🌱What overthinking has to do with avoidance

This week, the Queen of Swords gets serious about how we use our minds as hiding places.

Welcome to the Greenhouse 🌱 where we plant seeds for the week ahead with a tarot reading, a digital altar, and more! Consider this your digital quiet place to exhale, read, and nourish your busy lil brain to ground you for the upcoming week. Maybe we’ll bask in the sun a little, too (wearing SPF, of course!) So if you haven’t already, please consider upgrading your subscription!

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This week’s seed 🌱: Storytelling as avoidance; presence does not require a narrative

The compost 🪱: The Queen of Swords

This week, we are visited by the Queen of Swords. She arrives while some of us are with family and loved ones; a time in which many of us are reflecting on the year we’ve had, and maybe trying to decide what kind of year we are going to have in 2024.

If you’re familiar with the tarot, then you know that the suit of swords is a difficult one to travel through. They depict grief, loss, betrayal, sadness… to name a few. The swords are associated with the mind, and together, the cards in this suit reveal a journey of how powerful our minds are in shaping our reality—and what happens when our minds, bodies, and emotions are out of balance. The Queen of Swords has journeyed through these difficult cards herself and come out the other side to sit on her throne, a well-deserved seat of power, as an elder with much wisdom for us.

The Queen of Swords invites us into discernment—specifically around what we deem to be true. She reminds us that we choose our truths, and, often, we attach those truths to stories we tell ourselves. What kind of stories are you telling yourself? And can you tell yourself a better one?

For a personal example: Is it the truth that no one wants to hire me? Or is this a story I’m telling myself and believing? (🙄)

The Queen of Swords from the Rider-Waite tarot deck.

While it might serve a purpose to craft a narrative around something going wrong (or right) in our lives, the Queen of Swords reminds us that these stories can also be delusions—and she cuts right through those with that damn sword. (I mean, look at her! She doesn’t mess around.) Instead of building a story around a situation or your feelings, she asks that we get the hell out of our heads and into our bodies, into our relationships, into presence. So often, our stories are where we hide from discomfort and action, and we dishonor the mind by using it to enable our own shrinking. The Queen of Swords reminds us that discomfort is a doorway to a quantum leap. So buckle up. You want to sit on your throne? You have to be willing to get out of that comfort zone. (I didn’t mean to rhyme, I swear!)

This week, when you catch yourself falling into a mental spiral about what you didn’t accomplish this year, or when you’re laying in bed after a political argument with your family thinking about all the things you should’ve said, take a mental pause. Tune into your body and how it’s experiencing your anxiety, your sacred rage, your shame, your exhaustion, your yearning. Settle into the truth that you are a messy human, put on this Earth to make a kaleidoscopic mess with the rest of us messy bitches.

So go forth and give your poor brain a damn break. Stop using the sword to fight with yourself—and using that fight with yourself as a distraction from being present. Instead, raise that sword in the air and remember who you are; call yourself home; wield the sword like a queen; be the architect of your own mind; slice through overthinking, and if you must tell yourself a story, then for the love of Goddess, tell a better one!

The water 💧: A digital altar for the week ahead

Images from Pinterest.

The glass 🪞: Outer wisdom

• Read: “Head, Heart,” a poem by Lydia Davis. One of the lines reads: “Head is all heart has”—so let’s make sure head is being a compassionate ally to heart!

• Watch: Lie by 방탄소년단 (BTS), the live performance. This song is about the ways that we lie to ourselves about our true nature, ultimately leading to our own shrinking.

• Listen: ON by 방탄소년단 (BTS). When I feel overwhelmed sometimes I think about a line from this song that translates to something along the lines of, “even if I get knocked down, even if my knees fall to the ground, as long as they don’t get buried, I’ll be OK.” It reminds me that every low point is also a time to ground, to focus, to keep dreaming.

The sunshine ☀️: Some levity

Thanks for reading. The Greenhouse 🌱 is normally for paid subscribers only, so if you enjoyed it, please consider upgrading your subscription! Hope to see you here next Sunday 🪴

P.S. I am offering readings for your year ahead, where we explore what came up for you this year and how that will tie into themes for you in 2024. This is a limited offering, so if you’re interested, you can book a session here. As a subscriber, you get 20% off using the code SUBSTACK. Thank you for your support!