“Anything that costs you your peace is too expensive.”
A few years ago, in my early struggles to get pregnant, a friend’s mom brought me to a holistic healer. The healer gave me a fertility massage and immediately told me I was carrying a lot of stress in my stomach area. It was a similar diagnosis to that of my regular OBGYN– you are so stressed that your hormones are out of whack, and you won’t be able to conceive unless you get that under control. (But in more doctor-ish language).
It was the first time I really saw chronic stress as something more than an inconvenient inevitability.
But knowing you are stressed – and that stress is causing issues with your body – sometimes only adds more of it to your life. I blamed myself for letting it reach such a critical point. Maybe it was a sign. If I couldn’t even keep myself healthy, what right did I have to the care of a child? That mindset was crippling, and it’s taken a long time to unlearn it.
I got a little triggered yesterday during my daily tarot card draw- The Empress reversed. My old self-deprecating habits came back, and I immediately assumed it to be a cruel reminder of my infertility. And then she showed up again today, while I was doing a spread for the New Moon from Biddy Tarot Planner. The corresponding question was, “What is my highest intention for my personal freedom?” I put the card back in the deck, not wanting to deal with it in that moment.
It’s almost the weekend, I told myself. Don’t stress yourself out over this. So I packed up the cards and went about my day.
Later this afternoon, while happily co-working with friends at a nearby coffee shop, my productivity came to a halt. A text message confirmed something I had been fearing over the past few months. The cause of stress from those previous years was resurfacing, and my mind – out of habit – went into fight or flight mode.
Today’s tarot spread suddenly made complete sense. Personal freedom for me is peace, and the reverse Empress is a vivid reminder of the time in my life when said peace was most threatened. My highest intention in this phase of life is to protect myself from the negative energy that poisoned my body.
Instead of reacting or feeding the source of negativity, I poured another cup of green tea and savored each sip. We can’t control other people’s actions, only our own responses. The Empress wasn’t here to haunt me. She was helping me remember what I’ve learned since that awful time and give me strength to defend what I’ve spent these years re-building. With that power (and some Fluorite crystal, just for good measure), I can handle anything.