connect and how – for example, ceremoniously, through exercise, afterwards, when you sleep. Journalling is a way we can do this, asking guides to speak to us or come through as we sleep.

In this spirit work, we need to flex and move through our own paths. The guidance and support is to be accessed. It’s a gift we need to learn. We are reminded:

It’s a muscle like anything else.

Like a muscle, we need to use it.

Message in a Bottle

The next day while all this is settling, I receive the ‘Message in a Bottle’ card from The Wisdom of the Oracle deck, in protection position (reversed). This card is all about communication and signs from spirit and guides pointing to your highest good. In protection position, it’s saying:

Don’t ignore the signs. Spirit always has your best interests at heart and will draw your attention to what you are overlooking.

With its image of a telephone in a bottle, there’s a sense of messages coming and not being able to get them or read them. The Wisdom of the Oracle guide book says this is also about allowing yourself to “become fluent in the language of symbols, oracles, and omens.” But in protection position, it’s about maybe not acknowledging signs because they don’t fit our world view. We are tending to want them as we want them. Or we are missing them altogether.

So I’m listening, opening up and working to become fluent in this language of guides, signs, symbols and intuitive writing. It’s natural ground in one way, but the signs are flagging a richer and deeper connection with spirit and channelling of words.

This is welcome but there’s that resistance I can feel around what this means. Channelling, for example, is a concept I am not entirely comfortable with and it seems a big step into an unknown world right now. In my mind, are the inevitable thoughts of “What will (insert anyone you like) think about this?” with all the dark power and shadow that such fruitless thinking can muster.

Night thought visits

I head to bed with an open heart, inviting guides to speak to me in the night as this seems to be the way I am currently receiving information and inspiration.

In a wonderful interview on The High Priestess podcast, Julie Parker speaks with guide and psychic, Helen Jacobs, about intuition in the most down to earth of ways. This was such a balm for my soul at this time. They discuss how the way we access intuition and information from guides is different for everyone. And it can also change from time to time for each of us. Talk about keeping us on our toes!

The way my intuition and guides seem to be speaking to me now is through what I call night thoughts. They are words, symbols, signs or lines of songs that come through clear as a bell when I wake in the early hours of the morning.

So I wake in the night with wavy haint blue lines that I know from the Spirits card in Marcella Kroll’s Sacred Symbols deck. I know it means that spirits are calling offering wisdom and help. I draw the wavy lines with my finger in the air as I can feel them so strongly.

I look at the time and it’s 3:13am. Those numbers speak to me too – I’ve been noticing lots of number sequences lately especially 111, but this sequence 313 seems significant so I take note.

I know I will need to get up and write this down so I don’t forget. And I know I need to write. Here is an opportunity to harness the spirit of guides and channel any messages, despite my uncertainty about this. It’s a gift, a present, a presence and a guide. It’s there for me to access and it’s there to help me channel love and light. It’s not all about me it seems.

Journalling night thoughts

I have a Night Thoughts journal – I’ve had it for a while – and I capture all the thoughts that come in the night there. They are so rich. I open the journal and I write this message:

I’m waking you in the middle of the night to say I’m here, spirit, 313, helping you to see and hear the signs that come to you. Ask and you shall see. You need to ask.

(I then insert three of the Spirits wave symbols as in the card above)

The Empress, orange cloak, golden hair, is guiding you. Plant the seeds, heal the wounds, feel the gold inside the cracks, go there. It’s a gift you’ve always had from very young to see and feel the cracks and fill them with gold. The gold in your heart is what can help heal others’ cracks and wounds and your own.

You’re called to help heal, to hold the hands and hearts of those who hurt. In many ways, like a kindred soul, standing in healing, standing side by side, in the trenches of the heart. But healing with words of gold, from your pen and from your mouth.

Number 313

Afterwards I check about the number 313. And what I read again blows me away. Joanna Walmesley of Sacred Scribes explains in this post that it’s an angel number:

Angel Number 313 is a message from your angels that the strong connection you have with the angelic realm and the Ascended Masters is assisting you with staying positive, light and optimistic about your life…It is time to live your truths and express yourself with clarity, purpose, passion and love. Be a positive light to others.

