08. opening doors to your potential
Hey friends,
This episode discusses the transformative energy that’s nudging you to step into your power and fully embrace your potential. It’s about recognising the good energy coming your way and learning to accept it without brushing it off as luck or feeling undeserving.
Energy Update – We explore the power of the Two of Pentacles, encouraging you to balance all the good things that are flowing in. It’s about creating space to hold these blessings and resisting the urge to shrink back
Reassessing Personal Power – Where does your unique power lie? You don’t have to be a powerhouse in every area of life. Instead, focus on the strengths that feel most authentic to you, even if they’re less visible to the world.
Temperance in 2025 – As we prepare for what promises to be a chaotic year, the Temperance card reminds us to find balance and resilience. It’s less about relentless hard work and more about staying centred and letting things unfold.
Meditation as Inner Stability – The Hanged Man guides us to view meditation as a journey into our true essence, where we find peace in stillness and stability amid life’s highs and lows.
Shadow Work & The Strength Card – What doors have you kept closed within yourself? We talk about the power of shadow work, inviting you to integrate parts of yourself you may have ignored. Each door you open expands your capacity for growth
Manifesting with the Queen of Pentacles – This is about grounding your dreams into reality, be it through financial stability, health, or creative expression. Small, sustainable changes can create big shifts
Intuition as a Daily Practice – The Seven of Swords warns us about distractions that can drain our energy. Building your intuition is key to protecting your energy and staying true to your path.
I’ve also released a bonus episode over on Patreon, where I go even deeper into the energies of 2025 and how to prepare for the lessons ahead.
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I use the Queer Tarot Deck by Ash & Chess
Transcript
Hi. Welcome back to sunflowers and stars intuitive Tarot for the collective with me, your host, Fiona Fletcher Reid, how you doing? So I'm going to get straight into the Energy Update. Just feeling really cold to take a couple of minutes to slow down and to be present with this energy.
It feels really positive, but it feels like it might be I guess I'm getting this, this sense that there's good things coming for you, and that just to allow yourself to experience them without being suspicious or without getting caught up in this lack mindset that a lot of people speak about, and that can be a hard one to talk about, because lack is a genuine thing, like there are segments of society that are in poverty, so financial lack is a real thing, and but we're talking, I guess I'm talking about energetics here. I'm talking about, there's some good energy coming your way. There's some good people, some good opportunities.
There's some at the heart of all that really good energy that you are creating based on your choices and your commitment to self growth. So just allowing yourself to dream about that at the moment, to dream about it, to witness it when it happens not to brush it off as luck or a one off, to see those positive manifestations in your life as proof that they're always there, they're always available, and that it comes from, in part, the work that you do on your own energy.
And so we've pulled the two of Pentacles for the Energy Update. And the energy here is really learning to hold, hold space for all the good things that are coming. Because in order for you to be able to hold, to experience all the energy that you are dreaming of, because I know you've got, you have got these big dreams for yourself, you know deep down that you're destined for something in particular, not something special, okay? Because I think when we hear people say, oh, you know you're destined for great things that can give us the idea that every person has to do something extraordinary, that's not what I mean. I just mean that you're destined for something that feels special to you. You're destined for something different from what you're currently experiencing, or a level up of something that you're currently experiencing. It's really about allowing yourself to step into your full potential, whatever that looks like, whether that's as an artist, as a parent, as a friend, as an accountant, as a lawyer, stepping into your potential fully, whatever that means for you, fully as a person, not just your vocation, not just the way that you serve others, but in the way that you serve yourself. Because we've spoken about before how healing is resistance. If you haven't listened to that yet, go back after this. It's episode three. We talk about how the healing work that you do on yourself has a ripple effect on the collective so don't think that me asking you to dream and step into your full potential is a selfish act. I think sometimes self help and self care can be spoken about as a task that only supports yourself, but it doesn't. It supports the collective, and then the collective supports you back so thinking about how, how you can reframe the dreams and the hopes that you've got for your own self, growth in your trajectory in life, and allowing yourself to move into that space, and know that when you move into an energetic space that's for your highest good, then it's for the highest good of all.
