lesson 9: ya burnt!

LESSON 9: YA BURNT
Cards drawn: An arc of five--Wheel of Fortune (4), Nine of Swords (2), Judgment (1), Two of Wands (3), Ace of Pentacles (5). 
Deck: Tarot of H’arts by Isabel Hayes (If you haven’t seen this new deck yet, check out my walkthrough on YouTube. It’s wonderful.)

I feel like a lot of folks struggle to read Judgment. What are we really dealing with? The christo-centric tarot we know today paints the last judgment as the end of days, the awakening of the dead to “new life.” In Lisa St. Croix’s Tarot de St. Croix, we see Maat here. The weighing of the heart after death in Egyptian tradition. Frequently there’s a posthumous nature to the card. But what’s it mean?

I typically read the card as an alarm clock. Time to get out of bed! But having spent the summer with Lady Frieda Harris’s paintings, I’ve also come to see this card as representing a new era. Crowley would have said that this was the new age, not unlike the Age of Aquarius we hear referred to that no one can seem to agree on. Crowley believed he ushered in the new era, the Age of Horus, when he received the Book of the Law. I tend to be somewhat snide about this. Did he really receive it, or was it just the ramblings of a man who might have been using intoxicants? But, and I hate to admit this, he did define the new era in such a way that a backward glance shows his prediction of a long period of upheaval, war, and distress seems true. Unfortunately for anyone reading this, if he was right, we’ve got more than another 400 years of that to go. 

But whether we’re talking about a wakeup, a new era, or anything else, what does it mean in a reading? This is the great question for many folks. Lots of readers see this card and think fuck. I know, because I’ve been one of those readers. But the good news is we don’t have to know yet. When we encounter a card in a spread that isn’t singing, we turn to the other cards. This is one of many, many, many, many, many, many reasons I dislike one-card draws for anyone—but particularly for folks just starting out. More cards = more context and context is everything. So, this is my typically long-winded way of saying, “don’t worry what Judgement means right now.” 

Judgment is flanked by the Nine of Swords and the Two of Wands—both of which are flanked, respectively, by the Wheel of Fortune and the Ace of Penties. (Did I just call “pentacles” “penties?” Yes. You’re welcome.) The Wheel and the Nine of Swords are a cute pairing, because everyone hates the nine, and The Wheel is another one folks often don’t know what to do with. The Wheel is simply turning. The Nine of Swords has to do with the mentality of swords and the exhaustion of nine. The paring says, “You’re burned out now, but you won’t always be,” and suddenly we see what Judgement means: coming out of that burnout. 

I use the term “burnout” a lot and I sometimes worry that will make it mean less. But one reason it shows up so often in my readings is because so many people are suffering it and don’t know. Any one of the nines can signal it, but the swords and wands—being the weapons—can be the most painful versions of this very real, very important experience. In the case of the Nine of Swords, the burnout is going to be mental. It’s mental exhaustion—being worn out, being tired, being stressed, having nothing left in the old noggin of any value. It’s, in essence, when we’ve spent our entire intellect and have to replenish. 

The Wheel does describe the experience of burnout, too; it suggests the ways that, in the middle of being burned out, we have some decent moments. Moments that make us think there’s nothing “wrong” with us and that it will all be OK. These moments can last for a few hours, days, or even a couple weeks. But the wheel will turn and the burnout will return. It’s inevitable. We often find ways to treat the symptoms—and most of modern medicine is obsessed with treating the symptoms—rather than curing the disease. 

So, how do we cure it? Burial. No, not burying our feelings. Rather, burying ourselves. By which I mean resting. Now, a few things: burnout is a real medical experience. Rest isn’t the only cure for it. You can rest and feel great and then return to the thing that burned out out and you’ll go right back to feeling like garbage. The problem with burnout is that you have to fix the situations that caused it, not ease just the symptoms. Honestly, having been through this more than once in my life, I can tell you it’s better to avoid burnout entirely if you can, because coming out of it is not easy. But Judgment does give us clues to non-medical support. It’s just important that if we’re experiencing burnout, we both get professional help as well as divinatory. They need not be exclusive and frequently work best together. (This is my way of saying, “I’m not a doctor and I’m not qualified to give medical advice, and you’d do well to consult a doctor.” OK, American Medical Association? Happy? Of course you’re not. Capitalism.)

My deep-dive into the esoteric has forced me to face my own concepts of “life’s” cycle, and though I’m fairly convinced that when we die, we become nothing more than fertilizer (one reason why I’m fundamentally opposed to embalming), I’m very much in the minority on that. Much of the world seems to believe that death isn’t the end, but rather a transition point. The burial of the body, or more generally the “disposal” of the body, is often part of the process journey from State-of-Being X to State-of-Being Y. What happens when what happens? We decompose. The things that make up everything we tend to think we are transform into pre-human matter (assuming we’re not pumped full of carcinogens during the burial process that are dangerous for the embalmer and the environment). One might draw a line between the decomposing human corpse and the transformation of the caterpillar into the butterfly. It ain’t a pretty sight. And yet. It is necessary. So is death. We have to die. I don’t know why, but we do. We have to go through the process of decomposing (or any variant on that, which does include cremation and water burial, along with concepts like sky burial), we have to go from the state we know ourselves to be into another state. 

