00:00:30 Episode Preview

00:00:30 Opening

00:01:06 Introduction

00:01:49 Interview Begins with Sarah Gottessdiener

00:02:29 Reconnecting with the Moon, Body, and Self

00:10:06 The Spiral of Shadow and Safety

00:17:39 Ancestral Echoes & Emotional Literacy

00:25:12 Healing Cognitive Distortions & Embracing Change

00:32:18 AD – Join our Tarot for Alchemy Course https://learntarot.mysticmondays.com/

00:34:24 From Protection to Permission

00:38:39 Moon Mapping & Creative Power

00:47:24 Shadow Wisdom & Seeding New Stories

00:54:20 Trusting Your Inner Timing

00:59:06 Fast Five Questions

01:00:09 Collective Reading by Sarah Gottessdiener

01:02:15 Closing Statements

01:04:18 End of Episode – Make Sure to Leave a Podcast Review!

01:05:06 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 Sarah Faith Gottesdiener, artist, writer, and the creator of the Moon Book, a beautiful guide to lunar living and intuition.

In this episode, we explore themes of the Moon. This tarot card is known for mystery, intuition, illusion, and the unknown, particularly from our subconscious minds. Sarah shares how to navigate moon cycles, shadow work, and how embracing the darkness can help you live more authentically in the light.

Now, let’s get into this episode.

✨ Interview Begins with Sarah Gottessdiener

Grace: Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the GRACED Podcast.

Sarah: Hi, Grace. I’m so happy to be here with you today.

Grace: So excited to have you on. You’re definitely someone I really respect in the witchy spiritual community. And today we’re talking about themes of the Moon Tarot card, and you wrote The Moon Book: Lunar Magic to Change Your Life.

You’re also the career behind the popular, dare I say, cult classic, Many Moons Planners, and I have a stack of them with me here, and I was honored to contribute to the 2020 edition.

✨ Reconnecting with the Moon, Body, and Self

Grace: So could you tell us more about your journey and what inspired you to be a Tarot content creator?

Vanessa: Yeah, so firstly, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I feel very honored to be part of this space and also to share this time with you. What I would say inspired me to be a Tarot YouTuber is that I’ve always known that I wanted to somehow help and support people.

I wasn’t sure precisely how I was going to do that. And then I fell into Tarot as a craft, and from the moment I held my first Tarot deck in my hands, I became obsessed with it. And there was just something very magical about it that made me think. I want to upload my first video onto YouTube.

I think this is a way how I can connect with people, how I can uplift people and help people and somehow bring positive energy to this world. And from there on out, the rest is history.

✨ How Crystals and Coincidence Led to Tarot

Grace: So I’d love to hear from you, what is your relationship to the moon and how did it start?

Sarah: I think like all creative, sensitive, intuitive people. I had a connection with the moon since I was a child. I’m sure everyone listening has a childhood memory of them in the moon, whether they were looking at the moon through their bedroom window, or a lot of folks have recounted that they’d be in the backseat of their parents’ car and the moon would be in the window and they’d be like, it looked like it was following them.

Or I think all of us have this connection to the moon. In my book, I explain why we are lunar creatures, like scientifically, our fertility is linked up with the moon. There’s also, of course, scientifically the gravitational pole of the water and the moon, and of course we’re water. We’re anywhere between 60% to 80% water.

So when the moon cycles, we are impacted and affected. And of course we have such a connection to nature and agriculture, and the moon plays a role in that as well, because as the moon influences water, that also has to do with agriculture. So if you’ve heard of biodynamic gardening and farming. Very much is about farming and growing plants with the cycles of the moon because there are those rhythms about when to harvest, when to plant seeds, and we can do that in our own lives.

So I started getting interested in the occult in my early twenties. I think I was very much looking for a way of. Living or a philosophy that explained the world, like in a world that didn’t necessarily make sense to me, get a job nine to five, white picket fence heteronormative kind of world didn’t really seem to connect with me.

And I think that the aspects of the occult and the metaphysical that had a strong emphasis on agency and on the agency of the self and our ability to change our circumstances, I’ve, I’m pretty obsessed with the science of change. I’m pretty obsessed with how we transform, how we heal trauma, how we grow.

I’m pretty obsessed with how we’re connected to nature and nature cycles and how that is a mirror and a template for our own cycles of growth and change. And so the moon is that symbol in the sky. The moon’s cycle reflects the cycle of nature, right? We have a darker waning. Moon is winter. We have the new moon is spring.

We have a full moon is summer. We have the last quarter moon, the waning moon as autumn. It is this great big mirror to what we’re going through in the sky, and it resets itself really a lot quicker than the seasons, which makes it incredibly useful, incredibly collaborative. For pairing with our own change cycles and our own transformation because who wants to wait for another season to come around?

Like we get the opportunity to explore a cycle of change, a cycle of waxing and waning of expansion and contraction, right? Every lunar cycle. So I started collaborating with the moon in my ritual work and in my internal work and in my magical work. And over time I realized a couple of things. I realized that working with multiple lunar cycles was much more effective, and that also syncs up with studies that have been done in terms of change.

It takes a new habit anywhere from 60. To 90 days to embed in our neuro pathways. That’s three lunar cycles, right? So it’s effectively three rotations of the moon. It makes sense to me. I didn’t need science to tell me that ’cause I was living it, but what’s nice to always get that affirmation right? I also started noticing that the moon was connected to our levels and layers of consciousness as well as our body.

And so that’s really how we create change. Through the body and through the levels and layers of consciousness. So during certain lunar phases working with the process, I suggest in my book and I guide everyone through and many moons I would time processes for letting go and reprogramming during the waning moon.

I would time new actions, new thoughts that were associated to the prefrontal cortex, new habits during the waxing moon. So I would begin timing it all around one theme or one topic. I wouldn’t do like too much all at once, but I would say, let’s just say it would be money or finances. And I would, through the guidance of the moon, giving us a 360 degree lens, right?

