I finished a long day of seeing clients recently and felt a tongue in my belly and a gut in my throat. My insides were muddled with nausea and displacement—tell-tale signs for me of grief and confusion, two of my least favorite emotions. I had been in one dark-walled, low-ceiling room all day, in front of a computer screen, while the emotions of other people welled up and over and across the cables that separated us. All of them—like me—had been recently very sick, or were afraid of being very sick. And because my astrological and tarot readings are less about fortune-telling and more about alchemizing the primary material of the psyche into the stuff of creativity, action, and purpose, I spent a lot of time that day in a counselor role that, years ago, I had never foreseen myself playing.
I value and am grateful for this role a lot. It turns out I’m good at being a therapist, even if I’ve come to it through literature, personal experience, and spiritual practice rather than through traditional training in social work or psychology. But because my path to counseling has been unconventional, (Uranian, we might call it, in the language of astrology, The Fool’s path, in the language of tarot), I’m missing some of the accepted paradigmatic frameworks (never mind institutional) that could help me quickly and accurately identify moments of difficulty and stress while acting as an occult therapist, as I’ve come to call this new job in my head. What was going on with the nausea after seeing my clients, for example? The sensational perplexity? Did I just need to get out of the house?
Yes, I needed to get out of the house, I decided, so I took myself up to Fortune’s Cove, a beautiful, if strenuous hike along a mountain ridge just a few miles away from my home. It was a little before five p.m., the air was cool and blue. The sun drifted to rest on the shoulders of two-hundred-year old yellow tulip poplars, my legs burned like legs should burn on uphill switchbacks. I had my headphones; I considered listening to a podcast, but the thought of more conversation, the hum of electrical processes in my ears set the tongue going again in my stomach. Nope. All of the sense doors of my body wanted to slow down, open up, disperse. Oh, right. I knew that want.
I’ve been meditating for a half-an-hour to bookend each of my days; a strict practice that I began at the end of January, following the Buddhist meditation maps laid out in Daniel Ingram’s Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha in conjunction with the heart-centering prayer of the contemplative Catholic tradition, as described by Father Thomas Keating’s work. The practice has had a lot of benefits (a lot of small horrors, too), not the least of which is to intercept that desire for dispersal coming on and rather immediately follow through with sitting myself down on a cushion, or the ground, or in a blank space in my mind to welcome its wash.
At Fortune’s Cove, I stopped climbing the trail. I sat in the middle of the mountain, on the path, in the dirt. I closed my eyes. I let a kind of blueness explode into view on the backs of my eyelids, a sense of the mountain’s being moving into my face through those lids. Whatever it is I called my “body” in that moment—tingling stomach, thoughts, a need to pee, my breath—fled outwards, or tried to. My skin jumped and flooded, not unpleasantly so much as in a way that made it seem like it wasn’t skin. Lots of somatic practitioners talk about the flesh as what definitively demarcates internal and external reality, but through my baby months of syncretic Buddhist meditation, I’ve begun to understand the skin’s lazy permanence, just like everything else.
The emotions of the day conveyed up and out on the blues—my clients’ fears, my fears, my grief, my baby being cut out of my body, the cancer being cut out of my body, once, twice, four years stretched out into thin survival mode—how becoming a mother had opened every impossible door at the same time, the humiliation of every angle upon which I’d constructed my sense of self.
Oh! I got it, then, something I’d gotten before, something I have to sit down and get quiet to get, over and over again: I had to say “yes” to my own suffering for a minute. I had to let it wash through me, to feel the discomfort of how it has changed me and was still changing me. I noticed wetness on my face—tears—at the exact moment a red pileated woodpecker began keening. I opened my eyes, found the bird through the trees. We wept together for awhile. The sun went down; I hugged with cathartic abandon the last tulip poplar on the way down the mountain.
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Later, I’d come home and learn about “counter-transference,” a process by which a therapist finds herself projecting her primary material onto her clients. Counter-transference has its problems, but ultimately can be a helpful paradigm as it underscores how good therapy works not so much as a process of scientific hierarchy where one person helps another by measuring behavior and offering adjustments but instead as a mercurial undertaking where both people participate in bringing truth to the surface in playful, direct, and symbolic ways.
Counter-transference is related to but opposite the concept of transference, which is the notion that a client cannot change their lives, minds, or hearts in therapy without establishing enough trust in and friendliness with their therapist that they feel comfortable projecting the authority they used to afford to other people (mom, dad, ex-partner, former friend) onto the therapist herself. This enables the client to experience healing around past wounds as the therapist offers acceptance, validation, kindness, and empathy in places where clients once experienced rejection, hurt, indifference, and abuse. Or, in the words of Duncan Barford, as he considers the effects of psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion’s writing on the field: “truth in therapy isn’t so much about the therapist telling us something so much as it is about the therapist becoming something, embodying something for us that brings truth into being in an immediate and direct way.”