So try not to feel as though you chasing after particular things is selfish. It's up to you to use your discernment as to whether it is a selfish goal. You know, are you? Are you trying to earn a certain amount of money in order to gain something that serves you and only you. I think we have to get away from this idea that manifestation is always just about money, because manifestation has become this kind of to me, it feels this feels very patriarchal. It's women talking about making as much money as men, and then not really thinking about how they wield that power.
So I'm not going to go into all that just now, but that's up to you. To think about what you're trying to create in this life, what you're trying to work towards, and thinking deeply about, is that for the highest good, and is it for the highest good for all. And this energy right now is you kind of, I think, flitting between like you're stepping into your potential and then cowering away being like, Oh no, that's too scary. Like, I think you need to reassess your relationship to power, because your personal power is feeling quite scary.
Scary to you right now, it's feeling as though, because you know, we all have these stories, like we have these stories around money, we have you might have a story, if you have a lot of money, then you're a bad person. If you have a lot of money, you're greedy or you're selfish. And not everyone with who has a lot of money is like that.
So it's we have a similar relationship to power, where a lot of the time the people in power are men, and if we look on a global scale, a lot of them are doing really horrible things, and they're not using their power for the collective they're not using their power for the greater good. So I want you to think about how you are being called to use your power for the greater good. And that doesn't mean that you have to go and work for a charity. You have to go and do healing work. Doesn't mean that you have to donate a certain amount of your proceeds to charity. You can do all of that stuff. But I want you to think about your power, your skill set, your sweet spot, like, where do you Where does things come naturally to you?
Because it might be motherhood. It might be that actually your power is in being a mother and raising a generation of people who you know, if you have two kids and you raise them to be feminist, you read them, raise them to be anti racist, you raise them to be spiritually connected to their intuition, all this kind of thing like those two kids are going to have a ripple effect on all the people they meet. So think about where, where does your power lie, remembering that it's okay if other aspects of your life don't feel quite as powerful.
So this is why it feels like you're jumping in and out of your power. It's like, it's kind of like Superman going into the phone box and getting changed and coming back out. It's like you're switching between I think the energy here is really about just knowing your power is always there, but you don't necessarily always have to use it. You don't have to make every area of your life the pot like the most grand and purposeful, like if your part time job is boring and you kind of just put in like 80% effort, and you're friendly to everyone. You get your work done, then you go home and you're a mother, and that's, you know, that's where your real power lies, awesome, because the stuff that you do out of work, when you get back into work, it will naturally feed into the energy that you bring to that so making sure that you make time to use your your power and your potential when you are free to create the space to do it, because in work, I just think we have to accept that.
And maybe when you're in work, you're not empowered to give the mothering energy that you would like to so you're maybe not able to spend as much time nurturing people the way you would like to. You can try your best, but we all have limitations, and we live in a society that has structural limitations, and that's okay, so allowing but that, but not using that as a template for the way the rest of the world has to be. So thinking about when you have your free time, when you get into your groove, when you've got the time to go and do the stuff that you know you love and that you know, is actually you tapping into your power and your potential, doing that stuff to the best of your ability, doing that stuff without limitations, and knowing that that would feed into other areas of your life. That's the energy we're working with just now. It's kind of, it's a lot of self doubt.
There's a lot of there's some pessimism as well. There's some, some it's like, you've realized your power, and you're like, but how can I possibly use this power when the world is like this? How can I possibly like? It's like, you don't believe that you can be that powerful, powerful, but you can, and this is the first time that you're stepping into it. So how do you how do you know? How do you know what's going to happen? How do you know?
And some of that is letting go of actually, I don't know how my power is going to change the world, but I'm just going to have to trust that when I stand in my power, when I reach my potential, and when I follow my highest self wisdom and advice, that that can only lead to good things, that can only be a good outcome, even If you don't ever really get to see the tangible impact of that, and that's just that's a reality of life, is that we will never know how many people we've affected. We will never know how many people we have reached through our energy, like it's so so often I'll see I'll be served by someone in a shop, and I go home and say to my partner, oh my god, I was served by like the kindest women ever. That woman doesn't know, she doesn't know that she affected me this way. But it's still true. So trusting that when you're in your power, in your when you're in your state of ease and love and receiving and get like giving, that that that kind of cycle of give and receive, just know that it's being rewarded. And now we're going to talk about how to align with the energy of 2025 if you've listened to the last few episodes, you'll know that we spoke in Episode Seven about the hard lessons that you've learned and how to prepare for 2025 there's also a bonus episode in the Patreon where we pulled a card to signify the focus of 2025 so if you fancy doing that.