I’ve long said, but never really believed, that we need fallow times in life. We need pauses, rests, intermissions; we need times when we’re not creating, not making, not producing, not acting, not moving. We need downtimes, pauses, and they often need to last a few months. I know this to be true, I just don’t believe it because I’m not good at doing that. (You probably aren’t, either.) And, in looking back on my life, some of the times I’ve experienced moments of high-level, clinical burnout, these were times where I couldn’t or wouldn’t pause. To borrow from Alanis Nadine Morisette, I equated stopping with death. When we do not take fallow periods, though, life will take them for us—and that may be one reason we experience burnout: because if we go on any longer, we truly will short circuit. The Earth itself demonstrates this necessity. The earth itself goes fallow for about half the year! Most of us can’t take that time. Capitalism has fucked our rhythms. I sometimes think seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is less a disorder and more a reaction to our body being forced to do shit it doesn’t want to do at a time of year when the rest of creation is resting. But what do I know?

Anyway, the point is that we need to undergo little burials in order to keep ourselves functioning well. This is what sleep is supposed to do, but for many of us sleep doesn’t cut it. Sleep, wonderful as it is, seems not to be a powerful enough force against the current culture of doing. And that is why (I think) so many people are experiencing such deep levels of burnout. We’re simply not getting enough fallow periods. 

Because we can’t take a three-month “rest cure,” the way wealthy British colonizers used to do, we have to find other ways to do it—and the final two cards in the spread speak to it. It’s important to note, first, that the remaining cards are quite low numbers: one and two. Compare to the rest of the cards in the reading: A ten, a nine, and a twenty! When we get burned out or reach a time when rest is necessary, the temptation is frequently to do the opposite—to push through until the exhaustion passes, the need dissolves, and the energy returns. It won’t, of course, we know that, but we also know we can’t stop—so what the hell else is there to do but hustle? (Have I mentioned that in addition to massive amounts of burnout, more people are self-medicating than ever? More people are experiencing high blood pressure and cholesterol? More people are sleeping worse? Literally everything about our current culture is poison, and we somehow believe that we can just push past it.) So what do we do?

A little bit.  That’s the main lesson of these two cards: their tininess. Just a little bit. A little bit of what? A little bit of fire and earth. What’s that mean? Often, and I know this from experience too, when we are feeling burnout, reconnecting with our joy, our spark is a great way to move through the pain. A quick story: the first time I experienced burnout was in my mid-twenties. I’d been in a job that I used to enjoy for about five or six years and I’d reached a point where I’d started hating it. Even more exciting, I had a lot of personal issues going on around my living situation. I had nothing left in my battery but I lived alone and had to keep pushing. I needed health insurance, I needed to pay rent, I needed heat and hot water (but I definitely went a winter without those during this time). So I couldn’t leave my job. And one of the things that happens in toxic jobs is that they slowly extract your self confidence from you, so you believe (much like in a toxic relationship) that you can’t do any better. I’ll spare you the gory details, but in addition to winding up in the ER, I nearly lost that job because—after years of great reviews, my boss suddenly decided to download every awful thing about me. Somehow I survived that termination, but not the feelings of despair that permeated my flesh and bones. 

How did I get through? Purpose. I was forced to attend a conference shortly after that terrible review and though I loathed my job and especially my bosses, I had no choice but to go. And what I discovered while there I discovered why I’d been so burned out and what to do about it—not from a medical expert, but from reconnecting to why I wanted the job to begin with. And I began learning new techniques to make myself better at my job, which in turn made me happier doing it and improved my overall wellbeing. It also improved my work performance, but I didn’t really give a flying fuck about that at that point. My bosses had already proven to me they were inept leaders who didn’t deserve my effort. But I deserved my effort, and so did my students (this was my early days of working in adult learning). I did it for me and I did it for anyone who would sit in my classes. And a year from that time, I won an employee of the year award. And I’m proud of that award not because it meant I’d changed peoples’ minds about me (although, in retrospect, it’s fucking amazing I did that), but because I saved myself and found great joy in doing it.

(One of the insidious things about burnout is that it’s often not your fault. It’s the machine you’re caught in. But that doesn’t mean it’s not your responsibility to get help. No one else will do it for you. It’s fucked up but true.)