So you’re not only looking at your aspirations around finances. You’re looking at the shadows that you have around finances. You’re not only starting a savings account, but you’re noticing in your body what’s happening and you’re rewiring it over and over, and that’s how you change. You change through the body, through the nervous system.

Through different levels and layers of consciousness and through creating new habits and associating new positive capacities with those habits. So it was so natural to me. It was like as if the moon just told me what to do. The moon was like, no, you see this part of this is linked to your subconscious and this part is linked to your super conscious and here’s your body and here’s what you can do, and this is how we create cycles and seasons of change and this is how I can help you.

And it almost feels like she was trying to get me to understand how these things worked. And so through working with those, I began to see amazing change in my own life. And of course, as one does when you see change in your life and you’re super excited by something. You wanna tell other people about it?

You want other people to understand that like the patriarchal, linear push hustle, we only go up or whatever. I wanted ’em to be like no. There’s a much more natural way. There’s a much more organic way. And the coolest part I think, I mean there’s so many cool parts about this process and this discovery I made and then created this modality.

But what I think is more the most awesome part, and this is like the main aspect of my work when I work with people and I work with groups. Through doing this, you get to know yourself so well. You get to know your intuitive gifts. You get to know how your intuition functions. You get to know what you prefer.

You get to know like what, how you make change and what’s easy for you. You get to create your own modalities and your own practices and your own rituals. So you heighten the relationship with yourself, your intuition, and then by doing so with the entire world, because when we know ourselves better and we’re more secure, we can connect with people on a much easier.

More intentional and vulnerable level and that is to me the main aspects of the moon, yeah.

✨ The Spiral of Shadow and Safety

Grace: Yeah. Wow. There’s so much juiciness all wrapped up in there. I love that you link science to magic and the occult, because I feel like the occult is a visceral, where you can’t really explain some things, but so much of it is within your own making, right?

Like. Science is tied into that because you’re talking about cycles and seasons and timing, and you’re also talking about how timing isn’t necessarily linear. However, the moon does operate on a certain cycle, and you’re also noticing takes three lunar cycles, which is three months, so that is a season, so to speak. But you write in your book in astrology, psychology, and some magical traditions, the moon represents the subconscious. The subconscious is a source of our yearning and fear. It is where the stories and motivations behind our conscious behavior reveal themselves. When we decide to program our subconscious, we change our beliefs.

When we change our beliefs, our behavior changes. When our behavior changes, our life changes. So basically everything you were just talking about. For anyone struggling to make changes, how can we utilize the power of the moon to illuminate our shadows and how can we make those desired changes that can also be rooted in fear?

Sarah: I love this topic. I was just talking about this yesterday in a class I was teaching. It is absolutely gonna be some of the courses and workshops I’m going to be doing next year, and that’s this idea of we often are afraid to make change because. Of our past. That’s also the moon, right? The moon is linked to the past.

And in the moon card in the tarot. We see this connection really strongly of the past of some kind of pole that seems bigger than us or greater than us. When we get the moon card, usually, I know like in traditional tarot it’s linked to fuzziness. Murkiness, like obstructed things, hidden things. But for me and my practice as I teach it, the moon is the second and what I call the sequence of sight, I call the star, the moon and the sun.

The sequence of sight and what those three cards together, the star, we see the little pin pricks of light that help give us direction. After a period of challenge or hardship, we begin to create new constellations and new stories in the star. That’s why it’s such like a healing, beautiful soul retrieval kind of card.

Then in the moon, we’re often faced with the challenge to that aspiration. Often when we pull the moon card, not always. But often we’re like, wait, why am I back here again? Wait, I thought I had figured this out by now. Wait, like I thought I should be over this. Or why is this person I’m dating just like the last person I thought I had healed in, gone to therapy about, we’re often like, what the f?

And we can think it’s our fault. We can immediately blame ourselves. We can blame the universe. We can think we’re unlucky. But what is happening is, there’s some psychological reasons for it that I won’t maybe I’ll get into. There’s this idea of repetitive compulsion, which is that we seek to recreate challenging circumstances.

’cause they either feel familiar with us and our nervous system. That’s why you keep dating the same person, although they’re different people, right? Because your nervous system codes say folks who are avoidant or folks who are mean as being safe. Because we have to remember that safety just means familiarity and normal.

If you’re used to hustle and be go. That’s your level of safety because it’s been normalized and it’s hard for your body and your nervous system and your brain and your subconscious. To adapt to, to feel safe at a different level, right? So we get into these challenges, to our dreams or to our safety in order to move past them, in order to respond in a different way so that we can tell ourselves we’re safe to move on so we can complete a cycle so we can resolve something and assure ourselves that we’re safe and learn a little bit.

Each time, I don’t know if any listeners or you, grace, have really had to learn some lessons the hard way and now you’re like, oh I know what those flags are. Or even just next time I’ll get a contract or, next time I’ll ask these questions about to my landlord. Or, we learn through experience and so that’s the moon card.

The moon card is okay, maybe you’re in a similar situation. Maybe you feel like you’re getting pulled o under by the tide, but what, where can you create agency and safety and create new patterns? Like I often talk about, we don’t, we spiral out of stuckness if we are just circling. Circling and circling.

That’s a flat circle and we’re never gonna get out, like we’re trapped. But if we spiral out, if like we’re 5% more confident if we, instead of 17 dates with someone who’s maybe not the best for us, we have four dates. To me that’s progress and that’s the spiral. So often, I don’t know. I’d love to hear what your beliefs are.

Grace. I’ll just share a little bit of mine. One of my beliefs is that we all come in. With a set of specific challenges around certain themes, and part of our life’s path is to both heal those themes through a series of experiences we get exposed to again and again, right? Or the medicine and the gifts of our lives is found through alchemizing and transforming those shadows into light, right?