You can join the Patreon if you're not in the Patreon already. What are you doing? Join the club. But we're going to talk about, how can we align with the energies that are coming in in 2025 and we've pulled temperance, which is lovely, because that's really about letting things unfold, letting Jesus take the wheel. And that doesn't mean not putting in the effort. It means being ready for anything that comes your way. And that doesn't mean working really hard. It actually means finding balance as this energy comes in throughout 2025 and I do think it is going to be another chaotic year. I do think there's going to be a lot of hard lessons to learn. I think there's going to be a lot of extreme highs and extreme lows. So how can you find energetic stability? How can you make sure in your in your body and in your mind that you're going to be able to kind of swim through this energy? You know, when it's feeling good, you can float through it. Going to be some difficult times where it's going to be choppy waters. Are you going to have the strength to swim through that, or the, not even the strength, but, you know, like the muscle memory of, okay, I've practiced for this. I've learned I know swimming technique, or, you know, it all comes back to that inner work and not looking externally for things to make us calm, not looking externally for things to solve our problems, but realizing that all that stuff that we need is inside, and temperance is asking us to connect with the universe. So to find that stability, you just have to be to find that stability,
you have to stop you have to slow down. You have to be present and see when you close your eyes, if you can close your eyes right now, if you're not driving, you're not walking around, close your eyes. Stop, take a breath and feel what comes up, maybe like a rising in your chest. There might be a feeling of anxiety. There might be an agitation, an itch somewhere, maybe external noise that irritates you whenever that stuff comes in and tries to pull you away from your peace.
So when we're in silence and we're in stillness, that's where the stability is, and when these other interruptions come in through our meditation, it's our job to continue to find the peace, to continue to connect with the infinite state of stability and peace and nothingness that is there in our consciousness. Because we are consciousness and we are just observing. We're just observing that's where we find the stability, because it means when we when these external events come in, like a sound or a physical sensation or something on the news or some horrible thing that has happened to someone we love, we still experience those emotions.
We still experience the pain or the joy or whatever it is, but we don't become attached to it. We're still able to as we witness and experience those emotions, we're still able to access this underlying it's almost like a backdrop of stability, calm, nothingness, complete stillness. That's how we're going to deal with the energy that's that's the only way we can deal with it if we don't, if we if we don't connect to this sense of peace.
If we don't connect to this sense of inner stability that we can always have access to, then we are at risk of being carried away by the pain, carried away by the anger that comes with the distractions, the upset that comes with the injustices in the world. We're human. It's right that we feel all those things. It's right, we're human. If we don't feel those things, then we're not connected with our humanity. So yes, we feel those things, but we don't hold on to them in the body. We don't identify with them. We don't become those feelings.
Because when we do that, we forget we forget who we are. We forget that we are that stability, we are that backdrop, we are that nothing. We are that peaceful state that's our default. We can always have access to that, always. And the more this is the great news, the more that you access that, the more that you move back into the state of just observing being. That's the energy that the universe is like vibing with and that means that that the connection between you and the universe is open and it's strong, which means you're able to more effectively co create the life that you want, make change, see justice for the people who deserve it. So connect into that space. It's not you escaping the emotion. It's not you denying that that emotion exists. It's you being able to witness it without resisting it. And in case you are thinking that sounds lovely, meditation is not for me. I pulled a card to ask, how do we channel this energy? And we got the Hanged Man. The Hanged Man is all about seeing things from a different person.
Perspective, and it's also about waiting. It's about hanging out in the unknown. It's about not necessarily having any control about what comes next, but as you wait for what happens, you get into this space and you see things from another perspective, and that could be seeing things from the perspective of the universe. Wouldn't you like to see that? Wouldn't you like to see what it's like to feel the reality that you are consciousness. You are consciousness. You're not your body, you're not your thoughts, you're not your friends, you're not the things you say. You're pure consciousness. I invite you to get brave and to work towards feeling that. And if you want to take this card as a piece of advice to see things from your perspectives, I would suggest you gather up as many resources and perspectives on spiritual teachings and consciousness that you can. So whether that's watching YouTube videos, maybe you want to try some different visualizations. Insight Timer is a really good place to try lots of different types of meditation.