The Two of Wands and the Ace of Pentacles tell us to come back to our passions, to our attraction to the work we do (passion=fire; attraction=two). That we ground (Ace of Penties) ourselves in that love, that fire. But just enough (the smaller numbers), not so much that we just burn out all over again or in a new part of our life—no, that we take periods of gentle, active rest. The kind of rest that feels productive but that is also replenishing our batteries. What this is will be different for everyone, but so many times in my life (and I feel so lucky about this), that thing has been tarot. Just being able to spend time with my cards has frequently been a way to relight my fire. Whatever it is for you, do it--but don’t overdo it. A thing I love to harp on when talking to newer readers is that you can get burned out doing things you love doing just as much as things you have to do. I have gotten burned out with divination, too, and I had to take a few years away from it. I thought I’d honestly never come back to it. But it refused to stay dormant, which, when you think about it, is exactly what the Judgment card is doing! The Judgment card reminds us that when something is truly for us, we can leave it be for a while and it will come back. If you love something, let it go? I guess? But truly. I have had to give tarot a break and when I came back to it I was a better reader. The same thing happened when I was acting. I took a break in my twenties, not because I wanted to but in part because of that job that was burning me out, and when I returned to it finally I’d improved so much. 

It’s probably worth pointing out that, having typed the above, I realized that my burnout at work may have been in part because I was being forced to deny myself an activity that did replenish my battery. Because I had to work nights 90% of the time, I couldn’t audition for plays—or I could, but I couldn’t be in them—nor could I take acting classes, or, hell, even go see theatre. My nights belonged to my job and my days belonged to sleeping off the depression I felt from not being able to do the thing I thought I was meant to do.

The point of all of this is (and so much for my attempts to make these blogs terser) is that when you feel burned out, you might do well to return to the ignition point of your passion. That might mean coming back to basics, it might mean rediscovering old methods you dropped along the way, it might mean shaking things up and learning something new. Whatever it is, though, stay grounded and don’t let it take over your life. Otherwise, you’ll end up right back where you started—which, The Wheel warns us, is quite possible. And lets not ignore the visual resemblance between The Wheel and the Ace of Pentacles. We could easily end up back at the start if we’re not careful. As I always say, everything is its own other—including healing.

A read of one’s own
This spread is designed to detect areas where we might be on the verge of burnout and what we might do to prevent ourselves from spilling over into it. I have found that when I do example readings for myself on situations I’m not currently struggling with, the readings are kind of clumsy and not particularly useful. So, in this case, I’m going to pretend I am reading for someone else. This imaginary person, let’s call them Bo, has sought out a reading because they feel like something isn’t quite right. They want to know if burnout might be a culprit. 

The spread:

• Position one: An area of life where burnout might be developing.
• Position two: The potential root cause of this burnout. 
• Position three: How deep/serious the burnout may be.
• Position four: What to do about it immediately.
• Position five: What to do long term.

As always, I recommend using three cards per position. For the sake of brevity, I’ll use only one except for the first position—which I think needs much more context than the rest. Here goes. 

A brief sample:
Position one, an area where burnout might be developing. Cards drawn, Ten of Pentacles, Seven of Swords, King of Cups. This suggests the area is family and particularly care-taking. The Seven of Swords suggest that this is creating a lot of inner stress around their ability to do all the things that need doing, caring about all the things that need caring about. They might well be capable (king), but only for so long—and if the King of Cups isn’t getting some care, that’s not good. Being cared for is how they replenish their electrolytes. 

Position two, the potential root cause. The Lovers. I’d say this card suggests people pleasing tendencies (“Please love me!”)—they think that their ability to be loved has everything to do with how much they “love” (read: give themselves away to) everyone else. 

Position three, how deep/serious the burnout may be. The Nine of Wands. This is serious. This is already just about as bad as it can get and should be addressed immediately. The Nine of Wands is the burnout card. 

Position four, what to do about it immediately: Two of Pentacles. Oh, how tarot tickles me, even when we’re not doing a real reading. This is the “balancing all the things” card to a lot people. In this case I’d interpret this as “juggling only what is fully necessary.” Anything else needs to be put down, delegated, postponed. Grounding is probably necessary to. The only thing that will work immediately is to put all non-essential labor on hold for the time being. 

Position five, what to do long term: Seven of Wands. This is a restructuring of our role in life. This is actively defending ourselves against taking anything on that we do not have the energy for. This is deciding what is worth “fighting” for or clinging to and what isn’t. This is a re-assessment of what we deem worthy of our energy, worthy of our time, worthy of our spark. We’re going to have to commit to protecting ourselves from that which does not really require our attention. With fire, there’s also the quality of needing things that we’re passionate about, too; though I hate saying things like that to clients, because most folks don’t have the ability to spend more time doing what they’re passionate about—particularly folks who are on the edge of this level of burnout. Nonetheless, where we can find time to devote to what is truly important to us, we must. ​