So I think that I, in no way do I want to romanticize challenges or suffering. I don’t want any suffering or challenges for myself, my loved ones, or anyone else on the planet. I’m not on any level trying to romanticize violence, abuse, and trauma. Our world is a pretty, we’re in some really dark times right now.

I don’t on any level wanna romanticize any of it, and I also don’t un. Any level want to suggest that we necessarily agreed to undergo challenging things. I just wanna be like really clear with that. I I don’t think I asked for any of the hardship I got, and in fact, I would prefer to have learned in a different way, as I’m sure many people who’ve been through hell and back would feel the same.

I do know that, I do know that the ability to alchemize and to transform certain shadows is one of the greatest, most rewarding things we can do as people. I do know that what we learn as a result of moving through those things in a different way and really learning what security to ourselves feels like, what love feels is one of the most priceless gifts I know that I could ever experience.

So that’s a little bit of what I’ll say about that.

✨ Ancestral Echoes & Emotional Literacy

Grace: Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you said. I feel like we all come to earth with our soul contracts and we also carry karma with us, and I think that we come into our current lives with. A certain lesson to learn or many lessons because it’s a culmination of things.

We’re all multidimensional, so it’s not like we come in and we’re only learning one thing. I feel like we’re all balancing many things at many times, and at this time there’s so much polarity going on. I do believe it’s because a lot of people just haven’t dealt with their shadows and kept pushing it down and down, and it usually comes out as projection, which I feel like is something the moon does.

It illuminates shadows, and so if you’re not dealing with a. Your own stuff. It tends to come out in other ways. And I will say personally, like recently, I got my wisdom teeth out two weeks ago, and I felt like all this ancestral stuff was coming up. I was like, oh my God. What is going on? All this pain was coming up.

Obviously I was like dealing with my wisdom teeth coming out. So there was pain there, but there was all this like emotional pain too. And I feel like something about letting go of old ancestral beliefs was coming up, which I also feel like what ties us and the planet and the moon and our soul contracts and whatever is like the moon has been present for all of those stories.

And sometimes the stories that we come into this life with aren’t even ours. So I can recognize in myself when I’m like, in these patterns and I’m like, okay, this is great. Like I really relate to what you said earlier about the hustling and proactive and blah, blah, blah. And like these two weeks I like really couldn’t do anything.

I had to rest. I really had to rest. And it was like the universe was like, you need to stop. And I feel like sometimes we just need something like that to stop our patterns. And I think sometimes pain is obviously uncomfortable, but pain is part of the process and it can also be a catalyst to our growth.

Sarah: Yeah, I love so much of what you shared. Absolutely. The moon is linked to ancestors, ancestral gifts, ancestral trauma, ancestral stories, because where is this all carried like in the body in our DNA and our cells? And again, there’s a whole scientific field that is backing what many indigenous traditions already knew, which is that DNA in cells, I think it’s seven generations are carried.

And that if trauma happens in one generation, certain DNA in cells can be switched on that weren’t, and it can continue on. So if your grandparents or great grandparents, all, I think everybody listening’s ancestors dealt with, again, levels and layers of trauma. And so we carry that in our body. And if you’re a cycle breaker, which I think probably many people listening to this are.

I think whether we’re conscious of it or not, all of us are cycle breakers. In some ways. Pattern disruptors. We are creating new cycles. We’re ending old cycles that maybe we didn’t consent to or that we’ve been carrying, and then we’re creating new cycles. So the projection part is major, and it’s huge because you know this and folks listening probably know, but usually 1 0 1 shadow stuff is looking at people you’re envious of or people who irritate you and figuring out why that is, because it might be something in you, you either don’t like, if you think someone is annoying because they, I’ll use myself as an example, talk a lot.

Maybe you have stuff where you secretly wish you could use your voice a little bit more, and if you do some journaling about it or some investigation, you figure out, oh. When you were a child, you still love to sing, but your mom told you to be quiet all the time, and now you kind of harbor resentment around people who can express themselves easily.

That’s like an example, right? Of shadow work. But the other part of shadow work that has just been really useful for me is being able to parse out the levels and layers of our emotions and get really real about what’s happening. Because the moon can speak to projections, it can speak to cognitive distortions, it could speak to us projecting onto other people in positive ways and in negative ways.

And anytime we’re too much in projection, there is the possibility of some stuff going haywire. And so for me, taking accountability for my emotions. And figuring out what’s mine and what am I projecting. I’ll often say to people, if you ’cause the moon card also in some traditions is linked to gossip or things like that I’ve heard.

And so you can ask yourself, am I making a story up about this person so that I can experience an emotion that is taboo for me to have. I have found this to be true in my own life where if you’re on the internet, if you’re someone who people think they know, and we see this with celebrities and things of that nature, they, you often serve as a cutout, a flat projection.

If someone’s having a bad day, you then become the symbol of that bad day because that person hasn’t taken a minute to be with their emotions. Be like, oh yeah, maybe I’m feeling sad because it’s the anniversary of my first breakup with my partner. Also very moon things like the body keeps the memory.

You’re not tracking, you’re not understanding. You’re not letting yourself feel that feeling. So that sadness might turn into anger, or it might turn into defensiveness, or it might turn into snapping at a coworker or cutting someone off in traffic. If we’re not conscious of our emotions, they become projections, and that can really do harm to both ourselves and to just random people or beloveds in our lives.

So the moon to me is this card around radical responsibility around our emotions. Not that they’re bad in that, like we need to get really real with ourselves and question what’s going on. It’s I. Do we not like that person? Or are we threatened by them? Are we intimidated by them? Or do they remind us of a parent that wasn’t kind to us or we just getting clear on that is so freeing.