Something that helps me was, as I got into meditation, learning about meditation, so not just doing it, but reading about it and understanding how it works, if you're someone who needs to know the kind of science behind it, and the anecdotal experiences about something, then learning about meditation is so interesting. There's a really good book that I enjoyed called everyday Zen. My friend Vicky tipped me off to that. It's not always an enjoyable read, but I found it really profound, really life changing. And there's another one called, I think it's called wake up by Sam Harris. He's also got an app, a meditation app, that I've used before, which is pretty good. So see things from a different perspective. Don't think about meditation and presence and sitting in the silence as a denial of what you're experiencing. Actually, it's it's going deeper. It's if you want a way to go deep into yourself, meditation is the way to do it. And if you think that you can't do meditation, you think, Oh no, it's too hard, then you're denying yourself a layer of self knowledge. And there's there is just a degree of fear. There is a degree of fear that when we sit down and we allow ourselves to not be consumed or attached to people or to thoughts or to our job or our hobbies or our kids, when we just allow ourselves to be with ourselves.
It's terrifying because a lot of us don't know who we are, and we're so scared to confront the fact that we're not who we think we are, or that there's nothing behind going on behind the thoughts and the busyness can be really scary if you've never meditated before, because there's a lot to get through, and that's just the truth. There's a backlog of triggers and old stories and attachments that are there for you to work through. There's no online course, there's no visualization or workshop that is going to make yourself growth like checked off the list. There's absolutely no substitute for being with yourself, sitting with yourself, observing the thoughts that come up, observing the sensations in your body. And you'll be so amazed after you've meditated for a while that day to day, you're actually able to do it through throughout your day. So as you're replying to an email, you'll be able to stop and think, actually, do I want to say that? What was this thought? You'll be able to just observe your thoughts and your behaviors without, without them being so emotionally charged all the time, they'll still be there, and there still will be a moment, like, lots of moments, like, more so than there are moments where you're overcome by emotion and you just act on emotion, but sometimes in crucial moments, the the kind of muscle memory, or the, I don't know how your brain works, but it remembers, oh, we can go to that peaceful place and we can pause, and it's okay, because if You hadn't done those those weeks of meditation, there's no way that you would dare to go into that quiet space because you're so scared of it. But the more that you go into that quiet space and you feel the peace, and you build up your ability to sit in that void space, the more you actually want to go back. Because even though hard things happen there, you see the consequence of them in your life and in your growth.
So ask the cards, what seeds? What seeds can we plant in 2025 and you know, I don't when I pull these cards, I don't really think about what I'm going to say until I start talking. And now I realize that I have definitely already spoken about the strength card, which is what we've just pulled. So the seed for you to plant with the strength card is getting to know your shadow. It's getting to know these parts of yourself that you don't really want to confront. And it doesn't need to be traumatic things that have happened to you. It's more likely to just be parts of yourself that you're not willing to acknowledge. For me, I'll have a lot of shame around desire. So you know, being a closeted lesbian until 35 will do, will do that to you, and my the shame around my desire is what kept me in that place, because I wasn't consciously ashamed. But now I can see it. Now I can see, oh yeah, there was shame around desire. So, like, I, basically, I until, for most of my life, just didn't have much of a sex drive for men or women, and now that's completely changed. Like, I've realized that that was, that was my shadow, that was a defense mechanism of just don't really get don't get into that mindset, don't get into that space, because when you realize what you do desire, it's going to come with consequences, and you're going to be socially excluded. People are going to judge you, you're going to be hurled abuse at, like all these messages that were, you know, implanted in me as a kid growing up, and that shame for desire is is really like a kind of, it's a big cloud that covers everything in my life. So, you know, from everything from sexual desire down to having extra cheese on my sandwich, you know, like, yeah, I want extra cheese, but part of me says no to desire that would be wrong, so don't have any cheese, or just have a small amount.
