Strength - Maintaining the Flame
Strength as maintaining the flame, made for my upcoming tarot deck!
Quiet the Mind, Open the Heart
In my experience, Strength will show up when it’s time to face the truth of what is in alignment and what is not. If you haven’t learned how to trust your intuition, it’s possible to get stuck in a reality that isn’t meant for you. If a situation you have control over is draining you, it isn’t in alignment. Making aligned choices can be scary, and to follow through we need strength. Strength to walk away, set boundaries, start something new, anything that moves us closer to living our truth.
When you’re in Strength, you’re in the process of beginning a huge transformative inner journey. Throughout this journey, we will be learning how to quiet the mind and open the heart, going deeper and deeper into radical vulnerability. The heart is where intuition lives.
Maintaining the Inner Flame
We each have a flame inside of us, and every time we take a step closer to living our truth, that flame gets brighter. Strength is ruled by Leo, and we are channeling that fiery Leo confidence to step into this new, more authentic version of ourselves!
Numerologically, I was in a Strength year in 2020, and it was the year that changed everything for me. I started a new relationship with myself by tapping into my intuition. As a result, I finally admitted to myself that I was living an unaligned life. I imagine if I was reading tarot in 2019, I would have gotten Strength reversed quite a bit. I didn’t understand it at the time, but my fire was an ember. My inner knowing was there, but it was faint. I didn’t know if I could trust it, and I didn’t know what to do with it. In 2020, the clarity arrived. Through a lot of therapy and journaling, I was able to start following my intuition. I took action, and slowly started rebuilding my fire. Now when I get that gut feeling, even if I don’t know exactly what to do with it, I know that the situation isn’t right for me, and I need to make a big change. Each time I take an aligned action, my flame burns brighter.
This can be around a relationship, career, home, etc. If strength comes up in a reading, it’s an invitation to look into your raw honest feelings around the situation you asked about. This is about how YOU feel. The feelings and circumstances of other people involved in this situation must be left out when exploring this part of yourself.
Importance of Intuitive Practices
As mentioned above, I built trust in my intuition through therapy and journaling. Tarot is another powerful tool you can use to enhance intuition, and I personally journal after every tarot reading, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Tarot is truly a mirror when used for self-reflection. It will validate you and it will challenge you to see new perspectives, all with the goal of helping you step into the version of yourself you came here to be.
Having deep trust in yourself will help you keep going even when it feels scary. When my intuition tells me something now, there is no option to ignore it. I want you to know that you can always change your story, and you can always gain clarity. I have lived my entire life with an intense brain fog. I mentioned it to my therapists, and we could never pinpoint it. I eventually thought it might be physical, but my tests always came back normal. Just a couple of months ago it went away, and I mostly attribute that to everything I’ve been doing over the past year to enhance my intuition. I will talk more about clarity in my upcoming article on The Sun!
This leads me to sharing the purpose of my blog; helping people understand how to use tarot as a tool for self-reflection, with the goal of building unconditional self-trust and clarity. I’m hoping these articles feel like an accessible and enjoyable way to learn tarot. We need to trust our intuition over the information and opinions of others. It takes practice, but you can and will get there!
Working with Strength
To sum it up, when you receive Strength in a reading, it’s always a call to follow your intuition. Even if you only see a small glimmer, you know what’s there. If you receive Strength reversed, it’s likely you’re having trouble trusting your intuition, which in return, is dimming your flame. If you can’t trust the glimmer right away, the first step is to look into it. Pull some tarot on it, journal about it, and if there is someone like a therapist you can 100% trust, talk with them about it!
Tarot / journal prompt suggestions to work with Strength: Is there anything dulling my inner flame right now? What is holding me back from trusting my intuition? How can I feel safer trusting my intuition?
Meditation recommendation: In the section on maintaining the inner flame, I paralleled my healing journey to the metaphor used in the meditation “Sit Around the Fire” by Ram Dass. This meditation is my go-to heart opener when I’m feeling stuck!
Podcast recommendation: On the podcast "Moonbeaming", Sarah Faith Gottesdiener started a series of episodes on intuition that I have been listening to and loving!