I’m encouraged just like the ‘Message in the Bottle’ to pay close attention to intuition and inner wisdom, that guides are there helping me with the next steps along my path.

313 is made up of the attributes and vibrations of 3 appearing twice. Then I recall that 3 is The Empress’s number also, she who has appeared twice recently in my tarot readings, with 3 linked to creativity, self-expression, talents and skills. Number 1 is about self-leadership, intuition, fresh beginnings and approaches – all in line with The Empress and her messages of creativity, intention and patience. I love the term ‘self-leadership’ and this number emphasises that:

 we create our own experiences with our intentions, thoughts and beliefs. This makes 313 the number of optimism, enthusiasm, communication, creativity and expansion.

Kintsugi

After all this beautiful light and energy that has flowed from The Empress appearing in various guises, I keep reflecting on that palm of the hand holding my heart and filling it with gold. It feels so warm and positive. I know that sense from somewhere.

Then I remember the Japanese art of Kintsugi (or kintsukuroi). A representation of the idea of wabi-sabi, it’s a method for repairing broken ceramic pieces with a lacquer mixed with gold or other precious metals with the philosophy behind this:

to recognize the history of the object and to visibly incorporate the repair into the new piece instead of disguising it. The process usually results in something more beautiful than the original.

In a piece on kintsugi, wabi-sabi, the beauty of scars and her son’s repaired heart, Amy Basken says:

kintsugi pieces are prized precisely because they have been broken. They are said to be more beautiful, more unique, and “stronger at the broken places” (to quote Ernest Hemingway)

I’m feeling like my heart is a vessel, a sacred object, cracked from wounds and hurts but healing. As I reflect, I realise there are 3 significant times in my life when my heart fractured and hurt intensely with deep grief, loss and pain.

I feel my heart wounds fill with gold and heal. I’ve had enough suffering from these wounds for now. I can move on. I can communicate the lessons and emotions to help others heal, to feel they are not alone or to acknowledge and honour these feelings as part of moving on.

How often do we hide these wounds and experiences with a sense of shame instead of realising they are what makes us strong, beautiful and able to support others with what we have learned.

Not that we would ask for these experiences. But if they happen to us, Kintsugi and The Empress remind us that breakage and repair, wounds and healing, are natural, not something to be concealed but there to be held up to the light with love. And love mostly for ourselves.

Seek and you shall find…one layer of Truth at a time. Every experience we have in life, even the missteps, and especially the bliss, is a step closer to that sacred radiance. We are all waking up in the same direction.

Danielle LaPorte White Hot Truth: Clarity for keeping it real on your spiritual path from one seeker to another (forthcoming May 2017)

Alchemy: the power to transform things for the better

I leave the draft to this point overnight, asking for guidance to clarify and make sense. The words that come in the night are:

This is alchemy, you are experiencing alchemy.

Yes, I realise, that’s it. Alchemy: the power to transform things for the better – that would be a relief and something I can work with, a healing thing for me and others. I relax suddenly, snuggling into the warmth of my loved one and cuddling my little stuffed bear in the dark, smiling. I relax into this knowledge, this beauty, and lean into its wisdom, embracing whatever is to come.

Thought pieces

You can learn more about Amber Adrian and her brilliant work in activating creativity and healing at AmberAdrian.com – she is also a fan of stuffed animals and is the most beautiful writer.

Dee at Archangel Oracle – Divine Guidance explores The Message in a Bottle card in more detail. These thoughts resonate on becoming fluent in reading signs and symbols.

For more reading and beautiful visuals on kintsugi and its processes visit:

Kintsugi: the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery

Kintsugi: the art of broken pieces

Image acknowledgements:

• The Empress card is from the Sakki Sakki tarot deck; others as noted in the text
• Other images from pexels.com and used according to licence with thanks to the creators.

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