Table of contents
Hello, and welcome to my morbid (but hopefully humorous) headline. I'll be completely honest with you: I struggled with keeping this article exactly as it is, without editing out the less "happy" bits. But in the end, I decided to keep everything as it is.
This week's newsletter is a brief little excerpt from my own reading done a few days ago, and the words are picked directly out of my tarot journal. The King of Cups popped up with some wise advice (and some gentle dragging as always).
The reading:
"Make your foundation strong and stable. This is one of the biggest things you can do for yourself to help you weather the twists and turns that are coming up ahead. Do not run to your spirituality only when you need something from it. Be proactive. Invest in yourself. Make yourself spiritually stronger.
You don't run into the ocean and then start building your boat. You build your boat before your feet ever touch the water.
So do not make the naive assumption that saying Yes to yourself means that the path will be easy. You are wiser than this. You know that you cannot escape the ups and downs of life. What are you doing to help prepare you for the downs? Where do you need to step up? I am the part of you that is strong enough to weather any storm, but you need to spend time with me to truly absorb my gifts and skills."
You're only as strong as your inner self
Some parts of this reading seem really similar to the one I did on the 16th of May. (If you missed it, look for the post titled "I'm calling out your ego–with love".) And what especially stands out in that previous post is the part where I wrote, "I have so much I want to write about this, but I don't want to word vomit everything into one incoherent mess. This topic will probably come up again in future posts, but right now I'm trying to stay on track."
So I'm really not surprised that this theme has come up again, talking about how you need to strengthen your spiritual self before you run into challenges, instead of waiting until things are hard and then trying to use your rusty tools to cut away at the problem. Because you're only as strong as your inner self. And if you let your inner self get rusty and forgotten about, it makes it that much harder to cope when your outer life gets difficult.
Coping in a world that's (seemingly) going to shit:
The theme of foundations has been coming up a lot recently. And not just for me, but for others in the spiritual community as well. It's as though we're being prepared to deal with all the stuff that's coming ahead. 2020 triggered a big shift where politically and economically, it felt like things just started to spiral downwards. I'm not sure which country you're reading this from, but I see people from around the world all struggling to cope with the rising cost of living, and the knowledge that financial security is becoming even more elusive for a large section of the population than it already was. And on top of all the governmental nonsense, society itself is pretty divided and heated. Twitter remains a toxic cesspool of negativity, everyone hates the other side, and for a lot of us, it feels like we're in a boiling pot that's going to spill over sometime in the future.
Simply put, for a lot of us, we're living in very scary times right now. And we don't know what's coming. Maybe some of you reading this are privileged enough to not have to deal with the fears that other people have to deal with. Maybe this is just a rough patch that will work itself out in the next few months. I'm not a prophet of doom trying to work you up into a panic. But I also don't believe that spirituality can really help us if we lock ourselves up in a tower and fail to acknowledge what's actually going on in the world right now.
So again, the focus comes back to your foundations. Because if you accept that you can't really control where this world is heading, then the only thing you can control is your response to it. You show up, you say Yes to what calls to you, and then you do the fucking work.
Saying yes is not the work.
You don't say Yes and then sit back and feel that you're now living your purpose. Saying yes is the opening of the door. It's tying up your shoelaces and packing your bag. But you still need to walk out the door and down the path, and then after that you need to keep going. You don't say Yes once and then rest. You wake up every day and do it over again, through the doubt, through the fear, through the confusion, through the setbacks and the obstacles. That's what it really means to follow what calls to you. It doesn't automatically make the path easier. In fact, in some ways it can make it even more challenging because once you start to face your fears, all the stuff you've been burying and avoiding begins to come to the surface.
So just like last time, there's honestly so much more I have to say on this topic. And yet again, I have to stop myself here because I can feel myself starting to go off on other tangents, haha. But I hope this reading has been helpful for you. I hope it's planted some seeds in your mind about the foundations you've been neglecting. I hope it's helped you turn your gaze from always looking outwards at what you want to achieve, and reminded you to take some time to look inwards at what you need to first strengthen before you go out and conquer the world.
As always, if you want to chat, ask questions about the reading or tarot in general, please email me at me@terriwanjiku.com. I always love hearing from you. And until the next time, sending you all the healing vibes that I can. 🌙