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Today's pulse is represented by the card I love the most in tarot, The High Priestess. This card is traditionally about the feminine, the intuition, and accessing the depths of your inner knowing. This card to me also speaks of balance between the light and dark from a place of fearless non-judgment around these themes. There is much that can be spoken of and read using this card but today's focus for our purposes is firmly on the concept of hope needed to go through with a shift in perspective and a change in self-narrative.

Before you read further, ask yourself and maybe, take it as a journal prompt: What does hope mean to you? What are your feelings about hope? When do you feel hopeful, when do you not feel so? Lastly, is there some place in your life where you really want to feel it, but find it hard to be hopeful? Identify it and write it down.

As I feel it today, there is a change that we all have been undergoing which runs deeper than what we can articulate. I also feel that much of it is best left unarticulated because not only is that easier on you and your mental health, but it also assists in not letting old narratives around unworthiness, mistrust and any other limitation come in the way of a slowly developing sense of trust in your worthiness as a human being.

What I feel this change is about, is a belief system, an emotional pattern and how they have so far fed into your perception of yourself and the world. It may have been so intricately tied into your way of life that you may not even consciously be able to see it as a something that can or even needs to go. This is where self-sabotaging behaviour is also rooted, considering that this feels familiarly safe. (Little side note: if you tend to self sabotage, try not to judge yourself for self-sabotage is misdirected self love, and that misdirection is what we are speaking about today.)

This is also why to have hope for a different life, a different way, a different outcome is not easy. Hoping is the ability to still believe in possibility, that even if everything is new and uncertain, I will be okay. Hope is the ability to believe in one's worth as a human being, in being able to see the silver lining, no matter the darkness of the cloud, to feel the trust that the silver lining is for you to hold on to, despite the heaviness of trauma, darkness or despair. To have hope is the biggest asset that you can ever have, for hope is the very foundation of movement, abundance, change, love, life. Hope is imagination.

Despair has its way of clinging on to the heart and in this part of life where you really want to hope for a better outcome, but feel it is unsafe because you haven't really seen your expectations met so far, maybe you have not been able to hope because it may have felt unrealistic or (pardon the word) stupid to focus on. After all, we all have been around and witnessed people who ask those who may be despairing to "just shake it off and be more positive." But, hope is not that "positive thinking" that denies the experience of heaviness and pain. That "shake it off" advice is usually synonymous with a proverb in Hindi that mocks the pigeon that closes its eyes when threatened by a predatory cat, imagining that just by closing its eyes, would mean that the threat to its life has gone. That never happens... unless the cat gets distracted by something else.

The High Priestess in today's pulse is an invitation to close off external definitions, and instead find that anchor of real grounded hope to expect better, to trust your own self within your own intuition, leaving behind fears of disappointments and rejections. It isn't easy because you will have to stop clinging on to an old narrative about yourself and the world, but imagine it to be like the process of taking off training wheels off your bicycle, knowing that you are safe, you are equipped to go towards better and newer territories without selling yourself short. And if you fall, you will not only be able to take care of yourself, but will be met with other travellers too, who will stop to help you along the way. Hope is not as much a fool's drug as it is the brave one's anchor.

I close today's pulse with this line by filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky as a nudge to leave behind limiting patterns, "Birds born in a cage think that flying is an illness." Don't let your intellect fool you into not having hope.

Take care.