It’s also okay to admit you don’t like someone. Not everyone has to be everyone’s cup of tea. You can just move on. You can be like, you know what, actually I don’t like. I’m just gonna move on it. Not everything is like shadow work and you’re the mirror. Like sometimes you can just admit that certain people, certain singers, certain flavors of sparkling water are just not your bag and you can get to move on.

You don’t need to make a big drama about it. You don’t need to create a story. You don’t need to start a rumor about them or make anyone who likes the flavored sparkling water bad. You can just have your preferences and your feelings about them, process them. And I know the world would be a much, much easier place to navigate if more people were taking accountability and responsibility for the levels and layers of their emotions. Emotional literacy, that’s what I’m a big fan of.

✨ Healing Cognitive Distortions & Embracing Change

Grace: Yeah. I love that term. And I don’t think we hear it. Enough, because I feel like the internet is just like a playground for people who probably aren’t feeling safe to express themselves because that is a safe way to express anger or whatever it is they’re feeling.

I feel like a lot of anger lately, especially at people they don’t know. And it’s interesting that I think safety is a necessary means to create change. And I think a lot of the times in this world, it’s not designed for us to feel safe. So I think that speaks to this radical responsibility of understanding our emotions and understanding like, is this like a real thing or is this a pattern thing?

Am I reacting to something? And something that I’m hearing from you that you’re saying is not being afraid to question yourself, and you mentioned cognitive distortion, and I’m wondering like how can we, if we’re so used to this pattern, way of thinking and perhaps even skewing things in a way that.

It’s our narrative. How do we recognize that we may be skewing things in our favor? Oh yeah. What an amazing

Sarah: question. I love this question and I wanted to respond with what you said. 1000% feeling safe inside our body. And I would also say feeling like we can trust ourselves, right? We can trust ourselves to feel uncomfortable.

We can trust ourselves to not know. That’s like a big one. We can trust ourselves to be in process. We can trust ourselves to still love ourselves even when we’re not super productive or even when we’re not doing our to-do list or whatever. That was a really big one for me at least. How can we tell if we’re really like operating from cognitive distortions?

I think I just wanna throw it out to folks listening if they’re into this. I believe that if you literally Google like common cognitive distortions, it’ll show up like a list of 12 or something like this. I literally just did a podcast episode on this, so it’s in my mind of, I did three examples of what psychologists call magical thinking, and I thought that was hilarious because magical thinking, the episode is called Magical Thinking verse.

Magical thinking, meaning like magical thinking like us, like we’re creative. We’re making things happen, we’re using our intuition to make things that didn’t exist. To me, that’s magical thinking. Creator consciousness is like magical thinking in terms of like our world, but there’s also psychological term magical thinking.

And so the ones I pulled out were this belief. A lot of it is around either waiting for other people to give you permission so someone else will take care of it. Or when someone tells me I’m good enough, then I can apply for the job or that thing. Another is. If I avoid it, it’ll go away. So anything extreme, if you’re avoiding certain things too much, if you’re disassociating or numbing out too much, or if you’re overriding, if you’re like trying to make certain things happen.

Usually a indicator that you are in a form of thinking that will not be helpful to you is either or rigid yes, no thinking if you can’t do this thing, or sometimes it’s if everyone else can have this thing, but I can’t have it. If there are these younger parts of us that are running the show, usually a sign is that it’s very either or.

It’s very rigid and it’s, there’s this paradox. That when we can create more safety in ourselves, in our nervous system, that in turn creates curiosity and it creates more openness. If we can become more expanded, if we can become both grounded and soft, then our thought processes opens up. And it’s funny, grace.

I’ve been thinking of doing a whole series of like how to tell your healing or how to tell you are making change. I’ll give an example for my own life. Just today I was like, yeah, I really should start journaling about this because a lot of my thinking around certain things are getting shaken up and loosened up.

Where once there was a lot of rigidity and contraction, you have to remember that’s how we often were taught to be safe is to be defensive, is to like contract, is to be in the little chrysalis is to get under the weighted blanket or under the bed or in the closet or not be seen or not really move our body.

We have to remember that is such a beautiful and intelligent response to a rupture or heartbreak or disappointment or grief. I just wanna name that there’s nothing wrong with you if you’re in more protective, feeling guarded. Don’t wanna peek out of the cave. Totally normal. Take as long as you need, right?

But I realized that I was on my way today to do a medical healing procedure and I was driving there and I remember thinking, I am so excited for this. This could be the beginning of really beautiful change. And previously around certain health stuff, I had been really protective and I had been really cautious.

I had not let myself, that’s another thing to, that folks can clock in themselves. We’re protecting ourselves when we don’t let ourselves get too excited or we don’t let ourselves dream too much. It’s when we’re like, again I bet this is gonna be more of the same. Or like when we get very negative, a lot of negativity can be a sign of depression.

Not a sign necessarily of being like a bitter person. But I really have meditated a lot on negativity as being a defense mechanism. ’cause if you push things away, if you’re not expecting too much, you can’t get hurt. If things are already not gonna go super great, you’re not gonna be let down Too much.

Being excited about things, looking forward to things, hoping, dreaming is incredibly vulnerable. We don’t really name it as such, but it is when you’re trying in public, or think about it when we were little, like showing that you liked someone that wasn’t cool. You weren’t like, oh, you’re so cool.

Wanna play with me? It was only cool to be like that as a child, but once we hit chemicals and puberty, like that wasn’t cool. Remember I don’t know about you, but I was taught if someone like treats you poorly, they like you I don’t know, like if boys treated you poorly, they like you.

So all is that to say watching for the shape of your responses to life. Are your responses to life neutral? Are they shut down and closed and contracted and you’re like bracing yourself or holding your breath? Are they open? Are they relaxed? Is your belly soft? Are you looking forward to meeting that friend for dinner?

Are you starting to get excited about your next project where you might like to move? That is how I gauge it and I clock it in myself by some of the stories I tell myself about what is happening as well. So hopefully that was useful to folks.

✨ Why Intuition Alone Isn’t Enough in Business

Grace: I love that. And I feel like also with creating a business, a lot of it does happen to be intuitive and having to make these decisions. And I feel like why a lot of people are drawn to Tarot is because they may struggle with making certain decisions for themselves. And so how do you integrate intuition with creating a business and also stepping into this role as CEO?

Vanessa: So I feel as though integrating intuition has to happen in a way that there’s this balance. So you’re not either becoming so superstitious that you’re constantly preparing for an action you’re never taking. If you start to feel as though, okay, I have to intuitively feel ready. I have to get a sign from the universe, from the gods. I have to meditate. I have to do my singing bowls, I have to have my apple cider vinegar shot. Like by the time you’ve done all of that, the moment may have come and gone and you may be too exhausted to even take action.

So I would use Tarot as a tool to actually give me more confidence in, okay, just make the decision. You can course correct later, and this is the guidance that your cards are giving you right now. If you’re a little undecided, if you’re at a crossroads and you really can’t tell, should I take path A or path B, that that helps you to actually make a decision.

But I think a thing about business that sometimes is in conflict with spirituality and intuition is that business is fast. You are not as likely gonna succeed if every decision is mulled over for a really long time because your competition will have already taken the action, move the step forward. Meanwhile, you’re still thinking about it, so I think it is like the combination of both.

✨ Easy Intuition Exercises for Beginners

Grace: Yeah. And so for anyone who is brand new to developing their intuition, what would you say to them or what advice would you give to them?

Vanessa: So for one, what I have been coming up with are different intuition exercises. So I have been putting them out within my online memberships and courses. It’s like an intuition bootcamp and training. So I’ve been basically trialing it with my members who have loved it, and I think I will also bring it to YouTube so it will be publicly accessible, where you can basically use your intuition in order to uncover the different card options that I have available.

And then see, did you intuitively pick the card that I asked you to pick, or if you picked a different card. What might that mean for you at this moment? What is your intuition drawing you towards? Because on one hand there are coincidences, and then on the other hand, these coincidences might be meaningful. These might be synchronicities where you see a reoccurring pattern and a reoccurring symbol that shows up for you that may have a deeper implication.

✨ Why Every Tower Moment Leads to a Star Moment

Grace: Yeah. And so, so much of the star is about stepping into this confidence and being seen and being visible. And there’s a saying that after the Tower comes the Star, and as a business person there happens to be many things that happen that are out of our control and I have stories about that for me anyway.

But I love to hear about stories where, have you had anything happen where you’re like, oh my god, like this is a Tower moment. But it really led to a catalyst where you’re breaking through into a Star moment.

Vanessa: Hmm. I think all the time. I think Tower moments always inevitably lead to Star moments.

So long as you don’t give up, there is no other option than it leading eventually to a Star moment because nothing lasts forever. The good times don’t last forever, but the Tower moments, and the struggles, and destruction doesn’t last forever either.

And I’ve had many, many of these moments and I think what I have done topically is obviously cruise through it, but that’s where I would say the intuition and the confidence of taking action is built when you go through these Tower moments and you trust that it is either leading you towards your next building block. Or it’s just showing you, look, this is an area that you maybe have neglected and needs a little bit more TLC.

For me, there have been multiple Tower moments. I would say the most pivotal one of the past couple months is perhaps that my warehouse did flood two times. And that was the catalyst as I was already playing with the idea of becoming location independent. That was for me, my Tower moment that showed me right now, I think your resources, your time and energy is best invested in what you’re really good at, which is creating digital content courses, which is being present with people rather than managing a warehouse. And logistics can be outsourced. That’s not your field of expertise. You learned a lot when it came to that, but now it’s time to take on a different role. Now it’s time to pivot and to be flexible in your business, especially when you own a small business.

It’s going to change in so many ways, on so many occasions, and I think being flexible is one of the most valuable skills that you can have.

✨ From Protection to Permission

Grace: Yeah, I can also pinpoint to like things that I do where I am behaving in a way that is just protecting myself. And I think a lot of what we do in the world, because the world can feel unsafe at times.

Sarah: It is unsafe. The world is, let’s just say it is unsafe for many people.

Grace: Yeah, absolutely. And so a lot of what we do is to protect ourselves and to feel safe, even if that’s not what we really want. And so I actually love that you brought up these signals to yourself that you are embarking on change or there are certain things changing because I think sometimes we can get so sucked into our everyday habits that we’re not really noticing the signs.

So what are some signs of change for you?

Sarah: As I’ve said, when I start noticing that I’m thinking about change with excitement or with. Neutrality. I think neutrality is always a really good place to be measured. That’s a really good place. Also, depending on the state of your nervous system, if you are, in fact, if you’ve maybe been shut down, if you’ve maybe been in an overly protective mode for a while.

One thing I tell folks that not a lot of people talk about, but one of the first signs that you’re getting out of freeze is anxiety, anger, irritation, because your nervous system is rewiring and remapping. And so sometimes after a long period of shutdown or kind of numbing, the ability to feel feelings, like any feelings, right?

If you’re like, I’m so angry right now, that often to me is a sign that energy is moving, that your body understands it is safe. To express energy, right? Because going back to safety, and especially you can probably relate grace. Creativity is an expression. We have to feel safe in order to create So expressions, if you’re like.

I wanna go out dancing, or I want to move my body and allowing your body to move in different shapes, I think that’s usually a sign as well. The last thing I will say is that a really important part of healing, at least in my process and what I teach, is being able to have a different perspective around what happened and being able to either learn the lessons, make meaning, or even in some cases, but not always.

Again, I don’t wanna romanticize anything, but even sometimes feel grateful. Oh, I’m so glad that my fiance broke up with me. Obviously this might take years, but like understanding that even though something was very painful and hard, maybe you dodged a bullet or maybe you wouldn’t have ended up doing this other thing, or maybe you wouldn’t have met this other person is hindsight is 2020 often, so getting to a place where you understand what maybe you were supposed to learn, especially so that tying it back to the moon if something similar happens again, or you can trust yourself to be able to notice.

Certain things that what happened in the past taught you, oh, you know what, I don’t think I should, take that job. Or, you know what, maybe I shouldn’t have that third date with that person, or whatever it may be. The last thing I will say, and then I will stop because I would love to hear from you.

’cause everything you say, I’m just like, just wanna respond to that. I think this is a weird one for me to say, but I think someone listening to this needs to hear it because I said it before and I wanna say it again in a different way. Being okay and secure with your preferences. Just no, that’s a no, not now.

I don’t even necessarily wanna say boundaries. I just wanna say preferences. Understanding what you need and what you would like and being able to make choices and decisions. Off of that without guilt, without shame, without any kind of tension.

✨ Moon Mapping & Creative Power

Grace: Yeah. I love that. I love that because there’s a theme of acceptance.

You mentioned radical responsibility, but there’s also radical acceptance for what we desire. And even going back to that example of oh, I was told that if boys like me, they treat me poorly, but even like maybe your body is saying that’s not true, or maybe something within you is I don’t actually buy into that.

If this boy likes me, then he treats me badly because I feel bad. And that is a sign that’s not true. And so I think that goes back to questioning ourselves and questioning what we’re told, but also really inquiring what our needs are. And what our preferences are, and not necessarily making a story about why we’re wrong for wanting certain things, which I feel like there’s so much shame around.

Let’s say I want strawberry ice cream versus vanilla or whatever, right? If I want strawberry today, then I want strawberry, and that’s okay. And that is just my preference and that is fine. And that’s acceptance. Whereas, maybe back in the day you were bullied for that or maybe there was, a certain stigma against strawberry ice cream or whatever.

And I feel like that comes down to power because you were talking about taking agency, and I think the power of voicing our needs is something that has just been like stifled over time, and coming back into that power and this loo nation of power within, let’s say the dark moon, which is something that I would love to ask you about.

I feel like there’s power in creativity as well, and we’re both creatives, so I love that you mention creativity. So before we get into the dark moon, I just wanted to ask you, how can we use the moon phases as a blueprint for our creative process? And what is moon mapping?

Sarah: So we can use the moon as a guide to our own natural rhythms.

It if. Folks are listening. Like when I used to teach this, I might do one more class in 2025, or I might create like an evergreen thing, but I used to teach this for years and so I’m a creative and I got tired of teaching the same thing, so I stopped. But what I always say is, look what phase of the moon you were born under.

So figure out what phase of the moon you are born under and it’s that and oh, and for folks wanting to know how to do that, you don’t even need to know your time of birth. You don’t need to know like your astrological chart on any level. You can literally just Google. Your birthdate and like moon phase and you’ll be able to find was the moon full?

Was there a new moon? It also, while I’m like in the weeds, it’s also useful and helpful to look up if you were born a couple weeks on either side or in between and eclipse. It’s good to know for what eclipse season might bring you. So similar to, let’s just say someone being born under Mercury retrograde, and so when Mercury is retrograde, it’s either a really beautiful thing for them or like movement happens during the retrogrades.

If you were born around Eclipse season, you might have an affinity like Eclipse season might be. Like really powerful for you in a time of like real turbo change in charge. I was born under a dark moon right around eclipse, like just a week before an eclipse. So I was like, oh, that tracks, because I love eclipses and I’ve tried to really be clear, there’s a lot of eclipse hatred out there and I’ve tried to reposition eclipses as.

A time of great change if you are ready for that. So look up what phase the moon was in when you were born. Start to notice over a whole lunar cycle, maybe a couple lunar cycles. What is going on with your body? What is going on with your energy levels, your intuition. And it’s easiest to tell obviously, around full moons and new moons.

But for example, let’s just say if you were born under a waning moon, the waning moon cycle might be the most fruitful for you because you might feel most at home, right? So if you’re creative, if there are so many different ways we can work with the moon and creativity, right? And this like really cool way, I think we’ve already given folks suggestions like through our.

Talk, whether it’s channeling energy, expression, anger, emotional expression through our art, whether it’s through getting more honest with ourselves, whether it’s through dropping down into our subconscious. I don’t know about you Grace, but I’d love to program my subconscious. So for example, let’s say I have to teach a class.

This is literally how my, like creativity works. I’m like, or I’ll tell my subconscious, okay, I’m gonna teach this class in a month. It’s gonna be about these things. I want the participants to undergo these things. I need you to come up with three meditations. I’ll just tell my subconscious. Then I live and I wait for, oh yeah, I’m in the shower.

Oh, okay. Let me write this down in my notes app. Oh, I am chopping vegetables. Oh, got it. Like that. I call it the hunter-gatherer method. It’s like I tell my subconscious what I need and my subconscious is okay, we’ll figure this out. That’s how I like to work. Or getting into a more relaxed state.

To work, to be creative. And for me, what that often looks like is not going right to the computer, but drawing first, writing things down first. And that is literally where the next thing I will talk about came from. And that’s moon mapping. So if you’re a creative. Notice your rhythms of creativity. Notice what like lunar aspects and what lunar phases you feel most drawn to or most generative around, right?

And use that as your gentle guide. You don’t have to force anything. You can work with every phase of the moon in any way you want, but you can start to know. The other thing that I do wanna say that I teach, what I love about the moon is if that you’re gonna be completely wired during a full moon, which is what I hear from a lot of people round a full moon leading up a couple days leading up.

And then maybe the day after, maybe if you can not plan a big presentation, maybe if you can like not plan a breakup conversation or not plan your calendar to be super stacked around a full moon, if that. Conversely, I always feel really good. I’m always like, woo. I’m like, oh yeah, let’s go out. Let’s go to a concert.

Let’s, I’m gonna socialize, like that’s fun for me, but I know that’s not for everyone. So literally, lunar work, the moon is about our intuition, our needs, a lot of astrologers correlate the moon with hunger and what we need to feed ourselves literally and figuratively in order to feel nourished and in order to feel safe.

A lot of astrological traditions. Pair it with the mother or pair it with our main caretaker. So as adults, we’re our main caretaker, so we have to parent. So lunar work is re-parenting work, right? It’s psychic work, it’s intuitive work, it’s creative work. It’s also re-parenting work, which is of course what feeds the creativity and feeds the intuition.

So moon mapping is the method. It’s what I called working with one entire lunar cycle where you pick the theme or the themes you want to focus on where you wanna see growth around. Again, it can be finances or self-care or activism. Whatever it might be. Getting rid of a bad habit, anything really that you want, there’s nothing too big or too small, right?

And then you take it through the phases of the moon, where during the new moon, you set your intention around it. During the waxing, you create new actions around it in the world. Every day or every couple of days at the full moon, you reassess. You see where, how far you’ve come and what you wanna do more around.

And then in the waning moon, you do that behind the scenes work, decluttering, clearing, wrapping up, loose ends, subconscious, reprogramming, all of those kinds of things so that when you arrive at the next New Moon, you’ve made progress on the inner and you’ve made progress on the outer world. And we love to see humans love to see progress.

Like we love to see external and internal change. And so I call lunar work a transformation from the inside out. And that’s really what we want. That’s, at least that’s what I want.

✨ Shadow Wisdom & Seeding New Stories

Grace: Yeah, I think that’s beautiful in that there’s a full spectrum of where we can exist. And I love that you mention different rows and pathways and timelines that we can enter just because you are in this present moment, and I know some people may feel stuck in where they are.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t create a new paradigm for yourself. And I feel like the void is where creation is made, right? Like the void is associated with female sexuality and the universe and the big bang and all of that. And I feel like. The void is where we can uncover our truths because it’s not necessarily being casted upon any like projection or story or whatever.

It’s like nothingness where we can create our own truths. And I just wanna go back to what you said about, you tell your subconscious that I wanna do a workshop, I want meditations, et cetera, et cetera. And I love that you mentioned that because I feel like you’re like literally telling your subconscious, like a computer, like a program.

You’re like, I want this and this. It’s like you’re not asking Google, you’re asking your intuition as if it’s Google and you’re like, I’m not gonna sweat about when the answers come to me. They’ll come to me. When they’re ready to come to me, whether it’s in the shower or I am like on a long drive or whatever, like it will come to me when I’m ready to receive that information.

So I love that you mentioned that because I’ve been thinking a lot about us, like humans as a work of technology, whether that’s consciousness or how we program ourselves. Because I know you’ve mentioned programming, reprogramming, working with your subconscious, and I think that’s a huge part of it. And I also like what I heard from that too was like a level of detachment of not necessarily expecting something from your intuition to deliver.

Because I feel like when we put those expectations on ourselves is when we get so wrapped up in oh, it’s not coming quick enough, or whatever it is that we’re telling ourselves. You’re just like, I told my subconscious this and I trust that the information will be delivered to me. When it is ready to come and I am ready to receive.

Sarah: Thousand percent. I will I wanna echo things, take time. I often think we get things or change happens at the pace of our nervous system and our ability to receive it. So like classic thing I used to do with my clients when I worked with one-on-one people around change work. Now I mostly just do groups, but I would ask them, if you got what you wanted, like exactly what you wanted tomorrow, would you be able to handle it?

Would you be able to sustain it? Would you be able to keep it? And inevitably, most of them were like, no. Like they’re, they didn’t have the capacity or they didn’t fully have the belief or their nervous system still believed. Going back to what we talked about in the very beginning, their nervous system maybe didn’t believe that was safe, right?

Because again, for some of us, scarcity is safe for some of us. Like isolation is safe, right? For some of us connection, abundance, ease raises hand is dangerous, right? It’s dangerous. ’cause historically when we would let our guard down, not great things would happen. So it’s like rewiring and re-patterning has to happen on again.

It’s not, to me it’s very much not one modality. It’s very much not one way. It’s a mix of different aspects depending on who we are, what we need. I. What our intuition even tells us to do. I met a woman once and she was like, I healed my entire life through my diet, like through eating whole food. That’s not me.

I needed all of this stuff I’m talking to you about, which is why I share it, right? But for someone else, it literally might be creativity. That’s it. Creativity and playing sports. And they become a creative director and they play tennis three days a week and that’s what they need. So the world is so heavy, the world is so hard.

We’re all going through so much. I don’t know one person who isn’t going through something very serious. I do wanna say that we have to make time to carve out these lunar things that give us joy, emotional expression, physical movement and expression. And that kind of like alone, lunar time, whatever it might be.

Whether it’s the bath or the shower, or once a week journaling or listening to music and crying, putting on a playlist in your car and crying. There’s no shame when it happens. If you’re like a busy caretaker with kids or you’re taking care of an elderly parent or you’re super sick and you can’t get out of bed, whatever it might be just like figuring out some simple things where you are, how you are with the capacity you have.

Yeah.

✨ Trusting Your Inner Timing

Grace: Yeah, so I know sometimes consistency is really for whatever reason, difficult for some people. And so part of, I think social media and the tactics out there that are relevant they always say consistency is really important. Would you agree with that? And what were some tips for you to stay consistent?

