Timely Tarot: Befriending Your Emotional Depths with The Moon Card by Lisa De La O Wyman
Timely Tarot: Befriending Your Emotional Depths with The Moon Card
by Lisa De La O Wyman
As we joyfully anticipate the renewal of spring, there’s a bit more work to be done in the shadow of winter. We are now in Pisces season and its watery energy has many of us out to sea. Emotions are heightened, and the pull of the past and deeply buried feelings are visiting us once again. The question is - what do we do about it? This is where The Moon card is our friend. The Moon has been our companion since the beginning of time, contributing to the cycles of our planet, our bodies, and our emotional lives. It helps us survive and feel. It’s also been much maligned throughout history via associations with witches, werewolves, and lunacy. But when you consider that “witch” simply means “wise woman”, werewolves merely represent our instinctual animal nature, and that emotions make us capable of love, it’s easy to see that the Moon can remind us of how scared we are of our own feelings.
The Moon Card - Tabula Mundi Tarot
The Moon card invites us to acknowledge and examine our emotions so that we can ultimately process and release them. Doing so helps us create greater emotional stability. We can learn to stabilize during emotional shifts and upsets. Pisces and the Moon invite us to dive deep for the purpose of discovery and integration. Intuition is our tool of navigation. The process may be challenging and initiate you into new levels of awareness of your waxing and waning energies – but emotional liberation is the reward.
Ruled by Neptune, Pisces is a mutable Water sign. In Latin, it means “fish”, and its astrological glyph represents two fish swimming in opposite directions bound by a link. In Greek mythology, a common origin story tells of the goddess Aphrodite and her son Eros being pursued by the monster Typhon. To escape his clutches, she transformed herself and her son into fish and dove into the sea, binding with a string so that they would never lose each other in the depths. Pisces is deeply connected to the ocean and frequently linked to mermaids, nymphs, undines, and all deep-sea creatures.
The Moon Card - Thoth Tarot
As the 12th and last sign of the zodiac, it represents a returning to Source, a final unity, dissolving into universal consciousness of heaven, earth, and all dimensions in between. Pisces seeks to transcend and merge, which can be both glorious and rather tricky. Healthy boundaries and a clear sense of individuality can be a challenge for the Piscean, as well as taking on energies that are not their own to the point of exhaustion and confusion. At best, Pisces is kind, compassionate, empathetic, forgiving, imaginative, psychic, romantic, and hopeful. Struggles can emerge from being overly secretive, seeking escape from reality through delusions and addictions, feelings of martyrdom, and a tendency towards depression and despair. They are our sensitive dreamers, artists, writers, poets, and helpers, and they inspire us to believe, to love, and to imagine a more beautiful way of life.
The Moon card traditionally depicts a full or eclipsed Moon in the night sky. Below, a wolf and a dog stand on opposite sides of a winding road. In the foreground is a body of water with a crawfish emerging from its depths. The canines symbolize the two sides of our nature – wild and domesticated. We are both refined intellectual beings and instinctive beasts. Our conscious behavior and unconscious drives are in a constant and often fraught dance of competition and dominance. We struggle to find balance between the obligations of work, family, and society versus our innate wildness and desire for freedom and untamed expression. We shift and change as the Moon changes. Only two other planets besides the Moon have phases (Mercury and Venus). For millennia, the phases of the Moon have been intimately connected to the cycles of plant, animal and human existence. They’ve helped us track time, menstruation, pregnancy, and planting and harvesting cycles. Its gravitational pull causes fluctuations in ocean tides. Its energetic pulse beats deeply within everything on this planet and its changes make life possible. Change is life.
The Moon Card - Rider-Waite Tarot
The Moon card follows the Star in the Tarot, just as the renewal and hope of the Star’s river waters flow into the ocean, pushing you to explore your emotional depths by moonlight. To complete your journey, you must first access the subconscious for deeper self-knowledge and healing. The crawfish is an ancient creature and bottom-dweller. They represent your old stories, the past, and ingrained patterns and beliefs that may no longer serve. They are the bottom-dwellers of your lineage, ready to be released. Crawfish cyclically experience a molting process, repeatedly shedding, transforming – evolving. They have to go through this to live and be healthy. It enables them to thrive in an ever-changing environment. They remind you that it’s safe to leave your comfortable shell and enter a different realm for a higher purpose.
The Moon Card - Lioness Oracle Tarot
The Moon card invites you to befriend your emotional mysteries and to get comfortable with phases when direction and certainty are not available. It can sometimes feel like a dark night of the soul and that you’ve lost your way. The Moon helps to shine a light on what’s hidden and ready to be released. It encourages you to shift and change as it changes. But first you must enter the waters of your own ocean. The Moon is your companion and you’re not alone. You may feel bewilderment, the pull of nostalgia, or the sting of wounds related to the maternal side of your family. Revisit the stories of your lineage, your ghosts. By giving them a voice you can ultimately process and release them. Transition from feeling haunted to being free. Get better acquainted with your fears; by actually looking at them they begin to lose power. They’re no longer the dark, looming beast in the closet but something smaller and more manageable. You can work with them through accepting them, and sometimes you can just let them go because you’re ready and it’s long overdue. Like the Moon, there are cycles and seasons to your life. Be patient enough to see them through with commitment to understanding them. Intuitive listening, revelation, and healing can take time.
When a client pulls The Moon card, they are usually moving through a phase in which emotions are heavy. They may be struggling with confusion, escapist tendencies, uncertainty regarding their own emotions, or feeling so emotionally heightened that they can’t see things clearly. It also can indicate an issue of the past that it revisiting them and requires deeper examination. It’s usually not a good time to make any big decisions until greater clarity is achieved. It’s really a time for exploring the parts of yourself that are beyond language, perhaps tied to your maternal lineage, repeating patterns or cycles, or exhausting emotional burdens and blurred boundaries. Spending time near water, getting more sleep (which encourages dream activity and subconscious processing), and any sort of creative expression can help you work through your feelings in a free and unstructured way. You are an infinite ocean of beauty, complexity, and thrilling possibility – let yourself love, rather than fear, your depths.
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Lisa De La O Wyman is a Tarot reader and writer based in Redondo Beach. At Tarot for Empowerment she works with individual clients, private parties, and special events. Through her work she seeks to connect people with their innate power as well as encounter the mystery in everyday life. She can be reached via Instagram and Facebook at @tarotforempowerment.