Finding Yourself When You Feel Lost
Hierophant is derived from two Greek words meaning sacred and reveal. Think of the hierophant as a modern day preacher or priest. This card in the practice of tarot represents conventional wisdom and shared community. And while it's great to seek support from a community when you're feeling lost and isolated in life, there are some caveats to consider. Let's talk about that in this episode.
Thank you for tuning in to an episode of Merwin's Philosophy, where I explore the connection between spirituality and psychology and how that coincides with social issues we face today. Now here's the show.
So in this episode, we're continuing with the Life Journey series, and for anyone new to this podcast or this series, let me just break it down a little bit. So tarot is the practice of using a specific deck of cards and laying them out in what's called a spread. And basically when you lay the cards out in a certain order, you let your mind interpret whatever messages that are showing to you. So let's say you're laying out a spread for a particular problem, the way the cards fall, you kind of look at that, look at all the meaning of the cards related to your life. Use your intuition to see what those messages may be pointing to. And this practice tends to give people a sense of direction or kind of point to something that you should be paying attention to. Which is why I have placed Tarot into the realm of spirituality. And again, as I say, spirituality is deeply personal.
So of course, not everyone believes in it, and that's okay. Within the practice of Tarot, and within those cards, there is called the Major Arcana. These 23 cards, when you look at them, detail a path in life that many of us take. And, you know, taking out the spirituality aspect of it, we can relate it to several phases and transitions in a person's life. Which is why I've called it the Life Journey Series.
So we started off with the very first episode, talking about what to look out for when you are starting a new journey or making a major transition in your life. That is represented by the Fool card, a naive person at the very beginning of their journey. Next is the Magician card, which represents our willpower and motivation that we have in life to continue through this change or continue through this new journey. Then we have the High Priestess, which represents our intuition, those gut feelings and emotions and those intuitive thoughts that help you along in the journey. And then lastly, the Empress and the Emperor. Those two cards represent self care and self empowerment. And in the last episode, which I covered those two aspects, I said that self empowerment and self care are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes we need to take action and go forward, and then sometimes we need to pull back and take care of ourselves.
So now let's talk about the next card in the journey, which is, again, the Hierophant. And this represents our sense of community, shared wisdom, traditions, rituals. Which become very helpful in life when we are feeling, again, lonely, isolated. You've probably hit a major crisis in your life. You're not quite sure what to do. Or, and I think this is probably going to be a better example, those moments when we have lost something. We're going through some kind of loss. We're probably going through a relationship breakup. We've probably lost a loved one. Or we've probably lost a job.
I went through my own quarter life crisis right after college. Quite didn't know what to do, that structure of going to class and kind of knowing what the next day would hold. Once you graduate, now you got to figure out, okay, what to do next. If you're a little bit older in life, you've probably heard of people having a midlife crisis. Sometimes people enter this period when they look around and they realize, “Okay, I'm in my middle age. How do people navigate this now? There's probably some things that I haven't done that my peers have done or maybe the children are grown and they've kind of gone off to college or kind of doing their own thing.” And now you're looking around trying to figure out, “What am I supposed to do now.” This is when that Hierophant card comes into play.
And one way to mitigate this feeling of isolation, loneliness, confusion, feeling lost, is we reach out to others to try to figure out what to do next. And this can be a good thing. Some people choose to go the spiritual route. They may join a church. Some people may choose to go the more psychological route and go to therapy, group therapy, or even an addiction recovery group, Alcoholics Anonymous, or any other group that is recovering from an addiction. You feel like you're not alone. Joining a group can ease that feeling of, again, loss, isolation, which can bring about feelings of depression, anxiety, which prohibits your ability to think clearly about a problem.
But, like I said, there are some caveats that we need to discuss. So, as usual, I'm going to break this down into three parts. Part one, we're going to talk more about the benefits of joining a community. Part two, we're going to talk about what to watch out for when we are at this point in our life, when we need to leave a community. And then lastly, the road to discovering yourself.
Part 1: Group Support [05:07]
So let's jump into this first part. Like I said before, joining a group has many benefits to it, especially when you are feeling a little bit cut off and you're feeling isolated in your own problems. Joining a group or some sense of community can make you feel like you're not alone. But within each community, there are certain community leaders. If we think about church groups, there's always the preacher or the priest. If we look at our families, we may think the higher position as the elders, or maybe your parents. Those are people that we tend to look for guidance and wisdom, especially in certain complex issues in life.
