EPISODE 17: TEMPERANCE
RUN TIME: 57’ 26 ’’
DATE: 12/21/2021
[00:00:00 Soft piano chords accompanied by light percussion, interspersed with a gentle harp and electric guitar plucking in the background. Music plays and overlaps with Sarah’s introduction.]
[00:00:03] Sarah Cargill: Welcome to Tarot for the End of Times. A podcast where we utilize the tarot as a tool to navigate through epochs of deep change.
My name is Sarah Cargill. I’m an artist, cultural worker, and your host throughout the duration of this series.
In each episode, I’ll take a look at the archetypal figures presented in the Major Arcana from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck to discuss what each card has to say about navigating through cycles of change, chaos, and instability.
Throughout each episode, I’ll offer reflection questions and suggestions for exercises that might support you in inviting the energy and wisdom of these archetypes into your daily life and practice.
If you’d like to support this podcast and the person who makes it, you can make a monthly donation through my page on anchor.fm. Your generous act of community care and reciprocity helps me to access the resources that I need to make projects like this possible and sustainable. You can also support this work by sharing this podcast with your friends and loved ones and, most importantly, by tuning in. Thanks for joining me.
[00:01:30 Music fades, introduction ends]
Hi there, and welcome back. And, also, welcome to the end of the year! I’m excited to be celebrating the Winter solstice with you, and am looking forward to spending this episode wrangling some of this mutable Sagittarian fire as we set our intentions for the upcoming year. But before we do, let’s do a little bit of housekeeping before we launch into today’s episode.
First, I want to thank all of you you for all the ways in which you have supported the growth of this work and, by extension, my growth - my “coming out” if you will, for lack of a better analogy - as a spiritual care practitioner over the course of the last 2-ish years through this podcast. In honor of the solstice and the cluster of holidays that occur during this time of year, I wanted to extend a token of my appreciation to y’all in the form of a promo code for either a Full Tarot Consultations or a Shadow Integration Readings with me at Snakeskin Tarot. It continues to be a deep honor and pleasure to hold space for the space holders, and I’m grateful to be able to sink into 1:1 work again. It’s truly where I feel most at home. Whether you’ve received a reading from me before or if it would be our first time working together, listen, I gotchu! From now until January 31st, 2022, you can enter the code WNTRPORTAL for 11% off of your next reading. You don’t HAVE to book your reading for December or January, by the way, but you DO have to use the code by January 31st in order to receive the discount. Also, do keep in mind that this only applies to the Full Tarot Consultations and Shadow Integration Readings, not The Sabbatical. For those who identify along the intersections of being Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color and who bear the brunt of economic marginalization, I thank you for your patience as I work to systematize my sliding scale options. I invite you to stay connected with me via my website, through Instagram and through this podcast for updates on this. As always, I’ll leave all the details in the show notes. Let’s move on…
So, as y’all know, I like to introduce each archetype with a little story, a little bit of mythology before getting to the more pedagogical elements of the episode. To tell you a bit about my process, usually, when I sit down to script an episode, I’ll get these flashes of images - almost as though I’m pulling pictures from a scene in a children’s story book - that help me connect to the energy and origin story of each archetype. And then I kinda do this thing where I jigsaw the pieces together to conjure up a cohesive narrative. Now, I knew it was time to sit down and write this episode because I was starting to get those flashes, but as I wrote the script, I would hear this little voice that kept saying, “just tell them what you learned! Share your field notes!” There’s something about these Jupiterian archetypes that want me to uplift my own experiences, and so, that’s what I’m going to focus on today.
Because of the nature of today’s topic, it felt important to share a few personal stories that reference some of the experiences that I’ve had while exploring my own path to healing and recovery, but I just wanted to acknowledge that it feels kinda vulnerable. There is such a fine line between strategic vulnerability that supports the work and trauma porn, and negotiating between what feels appropriately brave versus what feels kinda…icky and self-exploitative is challenging to navigate, especially on the digital landscape. I don’t have a secret recipe for how I negotiate this, but I’ll start here today. A bit of a content warning and request: Towards the tail end of the episode, I’ll be alluding to my own experiences navigating the Medical Industrial Complex as well as sharing some field notes that I’ve collected while observing my own body’s collapse and subsequent regeneration, and so, you know, do be mindful of that as we approach the last quarter of this episode. I also ask that folks mind my boundaries by not giving me unsolicited medical advice after listening to this episode. You know how that goes. Anyway, I’ve tried a lot of shit in the name of healing, and I am excited to share my findings as an expression of my solidarity with everyone who is engaged in their own healing practice. You’re not alone,, and I got some stories for ya to prove it.
