a reading for The Empress
1. What is my passion? (4 of Wands) Celebration and joy, recovery. “Share with me the sun--you forget sometimes it’s yours! Can’t you see you’re not the only one? The doors all lead outside, let it soak into your mind.” The sense of healing and relief and joy of someone coming through a hard thing and stepping out into the sun. I am a person who loves to nurture and support and bring people out. Right now I’m severely burned out after several years of relentless grinding misery from the mental health issues of every single person I love and interact with, but it’s still in me to want people to find joy. The 4 of Wands has a sense of stability to the celebration. It’s not wild unhinged joy--it’s relief, community, structured and loving joy.
2. How have I expressed it? (2 of Wands) Security vs adventure; choosing risk; balancing success vs feeling closed in. I can stand on that wall with someone’s world in my hand, rolling it around and listening as they explain. I can look at everything that feels so huge and overwhelming. Pose this choice: do you change something and risk things being either worse or better, or do you stay where you are and rest, recover, strengthen. This feels here like a card of an advisor. Presenting choices with dispassionate mind.
3. How can I express it more fully? (King of Wands) Strong confidence, impatience, powerful energy. I tend to get stuck in the “listen” mode, accepting everything someone says--especially if that person is agitated. This doesn’t mean I don’t offer solutions--just that I never question perceptions or call someone out. I feel like I am being thoughtful and accepting, but maybe total unemotional reaction isn’t always the best course. Maybe sometimes people do need someone to push back, to say “that doesn’t seem right.” Maybe I can be the push sometimes instead of the perpetual safe landing zone.
4. What blocks me? (Ace of Cups) Love and healing, as gifts and grace; nourishment. Giving freely, always, no strings attached. I can read this as the root of my burnout: giving forever, pouring out and pouring out and never asking to be filled. It’s not good for me, and it’s not good for the people I nourish. I can look at my sister and see what happens to someone when people cater to her every need and never hold her accountable. I can’t build up the King of Wands’ fire if everything is flowing freely out of me.
5. What frees me? (4 of Pentacles) Structure, closing off. This is where I am now. I am deliberately and consciously pulling back and closing up and making sure to take care of myself. And yes, financial security would be very freeing! When my life is less stressful there is more of me to put into either my own passions or others’.
6. What do I nurture? (6 of Wands) Confidence, success, leadership. I’ve thought of myself as a sidekick for years--nurturing the leadership of others. In this card, am I the leader nurturing my followers, or the followers supporting the leader? As I mature and grow, I am more confident, less shy, and more comfortable stepping into a leadership role. It’s felt like necessity in the past--”everyone around me is paralyzed and indecisive but I can do this.” I have no idea anymore which role is natural and preferred for me. Does it matter? If the leader is strong and good, I don’t care if it’s not me!
7. What does nurturing ask of me? (7 of Cups) Imagination, passivity. This feels in direct conflict with the King of Wands earlier in the spread. This card asks me to imagine all the possibilities for someone, but not to take any action myself. Does it have to be conflict though? It’s not my action; maybe the role of the King is simply to not accept inaction on the part of others, and the 7 of Cups reminds me that it’s not my action to take.
8. What does it give me? (10 of Pentacles) A sense of security, but no emotional connection. Material wealth but dull and narrow life. If all I do is listen endlessly to other people’s problems, I cannot connect because I am bringing no energy of my own into the relationship. I am basically an unpaid therapist. I have the security of having a lot of people who “need” me, but flat one-sided relationships. I have a lot of people who have very close intense relationships with me--from their side.
9. How can I bring together my passion and my nurturance? (Ace of Wands) Fire, life force, beginnings, impulses, forcefulness. Act! Put my own energy into connections--as in, be vulnerable and open, talk about myself too. Don’t just accept other people’s inertia. Push them to move forward and myself to connect.
Wow. Wands everywhere! Unprecedented for me, I’m usually alllllll pentacles. Interesting reading, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my tendency to freeze up, shut down, and go into dispassionate acceptance mode when someone is in crisis. Even if the crisis is of their own making, I don’t think I’ve ever said to someone “hey you were wrong, that’s shitty.” I feel like this reading is calling me out and saying I am doing no one any favors by being endlessly forgiving and accepting.
