Intuitive Strategies for Feeling Free
image: a black person with locs holding a bunch of flowers over a pink, blue, and green psychedelic background
The opposite of feeling used up, drained, and burnt out is feeling free. There is nothing more intuitive than feeling free.
It's a kind of hope, a radical optimism that keeps us moving forward. It's an image of real freedom in our hearts, spirits, and minds.
Even when we can't tell which road leads to the freedom side, we can hold on to the feeling of freedom. We can let the feeling of freedom guide us.
Feeling free is like petrichor; it may not be the rain, but the rain is soon to come. When we feel free, we are doing so with our intuitions. It's a sign our work is working.
Now, I've never been one to extoll empowerment for it's own sake. It's always felt like a trick, feeling strong as we're weakened.
Feeling free is not empowerment. It isn't even always empowering. It's not done in spite of the moment, or granted as a respite. It's something we seize, demand, and steal.
Feeling free is a gift we give each other. Feeling free is a skill we learn from our elders and youth.
Feeling free isn't always hard to learn, but it must be fed. So how do we feed it?
The other day, I was talking to my friend Leah about disability justice, as is our habit. We were talking about the concept of movement folks, people who dedicate their lives to the work of freedom.
When people say in the movement, they almost always mean activists. Activists are our soldiers. We need them. But they can't be the whole movement.
We need thinkers, artists, caretakers, healers, and polemicists. We need bakers, and gardeners, and people who are good with knives. We need hunters, and trappers, and folks who can fish. We need anyone ready to do good work.
Because the focus is almost always on activists, we mostly think of the way activists burn out. This is usually a big display. They are disgraced. They are replaced. They retire. The fall apart.
Tarot's King of Wands is one activist archetype. It's some blaze of glory shit.
Some people carry on the work their whole lives. Some start non-profits. Some grow conservative, and grow away from the young people they were supposed to lovingly train.
It's all so tenuous, it's all so dangerous.
We need activists, of course. But do we need anyone any less? Who will take care of the activist's kids? Who will feed our communities? Who will educate the activist?
All these roles need filling, and each is prone to burnout. Yet rarely do we work to address the burnout that plagues us. It's kind of an open secret.
In Healing Justice Lineages, they noted that healing justice has been coopted by non-profits. This makes sense for an industry hellbent on being both problem and solution.
And other than that, where do we go to heal? What are our resources? Where do we start? How do we feel free again?
These are the questions I created 🌿 Grounded Intuition to address.
🌿 Grounded Intuition is designed for leftists, activists and movement folks to (re)connect to their intuition through tarot, earthlove, and dreamwork.
🌿 Grounded Intuition is a cohort program with the option for bimonthly one on one mentorship. It also has:
🌿 Three months of intuitive work as a cohort
🌿 Two (recorded) live sessions every month
🌿 Two digestible (45 minutes or less) video modules per month.
🌿 Monthly Notion workbook so you dive-deep into your goals
🌿 Support from the Seeding Intuitive Strategies course community
and when you join the waitlist, you’ll be the first to know when the doors open on March 26th…while snagging 25% off the price.
Every time we burn out, our purpose is threatened. Every time someone burns out for good, a link in our great chain is lost.
We treat burnout like it's a work problem, when it's also a spiritual problem. Burnout is what happens when our spirits say "enough is enough" and we have to or choose to keep going.
It's yet another spiritual quandary created and exacerbated by capitalism.
And since we are working to end capitalism, but it is still here, burnout is still here. So what do we do in the meantime?
Below are the three foundations of 🌿Grounded Intuition, and three methods for coming back to our purposeful work with greater ease.
You can learn more about 🌿Grounded Intuition by clicking here. You can read the 🌿Grounded Intuition syllabus by clicking here.
1. 🌱Earthlove: Being Like the Earth
2. 😴 Dreamwork: Observing What Comes In Rest
3. 🔮Patternism: Leaning on Spiritual Technology.