[00:07:10]
Lastly, a gentle reminder that the best way to get in touch with me via social media is to follow Snakeskin Tarot and DM me there, especially if it’s about the podcast. Again, I am doing a bit of a digital transition, and my other account is mostly there so that 1. You remember that I’m a real person and 2. So I can maintain a digital space where I can distinguish my personal life and art practice from my spiritual care work practice. So if you wanna talk to me about the podcast, I wanna talk to you, too! Just please make your way over to Snakeskin Tarot or send me a voice message through the Anchor platform. In the meantime, thank you for your patience as I work my shit out on these platforms, it is… a work in progress. So, without further ado, let’s welcome in the archetype for today’s episode.
[00:08:14 Gentle transition music plays. Light harp and piano chords accompanied by sparse bass beats.]
Let’s start here. I’ll be paraphrasing the words of Deepak Chopra, whose Midheaven placement is in Sagittarius, the astrological ruler of this card - go figure, right? So, here it goes: nothing is physical. Everything that we experience as “real” through the senses comes down to one thing, that “one thing” being consciousness. Every “real” thing - from the glasses you wear to the cookie you just ate to the forehead you just planted a loving kiss on - everything is, when it comes down to it, an expression - a different vibration - of consciousness. We interact with consciousness by way of our experiences, and our experiences are filtered, articulated, and integrated through our tools of perception - so, through our body, and through our senses.
Some people call this world a hologram, and what I finally understand about this statement, about this bold statement, is this: the information we need to draw some cohesive sense of who we are in relation to the world around us, is harvested through the senses and is then projected onto a screen that we call “not me”. We are, more or less, wearing virtual reality goggles, those goggles being the interlocking machinations of our senses, emotions, and memories. Therefore, our understanding of the world, and the material consequences of that understanding, is merely a reflection of what we project onto that “not me” screen. “Experience is everything,” said the centaur.
The Temperance card depicts the image of a towering angelic figure in a white smock hovering over the surface of a gentle river that pools at their feet. Their golden hair shoots out threads of radiant light, its halation echoing the image of the rising sun in the background. They use one foot to dip their toes in the water while using their other foot to anchor themself to the shoreline. They cast a downward gaze at two golden chalices, each vessel vaguely reminiscent of an hourglass. They grip the narrow neck in the middle that separates the receptacle from the bell-shaped stem, methodically sloshing water back and forth in a horizontal figure 8 motion between the two cups. These chalices look a lot like sand clocks, and the figure 8 motion indicates both the passage of time and the cyclical nature of healing. The angel transfers the liquid between the two vessels to remind us that healing has its own timeline, and that linearity is just another illusion caused by the limitations of human perception, and the limits of human memory. The angel gently outstretches their scarlet wings which, even at half mast, takes up nearly half the visual space on the card, emblazoning the sky with feathers that flick in the wind like dancing flames, victorious.
The chromatic shift, the change in color palette from the utilitarian black and white portraiture of the Death card to the technicolor dreamscape of the Temperance card elucidates a sub-narrative that’s worth exploring here. The Death Card, though not necessarily a harbinger of literal death, still acknowledges the finality of transformative change. It’s not lost upon Ms. Reaper that the catalyst for transformative change is often served with a side of, welp, a side of trauma. And so here’s the thing: the overapplication of black and white thinking is, in my experience, more often than not, a sign of trauma. When you’re in danger, when it’s “go time,” your first priority is to get to safety, and you may only have a split second to make that choice, right? And so, black and white thinking stems from our reptilian brain, it’s a survival impulse that can help us to prioritize our immediate safety, which is important when undergoing the kind of change that the Death card heralds. Being able to anticipate danger and quickly decide whether or not something or someone feels safe or unsafe is an essential survival tool, but it’s not appropriate for every situation.
