As the year of the Chariot draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on the profound journey I've experienced over the past months. This period has been marked by a surge of learnings, energies, messages, and guidance that has led me to reorient and reorganize myself both internally and externally. The Chariot year has brought with it a series of powerful lessons, paving the way for transformation and growth in ways I could never have imagined. Here are five lessons I have been reflecting upon, receiving, working with, playing with, dancing with, etc. these past few months.
1. Change is holographic and nonlinear.
Change can happen in the most microscopic levels. From you taking a moment to make a different choice, access a different part of yourself, or choose a different path home, change can often feel small and incremental. Change can also happen all at once, like learning to cope and adapt after receiving a life-changing diagnosis, leveling up in your practice or career, taking a big risk, or going through a spiritual crisis. Change cannot be contained. It is messy, wild, and emergent. It has its own consciousness, its own process, and its own flow. Change is holographic as it touches everything. Change moves within and without. Change is the universe and the soul.
Change has an energy you can tune into and that you can speak with, commune with, and flow with. What does change feel and/or sound like for you? For me, it’s electrifying, tingly, uplifting, enlivening, and sentient. I feel it moving through my hands, my heart, my back, my neck, through my third eye. It has structure, scaffolding, and a certain sense of unfurling, reaching, stretching, and contracting. It asks you to listen, to be present, and to feel its presence.
It moves forward and not at all. It is nonlinear as it exists now, existed before, and will exist for time immemorial. It moves in cycles, in seasons, in waves, in moments of eruption and transcendence, and moves slowly, imperceptibly, in chthonic underground fermenting, rotting, interconnected ways. Change can feel like a river, it can feel like a trickle, like a big flow, like a void, or a pause. Change is mutable and mutates. Change will not stand still. What does change feel like for you?
2. What we feel and think matters deeply when it comes to making changes.
I’ve been sitting with the profound power that our feelings, emotions, stories, and imagination have when it comes to how change happens in our lives. The Chariot can often be associated with action, with taking the reins of life, and while that is an important aspect of this tarot card, it is also important to look at what is underneath our desires, our dreams, and, ultimately, our decisions. This year, I have been asked to take a deep look at my own motivations, catalysts, and the emotions and stories that I am consciously and unconsciously producing. It is challenging me to take risks, dream bigger, and expand my ability to tolerate the unknown, the seemingly impossible, and the great discomfort that comes with trying on new ways of existing, perceiving, thinking, and behaving. It is important to take action and it is important to ask ourselves why we are taking action. To look at the maps we are creating and to re-direct, re-draw the map, access other dimensions, and form new possibilities. It is also important to really take a look at what is fueling our Chariot. What is driving us? Why are we taking action?
3. There is control and there is allowing.
I have been directed to take expansive and microscopic looks at my life. To think about the next few decades and to make decisions in the present moment based on the goals, visions, fears, doubts, hopes, wishes, and desires I see moonifesting in them. This has helped me make some tough decisions and start to create structures, processes, and changes in my life that are reflecting this deep work and the insights I am receiving about the many paths my life is taking/will take. I have also been directed to trust. To let go of control. To allow and receive. To feel into the synchronicities that want to unfurl in my life. To enjoy the mistakes, the failures, the moments of serendipity and surprise that accompany this type of change. To know that there is control and there is allowing and that both of these energies are important. To try and find balance, flow, and enjoyment within these ways of being and doing.
4. Clarity and imagination are keys!
Keys are potent forces of fire in our lives. Keys help us unlock doors of possibility and they help us enter into other dimensions and other realms of being. Keys are psychic tools and psychic gifts. Clarity and imagination and two magical keys we are being called to connect with deeply.
Clarity allows us to see things clearly and to get specific. The devil is in the details and so is the divine. Let the universe know exactly what path(s) you see yourself on and what it is you are looking to bring into and/or change in your life. Write a list. Make a map. Draw up a plan. Put it in your calendar and check off those items on your checklist. These are the gifts of clarity.
