How To Return To What You Know When You Don't Know What The Fuck Is Going On
It's really awkward to be selling workshops right now!
Look, y’all, I don’t know what’s going on any more than anyone else right now. We’re overwhelmed, we’re confused, we’re sick with grief. Our care, our despair, our love for this world are so much bigger than our reach, than our sense of agency, that it feels impossible to know what to do, where to turn, where to start. Most days it’s hard to remember our own name.
Here’s one thing I do know: that’s by design.
It’s not an accident that we feel helpless, it’s not an accident that we feel powerless, it’s not an accident that hope feels impossible to reach for in these times. This is very much the aim of these crushing imperialist systems, because they know that the more we’re disconnected from our bodies, from our knowing, from the earth, and from each other, the easier we’ll be to control and manipulate. The harder it will be for us to organize and fight back against their regimes.
We all have different roles to play in the resistance, in the revolution, and I find that knowing what specific shoes I need to fill is a great comfort in this wild uncertainty. (Not sure about yours? I recommend checking out Deepa Iyer’s work to help you figure it out.)
My role is: I help the healers and dreamers and world weavers to repair their trauma & reclaim their true & resourced embodiment so that they have full access to their agency, which is their ability to create magic and effect change.
It seems that the question that everyone is asking is, What do I do? What do I do in the face of the horrors? And let me be clear–I don’t know what you need to do. (I mean, besides calling your representatives.) But I have some clues as to where to go look for answers.
The first thing I want to do is to remind you that if your knowing, your intuition, wasn’t powerful and dangerous to the established systems of power, then said systems wouldn’t need to spend their considerable resources separating you from the sources of your knowing.
Let me say that again: where you feel the most resistance is where you’re closest to your truth, your power to connect, your power to make change. When the going gets extra squeezy, keep going: you’re on the right path.
When I hear the question, What do I do?, I am reminded of how trauma is at its root an experience of helplessness. When the patterns and stories of developmental trauma took up residence in our bodies, we were small children, tiny infants that were completely helpless, completely dependent on our caregivers.
And when we’re faced with the horrors, it’s very easy for our nervous systems to get confused and to feel like we’re still those helpless children we once were, and not the grown-ass, bill-paying, newsletter-reading adults that we have become.
There’s nothing more natural than to forget what we most know to be true. That’s why we need to be in community, so we can help each other remember. I say this often: our relationship with ourselves, with the bodies that are the source of our knowing, is a dance of connection, disconnection, and reconnection. And in the face of the horrors, there’s nothing more natural than to disconnect. This is an adaptive and necessary part of engagement with the world around us. This is how our nervous systems protect us from overwhelm.
The question is, how do we reconnect? How do we return to what we know? How do we remember that we’re no longer helpless children, that we have the power to make change, that together we have the power to topple empires?
There are many resources I turn to in order to remember what I know, to remember my agency. Music is the biggest, the best always. (I am listening to so much Peter Gabriel these days, scroll down for some current faves.) Cannabis is not far behind. Nature, my journals & supplies, my newly set-up altar, my nearest and dearest people, these have yet to fail me. And always, of course, I come back to the cards, I come back to tarot.
Ultimately, all these resources redirect me towards Source, towards Spirit. They help me connect to a larger container, something deeper and older than systems of supremacy, than all of the ruptures that have brought us to our knees.
I’m teaching a tarot workshop this Saturday, November 4th. It’s called Witness & Resource: Tarot for Trauma Repair. The central idea of the workshop is that tarot helps us reconnect to attunement and agency, which are the two main unmet needs that are at the root of developmental trauma.
Attunement means bringing a quality of witness and curiosity to our lived experience; tarot helps us see ourselves clearly and compassionately. Agency is the capacity to make choices and effect change based on our needs and values; tarot helps us connect to resource, and to expand our capacity to feel & receive.
Look, I’m gonna be real with you: it’s awkward as fuck to be working and selling workshops when full-on genocide is happening as you’re reading this. This shit is surreal.
This workshop isn’t going to resolve anything. I myself don’t have a lot of answers. But I know this: each and every one of us has a clear, direct channel to Spirit, and that’s where the answers are. And if you’re feeling helpless and stuck and desperate, chances are, your own trauma is being hella activated (how could it not??), and chances are, your nervous system has decided that if you feel this bad, it’s because you must still be a helpless, defenseless infant.
And in order to remind your nervous system that this isn’t true, that you’re a grown-ass adult who’s fully capable of making calls and attending protests and sending money where it’s needed, you’re gonna need to access attunement & agency. And if you’re not sure how to do that, you can come to the workshop, and I’ll share what I know.
Tarot isn’t going to end genocide. But: another world is possible, and we have the power to dream it and to create it, and tarot can be one of the tools that makes the remembering and the creating possible.
If nothing else, it’s so important for us to gather and grieve and witness each other at times like these. It’s so important to remember that we’re not alone in this work. And tarot is as good a reason as any to get together.
WITNESS & RESOURCE: TAROT FOR TRAUMA REPAIR with Seagrape Apothecary | Saturday, November 4th, 12pm-3pm Pacific
Developmental trauma repair is about learning to be a safe caregiver to ourselves: it’s the process of getting curious about what’s been missing in our early attachment relationships, and building self-trust as we learn to finally meet those needs. It’s not a journey we want to enter into alone: fortunately, cultivating a relationship with the tarot can provide a guide, ally, support, and resource on the way.
The two principal unmet needs most of us share are attunement and agency, and tarot is a potent medicine for both. Attunement means bringing a quality of witness and curiosity to our lived experience; tarot helps us see ourselves clearly and compassionately. Agency is the capacity to make choices and effect change based on our needs and values; tarot helps us connect to resource, and to expand our capacity to feel & receive.
Trauma repair is about teaching the nervous system to feel safe in the world, and the nervous system learns by experience. Cultivating a relationship with tarot through ritual is a potent, yet accessible way to practice new ways of being and relating. Tarot invites us to recruit support from the more-than-human world as we tend to the wounds of relational ruptures and to take our place, as Mary Oliver wrote, in “the family of things.”
In this 3-hour workshop, you will:
Discover why tarot rituals can help you be a safe caregiver to yourself & build self-trust.
Learn how to approach your tarot practice from a developmental trauma repair lens to help you reduce the pressures of shame, scarcity, and urgency.
Experiment with specialized spreads to help you get to the root cause of your discomfort, make space for complexity and uncertainty, and orient towards resource & pleasure.
Explore about a dozen cards that can be used as resources & allies for specific moments of the trauma repair process, and how to work with them.
Receive attuned support to help you interpret your pulls.
This will be a highly experiential workshop, including a blend of lecture, personal reflection, and group sharing, as well as ample time for questions, and for getting instructor feedback on your tarot pulls. You will also receive a workbook of tarot spreads, rituals, and card interpretations.
Sliding Scale: $48-$68
Peter Gabriel’s songs do such a great job of witnessing our grief & orienting us towards hope. I made you a little playlist of some of my current faves of his that I hope will do just that for you.
These words bring so much connection to self and reminders of where to put energy. Thanks for joining us all in not knowing what to do but reconnecting with what's important to figure that out.
Thank you for these words