Hi! Kesha here of New World Tarot! Thank you for joining me for another blog!


(And to get you started right away on your re-commitment with creativity and your own effortless, naturally creative nature, please find my gift to you attached, a FREE creative visualization called "Wild and Boundless Creativity." There are two versions, one with only the guided journey and the other with the guided journey and a background of music and nature sounds. Enjoy, and rock the world with your amazing creations!!)

               
This is my first week back from attending the Masters of the Tarot workshop in Rhinebeck, NY. It was an amazing time spent surrounded by nature with several of devoted Tarot enthusiasts. We learned so much from the instructors, Mary K. Greer, Rachel Pollack, Joanna Powell, Terry Iacuzzo and Benebell Wen. It was a wonderful  and unforgettable time, and I am so happy to have gone through it and made some amazing new friends!  If you a student of Tarot, I highly recommend the Masters of the Tarot event at the Omega Institute!
               

            Ok! So here we are once again with another New Moon! And this time, the New Moon is in the sign of Leo. The New Moon is that part of the Moon cycle – the beginning of the moon cycle – that marks the beginning of an energy path. This is the time when we can re-dedicate ourselves to our goals, dreams and desires, and energetically grow them as the moon grows. We can use the gentle but transformative power of lunar growth to help US grow on the inside, as that is where change must begin to effectively change our OUTSIDE. As within, so without. To me, that is why moon cycle manifestation is so good.
               

                So this month, our New Moon arrives in the sign of Leo. What can we say about Leo? You so often know exactly when a Leo is in the room, because they bring such fiery, vital energy to a situation. They are often in motion, DOING things, MAKING things and CHANGING things.
               

                  Leo – symbolized by the Lion – is about courage, confidence, creativity and embracing life with fullness and vitality. Leo is about letting your Spirit live BIG.


                This New Moon in Leo, I ask you, “Are YOU creating your best life? What creative projects or creative expressions are you hiding or ignoring? Are you perhaps afraid to show that part of your life?”


                We as humans are natural creators. In our most mundane creative powers, we create other people. Through the miraculous and passionate power of reproduction, we create children and other humans.


                But, unlike other animals, we don’t stop there! Unlike other creatures, we create for the HELL of it! There are aspects of life that move our Spirit in such deep, profound and joyful ways, we need to express them, even if no one else sees them.


                A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that they are not naturally creative. YOU may think that you are not creative.  I believe that a lot of people believe this lie because they have been TOLD this by others. There is so often that time in our lives that we’re told it’s time to get practical. Many of us are told that our childish tools of paintbrushes, books, pens, clay, acting lessons, dance perfomances, etc. are to be put away in exchange for more “adult” things.


                This is a commonly held and widely supported viewpoint of society, that there is no value, point or purpose in creating. However, your creative power – your imagination and your birthing of things from your mind to the real world – is something so strong and deemed so naturally important that it is one of the few things you were armed with early as a young child. Other creatures get the ability to run, fly, and be self-sufficient. You, however, got the ability to imagine and create.


                When you were a child, you had an untethered imagination. The world was a wondrous and magical place, and your imagination was endlessly busy designing songs, people, creatures, dances, events and worlds. You invented things and created scenes as easily as you now type or write a sentence. However, over time, as you got older, adults discouraged this wild creative power. They shamed you heavily or discouraged you gently (depending on the adults in your life) away from being so creative. It was time to get serious.


                Now, unless you had a very harsh upbringing, you likely survived into adulthood with a passion (even if it’s a secret) to create SOMETHING. This could be a love of writing, of painting, of sculpting, of scrapbooking, of fixing things, as just a few examples.


                These creative powers and passions should NOT be ignored! If you believe that you are indeed Spirit in a human body, you must ask, “Why am I driven to create and express? Why does this still exist in me and tickle the back of my mind when I try to lock it away?” 