So it's and it's not to say that every time I should have the extra cheese. It's more about just acknowledging those thought patterns and being able to stop and get into that place that I said, the place of non judgment, and say, okay, isn't that interesting, that you want more cheese, but that you're not allowing yourself to have it. Where's that coming from? What's that all about? The strength card is saying, the more you get into this peaceful place, the more that you'll realize your self growth can only happen when you address the parts of yourself that you're not willing to acknowledge. Because if you imagine your soul as like a corridor of doors, say there's like, say there's like 100 doors on this corridor, and this symbolizes your soul at the moment, you've maybe got like 70 of the doors open like, you know what's in every room. You know yourself. You know what your personality traits are. You know what you're like, what kind of food you like, what your skills are in the workplace, but there's these 30 doors that you're just like, I don't want to know what's in there, or I do know what's in there, and I don't want to look so what happens is, when you open those doors, you're really just finding more innocent parts of yourself. You're finding the part of you from when you were six years old and you performed in a school show, and you were so excited, because you loved performing, you loved dancing, but for whatever reason, maybe like somebody laughed at you afterwards, and you just internalized this thing of, Oh, my God, I'm a terrible dancer. You shut the door on it, and then you never, ever express yourself with your body again that builds up over time, starts to turn into chronic pain. It's stiffness. You're just holding yourself tense. You never want to listen up, maybe even effects like the clothes you wear when you open this door, what you realize is all that horrible resistance, all that feeling of I don't want to acknowledge that. I don't want to think about it.
And you don't, you're not even conscious of this. You just know that you don't like dancing or whatever. When you go through that door, what you realize is, I'm basing my adult choices on something like a five. Another five year old did, and there was still 200 other people in the room that didn't laugh at me. And actually, maybe that kid laughed at me for reasons I don't understand. And so it's kind of about getting into that observation state again and looking at your child's health and being like she was innocent, she wasn't doing anything wrong, but the only thing that happened here was this kid went out and did something she loved. She had a good time. Yeah, I've taken the story. I've taken away from it is that someone laughed at me. But when you're able to open that door with compassion and look at these parts that you're not willing to integrate, what you realize is you take your power back, and you decide, I'm not going to make my life decisions based on what this other kid said when I was a kid. There was no malice intended, and even if there was, you don't still don't have to let it control how you act, how you live your life, because you get to control how you feel. You get to control what stories you take on and which ones you release, and then opening that door, you set that story free.
And what you do is you take back your power, you take back the five year old self who love to dance, and you reclaim that, you reclaim that, and you just let the rest go. Or you can go in there, and you can even talk to your inner child with compassion.
You can talk to them and say, Hey, what that that was a shame. The kid laughed at you. You can bring the other kid in and you can talk to them all together. There's loads of stuff you can do just when you're in that meditation space as well, of like visualizing how you would like to resolve the situation when you open that door. And obviously a lot of that stuff is really good to do with a therapist, if you can. But however that looks for you, doing that shadow work and opening these doors in a way that you know is is safe for you, mentally facing these shadow parts, it's not just about healing, as in, like fixing a wound. It's so much more than that, because you get power, you get you get something amazing as well. You don't just heal and like feel better. It's not like you get a cold, you take some medication, and then you go back to feeling the way you did before, when you face your shadow and you rewrite the story. You actually level up. You actually level up when you come back out, because now you've got one more of those doors open. And if you can work to continually open these doors. You're expanding. You're integrating every part of yourself. No part is left behind. And I'm not saying that you're going to achieve all that in 2025 but working towards opening those doors is going to be a huge part of the collective energy this year. So seeds to plant for you, thinking about how that is going to show up for you. So maybe that's getting a book on Shadow Work. Maybe it's asking your therapist about shadow work. Maybe it's addressing some childhood trauma.
Maybe it's just getting back into journaling again, signing up to the Patreon and getting access to the meditations in there, as well as the bonus episode that we just did, the 2025 episode that's in the Patreon. We actually do visualization activation in the episode, so you get time to close your eyes and I talk you through, clearing your aura of Old Energy and welcoming in the wisdom for the year. So that might be something you want to do, but planting that seeds this year, not address not all at once, but planting the seeds for how you want to start integrating your your shadow and using that as a way to expand into your full potential.
