honoring your emotions can be challenging — tarot can help.

hello, friends. i know that many of us are just trying to get through each day: trying to pay attention to the constant onslaught of horrifying news, trying to balance our resources, trying to stay connected to the people and causes we care about. when we're in a state of overwhelm or exhaustion, trying to navigate our own complex emotions or intense feelings can seem like a luxury we don't have time for.

and listen, i get it. carving out space to honor our own tenderness, our own fears, our own dreams, feels less urgent than getting dinner on the table, launching that new project, answering that big email. (if you also feel like your shoulders have been permanently hunched since 2014, you can come sit with me.) emotions, especially difficult ones, often get pushed to the wayside in favor of tangible realities or more immediate needs.

but here's the thing: repressing our own feelings, denying them or hoping they'll go away, rarely helps anyone. sooner or later, those emotions always come bubbling up — and rather than treating ourselves harshly for having big emotions, rather than judging ourselves for struggling, i'd like to offer another way forward.

introducing queens of spirit: a four-part journaling series designed to help you gently, courageously begin to build a relationship with your own emotions. featuring journal prompts, audio encouragements, suggested breathwork and bodywork exercises, and tarot spreads, queens of spirit will empower you to better understand the feelings that might threaten to overwhelm you — so that you can not only recognize how to care for yourself in challenging periods, but can also show yourself greater compassion, love, and care along the way.

after completing an incredible grief facilitation training with good grief network earlier this year, i've been eager to offer a way to combine tarot with holding emotional space — to create tools for acknowledging intensive emotions, and for navigating this complicated, beautiful, brutal world that we live in. queens of spirit is my first resource specifically along these lines; a way to give you safe methods for sitting with those big feelings, recognizing them for what they are, and starting to create spaces where you can safely hold them.

emotional work is big, but you won't have to go it alone. each week, we'll pair a difficult emotion with one of the tarot's queens (the deck's literal emotional containers!), offering you a supportive companion for your work and ways to see yourself within these figures.

by the time you complete queens of spirit, you'll understand your own feelings better: what activates them, how they show up for you personally, and what they might need in terms of tending and care. you'll also have a deeper relationship with each of the queens, and will learn to see yourself within these powerful, emotional figures. you'll be stronger, braver, and have a better sense of your own authenticity — and you'll also have some strategies in place for managing those emotions in the future.

the world is a lot right now. the queens can help you navigate it.

questions? feel free to email me at 3am.tarot@gmail.com. and if a journaling series isn't what you're looking for right now but you'd still love help using tarot for ongoing support around big feelings, check out the workshop i'm hosting with jeanna kadlec on august 17th!