[00:14:09]
The tools that got you to safety - the ones that served its purpose during the passage through the Death card - will not be the ones that sustain you through your healing. Black and white thinking, and black and white responses, will not be the thing that sustains you through your healing. And so, Temperance swoops in to invite us to view the world with a different pair of perception goggles, the kind that supports your capacity to revisit old scenarios with a wider color palette, so to speak. When we begin to add a little more color, a little more texture, and depth to the pictures we’ve painted in our minds about a person or shitty situation, we begin to loosen our grip on overused survival tools. The angel in the Temperance card demonstrates how to do this, inviting us to lean into the safety of the riverbed and dip our toes back into the current of our experiences to access a little more depth of analysis than before. While black and white thinking might have been the thing that got you to safety, Temperance invites you to lift your head up for a second and take in the entire palette of your experience.
Generally, the imagery on this card relies on the visual rhetoric of opposites, halves and pairs. With wings at half mast and two cups half full, our central figure plants half of their body on land and half on water in a realm that exists halfway between the living and the dead. The sun creeping halfway up the horizon line and even the blooming yellow irises in the background echo this theme, with one iris standing twice as tall as the other. Though a bit cryptic in its delivery, these visual markers prompt us to “bridge the gaps” so to speak - to reclaim the fullness of our stories and close the loop on repetitive trauma narratives by integrating all the bits and pieces that were excavated during your journey through the Death card, through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Take a closer look at our angel’s smock and you’ll find a curious insignia embroidered at the center of their chest - a small golden triangle boxed into a square, two unlikely pieces that have found a pathway to peaceful integration. Tarot lore tells us that this symbol heralds the merging between humans and Spirit, as well as the material laws that govern the earthly experience and the spiritual laws that govern the machinations of the Universe at large. Harkening back to the Justice episode, it reminds me of the ways in which we come to reconcile Universal and material truths. Yeah? This Sagittarian archetype meets us on the other side of the Death card, the other end of the River Styx, gently steering the course from conventional wisdom to make its way towards elevated wisdom, or Universal truths.
[00:17:46]
Now, conventional wisdom tells us that we cannot fit a triangular peg into a square hole - that two unlikely pieces just aren’t meant for each other. For me, the symbol stitched across our angel friend’s chest offers an open invitation to take another look at the broken, chipped, misshapen, fractured or otherwise “unfit” pieces or discarded or rejected pieces of ourselves that we may not have considered worth integrating. Some people might call this shadow work. This symbol thus serves as a barebones map that optimistically promises making a way out of no way, offering assurance that two unlikely pieces can, in fact, merge and move you towards a different stage of wholeness. By dissolving rigid expectations, this archetype makes way for a kind of ambiguity that heals. You see, you don’t need to know HOW you’ll get there - how you’ll fit a triangle into a square - you just have to believe in its possibility. Our angel friend reminds non-believers that, much like the queerness that they themselves embody, ambiguity can be evidence of a kind of cohesion that can only be found on the other side of black and white thinking.
The Temperance card sits along the Gemini/Sagittarius axis, which means that there is, you guessed it, a relationship between this archetype and the two other previous archetypes we’ve met before: the Magician and the Lovers. When comparing the imagery of the Magician and Temperance cards, the major difference that I see is a difference in the number of tools that these archetypes bring to their workspace. While the Magician, mercurial and meticulous, pulls every tool out of the bag to learn about the business of wielding the elements,Temperance wants you to recognize that you already embody the magic you seek. You are the catalyst. The experiences gathered through the arc of the Fool’s Journey catalyzes a shift in focus from knowledge (mutable air, the sign of Gemini) to wisdom (mutable fire, Sagittarian energy). While the Magician is interested in their studies, hypotheses, and with taking their tools out for a test drive, Temperance is concerned with internalizing that knowledge through field study and real-time experience.
The Temperance card also shares an axis with the Lovers, and for these two, the topic of interest is the alchemical process of union and integration, as well as the choices that we make to get there. While the Lovers are concerned with experiencing intimacy through the mirror of another, Temperance is interested in corralling the lost parts of themselves that they banished to the shadowy forest of the subconscious. Rather than searching for an external mirror, Temperance focuses on re-establishing intimacy with the self by reintegrating the parts that they once thought were necessary to discard in order to be lovable. These two archetypes activate the Gemini/Sagittarius axis by asking: what might happen if you offered yourself the kind of intimate witnessing that you so crave from others? What if shadow work is, really, just another way to name the journey back to yourself, a way to develop the language you need to articulate your homecoming?
[00:22:13 ]
Now, I’ve heard that the avatar for Sagittarius is often considered to be a representation of Chiron, the centaur whose reputation precedes him in both the Greek pantheon and amongst modern occultists as “The Wounded Healer.” Chiron was born out of the violent transgressions of his father, Cronus the Titan, and the unbearable wounding of his birth mother, the water nymph… um, I believe it’s pronounced Philyra? [Struggles to pronounce Philyra, makes a few attempts.] Cronus, being the ancient prototype for, frankly, the modern day Fuck Boy, and… Philyra [continues to struggle with name pronunciation. Requests audience help.] being understandably destroyed after her violent encounter with Cronus, they both chose to abandon their parental responsibilities over Chiron. The orphaned Chiron was eventually placed under the care of Apollo and his twin sister, Artemis, who taught Chiron critical skill sets that would later define his role within the pantheon as the noble healer and the wise medicine elder. Eventually Apollo and Artemis’s lessons on music, medicine, prophecy, hunting and archery raised Chiron up to become a well-respected and sought after educator and practitioner of the healing arts.
In addition to his birth story, Chiron also suffered a pretty tragic and ironic death due to his inability to heal his own wound. As with all myths, there are several versions of this tale, but in essence, Chiron is struck by a poisoned arrow and is unable to heal himself. Defeated and wanting to be put out of his misery, he relinquishes his immortality, dies, and is reborn as the constellation, Centaurus.
I share this story about Chiron to underscore two points, the first one being that immortality is never the point of healing because healing is not a destination, it describes a process, a mode of engagement, a choice. It’s a verb ignited by mutable fire. There is value in engaging in the process of healing that has nothing to do with the maintaining illusion of permanence. Before leaving this plane, our elevated ancestor Audre Lorde with her Sagittarius Third House commanded her descendants to speak our truths in remembrance that we were never meant to survive. And so my point here, really, is that it’s ultimately your responsibility - your choice - to alchemize your experience into medicine, into your ashe. How you do that is totally up to you, but you gotta put all that grief, all that hurt, somewhere, you know?
Though a bit on the extreme end, Chiron ultimately demonstrates what can happen when we claim our wounds. By staying engaged with his shadows through the vehicle of curiosity, he cultivated a kind of self knowledge that, ultimately, generated options throughout his life. Chiron’s presence in the Temperance card asks us to reclaim our story, choose our own adventure, and explore the alternative endings that exist on the other side of our wounding. I’ve mentioned this in the Hermit episode, I believe, but it’s worth saying again: the difference between medicine and poison is in its dose and application. And so, with a kind of gentle yet firm empathy, Chiron asks: what will you do with all that despair? What will your story become? It’s time to choose your adventure.
[00:27:06]
Towards the beginning of this episode, I talked briefly about how our experiences are shaped through the lens of our perception, but the Black Womanism in me [chuckles] wants to add an addendum and acknowledge that our perception is also shaped by our experiences, right? This isn’t a unidirectional thing, and, personally, I think that taking on an omnidirectional approach - some might say an intersectional approach - offers a few safeguards against spiritual gaslighting and spiritual bypassing. What I mean by this is that it’s important to acknowledge that the way we experience the world isn’t only informed by the state of our perception, but that our perception is also shaped by the ways in which we metabolize our experiences through the vehicle of our material realities. It’s a “both-and” kinda situation.