                Your creative expression, like the sun itself – which is the ruling planet of Leo – cannot remain blocked. It is a fiery and expansive force, and you need to give it reign to be balanced, have peace and mind and to be self-fulfilled.  You have creative desires for a reason. I believe that you are here on this earth to be a creator. You are here to create beauty, goodness, change and vitality for the world. The key to how to do that? That is found in your creative drive.


                This New Moon in Leo, I ask you to re-commit to creating. What do you like to create? What do you want to create? Are there creative projects that you’ve locked away to be more practical? Have you traded your creative powers of expansion for social acceptance? If so, why is that?


                For just a brief moment, I’d like to talk about a Tarot card – The Sun. And I am going to put up a few examples of this wonderful card for you to see in a moment. As we mentioned a bit ago, astrologically, the sun is the ruling celestial body of Leo. In the most popular style of Tarot deck – the Rider Waite Smith Tarot – The Sun card depicts a big, glorious sun, and beneath it is a nude male child riding on horseback  with a big red banner.


                A lot of decks, though they have their own depiction of the energies here, will still often depict a child. You can see that my Everyday Tarot (which is the purple, white and gold one that is like my daily go-to deck right now, I absolutely LOVE it!) ALSO depicts a child. Now, when I see the child in the Sun card, I think about the wildly powerful, naked, non-self-conscious creative power of our imagination. I again think of the imagination and the effortless, easy, powerful and impossible to bottle up creativity of our childhood. Inventions, songs, poems, stories, games came to us soooo easily and constantly!


               There was no such thing as a creative block when you were little! You had a constant and never-ending connection to your imagination. It was just as powerful as the Sun. Just like the Sun creates effortlessly and powerfully, so does your own imagination.


                The Sun card, to me, is also all about bright illumination. It’s about letting things out of the shadows and exposing them to the full light of day. This New Moon in Leo, this includes your creative power.


                So I want you to grab a journal and ask yourself, “Are there creative projects that I need to re-commit myself to and expose to the light of the Sun?” Is there a novel that you’ve abandoned? Or a song that you’ve stopped midway through? Also ask yourself, “How does it make me feel to have locked away that part of me and ignored it? At the end of my life, will I have regretted not creating more?”


                Secondly, I want you to ask yourself, “What is keeping me from creating?” One strong reason you may be hesitant to start again is fear. Social ridicule is a huge reason for us not embracing our creative urges more often. Our society has made it desirable and socially accepted to be boring, dull and very practical. Spending your time watching Netflix is a more acceptable use of your free time than creating and self-expression. Leo is all about being extraordinary, bold, and encapsulating the energetic element of Fire.


​              This New Moon in Leo, embrace this dynamic, creative energy and live boldly, fiercely and creatively.

Hi! Kesha here of New World Tarot, and thank you for joining me today for another blog!

                I hope you had a wonderful Fourth of July for those of you that are in the States! I had a wonderful time in Colorado, spending time with my boyfriend and his amazing cousin Britt Bigley, who by the way has a wonderful, very insightful and spiritually minded blog called “The Adventuress,” which can be found in the description: www.theadventuress.org. Definitely highly recommended as she has a lot of wisdom to share, she does some very adventurous and interesting things and lives in a gorgeous part of the world. So definitely check that out!

                So here we are, welcoming a new Full Moon into our lives once again! It is also a partial lunar eclipse, so this adds even more power and oomph to our Full Moon! A lunar eclipse is when we – the earth – line up between the Sun and the Moon, with the Sun behind us and the Moon in front of us. This enables us to see our shadow (the shadow of the Earth) being cast upon the Moon. This makes this a great time to deal with earth-centered shadow work, which is what this Full Moon is all about!

The Full Moon is of course the fullest part of the moon cycle, when the moon is so big in her fullest glory and splendor and magic and power. The Full Moon marks an extreme and a turning point in the moon’s cycle (the other extreme point being the Dark Moon), when it goes from waxing or building, to waning or growing smaller. 