Imagination on the other hand opens us up to possibility. It allows us to dream beyond the current constraints we may have or imagine possibilities emerging where we once could only see obstacles or limitations. Imagination is a realm of the unknown, and an invitation to pause, re-center, and tune into what is present and what is wanting to emerge, be born, and blossom. Imagination is closely connected to our intuition. It can sometimes want to be expressed through art, dance, song, somatics, poetry, breath, channeling, and other forms of non-linear and expansive containers. Our imagination should surprise us, confuse us, and make us wonder and reflect. These keys are, of course, not binaries and can sometimes mutate into each other and be a part of a similar tool and process.
5. Grief and change bloom together.
This one has been hard. But a big lesson I have been learning this year has been to truly sit with the grief of change. Of letting go of past versions of yourself, past relationships, or even stories that have provided us comfort, solace, and meaning. Grief means mourning the person we were, the possibilities we clung to before, and the existential worlds we created as a result. It means feeling the loss that comes with change. We cannot move forward without looking back and without acknowledging the sadness that emerges when we depart from somewhere with our chariot pointing in the direction of a different land, a different career, a different version of ourselves. Grief and growth are friends. They are mirrors of each other. We are blessed by their presence in our life and must learn to dance with them. They are here to teach, guide, clarify, enrich, soothe, transmute, and transform.
As an added bonus, I am excited to say that a few folks from my newsletter have decided to share their own lessons and experiences from this year!
Ohhhhhh soooo much, where do I even begin? How do I even put it into words?!
Everything is a sign
I often teeter between giving everything meaning and straight up nihilism. When I have that tickle in the back of my head asking if something happened because it was meant to be a message, I now embrace that notion. First of all… life is more fun when you believe it is magical, and you also never miss a message. This is true ESPECIALLY when you ask yourself “was that a sign?”
I am from the past and the future.
Not only do I represent what’s to come… one stroke beyond the pendulum of time that swings back and forth, but I am of the past… reflecting a time before colonialism and white power when my ancestors clung closer to their core and the earth and each other.
Every move in the physical world makes moves in the spirit world.
And vice versa. They are inextricably linked. Every chant, manifestation, dance, song, etc. effects all energies and spirits around me and connected to me. I’ve been “pushing” more than ever in the spirit world… and I have still yet to see its total progress in the physical world. So much has happened already!
Everything is a mirror because everything is me.
I look into the eyes of another and I greet myself, wishing myself a great day. I am happy for myself for having an experience, and sad when I’m stuck in a depression cycle. The collective mind is a humbling place to return to and remember.
I am creative because I am a creation.
I remember this when I feel a lack of creativity flow.
The tools I need in life are easily accessible to me… almost like I can grab them out of thin air.
This relates back to the “everything is me” theory. I have done literally everything in the world, so why not access what I want to now? The tools I’ve used for lifetimes can return to me now.
No matter how “enlightened” I become, I will always struggle with my core trauma and wounds.
They will find their way back in my body, in my mind and all I need is better tools to fight them. Just when I think I’ve slayed the last self-hate demon, another one starts to infest. Just when I think I’m done trying to appease my parents, some pattern of behavior reveals itself. I try not to beat myself up for it.
Being on Earth is a divine experience.
Embrace it and feel every aspect of it… hell and heaven exist here!
Text by Mads Ambrose
My chariot year is intermingled with my personal year, the star/strength (January 9th bday). I am 33 years old, just finished my masters in counseling psych and have studied human development and healing for over a decade (aquarius rising and Gemini Moon). Having said that, I was never really good at actually implementing or embodying the practices that I learned over the years, but this chariot year is helping me have the courage and self-love to put the healing in action when I need it.
When you wrote about widening your window of tolerance, I wanted to "like" your email! Through EMDR and trauma healing, I now realize that I couldn't implement all that I had learned because my nervous system's imprint of the past was overriding my experience of the present. Slowly, very slowly, and gently (I see the imagery of the strength card), I am feeling sensations in my body and the time it takes me to realize when I have been triggered is becoming shorter and shorter. I celebrate this growing capacity to put my knowledge into action so it may become embodied wisdom and muscle memory. I feel myself walking through the world with a more grounded and sure footing, and at a much slower pace than before. I am learning to be a better steward of this chariot, which to me feels like it's more about checking in with and taking care of the sphynxes than controlling them.
Text written by Erin F. Bower, Songwriter, Therapist, Teacher