Other seeds to plant is the queen of pentacles. So this is really about you mastering the physical realm. And again, this is not going to be something that you mastered in 2025 it's actually just about beginning this journey of using your potential and your power to affect your actual life. So thinking about what it is that you want to physically manifest over the rest of your life, not just this year, the rest of your life, what you do in 2025 is going to be setting the foundations for that. So planting the seeds for you might look like starting a savings account. It might look like starting on a fitness journey. It might look like trying some new recipes to eat in a way that nourishes you, particularly not sticking to not some stupid fad diet, but knowing, keeping a journal to know actually what, what makes my body feel good, what makes my mind feel good? And this can link into your meditation practice. So you might make a note of your diary, your food diary, and then the next day, think about how it affected your meditation. You know, I feel more clear headed, or I felt more sleepy, like thinking about how, because quite often we think about self growth, we think about the mind. We have to involve the body. We must. We must involve the body. Because if we don't, it becomes a distraction. If we don't, it becomes a source of pain, it becomes a source of trapped emotion. So we have to involve the body. That's why, when I'm doing this reading like I'm moving all over the place, like I'll post time lapses now again of my recording podcast and my hands are always everywhere, because I think when I'm when I'm channeling, when I'm receiving these messages, the energy has to go somewhere. And so connecting with the body is really important. If that story about dancing resonated with you. Certainly does with me, because I would like to be able to dance, but I don't. I don't think I've got this sass, but maybe it's you building up to rejoining a dance class and and not just thinking about the body as a as a tool for health, but actually as a form of self expression. So how do you want to use your body to express yourself? So that's a seeds to plant. And then the final question I asked the Tarot was, what is the wise women within trying to tell us? What does the wise women within have to say about this Energy Update, about the year ahead, and we pulled the seven of swords. So everything we've spoken about today is really all relies on you, making your spiritual practices and your self growth and your needs.
A priority, and hopefully that you've found this really inspiring, and you you're like you've been journaling, you've got a list of things you want to do, or you've got a little spark of an idea of what you want to do. But the wise women is saying, just remember that you live in reality. Remember that there's always going to be people trying to steal your energy. There's always going to be projects that will try and cut into your meditation practice, or maybe a fitness instructor who says, Oh no, like you can't join this class because of x, y, z. Or maybe there's going to be a influencer online that's telling you you shouldn't be eating potatoes, but, you know, your inner self is telling you, like, actually, I think potatoes a normal part of my diet, and I feel really good when I get to eat them. So why is women saying, just be aware, be aware of all the people that are trying to through their own things. Like, it's not always with malice intention. You know, it's just through their own shadows that they've not addressed they are going to try and kind of, kind of act as a smoke screen to your connection, to your intuition, and just wise women saying, the more that you can build up your intuition as a muscle, then the less these external forces will be able to get through.
They will always unless you're like, super, super strong, like, I don't really think there's ever a way to stop your energy from kind of being soaked up by other people. But that's why these spiritual practices need to be a routine. They need to be repeated. It's not, can't just meditate once and then solve all your problems. Like there's, it's like a production line, like there's a conveyor belt of things coming through, and they're going through the filter of your spiritual practices. So there's always more. There's always more coming in, which is why we have to keep up with the practices. And again, if you're like, where do I start with these? What do I do? Just think about the Hanged Man. Think about seeing things from different perspectives. So don't necessarily pick the book that everyone's talking about. You know, go to maybe you go to the charity shop, and you just say, I'm going to try and find a spiritual book, and I'm just going to pick one. You know, in the charity shop, you pay, like a pound for a book, so if you don't like it, then it's no big deal. You can actually just take it back to the shop and then they can sell it again and make more money for charity.
That, in itself, is a really good it's actually quite a nice spiritual practice, because you know you're you're giving back to the collective in a charitable way. So that's the collective energy update for today. I hope that was helpful. I hope that was a positive way for you to start the new year, to start your week, or whenever you're listening to this. I hope that it speaks to you in this moment, because remember, these readings are timeless, and time is fluid. So whenever this message finds you, that is the right time to hear it, I'll leave all the links in the show notes. If you want to come and join the Patreon, there's a couple of bonus episodes in there. There's also journal prompts and workshops and meditations that you can try, including a wise women meditation, actually. So if that, if that spoke to you, then you might like to try the wise women meditation. But anyway, that's enough from me for now. Have a good week. Come and talk to me on Instagram if you enjoyed this reading, and I love you, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.
Fiona
xx
