chronic illness

Reading for Chronic Physical Illness Vs. Mental Illness in the Tarot

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One great thing about being my patron is that pretty often I’ll ask my patrons what they want to hear me talk about. As I am very open and public about both both mentally and physically ill, one such patron requested an easy guide for telling the difference between physical and mental illness in the tarot and I thought that was a GREAT idea, so here we are!

I want to offer a huge, giant disclaimer to start with though:

I’m not a doctor, and none of this is meant to be perceived as medical advice. Furthermore, everyone’s journey with the tarot is different. The following advice comes only from MY experiences being sick and working with the tarot.

That being said, I have developed some very quick “go to” ways to see what the cards are talking about when they bring up illness or injury.

One HUGE thing I’ve done is gone through and assigned keywords that correlate to my various illnesses to the cards I think they fit the most. In my personal tarot journal, I have the Four of Cups listed as “depression” and the Five of Wands as “arthritis flareup.” I have enough cards assigned to various illnesses that if I’m asking about my day/week/month/etc. pulling those specific cards gives me a VERY solid head’s up on what to expect that day/week/month/etc. sickness wise.

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(As a side note, I STRONGLY recommend making your own tarot keyword list in addition to the one that comes with your deck, my slightly more radical approach to a keyword list, or anything else you might’ve purchased or acquired to help you learn your cards. Developing your own keyword list IS work. It requires looking at your cards individually and in spreads, and sussing them each down to 3 or 4 words or quick phrases each. It’s so, so, so worth it though. It deepens your relationship with your cards and makes your readings moving forward so much more personal. In doing this, you can ABSOLUTELY add in your own illnesses or worries for certain cards.)

If you’re starting from scratch or have a new deck and want to know where you might start looking, I GENERALLY use this guide to guide my health readings. ALWAYS trust your own knowledge and intuition over someone else’s though.

  • If a lot of WANDS show up in your reading: wands are fight and fire. When you get to know your deck you’ll see that so often the negative Wands cards indicate internal conflict and turning your anger inwards. For this reason I use Wands to denote autoimmune disorders most often.

  • PENTACLES represent Earth. They can also represent the human body itself. For this reason, in a health reading or a general reading where sickness is indicated I usually read these as a physical illness that is debilitating but not permanent. This could be the flu, or a sprain, or anything like that. Pentacles do heal and I think that’s an important difference here.

  • Both SWORDS and CUPS can indicate mental illness or trauma reactions if they show up frequently in a reading. Generally I read Swords as chronic mental illness like Depression or Generalized Anxiety Disorder or Bipolar Disorder (which I don’t have but am intimately aware of). There will be ups and downs but you can’t cure these things. You can manage them, but a flareup is still horrendous and will still happen on occasion.

  • I tend to read an overflow of CUPS as being more about the emotional side of mental illness. My Avoidant Personality Disorder can be cured. My PTSD can be cured. (I mean they won’t be until I find a new therapist, but theoretically they CAN be cured. They can CERTAINLY become more manageable in a way that chronic mental illness often can not.) I usually find these things then in the Cups which are about both emotions and healing.

  • The MAJOR ARCANA are not fun if they come up in a reading about health. On a smaller scale, they represent the health things that come with aging and are therefore inevitable. You’re going to get your mom’s bad eyesight and your dad’s weak knees and you can’t stave it off forever no matter how many carrots you eat. Unfortunately, a lot of times the Majors warn us about big, bad life-changing illnesses. If you do a reading about your health and get a ton of Majors, you might want to hit up your doctor ASAP, especially if they’re negatively aspected.

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All of the above are told from the lens of the idea that you’re doing a reading and you know that there are some health problems. This information is only meant to help you isolate the problem so you know where to start working from. If you are healthy and all of your cards in a health reading are positive, don’t sweat it! You’re probably fine! If you have been on a healing journey to manage chronic illness and you feel like things are pretty well under control and you get a bunch of cards about peace regardless of the suit, than that’s great! You’re doing great!

Another great way to check in on your health is to simply create a spread that addresses specific body parts or chronic illnesses.

If I’m worried about an arthritic winter and the emotional fallout of being isolated because it’s Minnesota in winter, than I’ll do a two card spread to see what the cards say. I take those at face value—scrap everything I said above. If I pull a 5 of Pentacles in the one about emotion than the cards ARE confirming that I’m going to feel very lost and alone this winter. You can do as many placements as you want! I’ve also done a head to toe check in using upwards of 10 cards, each representing a part of my body or piece of my health. Don’t be shy in how many cards you use, and you can always use scraps of paper placed beside the cards to remember which body parts or illnesses you were worried about.