🌱Earthlove: Being Like the Earth
🌱Earthlove acknowledges the deep connection to nature we as humans possess.
It also reminds us that nature is always (yes, always) accessible to us. Nature is always accessible to us because we are nature. The earth is everywhere, it never leaves us.
It's bigger than practices that surround it, practices that may be inaccessible to us. Earthlove isn't hiking, or gardening, or farming, or herbalism.
It can be as simple as blessing a glass of water from the faucet. It can be making friends with the cardinal that visits the tree outside your window. It can be a cup of chamomile tea.
Earthlove reminds us that under the pavement is the beach. Under our homes is the soil. Over our heads is the sky. Inside us there is fire and electric and water water water.
Earthlove asks us to greet a squirrel with the same gusto that one does a new friend. It asks us to get to know all our community members both human and non-human.
Earthlove helps us feel free because it reminds us that a connection with earth cannot be broken. It's fundamental.
When we breathe, earth is there. Wherever we move, earth is there.
When we learn to reconnect effortlessly, we feel our roots in the planet that is our home. That's earth love, and that's the first strategy.
😴Dreamwork: Observe What Comes in Rest
😴Dreamwork is the practice of interpreting, navigating, and healing with our dreams. It may include bending one’s unconscious mind and life to see the future.
Dreamwork is one of the best ways to feel free because it shows you the next step. Dreamwork reminds us that we'll get down the road by anticipating the bumps.
Dreamwork can happen anywhere, as can all three of these strategies with practice. It's not limited to our sleeping dreams, it's an extension of our daydreams, communal musings, and art practice.
Dreamwork is what manifestation wishes it was. It helps us cast spells straight from the collective unconscious. It shows us in great detail where we are blocked, and where we are already free.
Yet dreamwork requires diligence of us. We must prepare a place for sleep in our lives. We must commit to rest.
We aren't always enabled to do this, so dreamwork is a precious skill. It must be optimized and protected over time.
Not just the practice, but ourselves at our most vulnerable. That's why dreamwork is not only a skill, but a hidden language.
Dreamwork can help us feel free by literally helping us envision freedom. It also makes us aware of what's in our way as we work towards it.
When we learn to speak it, we are forewarned and forearmed even when our enemies hope to catch us unaware.
When we dream to predict, understand, and heal, we visit a world still under construction. That's dreamwork, the second strategy.
🔮Patternism: Leaning on Spiritual Technology
🔮Patternism is the intuitive study of things that reoccur. It was coined by Octavia Butler in her Patternist series.
These patterns may appear in the body, our habits, and other natural spaces. It may come to us in the form of reoccurring events, phrases, deja vu, or so-called chance encounters.
We can also invoke patternism through spiritual technologies like tarot reading. Once we understand the patterns and signs, our intuition animates the tool.
I often say, and have written about, tarot as a technology. It's a spiritual technology, and a citational technology as well.
We can predict burnout. It can be cross-referenced with other periods of burnout. We can locate burnout in the body. Our loved ones can often spot burnout before we see it.
Like many gifted readers, I don't need my cards. I choose to be in alliance with them for the benefit of my clients.
The cards and I are business partners. They keep my wise, and keep me from saying too little or too much. They reign me in and push me when I'm holding back.
They also provide my clients context to why I'm advising them as such. It's respectful to let people know you're not just talking out your ass, regardless of what path they'll choose.
This also applies when I'm reading myself. Pattern recognition helps me continue to make choices that work for my life. Pattern recognition helps me end harmful habits. Because what are habits but patterns?
When we can predict our daily progress like a spread of cards, we get clear with what we want, and whether we're on the right track. That's patternism, the third strategy.
***
We can combine these strategies to feel free more often, and longer. Not because they're magic, though they are, but because these strategies are widely available and deeply practical.
When we learn to do them, and apply them well, we can hone our skills and move through burnout with grace and ease at the same time.