                When the Full Moon comes around in my life, I like to use its powerful, potent energies to focus on illumination of the darkness in our lives, and using this bright illumination to empower us. This July 15th, the Full Moon arrives in the sign of Capricorn.

                Capricorn is an Earth sign, symbolized by the Sea Goat. This sign is often considered to be the social climber of the zodiac. Capricorn enjoys high social standing, financial and worldly power and being respected and admired by the world. Capricorn is very much an Earth sign in the regard that it is attracted to earning money, accumulating earthly possessions and being grounded and well-disciplined, but this is actually often a means to garner the status, the high power and the heights of achievement that financial success and mastery often bring.

                This Full Moon in Capricorn, I want to shed light upon our own need for power.  And not just for any old power, but for earthly power. If you have spent any time among communities that are spiritual or religious, then you know that seeking earthly power for yourself is something that has traditionally been frowned upon for a very long time.
               
          What is it that makes so many of us so uncomfortable or downright crazy with anger when it comes to power? We often bristle when we see people seek it for themselves, and we often go to great lengths to avoid accumulating too much of it for ourselves…or at least that’s what we often project.  But what’s the truth of our thoughts – and our emotions – on the subject of earthly power? (And hint: It is certainly our emotions that shed the most truth on our real relationship with this subject!)

                One very famous, very old story that I cannot help to think of when I think of the Full Moon in Capricorn is the dramatic rise and even more dramatic fall of Anne Boleyn. Now, I am a history nerd absolutely, and this story is just one of the most fascinating and timeless case studies of ambition and earthly power that I can think of! Yes, there are undoubtedly other stories all over the world and throughout time, but the story of Anne Boleyn just sticks with me, and undoubtedly sticks with the world as well, potentially for several reasons.

         If you are unfamiliar, Anne Boleyn was the 2nd and probably the most notorious and famous of Henry VIII’s six wives. Now being a woman in 16th-century England was usually not something anyone would associate with earthly power, but Anne Boleyn WAS Power Personified during a time when most women –especially commoner women – were anything but.  In Anne’s day, Kings married other royals. The class system was extremely rigid, and that’s the way things were.

        When King Henry VIII expressed unhappiness with his first wife because she wasn’t giving him the male he wanted, Anne’s family began scheming the impossible: grooming Anne, a commoner and a lady in waiting to the current queen Katherine of Aragon, to marry the king and become queen.  At the time, that just wasn’t done! Yes she was of noble family, but she still considered a commoner, and in most eyes not fit to marry a King in her day.

      But Anne herself was bold, highly intelligent, very charming and highly ambitious.  Though her male family members certainly helped her, Anne was no flaccid, frigid female pawn, unlike some other contemporaries and even some wives that came after her. She had the brains, the desire, the hunger for power and the calculating ambition to go after what she wanted and do what no other common woman had dared to do until SHE set the precedent – which was to get herself crowned as queen of England.

      And it worked! Through measured calculation, charm, sexual intrigue and seduction, Henry VIII cast off his first wife Katherine of Aragon, married Anne and crowned her queen. He even broke the Church of England away from the Catholic Church to do it because the pope refused to recognize either Henry’s annulment of his first marriage OR his second marriage to Anne.

       Long story short, Anne herself was also unable to give Henry his much-wanted male heir. Furthermore, as evidenced by her behavior that got her the throne in the first place, Anne was a strong personality. She was forceful, ambitious, sharp-tongued and prone to angry outburst when she didn’t get her way. After all, she was the mother of Elizabeth I. These aggressive charcteristics were simply not common or accepted among women during this time, and Anne became extremely hated in court, in England and around the world. Eventually, everyone turned against her, she had not a friend in the world, and Henry’s advisors convinced him to have her imprisoned in the Tower of London and ultimately beheaded. Oh, and Henry immediately married another commoner, one of ANNE’S ladies in waiting, who had been set up by HER family to be waiting in the wings for HER chance to be queen.  It’s all such a crazy, unbelievable story, really!
               
