Return to the Body

From the Archives: The Empress

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“Where do you feel it in your body?”

I swear this is my therapist’s favorite question to ask me. I used to want to punch her in the face for it. Any time I’m describing strong feelings, especially ones I don’t enjoy experiencing, she asks me where I feel the emotion in my body.

“Where is it?” she’ll say. “Let’s get out of our head for a moment and RETURN TO THE BODY.”

At first I’d groan and respond, “What do you mean, where is it? In my head. In my brain! I don’t get it.”

She would then ask me to close my eyes, take a few deep breaths, feel the emotion, and then pay attention to my body.

And finally, eventually, I would start to feel it.

“Well, my throat is feeling a little tight now that you mention it and my cheeks feel hot.” Interesting. So shame feels like this in my body.

Anger started to feel like a weight on my chest, a fireball in my gut, an unbearable buzzing in my arms. So that’s where anger resides. Interesting.

And it’s different for everybody, by the way. But we are so used to being in our heads, THINKING things through, prizing MIND over matter, that we too often neglect the signals of our body.

Learning to pay attention to these bodily signals benefits us in a few important ways.

First, we can’t actually feel or process emotions if we can’t tune into our bodies. And this is coming from someone who didn’t really know what an emotion was until about 20 years old and then didn’t know how to process emotions until about 30. So if I can figure it out, so can you, my friend!

Our emotions aren’t thoughts. They are caused by thoughts. They originate with thoughts, but they aren’t the thoughts. An emotion is a thought that has turned into a feeling sensation in the body. So, if we want to actually recognize our emotions, really feel them and sit with them, and be able to process them and let go, we can’t stay in the thought realm. We need to get into our bodies.

The Empress in tarot represents our need to return to the body. The Empress says, “Enough of this rational, analytical nonsense. It’s not mind over matter. It’s mind and matter.”

The Empress brings us down - even if just temporarily - from the heady mysteries of the High Priestess who comes right before her in the Major Arcana. The Empress is your mom (well, certainly my mom) saying, “Get your nose out of that book already and go play outside! We are not going back to the library until next week. I told you you’d have to make those books last until then. You need to pace yourself! Go run around for a bit!”

This isn’t about the Empress being better or worse than the High Priestess. (Although, if we are honest, we each lean toward one more than the other. I will give you two guesses which way I lean, for instance, just from reading this newsletter.)

It’s about their complementarity and how we can apply the wisdom of each to bring balance into our lives. In fact, in Tarot and the Archetypal Journey (an affiliate link to help support indie book stores) Sallie Nichols calls the High Priestess (well, the Popess, in the Tarot de Marseilles) and the Empress “sisters,” which I love:

One way to look at these two sisters is to consider them as if they were the same entity pictured in successive stages of time:

. . .

The Popess is patience and passive waiting; the Empress is action and completion.

. . .

In short, the Popess holds the book of prophecy and the Empress enacts and fulfills this prophecy.

. . .

One of the Empress’s chief functions is to connect [the High Priestess’s philosophies] and to give them a body in the world of sensory experience.

The Empress gets us grassy and dirty in the depths of nature and our bodies. And I don’t know about you, but for a Pisces who chooses to live almost entirely in the world of fantasy and potential that exists in her head, the Empress is such a crucial teacher.

The second benefit of returning to our bodies has to do with the fact that our brains are not always a fun place to be. If you are a fellow sufferer of anxiety attacks, you’ve probably been taught grounding techniques. These are designed to get us out of our heads - our intrusive thought spirals - and back into our bodies, our environment, the here and now. In fact, this is why I was the only person still seated at the laser light show acid trip that was Tame Impala at the Hollywood Bowl, tracing the lines of her palm with her index finger while breathing in for 4 counts and out for 6 and resolving to tell anybody who asked if I were okay, “Oh no, I’m great! Just pregnant and trying to take it easy!”

(I was most definitely not pregnant.)

And third, while many would argue that our minds (the seat of our consciousness, our self-awareness) is what gives us our Divinity (our God power or Christ nature, if you will), our minds alone can’t actually do much. That’s a highly controversial statement in many circles. It’s also a pretty feminist and post-colonialist one too. But the truth as I see it is that unless we embody our desires, we ain’t manifesting shit.

And the Empress is the embodiment of embodiment! A fecund and fertile creatrix, she is the ultimate manifestor. And while she knows how important mindset and visualization and self-talk are, she reminds us that we must also EMBODY our dreams and the highest and best version of ourselves to bring them into fruition. Feel them in our bones. And to practice doing this, the Empress encourages us to dig our toes into the earth, let the sun shine down on our face (with proper SPF please, if the exponentially increasing freckles on my nose can get on their dermatological soap box for a second), and bask in the wonders of our own human body.

The Empress invites us to honor, care for, and listen to our body for the wisdom it offers. So, how can you channel your inner Empress this week and RETURN TO THE BODY?

I have a quick and easy tarot trick that can help you answer that question! Here’s how to do it: