00:00:00 Episode Preview

00:00:24 Opening

00:01:00 Introduction

00:02:10 Interview Begins with Amanda Yates Garcia

00:02:38 How the Scorpio Sign Relates to the Death Tarot Card

00:04:16 Vulnerability in Sharing Grief

00:12:20 Living a Life of Beauty and Integrity in a World Full of Death

00:15:23 The Cycle of Death and Rebirth

00:26:53 Being Powerless in the Presence of Death

00:27:32 New Life Being Born From Death

00:35:06 AD – Join our Tarot for Alchemy Course https://learntarot.mysticmondays.com/

00:37:15 Directing Change Through Power and Balancing Control With Surrender

00:41:51 Omne Trium Perfectum – The Threefold Law

00:52:38 How to Frame a Question in Tarot

00:55:08 We Need Someone to Believe in Us, More Than We Believe in Ourselves

01:02:05 Learning From Challenges and Guiding Others

01:04:22 What is your Sun, Moon, and Rising Signs?

01:05:35 What Advice Would You Give to Your Younger Self?

01:06:41 How Would You Define Everyday Magic?

01:07:46 What Are Your Favorite Rituals?

01:09:02 What Are You Looking Forward to in the Near Future?

01:09:45 Collective Reading from the Motherpeace Tarot Deck by Amanda Yates Garcia

01:13:35 Weighing the Scales with the Justice Card

01:17:10 Closing Statements

01:19:03 End of Episode – Make Sure to Leave a Podcast Review!

01:20:11 End Card

Welcome to the GRACED Podcast! A space for everyday magic for your everyday life. We do this through rituals, aligning yourself to your soul’s purpose, and creating Alchemy to heal our mind, body, and spirits so that you can bring in more love and joy, manifest your desires, and believe in your dreams.

Listen and watch over at graceduong.com/podcast and on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify, Instagram, TikTok and all the places you can find me on social media.

Now let’s dive into today’s episode.

💖 Introduction

Grace: Welcome to the GRACED Podcast, a space where we talk about everyday magic for your everyday life.

Today’s guest is Amanda Yates Garcia, who is known as a writer, witch, and Oracle of Los Angeles. She’s also the host of the Between the Worlds podcast, which I was fortunate enough to be a guest on to talk about the Six of Wands Tarot card.

Today we talk about themes of the Death Tarot card and what death can mean on all different levels. From losing a loved one, to losing a pet, to the changing seasons. Death is a natural part of life, but often is attached to so much fear. We talk about the cycle of death and rebirth and how we can go through our own death and rebirth process in our own lives representing the different stages of life that we’re in, like the phoenix rising out of the ashes.

And we’re also doing a giveaway of Amanda’s book, initiated Memoir of a Witch. So make sure to check that out over on our socials, which is linked in this video description.

Now let’s dive into this episode.

✨ Interview Begins with Amanda Yates Garcia

Grace: Hi, Amanda, welcome to the podcast. So glad you’re here.

Amanda: So happy to be here with you, Grace. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Grace: Yeah, yeah. So I was on your podcast for the Six of Swords episode, and now you’re here for the Death Tarot Card episode. And why I reached out and wanted to have you on for this specific episode is because I knew you’re a Scorpio, which relates to the Death Tarot card.

✨ How the Scorpio Sign Relates to the Death Tarot Card

Grace: And so I was wondering if you as a Scorpio have related to the Death Tarot card in different ways, or how do you in general relate to the Death Tarot card?

Amanda: I feel like Scorpios are medicinal in the sense that being in proximity to a lot of Scorpio energy is transformative. So that doesn’t always benefit the Scorpio.

It’s not like a humble brag. It’s not like, oh, you come into my proximity and are transformed and aren’t I amazing? But it can end up for a Scorpio that people come into your life, your energy acts as a catalyst for their transformation, and then they kind of leave and go on and do their thing, live their best life after this massive transformation that’s occurred because of your energy and your influence.

And all of the signs have different influences and different medicinal properties, but specifically Scorpio. Is a composter and a devourer of poisons in a way. So in that way, I feel that the Scorpio card is related to death because that’s what death is doing, right? It’s composting old forms, breaking them down and making their nutrients available for future use of future generations or future life.

So I feel like that’s one big major aspect of Scorpio and death or that kind of proximity. And of course, Scorpios are known to be very witchy and macabre and all of that, so…

✨ Vulnerability in Sharing Grief

Grace: Yeah, and death is such a natural part of life, even though. I think it tends to have this negative connotation in earlier today, not planned, but I was recording a Tarot card lesson on the Death card, so I refreshed my memory on the symbolism behind the Death Tarot card in the Rider Waite.

And there are all these figures represented in the death Tarot card. So there’s a bishop or king, there’s a maiden, there’s a child, and death is coming for all of these figures, no matter who you are in society or what you’ve gained in the physical life. Death is coming for you whether you like it or not.

And something that reminds me of is I did remember seeing some of your stories, I think it was probably last year where you very publicly, and thank you so much for sharing yourself so openly, but your cat had passed away and you were sharing your grief with us online. And so I was wondering what that process was like for you.

And obviously having anyone or anything pass away in our lives is a big deal. It’s kind of scary because like when I got my puppy and she’s now seven. So she’s not a puppy anymore, but she’s still a small dog. Sometimes I’ll think to these moments where I’m like, oh my God, what if something happens to her?

Or this happens or whatever. My mind kind of like flashes forward and I’m like, everything’s good right now. I don’t need to worry about that happening. Everything’s fine. She’s healthy, everything’s great. But I feel like with you and what struck me about those moments that you shared with us online was that you were so vulnerable in sharing that grief process.

And I feel like a lot of the times grief is so hidden. Like it almost has to be a solitary process in which you’re either grieving alone, but I think grief is often felt more than we realize.

Amanda: Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. So like even thinking about it now, I get a lot of emotion comes up because my little cat, his name was Pagan, I had for 11 years since she was just, I think six months old.

And we just bonded instantaneously. So it was so devastating to lose her partially because as you’ve read my book and everything, I have a very complicated family life, and often complicated family life means that you later have complicated relationship.

And my relationship with Pagan was very uncomplicated and like purely loving and very easy and simple. And. Just always there in this like constant. And so I’ve had other people, like family members for instance, that I’ve lost that have not impacted me at all in the same way because like, first of all, they weren’t present in my life.

Like maybe they were present in my life as children when I was a child, but then I hardly spoke to them as I got older. But like Pagan, like slept in my arms every night. So our animal companions are just as important to us. I know that a lot of people treat an animal as if they’re somehow not as intimate as a relationship, but for some of us it’s much easier to be intimate with animals because we don’t have that same fear of betrayal or criticism or any of the other things that we’re worried about with maybe our family members or our partners, depending on what our life experiences have been.

The Death card alludes to that. Kind of lost sometimes with death. I’ve known a lot of people who’ve had people in their life pass away or go through long illnesses. It turns out Pagan died in my arms unexpectedly, and it was like an agonizing and long process. And one of the things that’s just so gut wrenching and humbling.

About being in proximity with death is that I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I could feel her pain and I could see it happening. Just kind of the agony she was going through and I couldn’t wrench her back out of it. There was nothing I could do. I was powerless to prevent that change from occurring.

And another friend of mine, Leah Garza, you might know her, she does like de-colonial spiritualities and she was telling me once about her father and how he was on his deathbed in the hospital and she was sitting by the bed and she realized, I’m powerless to prevent this stuff from happening. There’s nothing I can do to stop this from occurring.

So death is this hugely humbling force because we can have all sorts of will about what we want to see happen. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a king or a bishop or a knight or a great lady is in the Rider Waite common Smith. Tarot card, you can beg, you can plead, you can offer all your money and it doesn’t matter because there’s a force that’s larger than you.

And so what you have to do is surrender. Like you have to surrender everything. And that is also kind of Scorpio relationship is Scorpio rules the eighth house. The eighth house is that which you can’t take with you, which is everything basically like the eighth house is all that’s kind of taken from you or is beyond your control.

So there’s a radical leap of faith that’s required that every being that is ever lived has gone through this process. And it really asks you to contemplate whether or not you believe in the goodness of the universe when you see that all the things that are so dear are taken, are changed or transformed.

They don’t last forever. A lot of the time you’ll hear this aphorism attached to Scorpio and I think also to the Death card, which is given the fact that you’re going to die, how do you wanna live? And I think that also. Is something good to remember When the Death card comes up, when the Death card comes up, massive deep change is on its way, and that change will probably involve some kind of major loss.

But that loss doesn’t have to be as agonizing as like a personal, as someone’s death in your life. There’s millions of kinds of loss, infinite kinds, but it’s a change that’s unstoppable. There’s nothing you can do to prevent it. The seed has already started to happen. In Pagan’s case, it turned out that she had a, I believe it was a brain tumor, and I didn’t know, it wasn’t visible.

Who knows how long she had it, but by the time I realized it, there was nothing that could be done. And a lot of the time when death comes up in Tarot, it’s like announcing that a change has started long ago, that that change has now become so immense that the momentum of it is already moving and there’s nothing that can be done to turn it back.

And so you have to just surrender and let go and trust that the life force knows what it’s doing. Because in the universe change knows how to do it. You know, that’s one of the beautiful things about death is that whoever is dying the death knows how to do it. You don’t have to figure it out.

All you have to do is surrender to it, and then it does it on its own. So it also gives an immense value to life. It gives an immense value to the time that I had with her wasn’t infinite. I didn’t get forever with her, and her passing really taught me. In a way to really cherish the relationships that I have with the other people in my life and that I don’t get forever with them.

And given that I’m going to die and that everybody that I know is going to die and that everything that is familiar to me is going to change and transform beyond recognition. How do I wanna live in this moment? And often it will make you make different choices so we can be grateful when the Death card comes up because it really is saying, value the life that you have right now.

Make the choice. Reach out to the person. Say the thing that you need to say and your life is changing. See if you can surrender to the change and be curious about what comes next.

✨ Living a Life of Beauty and Integrity in a World Full of Death

Grace: Absolutely. That reminds me of the Wheel of Fortune is number 10 in the Major Arcana and Death is number 13. And so I kind of feel like with the Wheel of Fortune, it’s change is coming and it’s the initiation of change. And I do wanna talk about your book, which is titled Initiated and the Power of Initiation. But I feel like with the Wheel of Fortune, it’s coming into that initiation, also, setting that intention of, let’s say you wanna manifest something new into your life and something old has to die in order for that to emerge.

And I just want to also acknowledge you and your process. I feel like you have been through so many types of initiations in your life, and with that comes a birthing process, but there’s also a death process that’s involved in that. And on the back of your book, you pose a question, is it possible to live a life of beauty and integrity in a world that feels like it’s dying?

And I’d love for you to clarify what that means.

Amanda: Yeah. So, a lot of my work is rooted in that question, which is basically like, how do we live in an enchanted way, in a capitalist world? And there’s a theorist, a writer, an academic, Achille Mbembe, who came up with the idea of the Necrostate, which necro meaning death.

And this idea that capitalism is essentially a death cult, and the death cult of capitalism is not the same as how Pagans would understand death, because Pagans don’t really understand death as death as an end. Death is life. It allows for change, it allows for rebirth, it allows for regrowth. But the Necrostate that Mbembe is talking about is this extraction and exhaustion unto death.

This constant devouring of all that is alive and beautiful and intimate and interrelated and connected. And it’s about severing those connections. And I think we have to accept that at this point, that Necroculture has spread across the entire planet. There’s nowhere that we can go to escape from capitalism.

And so given that we are living in this culture that fetishizes death and destruction and extraction, and the severing of life’s interrelatedness, how do we live? What do we do? How can we live a life and integrity and beauty within that? I feel like I’m, I’ve kind of dedicated my life to trying to answer that question for myself and share what I find with other people, with my community, I guess you could say.

✨ The Cycle of Death and Rebirth

Amanda: I wonder what you think. Like, it’s interesting that you have asked that question because nobody’s ever asked me that before and I’ve been asked a lot of questions in my day, so I’m interested in what attracted you to that question.

Grace: Well, this is the Death Tarot Card episode. And I feel like there’s a beautiful contrast in the way you pose that question, where in death there’s the decomposition of a structure as you’ve mentioned, and that can be quite foul.

Like if you think about trash and you think about flies and all the things that go into the decomposition process, it can be quite ugly. But I think that there is a beauty if you choose to see it in the death and rebirth process. And it’s a very natural cycle that we go through all the time, whether it’s in a very like light to abstract way.

We go to sleep every night and we wake up every morning. And that could be seen as a death and rebirth process in some ways. And another death and rebirth process that we see all the time is with seasons. So when we go into the fall and the leaves start dying off the branches of trees and all plant life in the winter is essentially dead and then reborn in the spring. And that’s a natural cycle that we see all the time and our familiar with.

But I think in the context of our emotional connection to something, we’re so used to the seasons changing. So it might not affect us to the extent of like Pagan dying in your arms. Like that’s a hugely traumatizing thing, honestly, to go through.

And thank you so much for sharing so openly with us, because I think with vulnerable things like that, like a lot of people go through it, but may not be comfortable sharing what death has been like in their lives. It’s hugely impactful in a lot of ways. And it reminds me of experiencing a huge death in our family where my grandfather had passed, and I think that changed a lot of how our family shows up because he was a staple figure on my mom’s side.

But I also feel like in terms of the traditional values that he held. Dear to his heart, like I almost felt like some of those more restrictive ideas also died when he passed as well. So recently I went to my cousin’s baby shower and it just felt like an exciting time because quite literally new life is being born in this family.

Whereas I felt like our family had been grieving in various ways and in our own individual ways of my grandfather’s passing. And it wasn’t a sudden death or anything like that because he passed of illness and old age mostly. So it wasn’t surprising, but still it does impact like the whole structure when someone passes away.

I think on many skills. I mentioned death in the way where we might experience it on a day-to-day basis or on a seasonal basis or on a generational or decade like basis. In terms of a person’s life cycle within a family, and in that way, when we zoom out and we look at death and we look at the various ways we might experience it, I think it just depends on our willingness to see it, if that makes sense.

But I also think that in terms of beauty and integrity, that we’re almost desensitized to death because of the way we’re interacting with it. Like let’s say violent video games, or we see death all the time in the news. So that might not impact us in quite the same way, if it was like a personal connection.

Amanda: Yeah, I mean, it goes back to what I was speaking to about the Necroculture and the irony of the Necroculture, which is that capitalism is obsessed with death and also the mirror image of that, which is preserving eternal life or trying to prevent death from happening or trying to obscure it from view.

So on one hand. We’re in a culture that sees death everywhere, like with violent video games or on the news or in Palestine, or in the Sudan or wherever, across the world in second grade classrooms. And yet we’re constantly also kind of ignoring it or turning it into this wallpaper. And then simultaneously, there’s a constant desire to try and arrest the death process from happening.

So our bread doesn’t rot, our food doesn’t rot. Like the people who are like billionaires are trying to prevent themselves from ever dying, from ever aging. And so what the attempt there is to try and freeze. The moment is to say, okay, we’re gonna be stay here in this one place. And that is in itself this sort of negative aspect of death, which actually doesn’t really exist and isn’t really possible.

So it’s like marshaling all of our energy to prevent this change or transformation from happening. And I really love what you were saying about your grandfather and as treasured as he was, how he was a person of another time, right? And we can see that now with the global politics, or specifically in the United States of the elders kind of ruling and saying like, we insist on keeping our ideals.

Preserved for everyone and this new way of life and this new life force coming, that’s saying like, that’s not how we wanna do this. And evolution requires death and evolution is adaptation to the changing web of interaction in our environment. Like the weather changes, the landscape changes, the glaciers melt, and the animals, the life that exists needs to adapt to that.

Otherwise it can’t function, it can’t live. But the old ways have to die in order for this new life to emerge. The animal that lived on the Savannah, if the Savannah no longer exists. Then they can’t function in that new environment. So animals have to adapt to be able to live in the desert or whatever exists there now.

And the same is really true in our lives. So when the Death card comes up, it’s saying something has changed, the environment has changed to such a degree that it requires a new way of being to emerge. And you know, you and I weren’t alive when your grandfather was young, so we don’t know if maybe the way that they, people of his generation existed, maybe they needed to exist that way.

We don’t know what was really going on at that time. But we do know, like we are in the midst of this turning of the soil and that those old parts are decomposing and those old worldviews are decomposing and need to be made useful or made available. To new forms, new iterations, new ways of being. So yeah, I’m really inspired by what you’re saying around that process about letting as treasured as the old ways were letting them move on and letting them kind of reemerge.

For me, one of the ways that I really learn about Tarot is through the cards of the year. You know, we all have our own personal cards of the year, and then there’s the Collective Cards of the year, and I always think of my personal card of the year as like a class that I’m taking. I think of the Soul Card as like our mystery school in this lifetime.

So I’m in the High Priestess Mystery School and then every year in order to graduate, in order to get that degree in your mystery school or receive that initiation, you have to take these specific classes that are like independent studies, it’s just you and your teacher. And so last year was my Death card year, and I always feel that I really learn so much about the cards through having them as my card of the year, because then I get to study with them for a whole year rather than just like pulling it in the morning for your reading for the day. But I get to really be intimate and understand what the card is saying from a whole new level and perspective.

And so last year, one of the major changes that happened for me was. I started this PhD program and it’s partially challenging because I also still have my business on my podcast and clients that I’m seeing, and so I was already very busy, but PhD is taking it to a whole new level.

And also the labor is just really challenging. The reading is really challenging, the essays are really challenging. It’s not an easy process at all. And I was very scared going into it and never was like completely like, yes, this is 100% what I wanna do. But I had been thinking about it for so long and it just seemed like an inevitable course of action that I’m not getting any younger.

So I had to kind of just take the plunge and what it really taught me was the Death card isn’t just about people that we might lose, or companion animals that we might lose. It’s also about ways of life, times in our life. And PhD is such a transformative process in your mind. It really like reorganizes your mind and kind of once you do it, you can’t undo it and you don’t always know that this is what you want.

You’re fighting for me anyway, an institution as well because you’re kind of being institutionalized, but your mind’s also being expanded at the same time and it’s so demanding. It’s kind of like… I mean, I don’t know. I don’t have a child. I’m a childless cat lady for sure. But it feels like having a child because it’s so immersive.

Yeah. So that was one of the things that I understood about the Death card is like the old me that existed that I knew that I was familiar with before I started this program, left the building. She’s not there. And so the process of starting this program has really been a process of decomposition.

When I have a client who gets the Death card, I often invite them to consider how they want to engage in the death process in their life with this like radical change, whatever is happening a lot of the time, our first impulse is to engage in heroic measures to keep whatever the old way was alive. Whether it’s a relationship or a job that you loved or whatever, which is you’re kind of like really working extra hard to preserve your old identity.

Or people who get the Death card in relation to relationships. And the heroic measure is engaging in a relationship where you have to do all this work and labor and CPR to keep it alive. And if you stopped giving it a life support, if you pulled that plug, it wouldn’t survive on its own, but it doesn’t have that vital life force anymore.

And so you’re like breathing into it and you’re doing all the, giving it those electric shocks and trying it to keep it alive and revive it. And it’s asking you to let the process happen and you just have to have faith that on the other side of this something new is going to emerge in the natural world, in the biosphere, that something new always does emerge, and it’s usually something that is more suited to the current context.

Sometimes in relationships, that doesn’t necessarily mean like, oh, we must break up, but it sometimes means the form that our relationship has been in can no longer exist because it doesn’t suit the environment anymore. It can’t function in this environment.

✨ Being Powerless in the Presence of Death

Grace: Yeah, definitely.

So that brings me back to when you were talking about your experience with Pagan, and you’ve mentioned the word powerlessness when describing that experience and all of the figures in the Rider Waite Tarot experiencing powerlessness and a loss of control. And then you were talking about, is it called Neo? What is it called?

Amanda: Necro. Necroculture and Necropolitics.

Grace: Necroculture.

Amanda: Necro meaning death. Yeah. Like, have you ever heard of that word? Like a necropolis, like those old ancient cities of the dead. Necro means death. So yeah. Necroculture, Necropolitics, Necrostate.

✨ New Life Being Born From Death

Grace: Yeah. And I find it interesting because you mentioned for example, like billionaires trying to stay younger and trying to freeze this moment.

And in a lot of ways, like people trying to control the outcome of a situation that they can’t really control, which is about gaining power. And I think that’s seen a lot in a capitalism with taking advantage of certain situations or people or whatever it is to gain a certain sense of power. In a sense, when we’re dealing with a Death card, and you mentioned surrender, it’s also about letting go of power and this idea of power and what we have to do to gain power, so to speak.

Because I feel like that’s very much a thing that we all sort of attain to in the pursuit of ourselves. Whether it’s the pursuit of our own power when, let’s say education like you’re pursuing, you’re a PhD, and that in itself is a pursuance of your own personal power in knowledge and your own identity.

But what I also heard is that to pursue this PhD, there was a shedding of an old identity that had to be released. So in a sense, you also went through a death process in who you thought yourself to be and who you are becoming. And that in itself is like a death process. And just even how you’re thinking about yourself.

And you mentioned it was your death. Was it your death soul card or your death personal card? The card of the year. Okay. Your personal card of the year. So it seemed like death as a theme, like Hagan had passed you. Went on and pursued your PhD and I guess released some maybe identity things and you can let me know if that sounds correct.

And as a theme, did you also feel like New Life was born even though you were going through your personal Tarot card of the year, the Death card?

Amanda: Well, so much is coming up for me around what you’re just saying and this question, because I’m thinking a lot about Pluto and the myth of Persephone and like what power is.

I’m also thinking about Adrian Marie Brown and her constant refrain around Octavia Butler’s shaping change. Well, I think magic is shaping change. That’s a common way of thinking about. Magic is causing transformation at will. And when I think of witchcraft, which is very Scorpio, very eighth house, very Death card, it’s about recognizing that change is inevitable.

It’s always happening. In other words, we live inside of death because death is change is transformation. We live inside a state of constant rebirth. So magic is being able to direct or move with that change, and at least from the perspective of a witch. Whereas there’s this kind of ne culture, which is all about trying to freeze that change or prevent that change from happening, prevent the wealth from being distributed, right?

It’s like a hoarding mentality of like, we want to capture this. We want to make sure it never goes anywhere. It never changes, it never does anything else, but besides what I wanna do and how I want to control it. And so to really resonate with the Death card is to be able to be with the changes as it happens.

To be awake for your own death. In other words, as you move into the next iteration of your life and in Paganism, there is no death because the energies just get dispersed and move into new forms. Like there’s no matter is neither created or destroyed it, it shifts into new forms. It’s like being awake for your death so that you can choose the next incarnation of your life force within your own life, rather than just being dominated or controlled by it.

It’s about working with and collaborating with the energy. And then in addition, I’m thinking about the word Pluto is a euphemism. It means the Wealthy One. So Pluto is the God of the underworld. Pluto is the ruler of the dead or the King of the Dead. And he is known as the Wealthy One because, well, first of all, because the Greeks didn’t want to say his name because the idea was that, you know, when you say God’s name, you’re invoking them.

When you tell the myth, you’re invoking that God. And so they, so essentially you are making contact with that God just by saying its name. So they would refer to Pluto as the Wealthy One, so that they didn’t actually have to say his name and of course. Persephone is the goddess of the underworld. She’s the reason for the seasons in that like she as a child was abducted from the meadow in her youth and taken by the Wealthy One, by Pluto, by Hades, into the underworld where she eventually becomes it’s queen, and then she reemerges from the underworld. And that’s what brings the spring, right? So when we’re talking about Pluto, we’re talking about these very powerful and ex absorbable forces, like the force of the seasons, the force of life and death.

And he’s referred to as a Wealthy One because truly all power and wealth comes from the underworld. And the underworld is first of all, like the imagination, the realm of spirit, also the realm of the ancestors. All the knowledge, and the culture, and the DNA that comes, that creates new life. Also, all the gems, gold, sapphires, rubies, silver, where’s it come from? It comes from underground, comes from the earth.

And then also all the crops that we eat emerge from underground as well. So that realm of death is in fact the realm of abundance and the place from which new life always emerges. And so when, like in astrology, Pluto corresponds also with power. And of course Pluto is a co ruler of Scorpio.

So Scorpio being the sign of death and rebirth and sex as well, which is where the rebirth comes from. So these are all forces. That the force of, for instance, sexuality, which can often feel when we’re experiencing it, it subsumes our will. So it’s not, so for instance, I feel like you’re really crushing on someone and you might tell yourself, no, this person’s the wrong person for me but you could easily abandon everything in your life to go be with this person because it feels like it’s more powerful than you are. Or that desire to procreate, I mean, I don’t have that desire, but I’ve had a lot of friends who have been just delirious with the desire for a child.

You know, like it kind of takes over. It possesses them this desire to bring new life into the world because it’s not really your will, right? It’s coming from another place. So I think anytime we’re engaging with the Death card, we are engaging with this power that is beyond our control. However, the witch or the magical practitioner is learning to work with this power rather than be controlled by it.

So it’s about a co-creative capacity to shape change.

✨ Directing Change Through Power and Balancing Control With Surrender

Grace: Yeah, and I feel like a lot of what you’re saying with death, with this loss of control, there’s a certain amount of trust that all of this is happening for a reason. Time and experience is not necessarily lost just because someone leaves your life or passes or something like that. It’s still very valuable to my life and how I see myself and also gives a new meaning to life and how I pursue my life moving forward, or how I choose to live to my full potential or whatever that means to you.

I pulled a quote that I think really pertains to what you’re saying from your book. And it talks about trust and also using your own power as a witch. But I’m gonna go ahead and read the quote, which says, most often we’ll only look for signs when we are uncertain, when we lack confidence that we are making the right decision, or when we really want something but aren’t sure that we can get it.

When we have everything we want, we stop paying attention to the messages. In Tarot readings, people often wanna keep drawing cards until they get the message they want to hear. But interpreting messages as they come to us, rather than as we wish they were, is the whole point of divination. It’s in the interpretation of signs that we become oracular and it’s enacting with confidence on those messages that we become witches.

And I thought that spoke to what you were just talking about, because I’ve been guilty watching terror readings over and over again on YouTube or pulling cards over and over again for myself, wanting a specific answer. And I think that speaks to control. We wanna somehow control a situation that we may not have control over.

But what I’m hearing from you as a witch, it’s not necessarily about trying to control an outcome. It’s about working with the forces that are present with us in this moment. Being able to direct change in a way by using our own powers, and that comes back into play with, coming into our own power, which has a balance between control and surrender.

Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what you’re talking about is agency. Becoming a witch is about finding your own agency within all of the change, and I love this distinction that you’re making here between control and agency because control in a way, it’s wanting to deny the agency of the rest of creation, right?

It’s wanting to say like, no, I get to decide. I, as an individual get to decide what everything else in my life does. So, for instance, if it’s a relationship reading, a lot of the time people are like, yeah, I wanna pull that card and tell It says that they’re gonna call me, or that we’re gonna be in a relationship together.

And if that doesn’t happen, then I wanna do a spell that makes them love me or whatever. But that’s not really agency, right? That’s like trying to control what other people do and what other people want. Agency, on the other hand, is recognizing the integrity and the will of all of these different factors that are at play and co-creating or feeling like you’re a participant in the way that the energies roll forward.

So that would mean I. Rather than being like, well, I really am into this person and I want them to be into me. Instead, it’s about recognizing like, well, I’m really into this person, and whenever I call them, they don’t call me back, or whenever I am hanging out with them, they just talk about themselves and don’t ask me any questions, but I really want them to ask me questions.

But it’s like, well, finding your agency is kind of recognizing the truth of what you want. I want to be with someone who is curious about my inner world, for instance, and not trying to necessarily control that person so that it has to be that person. But then to say, to really recognize your own power and authority to make choices within that.

And say, I’m going to move towards something that is more in alignment with my needs than trying to control what is there and make it into something else. It’s kind of like saying like, well, I really love poppies, but all I have in my yard are daisies, so I’m gonna try and make these daisies be poppies.

And it’s like, well, that’s not what it is. Why don’t you go find a hobby field, find your agency instead of trying to control what the outcome is for other people.

✨ The Threefold Law

Grace: Yeah, and I feel like that really speaks to being able to tune in within yourself and just recognizing how you feel. Because if you’re like really stuck on how it looks, for example, like maybe this specific person is like your type or whatever, and you’re like, it has to be that person because that’s just what I visualized.

But if you’re not feeling aligned with that person’s actions or whatever, then give yourself permission to tap into how you feel and let that vision change, right? And I think because sometimes a lot of us were taught to ignore our feelings we’re then attached to this idea that it has to be a poppy instead of a daisy.

But maybe a daisy is exactly aligned with how you desire to feel in that moment. The attributes of a daisy are what you need. That comes to my next question. Because you mentioned the Threefold Law in your book, and I feel like that has to do with manifesting. Could you please tell us what that is?

Amanda: Well, the Threefold Law in witchcraft is whatever you do comes back to you three times, and I don’t think that in my book I said that that is a truth, right?

Grace: I don’t believe so.

Amanda: No, I don’t think so. I think because I don’t believe that that is true, right? Like I think if we look around in the world, we can see that many good people have bad things happen to them, and many people who are violent and greedy live their entire lives being able to do that with impunity.

So I don’t think we can say that the Threefold Law is an actual law. I think in my book I speak to the idea that we should live as if it is. Yes, you did say that. I think that we should live as if it is so specifically as a witch, I believe that in order to call in what we desire, and I do believe that witchcraft is all about desire and shifting from fear to desire.

I think that’s the whole point of it. And especially I think of that in relation to the Queen of Wands, who I think is one of the witches of the Tarot, the other two being the Strength card and the High Priestess. So transmuting our fears to desires is a major function of magic and also does relate to Scorpio because Scorpio does rule fear and desire to a large degree.

So that transmutation of like, I’m afraid that if I don’t get this person. Who I’m so attracted to, then I will never be happy in love because this is the only person that I’ve been really attracted to for five years or something like that. That’s the fear. And then we wanna transmute that into a desire.

So the desire in that case would be I desire to be in a partnership with someone who I am truly attracted to, and that gives us like a pathway for action. But fear is like we’re just cowering hoping that the universe delivers us what we want or doesn’t hurt us in some way, but we’re not actually seeing ourselves as agents or like as powerful beings within that.

Yeah, so I believe that witches should create in the world the thing that they want for themselves. So for instance, if they want abundance, which most of us do, that we’re also empowered and in a sense required to create that abundance for all beings. It’s not just for ourself, but that we’re working with the field of energy around us so that everything in your presence is abundant.

So it’s not at the exclusion of, or like the Threefold Law is. The idea that what we create comes back to us. And I think that that is maybe a little bit reductive in terms of like the way that I actually see it happening in the universe. People often talk about karma, and I think people have a very limited and sometimes remedial idea of what karma is like, oh, if you kick a cat, then somebody will come and kick you, or something like that.

And I don’t think that that’s really what karma is. I think it’s more like actions have consequences. And in fact, this really does pertain to the idea of death because I think that we have this idea of death as like the end, and that does not exist. Death does not exist in that way. There is no end of anything, right?

So when we think of, for instance, World War II, you know, there’s D-Day or Missus Day, whatever day it was that World War II ended. We’re like, okay, that’s the end. Celebrate, kiss in the street, ticker tape parade. But World War II didn’t end, because look, even now, right? The consequences of World War II and the Holocaust are playing out in a completely different place in the world.

And World War II began because of wars that started a thousand years beforehand. There is no end. There’s no end to the story, and there’s no end to the consequences of our actions. So in magic and witchcraft, the idea is that we create a field of energy other than a direct chain of causality. So a direct chain of causality would be like, I kick the ball and it rolls down the hill.

But you know, a field of magic would be about like everything. Within this environment is working independently or collaborating to create this atmosphere of abundance, for instance.

Grace: Yeah. So you mentioned World War ii, and that brings me to one of our last questions. In what ways do you think the collective is experiencing the Death card now?

Amanda: Whoa. We are like deep in the death process right now. For all of us who are alive at this moment in this form are really getting an intimate glimpse of the death process because of course, we’re in like this mass extinction event. Thousands or hundreds of species a day are dying. Billions of people across the world are paying for the climate crisis with their lives.

The old way of being is dying, right? The state, as we have known it is completely eroding. What existed 50 years ago or a hundred years ago does not exist in the same way anymore. And so we see a lot of people being very reactionary and clinging to those old traditions, your grandfather’s ideas and ideologies because it’s like, oh, this is what we know and we wanna stay with this.

You know, a marriage is between a man and a woman and we have these things that we clinging to, that we like order our universe, that help us feel like we’re in control, but we, like everything is kind of collapsing now. And that is why it’s really important to remember this idea of shaping change. As Octavia Butler and Adrienne Marie Brown so often talk about the essence of witchcraft, as I’ve said, is like the old forms are collapsing.

We need to stay really connected to our desire rather than our fear in this moment. What is the future we desire to see? What is the future that we desire to create together? In a lot of books about Tarot, when you read about the Death card, they’re going to say, get curious, because it’s so scary to be in relationship to death, right?

Like when, like this massive change that’s beyond our control, like a lot of us are like panicking when we’re using paper towels or whatever. We’re like, I can see the world is collapsing and I feel like there’s nothing that I can do. I can’t prevent this from happening. And it’s an invitation to be curious about how we can shape this change moving forward.

And specifically I think around how we can collaborate together to do this. Like, what is the future that we wanna create together? For me, I want to live in a world where all beings thrive, where I wanna live in a world of care. I want us all to be creating systems and networks of care and distributing resources so that none of us have to worry about medical care.

None of us have to worry about end of life care. None of us have to worry about being unhoused because that doesn’t exist because we all care about each other and we’re all living in this ecosystem of biosphere together. So given that that is the world that I want to live in and that is the desire that I want to move towards, then when every moment I have the option of taking that action, what is the thing that I can do in this moment, in this field of energy and this network around me that creates care?

And that’s enough of a job, right? Because it’s really easy to get overcome with fear and to like surrender to that. And instead, if you’re having an argument with your partner or you’re, you’ve just been laid off from your job or. You’re trying to decide whether or not you should sell your house or your car, or anything that you could think of, it’s really easy to get caught up in that fear and be like, oh my God, like I have to grab onto the nearest thing to me and try and control it.

But what if we surrender and instead think of what is my desire here? What is my desire to create and how can I create that in this moment? I feel like that is what opens the pathway. For our reincarnation. So as we’re on the death bed, life as we know it, we’re surrendering that to the universe, and then desire leads us to rebirth.

So considering what our desire is in that moment, which is often really hard for people, I ask people who are my clients all the time, who come in for a reading, I always begin my readings with a question to see what their question is, because I feel like spirit really responds to your question and often their question.

Is really more of a description of their misery at first. So they’re like, usually, they’ll often start off by saying, well, I’m really confused about this or that, and I feel like things aren’t going my way and I feel like I’m collapsing in some way or feel lost. I feel like disconnected from my creative process or whatever their story is.

And then usually we’ll dwell in that for a moment, and then I’ll ask them, you know, what is their longing in that? Like what are they longing for in the midst of this context of decay? And that is really already starting to lead them out. That’s the torch light that like shows them the pathway out of the underworld is to move towards what you long for.

So you’re even reforming that question when they’re like, I just feel completely disconnected from my creativity and I want to be an artist, but I never make art. And so then if you ask them, I. What they’re longing for in that moment. Then they might say, well, I’m longing for creative connection. I’m longing to commit some time to my creative process, for instance, and that is the door that they need to cross through.

That starts to give them a course of action. If they’re longing to commit to their creative process, then we can ask the Tarot like, what are the steps that you need to take in order to do that?

✨ How to Frame a Question in Tarot

Grace: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like so much of framing the question is important in Tarot and. I feel like a theme of what we talked about today had a lot to do with power and what we give power to.

And so a lot of the questions that it sounds like your clients are asking you are disempowering stories that they’re then relaying to you to almost confirm their disempowering stories instead of asking a question that may place them in a position of power, because that might be uncomfortable at first to really claim like, I really want that desire, like how can this happen for me?

Versus like, these are the reasons why my desires are not possible. Can you confirm that?

Amanda: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of the time it’s when we get kind of mired in that fear. We just don’t know how we need each other. We need community. We need oracles. Like that’s the reason we exist as Oracles is so that we can be like, what about this?

Like, I see you’re caught in this storm of a story about how you are disconnected from your creativity. You can’t find love. You are stuck in a job you don’t like, and you can’t see a way out of this. And I feel like the work of an oracle is to like, throw you a rope, you know? Like it’s to be like, yeah, you, maybe you’re stuck here, but what about your longing?

And that longing is like suddenly a light comes out from behind the clouds and it can illuminate the pathway forward. But that’s why we need each other. Because even for me, like I know this. I say this to people all day, every day. Like, I certainly know the truth of this, but I also need people to remind me.

And in my book, that’s what I talk about a lot, is like the Hecate who is the goddess who is able to move in and out of the underworld and is the Goddess of Witches. One of her symbols is the torch. And the torch is what lights our way out of the underworld when we’re stuck there, right?

It’s the thing that can guide us. And then when we find that torch, which comes to us through other people, it comes to us through inspiration. So my hope that we’re offering the light of a torch to people right now who are listening to this podcast, and then they will be able to go and offer that torch to someone else, you know, artists are torch bearers, musicians are torch bearers, people who create Oracle decks are torch bearers because someone inspired us, someone pointed out for us.

What if you move towards what you love?

✨ We Need Someone to Believe in Us, More Than We Believe in Ourselves

Grace: Absolutely. Even after creating all these decks, everyone needs guidance and there’s absolute value in seeking guidance and wanting that for yourself because sometimes we can get so stuck in the way that we’re thinking.

So if you’re really resonating with a certain healer or Oracle or whatnot, absolutely get a fresh perspective. Get that reassurance and confirmation, because I feel like a lot of the times we need someone to believe in us more than we believe in us. To then take that desired action towards what we really want.

Sometimes unfortunately, the people around us that we know the best are not always the most supportive in our dreams and desires because that can make them uncomfortable because they think of you in a certain way in relation to how they think of themselves. So sometimes you need to break that box by going outside of your inner circle when talking to somebody else who might have a completely different perception of you, because they’re not already locked into this idea of who you are as you were instead of who you’re becoming.

And I feel like that does speak a lot to the themes of the Death card, where a certain part of you, as we all are, we’re always constantly evolving as humans, but a certain part of you is always dying because even just like scientifically, our cells are always dying. We’re reborn every seven years or whatnot, however long it takes for yourselves to regenerate.

But even like the version of you a year ago could be different from who you are today. So I wanted to ask you this final two questions and then we’ll move on into our fast five. What is your definition of a witch and what is your definition of an initiation?

Amanda: So a witch is someone who initiates change according to their will, which happens through a shift in consciousness.

So a witch is someone who is able to recognize the way that the energies are working, and then is able to use the tools of witchcraft to shift and shape those energies or to move with them to guide change. Sounds easy, but it’s really challenging because for instance, that would mean being able to recognize where you are in the moment.

So let’s say you’re sad. And then to be able to use the techniques of witchcraft to shift yourself into the state of your desired. And so let’s say you desire to be happy. Well, first of all, when you’re sad, it’s not always easy to recognize that you are sad. So oftentimes, if you’re in a state of sorrow, it’s easy to get caught up in that whirlpool and also to believe whatever thoughts are going on in your head.

Like, well, I’m sad because I never can accomplish anything I wanna do, and I’m just not ever gonna have what I want. So we can get kind of caught up in that. And so the first step of witchcraft is recognizing where you are. The second step of witchcraft is being able to reflect and listen. Like, is this what I desire?

Like sometimes being, it’s worth it to be sad. There’s reasons for us to be sad. I’m not saying we should never be sad, but let’s say you’re ready to not be sad anymore. Then to be able to recognize like where you desire to go, and then to have the tools to be able to shift yourself. Now that is like a lifetime’s work, a lifetime’s practice to be able to shift yourself from a state of disempowerment to empowerment.

And then next level, like graduate level witchcraft. Is the capacity to help other people initiate change in their own life as well. So it’s like to have that medicinal power. That’s why Scorpios are witches. And most of us will have Scorpio in our chart somewhere, or we’ll be able to tap into that witchy power of Scorpio to transform and devour and decompose whatever is no longer serving and transmute it into something that is active and vital and alive.

So that is what witchcraft is, in my humble opinion. And then the second question was.

Grace: What is the definition of initiation?

Amanda: Initiation, right? Initiation is an ordeal that you will go through. It’s the fire that you walk through that. On the other side of that, you receive more power, more maturity, more wisdom, more knowledge.

So if you had an initiation from childhood to adulthood, often our Saturn Return is that initiation. So we pass through the threshold of our Saturn Return, which is an ordeal often. It’s like a hazing ritual and we get kicked from all the different angles. And then on the other side, we’re adults. We have power and authority, and we’re kind of keepers of the traditions of our people.

And we also have the capacity to let go of traditions that we think are no longer serving us, which is not something that a child has the capacity to do. They’re not given that sort of scepter within a culture. They have other roles within our culture. So our initiations in life, and that’s what my book is really about, is that like our life is initiating us.

To do the work that we are here to do to fulfill our life’s purpose, which is often shitty. Like often our initiations do not feel good. And oftentimes the very thing that we are struggling against, the very thing that we feel is our enemy is in fact our teacher. So it’s teaching us to reclaim our power and then to help others do the same thing.

So for instance. If you have had a series of relationships that have been really miserable, that is in fact an initiation, that is offering you a teaching about reclaiming your power in relationships so that you can go help other people find their power in relationship as well, and that really sucks if you’ve had really shitty things happen to you, which many of us have.

You know, the book is very much about trauma, and I do not believe like trauma comes to you for a reason or like you made a contract before you were born to experience this. I don’t believe that. I believe that that trauma is an old story from our ancestors. It’s like we’re born in the middle of the story.

So we didn’t choose that. Our ancestors chose that and we’re living that out. But it’s, the initiation is like, okay, now you are main character in this story. How do you want to do this? Do you want to do it the old way? Do you wanna keep going in this same pattern? We don’t really pass through that fire until we decide that we want to do it differently, that we have the power within ourselves and within our communities to create change.

So yeah, initiation not fun a lot of the time, but when we get to the other side, then we can help others be able to pass through them as well. So initiations aren’t necessarily things that we do alone. They’re things that we have to look to for guidance and community in them as well. Wow. So powerful.

✨ Learning From Challenges and Guiding Others

Grace: I feel like that really relates to Chiron as the wounded healer, where we learn these lessons and they’re often very painful, but whatever we go through that.

Tends to be painful for us. There’s somebody else out there going through that painful thing too. So you can often be a guide for that other person, even if you’re just one step ahead, right? So let that be a source of inspiration. If you’re ever questioning yourself or wondering why you’re doing something, I feel like the pain is not for nothing.

Often we have to go through challenges to become stronger, right?

Amanda: Yeah. Well, it also very much relates to witchcraft and ritual culture because ritual and theater, which have the same root, are giving us an opportunity to go through initiations and the pain of an initiation without having to do it. IRL like out in our life, and the trouble is that our cultures often no longer have those initiation rituals, so we don’t get that knowledge.

Theater allows us to experience what it’s like to kill someone, or what it’s like to break up with someone, or what it’s like to lose the person that we love most, without actually having to go through it. We are offered this opportunity to gain that wisdom without having to go through the real horrors of having that happen in our life.

But because we don’t have those rituals anymore, collectively, we do often have to go through that in our life. So our witch practices, our ritual practices, can help us find a way through the really painful things that are going on in our life in a faster, healthier, more joyful way than we normally would have to experience.

Grace: Yeah, I have a theory about emotions and the more heightened you allow yourself to feel certain emotions, the more freedom you can experience in your everyday life. So I think that’s why acting can be so great in that you’re not really killing somebody, but you’re going through all the trauma and emotions that might come along with it to then release whatever blockages you might feel in your body. That’s just an idea I have. I’m sure there are like emotional freedom techniques out there and whatnot.

✨ What is your Sun, Moon, and Rising Signs?

Grace: But let’s move into your fast five questions. What’s your Sun, Moon, and Rising?

Amanda: Sun is in Scorpio. Moon is in Leo. Rising is in Taurus.

Grace: How do you relate to that?

Amanda: Well, I have five planets in Scorpio, so I’ve got a lot of Scorpio energy, for better or worse.

I feel like my Moon speaks to what our innate guests in a way we’re born into this life kind of having already mastered. So Leo is a storyteller and the keeper of ar Aviv, and I feel like I did have that. And then Taurus is as a Rising sign, I feel like, is what kind of what we’re here to live into and what we’re here to grow into and cultivate in this lifetime.

So I feel like this is Taurus is about creating stability, creating pleasure, community connection and ease. And I feel like that’s a real gift with so much Scorpio because Scorpio is not about ease at all. It’s about going into the muck and the dark. And the underworld and kind of rolling in that mud.

And so I feel like Taurus is about growing a garden from that mud, and I feel like that’s kind of a beacon for me.

✨ What Advice Would You Give to Your Younger Self?

Grace: Yeah. What advice would you give to your younger self?

Amanda: The advice that I would give to my younger self is to trust myself more, to enjoy my life, like to be where I was when I was there, and also to recognize the pain that I was suffering, or the anxiety was really more about the world that I was in than like my own personal flaws.

And, I think back to so many things that I did when I was younger that I couldn’t fully enjoy or experience. Like, I was a dancer and I loved to dance so much, and I was so ambitious and really wanted to like, make my living doing that. And so I wasn’t really able to fully just be there and enjoy it because I was so worried that it wouldn’t work out the way that I wanted it to work out. And same with many relationships that I was in. You know, like I always wanted to get them to be somewhere else. Like I couldn’t just be where I was and enjoy what I was doing.

So my advice to my younger self is to be where you are, enjoy where you’re doing, and trust that you have the capacity to shift when you need to.

✨ How Would You Define Everyday Magic?

Grace: Beautiful. How would you define everyday magic?

Amanda: It’s about encampment. I think it’s about beauty. It’s about every moment, inviting more beauty into that moment. So it’s about recognizing your capacity to shift, even like to light a candle or to burn the incense or to open the curtains or to put on music, or to go outside to feel the wind on your face.

It’s about everyday magic is the practice of connecting to the world of enchantment and beauty, even amidst the machinations of the Necrostate. And so it’s about creating and pulling into that context. It’s like, I imagine the witch of shooting flower power everywhere in this ugly business park, bringing vines, and fountains, and music, and candlelight into this parking lot of a culture that we live in.

And so it’s about using whatever tools that we have available in order to do that.

✨ What Are Your Favorite Rituals?

Grace: Yeah. What are some of your favorite rituals?

Amanda: I do every holiday, like Lughnasadh, which was yesterday, Letha, summer Solstice, all of the eight wheel of the year Pagan holidays. I do these candle spells on behalf of my followers and to do that I like call in the deities that I work with, and I brush the candles with herbs and I say the name of each of my followers who are participating in the ritual and say their, they have a petition that they write, so they like say the thing that they wanna call in. And it’s really such a gift and an honor to feel that connection with my followers in that way and say their names and to do magic on, on behalf of like, creating this community of people who are thriving and joyful in their lives.

So I really love that spell. And then I love, also, there’s a place that I go nearby me up in the, in the Angeles National Forest where there’s a river and I love to go and sing to the local land spirits there. And I always feel like they’re singing back to me. So that’s another favorite one. Yeah.

✨ What Are You Looking Forward to in the Near Future?

Grace: Aw, I love that. It’s cute. What are you looking forward to in the near future?

Amanda: Um, I’m going camping with some friends of mine in about a month, and I’m really looking forward to that. There’s a beautiful river there and I love to just be with my friends and I’m not gonna work, which feels really great.

And then I’ve got two fun things coming up. One is the Salem Witch Fest, so I’m gonna be doing a lecture there on The Guardians of The Four Directions. I’m really excited about that. And then also the witches confluence in San Francisco is happening, and I’m really excited about that too, because so many of the witches from our community are gonna be there.

And it’s so fun to be able to see all of them. All these names and phases I admire and love to connect with. So I’m really excited about that as well.

✨ Collective Reading from the Motherpeace Tarot Deck by Amanda Yates Garcia

Grace: Amazing. So we’re gonna end this interview with a collective reading from Amanda. So Amanda, whenever you’re ready.

Amanda: Well, I feel like we have been here for a while now, so I’m gonna just pull one card.

And I’ll ask the question of how can we collectively connect to our desire so that we can co-create a path forward towards rebirth together? So yeah, so I get this beautiful card. The Justice Card. So you know, the Justice Card is about rebalancing, noticing what is out of balance and calling in the energy that’s needed to rebalance us.

And it’s about just making small adjustments that today that lead us towards like radically different future. So part of that is about recognizing what is out of balance in our own life. And most of us know, right? Like, we’re like, well, I’ve been working too much and I haven’t been spending enough time with my family, for instance.

Or I feel like the places where we feel pain, anxiety, stress, this is where it’s out of balance. And so the Justice Card is asking us to really sit with that for a while, let ourselves get on our meditation cushion light a candle. Place your hands on your heart and just notice what is going on in your life.

Check in and ask like, how am I, what is going on in my life? What do I see around me in my immediate environment? What is flourishing and thriving, and what is crying out for light, for water, for nourishment, and to allow ourselves to really hear that and then take a step, take an action towards giving life to that part that is like crying out for care.

And that might happen on many levels. So it might happen our physical level. So for instance, it might be you’re experiencing pain in your body and your body’s asking for more care. So it might be like, I need to spend some time outside today. That’s like a priority. Or it might be on a interpersonal level.

So it might be about recognizing what is out of balance in your relationship with your partner or with your family or in your friend group, and doing something to bring more balance and care there. Or it might be looking out collectively and seeing like who is hurting here, whose voice is not being heard here?

Where is all the gold sitting and who needs some? And then it might be towards like finding ways to redistribute some of that energy. But what I love about this version of the deck, which is the mother piece deck, is that it’s really about ecology and a healthy ecosystem is one where there is no hoarding.

Right where the energy’s always flowing through. It’s not stopping in any one specific place, but it’s kind of like flowing. And then it’s also about diversity. Like a monoculture is not a healthy ecosystem, so it’s really about honoring all the different voices and all the different beings within that ecosystem.

And so we can do that on a micro scale, like in our, you know, in our body. Like it might be about like eating more vegetables or other colored foods. If we’re only eating like white foods or brown foods, put some orange foods in there, put some blue foods or in there. Or it might be about allowing in different voices, different energies into our personal or daily lives, taking a different route home from work or exposing ourselves to new things, bringing in a wider array of voices as.

Always going to be like to create greater democracy and health within our own lives as well. And then that’s the same is true for the larger scale. What comes up for you around Justice?

✨ Closing Statements

Grace: Amazing. Well, this was such a lovely interview and possibly the longest interview I’ve ever done.

Amanda: I know. I love to just chat and like talk about all these things. Yeah, I definitely, I’m not like a Twitter personality. I’m much more like a long form personality type.

Grace: Yeah. I mean, I could chat forever about this.

This is amazing. So many nuggets.

Amanda: And yeah, your questions were really great. Thank you so much for being such a thoughtful host.

Grace: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. I feel like also like your wisdom as well, sharing all your knowledge and just, I feel like the deep research that you’ve done for many, many years.

Obviously being able to share that with us so quickly. It’s also like years of attaining all of that wisdom. So thank you so much for sharing that with us.

Amanda: So I just wanted to let people know that if they wanted to find my work, that they can find me on Substack at amandayatesgarcia.substack.com. I write a lot there and people can find out about me there.

Oh, and also you can follow me on Instagram @oraclela. So thank you. And also you should go back and listen to my interview with you on Between the Worlds because Grace, it was such an excellent interview and I was so grateful to your insight on the Six of Swords. I feel like it really opened up that card for me, and I know that like your listeners will really enjoy it.

Grace: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely go listen to that episode. It was fantastic being a guest on Amanda’s podcast Between the Worlds. Great episode. I was so glad to be a guest on the Six of Swords episode. And yeah, definitely go check out Amanda’s book Initiated Memoir of a Witch. So many nuggets in here and obviously shared within this episode.

So thank you so much, Amanda.

Amanda: Take care, Grace.

Grace: Okay, bye.

Amanda: Bye.

✨ End of Episode – Make Sure to Leave a Podcast Review!

Grace: Thanks so much for tuning in to today’s episode with Amanda Yates Garcia. This was such a poignant and thoughtful conversation, and I’m so grateful for Amanda’s depth and wisdom.

Here’s a journaling prompt and something to think about. What does death mean to you? How do you process grief? Feel free to share as a Spotify comment, YouTube comment, and or an Apple Podcast review. I’d love to hear your take on this episode.

And as a reminder, we will be doing a giveaway of Amanda’s book, Initiated Memoir of a Witch over on Instagram, YouTube, and all of the socials. So make sure to check that out.

Until next time, my loves, this was a deep episode, so make sure to take time to process whatever emotions come up for you during this time.

Sending you grace today and every day.

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