Feb 2025: Intuitive explorations

What is physically impossible is psychologically influential

Dear friends,

Sometimes I feel like I am just holding on. By my psychiatrist’s orders, I am avoiding following the news so closely, but what I do see makes me scared for myself and people I know. I don’t know whether I am more vulnerable for who I am or for who I appear to be. I’m just glad that I have support, through my mental healthcare providers and my neuroqueer friends, and materially at least through my parents.

I’m really enjoying my grad school coursework. I can actually use my readings sometimes as a way to escape from the world. I can feel a bit shy in class, in part because Zooming is awkward, but also because most of my classmates are significantly older than I am — there are other people in their twenties, but most are in their thirties or forties — and thus have had more time to explore their spirituality and create rituals and routines that keep them grounded. So it can feel like I have a lot to learn from them, but what do they have to learn from me? Yet when I do manage to get myself to speak, people seem to appreciate what I have to say. I just have a broad tendency to have imposter syndrome whenever I want to belong in a group but perceive that I have a different background from the rest of the group.

I have definitely grown as a student since I was in undergrad. As a college student, I struggled a lot with deadlines, due to a combination of mood episodes, ADHD, and just plain overthinking. Several of my professor were also pretty permissive about my tardy submissions, which may have been what I needed then, but I no longer want to continue this pattern. Although I have disability accommodations that allow me extra time to complete assignments if necessary, I am sticking to deadlines as best as I can. This requires me to forsake perfect writing and/or avoid procrastination. If I want to do excellent work, I need to work ahead. If I procrastinate, for good or bad reasons, I need to get the assignment done. Yesterday, I almost forgot a discussion post that I had to submit before my Meditation class in the morning. So I quickly did the readings and wrote a fairly short post, as there was no minimum word count and I started sobbing because I felt like I had failed with my meditation practice since I missed a few days. I explained at the end of the post that I couldn’t write more because I was sobbing and that I would return to the post later.

My instructor responded to my post yesterday evening, praised me for turning in the assignment on time, and offered suggestions for how to reestablish my practice. And that’s when I realized I hadn’t failed at all. I defeated my perfectionism, at least for the moment. And I opened a pathway for my continued learning by sharing about my struggle.

The sobbing, however, was in the context of a lot moodiness I had in the past few days. From Wednesday night through most of yesterday, I felt really sorrowful, as if tears were chronically stuck in my eyes. Not even a phone call with a friend helped. But for some reason, despite these depressive feelings, I was hyperfixated on memorizing the meanings of tarot cards and runes. I have just about memorized all of the basic meanings of the upright positions now. And then later yesterday evening, as my sorrow started to lift, my interest shifted to the I Ching and Tao Te Ching, and I read about a third of the chapters of the Tao Te Ching in English (granted that each chapter is a short, but meaning-dense, poem) before realizing that I had driven myself directly from depression to the beginnings of mania. (Although my hyperfixation on divination even while sorrowful probably made it more of a mixed emotional state rather than just depression.) I managed to stop it from getting worse, and today I’m feeling much calmer. But this does remind me of the dangers of too much spiritual exploration at once for me. I’m glad that I’m not experiencing extended mood episodes, but I’ve been chronically moody and having autistic shutdowns, so self-care is very important for me right now.

It does feel a little strange for me as someone who values a rational understanding of the world to be diving so deep into divination practices. Yesterday in class, someone said that all the planets are aligning tonight and that that is affecting a lot of people emotionally. I find it hard to believe that the planets directly impact people’s lives, but certainly they impact the people who try to read in the planets patterns that they can apply to their life. My perspective is that tarot, runes, the I Ching oracle, and many other practices are useful not because they objectively indicate any truth, but because they are like a Rorschach test that mirrors your own psyche. The meanings that you perceive, or even that you avoid, are truer than anything a professional seer could tell you. I find astrology to be somewhat less appealing to me than these other practices because astrology purports to indicate your personality and other aspects of who you are using a fairly extensive and detailed system (if you get passionate about it), and I don’t like being told by anyone who I am. But when I first learned as a nine-year-old that I am a Leo on the cusp with Cancer, I was fascinated by the contrast of Leo’s fire with Cancer’s water. Even then, I knew myself to be person of contrasting, balanced energies. On the other hand, tarot, runes, and the I Ching are all based more on archetypes and general life themes that can be interpreted in a lot more different ways and that are considered to be present for everyone, not just people of a certain type, so they satisfy me more as I use them to tell a story about my life.

But perhaps in the alignment of the planets there is some symbol for these times. There’s a lot of uncertainty in our world today. It makes sense to be afraid, angry, despairing. We need one another to survive. Please, check on your friends, especially trans friends, disabled friends, friends of color, and others vulnerable to the authoritarian state. Share the coping strategies that help you to continue. Please reach out for mental health support if you need it. I can help people find the appropriate resources for their situation; not all mental healthcare is good, unfortunately, and the search for a provider is conditioned upon many things like what insurance you have (if any) and what specific therapeutic approaches would be most suitable for your circumstance. (See this Embrace Autism article which cites a study from 2018 that found that 20% of therapists obtain 80% of positive results, while 38% of therapists generally do their patients harm.) A lot of providers annoyingly present themselves as specializing in everything, which is nonsense and doesn’t help people to assess if someone is a good fit.

Stay safe, everyone.

Announcements

Tomorrow (March 1st), I am helping with tech support at a Zoom-based Bed-In: Disability-Led Rally, hosted by Disability Community for Democracy, Inc. It will be from 1:00pm to 6:00pm Eastern. The goal of the rally is to build community and unite against ongoing attacks on disabled people in the U.S. Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-MA07), a member of the “Squad,” will be the keynote speaker. There will be ASL and Spanish interpretation for inclusivity. Register for the Bed-In here: https://tinyurl.com/bedinregister. Whether you attend or not, you can financially contribute to Disability Community for Democracy here: https://givebutter.com/disabilityrights.

citizen trans* {project}, which published my essay “The Magic in Life: A Trans Prophecy,” has announced that they will be open indefinitely for more submissions from trans writers relating to life after the 2024 presidential election. So long as your submission is on-theme and does not include hate speech, they will publish it. If you are trans, I encourage you to write something even if you don’t officially consider yourself a writer, as your voice matters (and one of the official milestones in the life of a writer is getting your first piece published!). If you’re not trans, please share this opportunity with those you know! Here is their website: https://www.citizentrans.com/.

Intuition/divination resources

If you’re curious about mystical practices yourself, here are some resources that I have found:

Labyrinthos: They have an app that’s great for learning tarot cards, lenormand cards, runes, and astrology. https://labyrinthos.co/

Zodianz: Astrology and tarot. They have a free online tarot card generator and an astrology birth chart generator. https://zodianz.com/

Brian Browne Walker’s apps: For reading the I Ching, Tao Te Ching, and other Chinese classics, plus an original work by Walker. The I Ching app has a divination tool complete with explanations. https://brianbrownewalker.com/store/

Posts from this month

Please read and share the first essay especially, as I want the list of Principles to belong to everyone and not just me.

A Contemplative Offering

How do you balance reason and intuition in your life?

What are the mirrors through which you know yourself?

Harmony, health, and happiness,

Margin | 天涯