But in the age of technology that we're living now, I would even say that online communities are very beneficial as well. And within each online community, there's always some kind of influencer or somebody that everyone expects to be at the top of that social hierarchy. And again, just like the preacher, or just like our family members, they can give these bigger perspectives in life that may speak directly to our own issues. Suggestions and solutions that we had never thought of before. Two minds are better than one, as the saying goes. However, sometimes we get into groups and we can overstay our welcome.
Part 2: Leaving the Group [06:21]
Which brings me to part two. Now when I say overstaying our welcome, I mean when we feel like something needs to change. Every group may have a shared belief, may have certain rituals or traditions, let's think church groups, families whenever it comes to holidays. And a lot of us, when we're in certain communities and we have certain identities about us, we feel compelled to follow these traditions, follow these rules, because again, it makes us feel like we are sharing in that sense of connection. But sometimes we may come to the realization that we don't quite connect with the group the same way we did. It may just simply be because we're moving into a different transition in our life. Or, it may be because we realize that the group is not as beneficial as we once thought.
Let's talk about church for a second, spirituality. We may have begun to change our minds about certain spiritual beliefs that we used to have. Maybe we've explored the world a little bit more, read a couple of more books. Kind of felt like, “Mmm, this doesn't really fit with what I believe in anymore.” Or you realize that there are certain restrictions, because I know that certain churches and certain spiritual beliefs can be very restrictive, especially in the religion of Christianity.
And so for certain people, they may not jive with that anymore, but there's a fear of leaving the church, that fear of leaving the group because you're afraid of being chastised, you're afraid of being criticized, and you're afraid of being abandoned again. Who wants to be left out alone after you've gone through this intense period of isolation and trying to figure out what am I supposed to do?
Maybe you actually like the preacher, but there's some kind of toxic traits going on in the church, or you simply realize that the preacher is not exactly who you thought they were. Or they may not have the same mindset that you thought they did. And maybe your mindset have changed as well. That's fine. Again, life is about change. But when we feel that moment that something has to change, we either we want to change or we want to implement some kind of change, some people will not speak up. Because again, that fear of being chastised, criticized, abandoned, kicked out. But the more that we stall a decision to change, the more we sit still in an environment that we feel is no longer conducive to us, the more that we stall our own sense of discovery, our own sense of healing within our life, and our own sense of change and maturity.
And this doesn't just happen in church groups. I know there's studies or articles out there about like Millennials leaving the church. I think I've referenced this before. And that's because a lot of us Millennials and younger generations are finding different forms of spirituality that we actually resonate with us more than what was taught to us by our families. However, leaving a religion can be very difficult. It can be a period of loss, which can trigger another period of, “Okay, what do I do next?”
And this just can't happen with spirituality. Let's talk about family, another very intense group that can push all our buttons with a single word. Some of us have the unfortunate experience of being in toxic families or coming from families with a very toxic mindset, very toxic behaviors that are very damaging and harmful to us, right? Some people, especially during the holidays, will bite their tongue and go back to their very abusive and toxic family just to, again, keep that peace, save face, and not feel a sense of burden and not feel a sense of abandonment. But that also compromises your sense of peace and serenity.
I'm actually speaking from experience from this, but I don't speak to certain people in my family simply because I want to protect my own sense of peace. I want to protect my own sense of sanity. I want to protect my own journey in my healing. Some people will continue to do certain actions and certain behaviors because, “Well, my grandmother always did it, or the old folks always said to do this. My family would be really mad if I went this route instead.”
But we have to remember that the community, our family, doesn't rule 100% of our life. They can't live our life for us. And when you're feeling very, like, lost in life and trying to figure out what the next move is, our family, our church, our sense of community, including the online communities, they can give us advice, they can give us suggestions, but they can't quite give us the complete answer to how to live our life.
Why? Because of our personality. Not everybody has the same personality, not everybody has the same interests, and each one of us have our own different paths in life that we take.