Vanessa: For sure. I think consistency is key, as boring as it sounds and as often as we’ve already heard this, but I would say in order to do anything very well, you must be consistent. If social media is just fun to you, then I don’t see a need to be consistent. However, if you want to build a following or make it a full-time job, obviously you’ll have to become very good at it, which means you have to be consistent and you have to be very inspirational amongst already inspirational people, or you have to be very clear to showcase why people should follow you or listen to you amongst other people who have been putting in the work for years who have been doing this consistently. So it’s really just also about reading the room and understanding.

Sure, consistency may be challenging, but there are people out here who are doing it regardless of whether there’s rain or sunshine outside. There’s people doing it regardless of whether they want to or not. And if this is something you wanna take seriously, that’s who you’re up against. So, there’s not really a choice.

Grace: Yeah. And I also feel like it’s really about consistently believing in yourself and consistently putting in the time to put your dreams out there. And so when you told your best friend that you wanted to be a YouTuber, what were your big dreams for being a YouTuber and has that fulfilled itself and come true or are there still things you’re building for yourself? Like what does the big dreams of Vanessa Somuayina look like?

Vanessa: I think in some ways it’s been like the first stepping stone. It’s been one of the things on my list that I wanted to accomplish and I did. And I would say this is definitely by far not the end, but it was a great start, if you will.

However, I still think there are things for me to do on YouTube and off YouTube, so it’s really never finished.

✨ Fast Five Questions

Grace: Yeah. Wow. So many gems dropped. So let’s move into our fast five questions to wrap up this conversation. I will be percolating everything you said during this conversation. It was so lovely. What is your sun, moon and rising?

Sarah: Oh, my sun is… i’m a Cancer Sun, Taurus Rising, and Gemini Moon.

Grace: So cool ’cause Cancer is related to the moon, right?

Sarah: It’s true.

Grace: So what advice would you give to your younger self?

Sarah: Don’t believe what other people tell you about yourself.

Grace: Powerful. How would you define everyday magic?

Sarah: Living in flow and enjoyment of simple pleasures of life and being able to access spirit and the greater whole every day in some way.

Grace: What are your favorite rituals?

Sarah: Definitely bath.

Grace: Yeah. Love a good bath. What are you looking forward to in the near future?

Sarah: I’m looking forward to my next season.

✨ Collective Reading by Sarah Gottessdiener

Grace: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do the collective reading.

Sarah: We’ll do it joint grace. I’m gonna shuffle and you just tell me when, okay?

Grace: Okay.

Sarah: Okay. Pick a number between one and three.

Grace: Three.

Sarah: And then one and two.

Grace: Two.

Sarah: Okay, when is this airing?

Grace: Probably sometime next year.

Sarah: So we got the Hermit, that’s why I asked. We got the Hermit, which is the numerological card of the year next year. This is a very mystical card about discovering the uniqueness of your gifts, your intuition, your spirituality, and your unique path.

It is definitely a card about focus. It is definitely a card about pairing down to what are the most important things for you. Maybe the top three things or the top five things. And it’s really getting rid of the noise distractions so that you can hear your intuition, because it usually correlates with preparation onto a new path or like being on the path, but being in the unknown.

Not like just using your eco location, using your intuition. For all y’all who live on the east coast or in snow, you ever been in a car at night and it’s snowing like wild. And you can only go three miles an hour and snows everywhere, and you can just see four or five feet ahead of you and you have to trust that you’re still on a road, but you can’t see it.

And you’re just have to surrender and go slow and be patient and keep your eyes on the road and like just be in the present moment. To me, that really resonates with the Hermit. You can only see a couple of steps ahead. You’re not quite sure. You’re in the unknown. You’re seeking, you’re looking for something, you’re going somewhere, but it’s often your own personal kind of process that might even be challenging to describe to other people, but it is a very worthwhile, beautiful, process to go on.

✨ Closing Statements

Grace: Yeah. So at the time of this recording, it’s 2024, but we’re nearing 2025, and the Hermit would be the collective tarot card of the year for numerology nine. And my personal tarot card is always the collective tarot card. So what you said, also, I feel like I feel where I’m like, I’m definitely clearing things are being removed, taking in new things, but whatever is coming in is preparing me for the next cycle, which is numerology number one, which is.

The magician and so on, so forth. And I feel like as a collective energy, I hear astrologically, it’s just gonna be a crazy year next year. Like a lot’s going on as it is every year it feels but I do feel like collectively we’re all taking in so much information all of the time that it’s just like there’s no room for new information almost.

So part of that clearing that is coming, or if you’re not already experiencing it, is to make space for new things and new experiences to come in. And that could mean like coming back to our conversation of new pathways, new stories, new patterns that you wanna insert into preparing for the new cycle to come.

Absolutely. A thousand percent couldn’t agree more. Yeah. So thank you so much, Sarah. This was such a beautiful, illuminating conversation and I love for our listeners to follow you and also to listen to your podcast. So where can they find you? Yeah. The best places

Sarah: are our studio newsletter. So you can just Google the Moon studio and then you can sign up for our newsletter.

We send them out about once a week. And I love them and people love getting them to make it easy. My podcast is called Moon Beaming and you can listen to it wherever you get your podcast. And there’s a really awesome conversation that was super inspirational with Grace, so you can find that one as well.

So yeah, that’s where folks can find me.

Grace: Amazing. All right. Thanks so much, Sarah.

Sarah: Bye, Grace. Thank you.

Grace: Bye bye.

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

Grace: Thanks so much for tuning in to today’s episode with Sarah Faith Gottesdiener. This was such a rich and mystical conversation, one that invited us to sit with the unknown and listen more deeply to our intuition. Sarah brings such wisdom to the liminal spaces we often rush through.

Here’s a journaling prompt. What parts of yourself do you keep hitting in the shadows? What is your relationship to the unknown? Feel free to share in the comments. Leave a podcast review on Apple podcasts and Spotify and share this episode with a friend who might need to hear this message.

Until next time, be gentle with yourself, especially if you’re still processing whatever is unfolding for you. Sending you grace today. And every day.

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