Counter-transference is when clients perform this role, powerfully, for therapist, too. Counter-transference is what was happening for me, when I felt sick after work. My clients that day had all been expressing a deep and necessary need for their grief around illness to be witnessed, validated, and held. It stirred up emotions in me that, later, my meditation practice helped me to comprehend and release about the ways in which I often deny those needs in my own life, '“post” cancer journey. I had been absent from myself, and my presence with my clients revealed how terrible and disingenuous it has felt recently to rush through the responsibilities of daily life while mostly pretending like the nesting-doll tragedies of the last four years of my life didn’t happen.
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The need to let go of the pretense around old hurts as a way forward into risk, beginning again, and the “other” side of whatever has scarred you, is very much spoken to by the dynamic between the Three of Air and the reversed Fool, our cards for March. I’ve been pulling from the Herbcrafter’s Tarot Deck recently, as an homage to the work I’ve been doing with the Elderberry Apothecary in Charlottesville, and as a necessary balance to the strain of entering the mind so religiously through meditation and counseling at the moment. I love this deck, I’ve realized, because it grounds the cards in the contact power of the plant world, reminding us that spirit and conversation come to us through the dirt of the world just as much as it does through intellectual or artistic endeavor. In esoteric tarot, the Three of Swords focuses on the pain of the heart—the need to remove the wounding implement and get on with life. But in the Herbcrafter deck, the Three of Air reminds us that “healing from grief takes time” just in the way that echinacea, a plant that increases resistance to infection and helps strengthen the body, grows in due course.
Can the processes of transference and counter-transference happen not just between two humans but also with the natural world? My hope, guided by The Fool, is that this is so, that the mind can learn to see itself in and be changed by a mountain, the name of the mountain, a woodpecker, a woodpecker’s song. Dandelions are weeds, for example, but they’re also heart-openers. This way of being with our environment offers a different inroad into counseling ourselves and others. It’s a more circuitous route into emotional and ethical skill. The Fool’s reversal for March shows us that this path to self-knowledge is not without its risks, including meaningless, animistic language that doesn’t reach people, a too-narrow focus on the hyper-local, and a too-vague sense of our moral responsibilities as genocide kills, displaces, and starves the Palestinian people.
At their best, though, the Three of Air and The Fool help to teach us, as Bett Williams writes in the The Wild Kindness, where our position in the collection has been injured, and what to do about that. My friend
recently gifted me a copy of Williams’ book; the memoir arrived in my mailbox the same day I wept in the woods.I read The Wild Kindness in a night, pulled into Williams’ entheogenic journey of spiritual awakening and therapeutic healing by the sheer art of her writing, but also because she was saying the exact things I had myself experienced in the mountains only hours before: “I learned how to literally suck the sickness out of my body and spit it out.” Williams is writing about mushrooms, but, not so much into psychedelics myself, I read her as writing about faith, writing about enlightenment as something that happens sat down in the dirt as much as anywhere else. In this way, a text can invoke transference and counter-transference, as something that, like nature, magic, and therapy, "showed me the resentments to which I was clinging and helped me to let them go.”
Wishing you truth, freedom, and a really good time in March.
Below are bibliomantic tarotscopes for March, using Bett Williams’ The Wild Kindness, the last book that reminded me of how heartache wends its way into self-knowledge, if we give it time, space, quiet, and an object upon which to transfer its meaning. The way I do bibliomancy is to use the divined quotes as a provocation to stir up some feeling, or some argument within myself. It’s not about whether I agree with these assertions, it’s more about what does it point me toward that I might need to understand, to develop understanding around? My own suggestions for the month follow the Wild Kindness quote. I’m not usually a “read for your big three!!” kind of horoscope writer, but we’re in Pisces season, which is about unitive experience, so I wrote these tarotscopes with the hope that you’ll find some whole truth nestled into reading for your rising, sun, and moon signs together this month!
Pisces Rising: "How I wish I knew a song to sing to you, mountain. You spoke to me and I did not answer back. ‘Stare at something long enough it becomes interesting,’ wrote Flaubert.” I almost wrote a whole different essay for you, dear Pisces, on the impossibility of being on the “other” side of sickness. Then I realized you know this better than I do, as wonderful as you are at parsing the falsehoods of duality. How can you answer the songs of healing directed at you this month, however much you know that “healing” is a construct? Understanding the difference between “looking” and “seeing” will also help you understand how to access help and support from other people in the last week of the month without being too ruthless about the process.