Part 3: Discovering Yourself [11:03]
And this brings me to part three, our last and final part, which is about discovering yourself. I feel like in a way, this whole Life Journey series that I've started is about us being on the path to self discovery. Understanding the world around us, gaining more perspective in our environment, in our life, in what we want to do and how we behave and why.
And there are many tools out there. Of course, there's psychology. You can always go through any kind of behavioral psychology. Personally speaking, some of my favorite books that I've read have been on healing from family trauma, healing from childhood trauma. And through those books, I've gained a lot of perspective, a lot of healing that I would not have understood and gone through had I not, again, read those books, had I not chosen my own path and chosen to do certain things that no one in my family had ever done, actually dive into generational trauma, which is a thing that I think many people need to take into consideration when trying to work on your own mental health.
So the psychological route is always a great route for a lot of people, especially in today's time and age, when mental health is being talked about so openly and we have plenty of resources now, finally, that are readily available. But there's also the side of spirituality. For some people, when we look at, you know, the more esoteric stuff, there's astrology, which is kind of looking at the date around that you were born and how the planets align. And we'll talk more about that in this podcast. I understand why people rag on it and people were like, Oh, this is just a lot of frou frou. But again, spirituality is very personal. And I definitely put astrology under spirituality just because of the esoteric nature of it.
But we can go to something that's a little bit more accepted and talk about personality typography. So think the Enneagram, Myers Briggs System, which I personally like. Programs and modalities that teach you more about your personality and, again, why you may act the way you act with some psychological reasoning behind it. As a matter of fact, one of my favorite books, another one of my favorite books, is called The Energy Profiling System, which is by this teacher named Carol Tuttle. I read her books a very long time ago, and just like when I read the books on like childhood trauma and a lot of other traumas that I have experienced, her books really delved into certain behaviors that I personally exhibit that had always been shamed for. Being a very introverted person, seeing the world a certain way, being somewhat critical, but at the same time being a deep thinker, other things that I was either criticized for or I criticized myself for. And realizing that, wait a minute, wait a minute. The things that I've been doing haven't been wrong. It's just the way that my brain thinks and the way that I show up in the world. And that brought a lot of self acceptance and healing.
And that is what discovering yourself is all about. Self acceptance, healing, and gaining serenity. But through all of this advice that you may get, whether it's through the sense of community, you know, your church group, your family, your friends, your online communities. Or whether it's through certain books that you read. One thing that we have to use is a sense of discernment.
I feel like when we are at a certain vulnerable phase in our life, we may take in information from someone we admire, someone we see as a leader, someone we see as a mentor and believe that everything they say is a hundred percent fact and a hundred percent applies to our life. That is not true though. Some information that may come from other people, these mentors, may be old information that worked when they were your age, but are no longer attainable anymore. They're no longer relevant to today's time. The technology is different. Society's standards are different. And we always have to take that into consideration.
But it is good to get advice, different opinions, different perspectives, but to use discernment for what matters to us and what resonates for us. Change can be difficult. The process of self discovery can be very painful. But on the other end of that pain is healing, understanding, serenity, and self acceptance. Some people may never get to this point because of those fears of abandonment, that fears of criticism, that fear of failure. But if we don't voluntarily go through it, life will push us to the point where we have no other choice but to go through it.
Conclusion [15:47]
So to wrap this up, it is always great to seek support from a group that has our shared interests, experiences, and it can be valuable to help us heal from whatever issues that we're having and getting a new perspective in life. But we must use discernment whenever taking in new information from other people and to know when to pivot out of whatever group that we're in. Take whatever information that resonates with you and leave out all the rest. Because only you can know what is best for you.
Change can be painful, but life is about change. Self discovery can be painful, but on the other side of that pain is healing, self acceptance, and serenity. This road to change and self discovery doesn't always have to be painful. It can also be a sense of excitement, a sense of release. Stay tuned for the next episode, which is on the concept of love, which is related to this concept of community and the support we gain from others.
Thank you for listening to this episode. If you're watching on YouTube, be sure to leave me a comment and subscribe for more. For those of you listening through a podcast app, make sure you subscribe and leave me a review. Click the link in the show notes or head on over to merwinmccrady. com to leave me a comment there.
Thank you so much and I'll see you in the next one.
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