So before I go on with this, I want to be clear: the pain that you’ve experienced through systems of oppression and control are not your fucking fault! The impact of anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism in general, for example isn’t painful because you refuse to see the good in it. What I AM saying is that, if the source of every experience is consciousness, and if consciousness is an infinite energetic entity with unlimited possibilities, then you, as an expression of consciousness, get a say in how you choose to engage the inevitable - how you choose to engage the inevitable consequence of living, which is pain. Temperance wants you to remember that you get a say in how you choose to metabolize the inevitable.
Now, I’m paraphrasing here and I do encourage y’all to check this out for yourselves, but in a conversation between Juju Bae and Ethereal Dean on episode 77 of “A Little Juju Podcast”, I heard Ethereal Deen describe their spiritual practice as one that is inextricably linked to their corporeal homecoming, or the process of coming home to the body. In the last couple of weeks, I heard several Black spiritualists and energy workers articulate this very sentiment, and it’s helped me to understand why I have always struggled to articulate the fullness of my own homecoming experience through the language of New Age Spirituality, or [exasperated sigh] to be specific, appropriated, whitewashed, colonized, repackaged, easily consumable forms of spirituality that form a market niche under the blanket of contemporary “wellness culture” in the U.S. I mean, the descriptor “New Age”, in and of itself, is cause for suspicion, right? - those of us who live this shit, who are about this life, know that none of this is new. Black, Indigenous and otherwise non-White teachings and spiritual methodologies that are new to White folks ain’t new to people of the global majority, riiight? Yeah.
Generally speaking, until relatively recently with the popularization of body-based mindfulness practices, “New Age” spirituality tended to promote transcendence of the body as this “promise land” to spiritual enlightenment. This entrypoint into spirituality and, by extension, wellness culture, is, in many ways, rooted in Whiteness, and it speaks to the ways in which Whiteness and theological domination work in tandem to reinforce White supremacy. When we integrate capitalism as an intersectional node within this analysis, we bear witness to how the commodification of spirituality and wellness becomes another way through which to fuel the burning dumpster fire that is capitalism.
[00:31:57]
I am well aware of the ascetic practices that aren’t dictated by Whiteness, but, you know, I’m not here to talk about that today. I want to, instead, call upon the teachings of Uncle Jimmy Baldwin who, along with other Black thought leaders at the time, taught us about how White supremacy wreaks havoc not just on folks of the global majority, but on the souls White people themselves. He frequently reiterated how White supremacy and anti-Blackness not only chip away at the spirits of folks of color, but must also effectively erode the spirits of White folks in order for them to be able to enact White supremacist violence and then just keep it pushin’. In other words, you gotta be able to leave your body to do that shit.
The kind of puritanical Christian rhetoric that places corporeal transcendence as the ultimate spiritual goal is, arguably, at least within the context that I’m currently speaking to, another expression of Whiteness that seeks to find spiritual relief without implementing any materially grounded steps towards accountability - without addressing the deep-seated and fundamental schism within oneself. The Angel of Temperance, to me, aligns with the principles of decolonial spirituality by imploring us to cut that shit out and to, instead, reaffirm the body as a potential site for spiritual homecoming and reconciliation, not as a site of escape.
You know that quote by Audre Lorde, one about self-care not being an indulgence but an act of political warfare? Well, [scoffs], I don’t know about you, but I have begrudgingly bore witness to the “Live, Laugh, Love”-ification of that quote and I highkey need for it to stop. [Laughs in the key of desperation] I am quite weary from watching that piece of Black disabled lesbian wisdom get diluted and misappropriated to sell products, and to be used as an excuse to disengage from the incredibly uncomfortable work of dismantling White supremacy within oneself. Discomfort is not inherently violent, but it is, inherently, necessary to your healing. As the character Minnie Ransom from Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters said, “wholeness is no trifling matter, a lot of weight when you’re well.”
So, what does all this have to do with the Temperance card? Well, the brighter your light the deeper your shadow. By now I’m sure you’re aware, dear listener, that I err on the side of caution when it comes to analogies and frameworks that rely on binaristic assumptions - particularly if those assumptions are rooted in the normalized oppression of others. But I also think it’s important to acknowledge the role that polarities play in metaphysics and occult studies.
