I have spent a large portion of my life trying to find happiness, holding on as tightly as I possibly can for as long as I possibly can. I have tried to ignore the sadness and pain that resides in my heart space, hoping for the love of all that is holy that it will go away, never to be felt again. Per usual my attempts at this were folly, for you cannot have one without the other. Without sadness, happiness wouldn’t exist. There would be no opposite. And happiness isn’t the ultimate goal I have come to learn. Joy is much more essential to the healing process.
This concept of joy was particularly difficult for me to grasp, as the varying definitions of joy tend to use the terms “happy” or “glad,” making it ever so more confusing. Joy, “a source or cause of keen pleasure or delight” (dictionary.com), seems so miniscule compared to this grand gesture of happiness. How could that ever do anything to improve one’s mood?
Fittingly for this season the Moon in tarot is ruled by Pisces, inviting us to go deeper into ourselves, into those spaces that we try to hide from the rest of the world. Most of the time, at least in my life, I have found those places to be filled with shame and embarrassment. Shame is a brutal emotion that says “I am bad,” which only succeeds in reducing us down to a fraction of who we are. We feel so alone in our shame, thinking that no one else could possibly know what we are going through.
Logically I know that other people feel this way sometimes about certain things about themselves. I am not one to sit here and proclaim that I am anything special. I mean, I am. We are all special in our own quirky little ways, but we are all built from the same cloth. Every time I asked my therapist if something about me was normal, she always responded with a resounding yes. We all go through the same rollercoaster of emotions, but it doesn’t always look the same for everybody.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Mark Twain
The moon controls the oceanic tides, gliding them back and forth across the shore. The tides can’t keep going in one direction, much like us humans can’t be happy all the time. It’s simply not sustainable. They have to pull back sometimes, to rest and re-energize in order to move forward again. I remember very clearly almost drowning in the ocean when I was around eight years old. I got caught in the undertow, and it was pulling me further away from the beach. Terrified I did the exact opposite of what you are supposed to do in these situations. I kept trying to swim back to shore, fighting the waves and the current with all of my might. Thankfully an old man happened to be swimming by, and he grabbed me by the waist and brought me in safely. I know now not to fight with all my emotions, although it’s not very easy to do. I had to learn how to befriend these waves of our lives, to be cool with not knowing what the fuck is going on half the time. All we really can do is float in the unknown.
The Card of Indolence
We can look to the Eight of Cups, our guide from February 19 to 28, to aid us in letting go in order to open us up to make different choices in our lives. This is the tarot card that represents a healthy dark night of the soul, one that honors the fullness of the emotional process. “Pisces is calm but stagnant water; and Saturn deadens it completely…” (Book of Thoth). There is only one thing in this life that we can call permanent, and that is the fact that everything will change. This is a time of endings and of death, of clearing out energies that no longer feel in alignment. I have found that the more we try to avoid things or to hold onto things, the more they fester inside us, much like the leftovers sitting in the back of my refrigerator.
Sometimes the things we leave behind we truly cherished, relished in even. It can seem bittersweet to say goodbye. It felt this way when I left the restaurant business. I essentially left everyone and everything that I had ever known. It brought up a ton of fear, along with some unpleasant feelings of unworthiness. My whole identity had been wrapped up in that image. Who am I without that? I knew it was the right decision for me. I could no longer put my life progress on hold for the sake of someone else’s dream. Hi, my name is Jenna, and I am a recovering people-pleaser.
Walk away to save your face, You never were a genius. Walk away to save your face, You let it come between us.
Placebo, ‘Second Sight’
Maybe it worked in the past very well, but now it’s time to let it go with trust and appreciation for where it got us. Much like a snake shedding it’s skin, the stories we tell ourselves need to be cleared out, otherwise we remain stuck in that same miniscule size, never growing into our full potential. This requires that we ask ourselves some honest questions, of reevaluating our lives to determine if this is truly the thing that is going to light us up on the inside. We must dive deep to reach the core of those emotions, to gather ourselves together for the hope of something that feels a little freer, and a little more spacious.
The Card of Happiness
As we move away from what is no longer serving us, there tends to be a time where life seems a bit empty. We have so many choices in this life, it can feel daunting to just pick one. I always thought it odd that we were supposed to choose our whole life trajectory in high school, the time in our lives where we think we know everything, but really we know nothing at all about the world or the ways in which we fit into it. I’m not even the same person I was back then, some twenty odd years ago. High school Jen, I barely know her.
The Nine of Cups is the wish card of the tarot, giving us the opportunity to dream, even for a little bit. Fantasize about what is actually possible from March 1 to 10, nourishing the potential to make them come true. It is “the pageant of the culmination and perfection of the original force of Water… (Book of Thoth). Is that thing that your heart truly desires really that far out of reach? Could we be courageous enough to get our hopes up? I know my brain immediately starts up with the “what if” thinking. I can probably come up with as many reasons as why this idea will not work as I can as why it just might. And that just might be enough for me to at least try.
It isn’t hard to make a wish. The difficulty lies in how to make what you wish for a reality.
Catherine Pulsifer
One time I told me therapist that I didn’t want to be one of those people who recites a list of regrets as they lie on their deathbed. Yeah I know it sounds kind of morbid to be thinking about dying, but once you’ve faced a few life or death situations, death doesn’t seem as scary as it once was. Not that I am ready to die by any means. I guess I would rather say that I tried a bunch of things, some worked and some didn’t. Friendly reminder that failing doesn’t make you a failure, but not trying at all does seem like a huge miss. Something is incubating inside of us, says the Nine of Cups, asking us to dare to hope.
The Card of Satiety
In order to figure out where our new path lies, we have to figure out what it is that lights us up on the inside. The Ten of Cups, being the ultimate inner child card, encourages us to be available to the joy and the beauty that is right here in this moment. I am sure we have all been to funerals where there is still laughter to be had, where we find solace during the difficult times in our lives. These moments are our proverbial rainbows. They are quick to fade after the rain, so we must learn to enjoy them while we can.
Tethering myself to the things that bring me the most joy is the truest form of self-care. It’s the only way I’ve been able to survive all the pandemonium that is happening in the world today. This anchor, which is our guide from March 11 to 20, is all about finding love in the present moment. It’s also what the whole mindfulness thing is all about. Living in the now has been proven to reduce anxiety and depression, and as someone who suffers from both, I’ll take more of that please.
Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to another struggling soul like you.
Shannon L. Alder
It takes radical acceptance to show up like this, which can be terrifying to the nervous system. Joy is found in the willingness to do the things that light us up on the inside, regardless of the disaster that seems to be happening on the outside. I don’t mean to say that we should do things that hurt or endanger the lives of others. That behavior is never acceptable. This is more a conversation of being okay with the things that you find enjoyable, even though others may not get it, may judge you for it, or make fun of you about it. At the end of the day, the only person you can please is yourself.
Mad love, Jenna
Please enjoy this Moon Energy playlist on Spotify.
deck credit: Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, drawn in 1909 by Pamela Colman Smith under direction of Arthur Edward Waite