Always trust a doctor or therapist over the cards, and always trust your actual intuition in that whole process too. The cards can offer some great insight into what’s wrong and why though. Hopefully this primer helped. Remember though that as you grow on your own journey with your own cards, you might find totally different results than me. That’s rad! Trust that.

In the meantime, happy tarot reading and blessed be y’all!

Cassandra

The Million Dollar Questions: Where Have I Been and Where Am I Now?


Photo By Janet Nguyen Photography

Photo By Janet Nguyen Photography

Hello Dear Readers,

I promise this is not yet another blog post where I just rehash the trauma of my brain injury, because where I’ve been in 2018 is so much deeper and more nuanced than one injury (even if that injury did suck literally over half a year out of my life).

When I was blogging before, my monthly posts about everything I accomplished/did/learned (and because I believe in accountability and strength in vulnerability, everything I failed at, struggled with, and didn’t accomplish) where some of my most popular and shared pieces. As I start back up, I want to keep the same personal voice with higher quality material so here we are back at the beginning of the month and ready to roll with some updates.

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As a reminder OR as information for new readers, the reasons why I do these “month in review posts” are basically because:

  1. Even if people didn’t enjoy them, holding myself accountable for my health, my productivity, and my community is really important to me. Posting publicly what works and what doesn’t keeps me going strong.

  2. I get really overwhelmed and excited about all of the great things that exist in the world and I want to share the ones I’ve experienced with everyone and promote some great things.

  3. I absolutely love reading personal posts, listicles, and other writer’s monthly round-ups, and I figured if I love those things that much, maybe you do too. My numbers consistently showed that that was true too!

Since it’s been almost a year since I wrote last, I obviously won’t recap EVERYTHING. That would take forever, and without an intense look through my photos and social media and journal from the year I’m not sure I’d even remember them all. (Thanks, brain injury! #stillbitter)

Instead, here are some snippets from my year:

  • The biggest news of all: I finished my book! It’s coming out May 1st, 2019 and it is so queer and so personal and still (I hope!) such a great educational tool as you start or continue on your own tarot journey.

  • Little Red Tarot decided to archive, cutting short the series that led to the above book. I’ll be doing a Queering the Tarot article a month on my Patreon, which is open for wide release on Monday. I am at peace with this decision and the beauty of the site archiving on Samhain was not missed. I decided to take this as an opportunity to get back into doing things my own way for awhile, and see what exciting new opportunities that leads to this time. The archived Little Red site is here.

  • The Column has also decided to archive. I’m still struggling with that, in part because I fell absolutely in love with doing regular arts journalism and haven’t found a new outlet yet in spite of pitching and applying for a few spots. I trust my writing skills and my ability to manifest, and I have so, so much respect for my editor. The struggle is completely in “how to move on” and not any anger or frustration AT ALL. Andy Birkey worked so hard for so long and made this beautiful thing that I’ll never forget being a part of. My past arts journalism can still be found here as the website looks for their best archival options.

  • I’ve taught several tarot classes this year. Many Queering the Tarot, Tarot 101 for Creatives and Sex and Tarot as well as a Tarot for Spiritual Use and a handful of others. As a response to those classes, I’ve also got some unique workbooks and an E-Zine in my tarot shop on this website that you can check out.

  • Theatre mostly went on hold while I healed, and that’s legitimately okay. I still performed improv a few times, put together a Drunk Queer History or two, and put together an amazing Board of Directors for Gadfly. I also got a very generous grant for my dream show: [Working Title]: 60 Queer Plays in 90 Queer Minutes. That goes up in March and trust me when I say it is a freaking dream team of writers, cast, and crew so far.

  • I fulfilled a lifelong dream of performing stand-up comedy and I apparently was good at it? I was VERY bitten by that bug and while I haven’t done it since, one of my upcoming projects is to scope out other opportunities that feel safe and daring at the same time to perform at.

Same adorable cat.

Same adorable cat.

In some ways, things haven’t changed that dramatically. This was a hard year in both my personal and my medical life, and the past two months have been very trying professionally. Yet I still wake up in the bed I love so much every morning, next to my cats who I adore, in the same apartment I fell in love with two years ago. My queerplatonic partner is still my person, and some of the same people who have ALWAYS held it down for me still do. I am still doing the things I love for a living, by some God’s grace. This was a year of good-bye and of death. It was a year of huge change and very dramatic scenes. It was also a year of rest and recuperation though. Most importantly, it was still a year of love, laughter, and at times, out and out silliness. I am grateful to my core, to the deepest part of myself for these things. I feel gratitude into my bones and oozing out of my pores. I haven’t felt this in a long time, and I hate what it took to get me here. I’m here now though.

My book cover! So great!

My book cover! So great!

As I look forward:

I see my first book being released. I see my dream show going up. I see more time in this wonderful apartment with more of the people who make it and Minneapolis a home for me. I see a successful Patreon and while I don’t know where or what they will be, I do see more really great writing gigs in my future. I see some other more ambiguous ideas right now too: a podcast, more theatre, some vague ideas for adventures. I see such lovely clients and collaborators, especially at my steady gigs like the Eye of Horus, The Future, and Gadfly Theatre Productions. I’m eager to add to that roster too, but I can wait.

I’m also facing something really hard and scary in this Pagan year.

I don’t know when or if I’ll be ready to talk about it, but I will say that I have decided to seek treatment for vaginismus as well as any underlying causes for it. It’s really hard and scary and I have cried every day for the past two weeks as I wait for the right doctors to call me back. I’m keeping things close to the chest regarding writing or talking about it, at least currently. I live most of my life VERY out loud so that others will know they are not alone. I am not in a place to be of service regarding vaginismus right now though. I am not equipped practically or emotionally to answer questions or shoulder other people’s confessions. I don’t know if I could have admitted that before my brain injury. That injury has taught me so much about rest and focus on self. Maybe I’ll just need an outlet and it’ll be this blog after all. Maybe not.

In any case, that is another very important answer to the question of “Where Am I Now?” Because where I am IS hopeful, excited, and well-rested. I am also facing the realities of what happens when you have Avoidant Personality Disorder and a really painful, terrifying problem like vaginismus. Where I am is also petrified, wanting to run and hide, and kicking myself for letting my AvPD convince me to wait this long. I am so emotional about this. There’s not another way to put it. That is where I am though, and that is what I’ve been carrying as I work to build this blog and it’s readership back up.

I obviously don’t want to end on that note!

SO here’s some happier stuff that I’m super into at the moment:

Current Fave Tarot Deck: The Numinous Tarot

Currently Reading (and Loving): Calypso by David Sedaris

Currently Watching: The Good Place, Charmed, and How to Get Away With Murder most vehemently.

Current Fave Movies: The new Halloween which I LOVED and Colette which I can not and will not ever shut up about. To think I used to not like Kiera Knightley?! Honestly what was wrong with me?

Current Favorite Websites: Them is what I read most often. I also like this article about traveling while arthritic.

Current Favorite Recipe: This really easy cucumber salad: Chopped cucumbers, feta cheese (I dump like half of a crumbled brick in there but most people probably use about half of that), and Garlic Expressions salad dressing. Plus whatever else I have on hand. Handful of onions or a couple croutons or whatever is there that meshes. SO good, easy, and relatively cheap once you have a bottle of dressing on hand.

Current Music: Sparrow by Jump, Little Children (the whole dang album), and I still can’t stop with Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer or Brandi Carlile’s By The Way, I Forgive You.

Most Recent Adventure I’m Still Raving About: This place is so much better and weirder and creepier than I ever could have imagined. I promise.

Thank you all so much for being here and sharing this time and space with me. I’ve missed you all! Please feel free to comment below with what you are up to or what you’re most excited about post-Samhain/Halloween!

Blessed be, y’all!

No End of Month Wrap-Up for April

Hey All,

Just wanted to drop a quick note about the slight blogging hiatus. I've been really sluggish lately, and at first it was easy to chalk up to my depression, until I noticed I didn't feel depressed. I felt tired. Really, really tired. Then some other weird things happened, and long story short my thyroid is out of control right now. I love this blog, tarot, witchery, writing about it all--but I need the rest of this week and some of next to recover, and by then April will be long gone. Suffice it to say, things did turn around for me, and I love where things are headed.

You can read about queer tarot by me here and here. You can read some writing from a new friend I made here. You can support my tarot biz by ordering an email reading, making an appointment, or visiting me here. You can support my theatre biz by grabbing tickets to this, this, or marking your calendar for this.

Until next time, Blessed be.

Please send healing energy in the meantime! Much love to you all. Enjoy this gratuitous photo of my cat.