✨Materia Prima✨
Gorgeous & heavy all at the same time
At the beginning of the traditional New Year in January, it’s super common in our culture to make goals and assess what’s going on in our lives.
We look at the things we’d like to improve, achieve, and release.
But it doesn’t take long to lose sight of those goals once the holiday season passes and life’s routine revs up.
So, I’d like to invite you to use today’s reading as a way to listen for messages that can guide you closer to your dreams and goals.
Perhaps: What can I release right now to help me move forward?
Or: What do I need to embrace right now?
Maybe: What do I most need to hear?
Whatever it might be, it’s always refreshing and helpful to take a look around and check in with yourself.
-Natalie
PS: If you’d like to go more in-depth with a mid-winter check-in, send me a note for a zoom reading. 1:1, 30 minutes, $33.
the cards
deck: Materia Prima by Uusi
Hold up!
Take a few centering breaths, then choose a card BEFORE scrolling down
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one
Gold
It’s time to release your grip, friend. Whatever it is that you’re clinging to so tightly—an idea, a project, a belief that’s causing issues with others—it’s time to gently set it aside of a while.
Gold has the incredible ability to both incite wars and brighten up a room. Like money, it is the value that WE assign to it that causes all the trouble. By itself it’s just gold. Pretty. Relatively heavy. Soft.
There is personal emphasis that you’re putting on something that’s making it difficult for you to see it for what it really is.
Take a break. Stop pushing so hard. Walk down the street and buy a cup of coffee instead. Do something not in your usual routine to get out of your head about the “gold” in your life.
Return to it with fresh eyes and watch how the answer is right there, shining like the sun.
two
Tungsten
There is shadowy folklore connected with Tungsten. This card shows up as a reminder to spend a moment connecting with your own shadow.
Often—because it’s hard work!—we bury our shadowy selves. We eat. Drink. Shop. Exercise. Pull Tarot cards. Pretty much anything that keeps us from looking at our whole Self. Warts and all.
Shadow work is work. But taking the first steps to reflect on your shadow, and even acknowledge that you’re tucking it away, is progress.
In addition to the hedonistic habits I mentioned, covering up your shadow can look like avoidant behavior, impatient attitude towards others, lying, and anything else that takes you away.
Take ten or twenty minutes alone and just look at something: a lit candle, a houseplant, the tiny waves on the lake across the street. Phone off. Radio off. Just you focused on watching this item.
Ask your mind to open up to your hidden shadows. This may take a while, and it might be uncomfortable. You be the judge as to how deep you want to go.
Or nothing happens right away. You just notice how pretty the patterns in nature are…that’s still something.
The gift here is recognizing what you’re avoiding, hiding, and what’s ultimately causing that pattern that isn’t serving you to resurface.
Be patient. Return to this practice if it calls to you.
three
Lead
Lead is heavy. In his own myth, Lead carries dark energy and flirts with evil. It is a no-nonsense energy, and yet, shares the same space and universe with the light and bright oxygen and helium.
There are places to lay down your burden in this world. People and practices that will take on your darkness and depression and exhaustion for a little while. They are safe, shadowy places that will safeguard your burdens until you can get enough help or energy to begin healing.
So if you’re sick of hearing love and light and meditation and “just breathe”…that’s totally okay.
What you need most instead is to lay down your heaviest burden for a day, an hour, a night, a minute.
Where can you deposit the heaviness for a moment and recharge? Sometimes it’s this step—recharging—that is needed before tackling the BIG work of healing.
You are supported.