What’s problematic about the “Live, Laugh, Love”-ification of spirituality and spiritually conscious healing work is that it flattens the process by failing to acknowledge the generative partnership that exists between light and shadow. Your ashe, your medicine, your magic - none of it alchemizes when you just skim the sweet cream off the top. I forget where exactly I was introduced to this culinary concept - you know, it may have been from that cooking show “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” starring Samin Nosrat, based on her cookbook - but the concept is that you don’t use salt to make things salty. You use salt to bring flavor to the surface and help things taste more like themselves. So if you find yourself on the floor, ugly crying, marinating in your own salty tears, the Temperance card swoops down to remind you that your salt is what it takes to integrate your shadows and bring your flavor to the surface. That is the weight of wholeness.
[00:36:41]
The laws of the Universe state that energy - or, specifically in this case, the energy of an experience - cannot be destroyed, only redirected. Transmuted. So, let’s say that you choose to bypass your pain - because that can be its own adventure, too. What happens to unacknowledged pain? Where does it go? All that pain has to go somewhere, and when we’re not projecting it onto others, that pain will, inevitably, make a home in our bodies. Unacknowledged pain often takes the form of, well, another kind of pain to get our attention.
Within the context of my own healing, I’ve been able to access the care that I need by combining the frameworks of allopathic medicine,Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) as well as other naturopathic and ancestral healing modalities with my spiritual practice. More importantly, this integrated approach has given my body a chance to articulate the story behind the pain, which proved to be, in and of itself, the medicine that I so desperately needed. The medicine I still need. Within my own life today, I continue to refine this integrated approach to keep me focused on my healing and to, also, validate my experiences and combat the medical gaslighting that I’ve endured throughout my life, but especially within the last 7 years.
For me, TCM in particular has helped me to understand how my spiritual, emotional, and physical wellness are all intimately linked and inform each other on the details of my experiences. Before I go on, please keep in mind that I am not a medical professional and am NOT offering medical advice. I am also NOT suggesting in any way that folks discard allopathic methods altogether, or anything that works for you. And with that said, chronic illness and other types of ongoing medical challenges can be so very isolating, so it’s my hope that, by sharing bits of my own story, someone out there might feel a little less lonely, maybe? Hopefully a little less defeated, and, hopefully, a little more resourced than a few moments ago. For the sake of proving a larger point, I will be sharing some of my experiences with medical trauma and medical racism, so if that’s not your jam right now, and that’s not something that you have the capacity to listen to at this time, I invite you to use the fast forward button for the next couple of minutes..
In the last few months, as I’ve been thinking about my own homecoming within the context of my health journey, I’ve been toying around with a concept that I’ve been calling spiritual somatics. Spiritual somatics, in essence, describes the ways in which we experience and metabolize spiritual events through the vehicle of the body. Another way to describe it would be the ways in which our physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies - or our gross and subtle bodies, respectively - communicate with each other to build a comprehensive picture of how we experience and are impacted by the world around us.
[00:40:23]
So about 8 years ago, I started to experience a very slow, very painful, and increasingly chaotic series of compounding health issues that completely, completely unraveled me from the inside out. In retrospect, it was also, not coincidentally, a time when I was being initiated into a phase that would require me to really deal with ancestral hurt and cycles of trauma that I inherited through my bloodlines.
