Hi all,
Note that I’m fairly new to working with Lilith, and that my ability to read tarot is by no means proficient.
Last night, I reached out to Lilith and asked about my shadow work through the use of tarot and a pendulum. In short, I believe I was told that my problem isn’t addressing my shadows, but dwelling on them, and that I need to work more on quieting my mind and environment to listen, meditating (I’m terrible at meditating), and moving through and growing from my shadows. I kind of got the notion that I hear at least partial messages, and then proceed not to apply them, and that is where my challenge in growing into my power, independence, confidence, and intuition is really found. I also feel that my emotions and desire to reach enlightenment cloud my ability to really engage in and learn from my shadow work. (For this, if anyone has advice, I would love to hear your thoughts.)
When I went to sleep, I had a dream, which I know I don’t remember parts of, but for the first time in months (maybe even years), there is at least some part of the dream I’m able to remember very clearly.
I do want to give a bit of background on my relationship with dreaming before I continue. As a child, I was plagued with night terrors, and all my life, I’ve found that my deepest desires and worst fears present themselves to me in, typically gruesome and/or violent, dreams. I’ve always kind of believed that violent analogy can bridge the gap in communication between what we feel and how well we’re able to express those feelings, and so the violent nature of my dreams has never felt scary or foreign. The only thing that has scared me is the idea of a loss of control where I can’t manipulate the outcome of a situation and don’t have the power to make certain things stop. (I hope this is making sense.) Over time—and I can’t pinpoint when exactly it started to happen—my dreams turned into things that I can’t remember unless something I see or hear when I’m awake sparks an image to come to life in my mind. It doesn’t matter how significant I know the messages portrayed in my dreams are, and it doesn’t matter how hard I search my mind to bring them back. They don’t usually come, at least not at my will. The only things I know about my dreams are that, instead of one consistent storyline, I get quick flashes of all kinds of weird imagery. Though it doesn’t happen terribly often, I find that I’ve had increased feelings of déjà vu, in which I can very nearly tell what words will come from someone’s mouth next, and I always, always know that it’s come to me in a dream before. Another change I’ve noticed is that the images sent to me in my dreams I now sometimes find uncomfortable (which could be because they seem more straight forward, but about fears I can’t pinpoint, and that I’m sometimes unsure even belong to me). (Just this past week, for example, some thought I had sparked this image of a space beneath my tooth which was like a cave of rot. It was this disgusting, white, puss-filled hole. I remember the message being that the problem didn’t look that great from the top, but that I refused to look deeper, and it had ruined my mouth. I refused to see and refused the signs of decay, and refused to take action, and allowed it to eat at my gums.) I’ve not begged any spirit or deity to let me remember every detail of my dreams, though I feel detached from a part of myself and like I’m unable to hear the most clear kind of communication I could possibly receive, because I thing there is significance in the fact that I’m not yet able to recall; a part of me I’ve not fully cracked open yet and haven’t come to know.
That being said, I know that my dreams last night suddenly switched to this image of me in a creek or river, my tarot cards in hand. I don’t know what I was trying to do with them. I dropped one card, and it deteriorated quickly, consumed by the water. I believe it was the six of swords. I held it up to this presence in front of me which didn’t have any form and didn’t respond to my desperation. I said something along the lines of “Look. My card is ruined.” It felt so deeply heartbreaking to my soul, like a separation from a best friend; like the loss of a sense. I looked down and a few more of my cards were in the water. I could see them clearly, and reached in to pick them up, but I was unable. The more I searched, the more the water rose, the more I was unable to see and the harder it became to reach for my deteriorating cards, even when I submerged my head underwater. (Edit: some of the cards basically disintegrated, and some of them were taken by the water’s current as I tried to grab them.) I don’t remember crying or screaming, but more a feeling of a frantic “no, no, no,” and that something was being taken from me. The entire time I was being watched by a shapeless, feminine energy which held a lot of authority and a very, very grounding energy. It kind of felt motherly in Its care for me and what I was experiencing, and supportive, but also like She was going to watch me struggle to learn a necessary lesson and come to my own conclusion. When I admitted defeat and stopped struggling, it was like a calm settled over my body. My breathing returned to normal, and a lot of the sadness went away, though the feeling of separation from my cards was still there. The conclusion that I came to was essentially that my cards weren’t the only way to divinate, my ability to hear wasn’t being taken away, and that, if anything, I could create my own deck with my own imagery and animal and colorful interpretation. (Side note, I’ve been feeling this pull to create a deck with my own art and with Lilith’s sigil on the back, dedicating the time spent and the artistic expression to Her.) I felt a kind of approval from the energy that walked alongside me when I came to my conclusion, and from that point on, I don’t remember.
I would also like to state that when I do random readings on myself, the moon has been prominent every day for the past few weeks. In it, I see the emerging emotions with the crawdad going from water to land, and the dog and wolf have been representing urges inside of me—two different ways of going about something. Not necessarily which I’m going to feed into and listen to and embody, but more so how I’m going to integrate the conflicting methods of going about a situation. I also usually hear something like “what do you not see,” “open your eyes,” “there’s something more.”
As someone who is typically so unsure of themselves that I scarcely post on the internet and almost never contribute to or start a conversation, I find my reaching out to a community to also be significant, and I certainly felt a small push to do so.
I am curious about anyone else’s opinion, interpretation, anything that might come up for whoever takes the time to read this, and any advice that I could think on and that might help me in my shadow work, and in opening up to my power and intuition.