          BUT the point of this story is just that…this story survives hundreds of years after it occurred, not just because of how wild it is. I believe it is a story that fascinates us because it justifies our fear of and disgust with earthly power.  It is an outrageous tale of a woman who decided what she had – nobility, money, the chance for a good, wealthy marriage to a nobleman - was not enough, and who used everything she had to gain massive earthly power. Furthermore, she was, at least for a time, extremely successful at it, and cared not a fig for what anyone thought about her. I think we all admire and are in awe of Anne Boleyn and those just like her – people who have defied the odds, had the audacity to not accept “normal” even if “normal” was quite nice, who had the drive and the single-minded focus to go after only the best, the highest, he richest, the most outrageous crown in the land.
               
        Anne’s story fascinates us because SHE fascinates us, but also because she scares and frightens us. A woman that ambitious, that unstoppable, who uses whatever she has to get what she wants, frightens us, and her violent ending seems moral and just. In a twisted way, it makes everything morally ok that her power hunger was “checked” in the end, and all is right with the world.

                And yet, why do I have the feeling if she was asked in the next life, “Was it all worth it?”, she just might answer, “You know, for a time, I was queen of the world. I rose to the highest office that any woman had achieved in hundreds of years. I lived fully, I lived well, I lived courageously and even now everyone remembers my name. It was absolutely fucking worth it, I’d do it again!”
                When YOU see people with a lot of earthly power – the Anne Boleyns, the Zuckerbergs, the Amazon CEOs, the millionairse/billionaire start up moguls, the politicians – are there triggers that go off within you? Do you bristle or resent a lot of people who have money, assets or power?

                If this is a trigger for you, this is something that you should face, and the illuminating, bright light of the Full Moon in Capricorn is the perfect time! It has been said that we most project onto others what we most hate about ourselves. If power is a trigger for you, this may well be a sign that you have unresolved issues with your own power.

                Power – yes even earthly power based upon physical assets such as money and status – is your birthright. You are here on this physical earth to be victorious with physical things, including money and assets. When you are victorious with physical things and assets, and you accumulate power, you can take care of yourself better, which means you can take care of your family and loved ones better, and you can help to protect the earth and things that are important to you better, and you therefore can help to change the earth and leave the earth better than it was before you got here. Power is important and healthy.

                Yes, it is absolutely possible to have an imbalance of power. We certainly see this in our culture, and the media loves to flaunt power madness. It certainly can be dangerous. But it is the inequality of power distribution that is the most dangerous. When one person has all the power, and everyone else has none, that is when it is most dangerous. This is why seeking power for yourself is in fact not a bad thing, but is needed. Power and money are not evil, but can be amazing tools for you to carry out healing, love and the empowerment of others. You may shrug and say, “I’m a spiritual person, I can’t have money and power!” But I say to you, “Imagine how much good you can do, how much philanthropy you can do, how many people you can reach, how much you can change in the world with more money and power!”

                One aspect of the Anne Boleyn story is that while she was in power, she used her status, wealth and influence to further the cause that was dearest to her, which was diminishing the power of the Catholic Church and reforming Christianity. She was very well-read on the subject and very serious about it. To Anne, she was bettering the world by furthering that cause. What would YOU do if you were king or queen?

            This is why if you find yourself being triggered by displays of great power, status and money, you should illuminate it, face it and learn how to become more comfortable with it. Journaling on the topic could shed some light if you dig deep enough. What emotions do you feel when you think of wealth and power? Is it jealousy? Insecurity? Resentment? Anger? If you imagine yourself with great wealth and power, how would that feel? Wrong? Do you feel underserving? Or do you feel as though you are betraying yourself or your family or your lineage or your spiritual path?
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                Really bring these feelings out into the open and confront them with the truth, that YOU can use more power and wealth, because the world could use more power and wealth for GOOD.