So let me paint this picture for you: It’s 2013, Obama was still in office and the concept of a “post-racial society” was still making it rounds, and I was living outside of California - outside of the Bay Area! - for the first time in my life. It was also my first Midwestern winter - the winter of 2013, the “Polar Vortex”, if y’all remember that shit - and my first year in graduate school at a very racist and very classist institution that made it abundantly clear that I was not welcome. Shoutout to Depaul University School of music [chortles in the key of Petty]. Anyway, I was living with a financially irresponsible White queer who fueled their chaos with their privilege, and all while attempting to hold down a barely-above-minimum-wage teaching job that was frequently in conflict with my weirdly inflexible school schedule. And, you know, I tried to make it work, I really fucking did for as long as I could, but it eventually came down to either keeping my scholarship or keeping my job, even though I needed both. A few quarters in, I was fully pushed over the edge after getting a phone call - that dreaded phone call - from a social worker in Alameda county, back in California, informing me that my estranged father was found very close to the edge of death. And so, for a while, after getting that news, I traveled back and forth between Chicago and San Francisco to deal with what I can only appropriately describe as a shitstorm, but that, of course, proved very quickly to be an unsustainable workaround. This series of events and circumstances - and the subsequent inevitable breakdown of my mental, emotional, and physical health from holding way to fucking much - put me in a position where I needed to make a choice. Something had to give, and I, armed with Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, I chose self-preservation. And so it’s with that that I learned: sometimes, we leave because the journey back home has something to teach us.
Up until that point, I had spent the majority of my life achieving success in my private and public life by dissociating from my physicality, from my physical experience. Because this type of trauma response is often rewarded in a White supremacist capitalist society, I firmly refused to take my body’s early signals of distress seriously. But that, eventually, proved to be not just incredibly unsustainable, but also dangerous. And so, crushed under the weight of these circumstances, my 24-year-old corporeal body started to shut the fuck down, completely inundated with what was, at the time, a laundry list of allegedly random, medically mysterious symptoms.
Leading up to my Saturn Return, from 2016 to 2018, my symptoms were so fuckin’ severe that I, quite simply, could no longer function. As doctors visits increased, so did the medical gaslighting and repeated misdiagnoses. I was repeatedly given the wrong medications and the recommendations provided to me actually exacerbated my symptoms. The fun little cherry on top was that everytime I expressed interest in other healing modalities like TCM, energy healing, and other ancestral methods of dealing with ailments, I would have to endure a condescending and racist lectures about why those methods are bogus and a waste of my resources. I mean… if you’re incapable of providing culturally resonant care, if medically gaslighting patients is just a regular part of your practice, if you find satisfaction in expressing your deep-seated racist biases under the cloak of Modern Medicine, well honey, just say that! But all jokes aside, I generally believe that allopathic methods - or, what some might call “Western” or “Modern” medicine - do a great job of treating symptoms and responding to medical crises, but what it often fails to do is to get to the root of the issue and address the story that the symptoms are trying to tell.
[00:46:28]
And so, by 2019 I had established a pretty solid relational foundation with my benevolent ancestral team, so I did what I do now and asked them for some help. Of course, one thing led to the next and I, eventually, found my way back to TCM and was introduced to a few other modalities that really met me where I needed to be met. I worked closely with a few incredibly generous practitioners who would take the time to explain their process and educate me on their respective modalities, without shitting on other practitioners. As I began to repair my body through herbal prescriptions, acupuncture, and various energy healing modalities, in conjuction with continuing to figure out allopathic methods that could work for me, I also found myself forging a closer relationship to plant allies who dropped various clues that helped me to piece together the story that my body was trying to tell. Eventually, these plant allies would show up in my mundane, day-to-day life as griots who helped me to unlock the stories of my ancestral pain buried within the cellular signatures of sinew, facia, blood and bone. I learned that cellular memory is one hell of a thing.
When I worked with a Network Spinal Care practitioner in 2019 I learned about a relatively simple but salient framework for understanding how and why pain manifests in the body, which is this: pain is often a symptom of disintegration. When we experience a traumatic or otherwise painful event, and if, for whatever reason, we’re unable to fully integrate and come to terms with that experience, our bodies will find a spot within itself where it can isolate and store that pain. Compartmentalize that pain. Similarly to how our brains block out traumatic memories to protect us from retraumatization and reliving our trauma, the rest of the body can do the same to ensure that we can, at the very least, kinda sorta function in the world. Now this framework may not work for everyone and that is totally okay, but it helped me to break the spell of my own numbness by helping me to develop a generative relationship with my pain.
