Your nervous system is the keeper of all the stories of the harms and wounds you’ve lived through, past and present. Like the soft animal body of a lost, terrified kitten, separated from its kin, shivering and hungry, your nervous system longs for a safe, dry, warm space where it can rest and heal.
Without the witness, validation, reassurance, and resources it needs, your nervous system—the soft animal of your body—remains stuck in a story where being vulnerable, being seen, being creative, being extravagant, being true, being wild is perceived as a survival threat.
The Fifth Spirit Tarot by Charlie Claire Burgess.
The Fifth Spirit Tarot by Charlie Claire Burgess
Your wild soul—the part of you that was never wounded by trauma, the part of you that never lost its connection with Spirit and with the land—longs for connection and creativity, for wonder and play, for the kinds of expressions of fierce, tender love that fundamentally disrupt systems of oppression, for the kind of art and imagination that builds new, just, sustainable futures for all bodies.
Your wild soul knows that all that it desires is on the other side of risk, comes through messiness and experimentation, and is born of a willingness to dance with the mystery and the unknown—and it is not afraid.
How do we make sense of having these different parts that feel authentic and true to us, and yet that ask us for fundamentally different things?
How do we meet both our need for safety and our need for change?
How do we move forward and build new futures together when it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface of healing from our past?
The Fifth Spirit Tarot by Charlie Claire Burgess