TCM and other alternative healing modalities have taught me that symptoms are not fuckin’ random, it’s how the corporal body communicates and alerts us to the experiences that require further integration. For example, within the framework of TCM, our organs are connected through a series of interconnected energy channels called meridians, and so when one meridian is obstructed, it’s likely to eventually impact the rest of the system. Each organ also corresponds to a cluster of emotions. For example, the liver/gallbladder meridian is the channel through which our bodies metabolize rage, anger, and frustration. Because the liver meridian also governs reproductive functions, when we are consumed by rage or when we hold our tongues to keep the peace at the expense of our own, we overtax our liver and that meridian becomes sluggish or blocked, and that triggers a whole other set of symptoms like long-term hormonal imbalance and, eventually, reproductive challenges like uterine fibroids, like PCOS and the like. Suddenly the disproportional rate at which Black people with uteruses experience reproductive challenges like uterine fibroids seems a hell of a lot less random, right?
[00:50:54]
And so, at the risk of oversharing, I am relaying my very personal field notes to underscore this: as I followed the clues that plant spirits, ancestral spirits, my own spirit, and Spirit with a capital “S” itself left for me to find, I began to piece together not just the story of my own survival, but the story of my lineages’ survival, while constructing the story of… How I’m gonna make it out. Symptoms, particularly symptoms that repeat within our bloodlines, can work to communicate ancestral wounds that need to be addressed. A lot of folks in my family - both the Cargills and the Ishikawas - learned to survive by holding their rage, but it came at a heavy cost and I chose - or, perhaps, depending on how you look at it, was chosen as one of the folks - who can pick up the tab on behalf of my respective bloodlines.
It has not been easy by any stretch of the word, but this is also how I came to understand the ways in which my healing is intimately, spiritually, and ancestrally bound with the healing of others. Do I still struggle to manage my symptoms as I attend to my healing? Fuck yeah I do! absolutely. I have my good days and my shit days, which at times, even with all my diligence, may grow to shit weeks and shit months. But am I in the same place that I was before I prioritized my healing? Absolutely not. As I continue to integrate my experiences and address my own wounds, I also address the wounds that my ancestors didn’t get a chance to attend to. To reference that book, the body truly does keep the score, and as I heal myself, I heal my lineage. Having the opportunity to write a different ending to this family story, well that’s medicine, too.
The Temperance card in the upright position prompts us to extend ourselves the kind of patience and grace that we extend to others, to unapologetically kick urgency to the curb and, instead, give ourselves permission to take the time that we need to undergo the process of integration. This archetype reminds us that our shadows and wounds have the capacity to activate a kind of agency that may not have been available to you before your unraveling. Temperance in the upright position offers a chance to take a beat, create some breathing room, co-regulate with your allies, and sink back into equilibrium on our own time, at our own sacred pace. Temperance wants us to remember that healing moves cyclically. When you choose to give yourself another chance to revisit your most painful wounds and to do so with a little less judgment, you know, a little less self-flagellation with each cycle, you’re moving in the direction of your healing.
The Temperance card in the reverse position speaks to the kind of excess that leads to dysregulation and loss of equilibrium. It, therefore, asks us to first get honest about the people, places, and circumstances that drain our energetic reserves and chip away at our peace. Slow things down and catch your breath, beloved. Resource yourself so that you can rebuild enough capacity to re-evaluate the role you play in cycles of overgiving, codependency, and to course correct. In the reverse, this card asks: how might fragmentation be showing up in your body and relationships? In what ways do you habitually overfunction to maintain the status quo? Are you safe there? Is that still working for you? Who exactly is running the show here, right? You or your trauma? If you can’t differentiate the two, perhaps start there. This card in reverse implores you to get honest about that which steals your peace and to, perhaps, consider what could break open if you paused long enough, if you offered yourself enough gentleness, to get your inner child to speak their truth. Doing so is the first step to teaching yourself and, eventually, teaching others what you will and will not tolerate from this day forward.
I want to leave you with a little affirmation that has supported me in doing this work for the last couple of months, and it goes like this: I am responsible for maintaining my peace. When I claim this responsibility, fully and willingly, I reclaim my time, energy, and power. Wishing you a deeply nourishing solstice and a wonderful transition into 2022. You got this, ya know… ya really do. Thanks for listening. Until next time.
[00:57:09 Outro music fades in, plays until the end]