The Hope of The Star: Archetypes of the Tarot

Have you ever wondered how you can harness the power of archetypes and symbols to live with more wisdom and depth? In this week's episode, Dr. BethAnne continues the Archetypes of the Tarot series with The Hope of The Star.

Key talking points include:  

• Understanding the archetype of the star and the invitation of hope in this card
• Perspectives on hope to uplift and ignite your spirits and heart
• How to utilize the lessons of The Star to inspire renewal and creativity
• Ideas and tools to help us channel inspiration from archetypes so we can feel more equipped to journey with peace and ease

Tune in next week for a new episode of Your Heart Magic, where we'll continue our Mental Health Toolbox series. New episodes of Your Heart Magic air weekly each Thursday at 6pm HST.

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Your Heart Magic is a space where heart wisdom, spirituality, and psychology meet. Enjoy episodes centered on mental health, spirituality, personal growth, healing, and well-being. Featured as one of the best Heart Energy and Akashic Records Podcasts in 2024 by PlayerFM and Globally Ranked in the top 5% in Listen Notes.

Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright is a Licensed Psychologist, Spiritual Educator, and Akashic Records Reader. She is the author of the Award-Winning Lamentations of the Sea, its sequels, and several books of poetry. A psychologist with a mystic mind, she weaves perspectives from both worlds to offer holistic wisdom.

If you’d like to explore what your Akashic Records have to share with you to guide you on your path at this time, you can find more about Akashic Magic Sessions HERE. Alternatively, sign up for the monthly newsletter Akashic Magic. Each month offers a unique perspective on the current energies along with intuitive writing prompts! Members enjoy a free gift— a complimentary copy of  Dr. BethAnne's book, Cranberry Dusk— upon signing up. 

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Chapters

• 0:13 The Tarot card "The Star" and its symbolism of hope, inspiration, and positivity
• 5:13 Maintaining hope during difficult times.
• 10:43 Hope, inspiration, and renewal through the tarot card "The Star."
• 14:44 Hope can arrive unexpectedly, shifting energy and inspiring forward movement,

Transcript

Below is a transcript of the episode as generated by Otter.ai. (*please note, this transcript has only been edited to put in line breaks for easier readability and may contain errors where a word or phrase got lost in transcription.)

[0:13] The Tarot card "The Star" and its symbolism of hope, inspiration, and positivity.

Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic, an illuminating space where psychology, spirituality and heart wisdom. Meet. Here's your host, Dr bethanne kapansky Wright, the clinical psychologist with a mystic mind.

Aloha, everybody. This is Dr bethanne kapansky Wright, and welcome to Your Heart magic. We are continuing our archetypes of the Tarot series today, and for this month, we are talking about the card, the star. And the archetype of the star is as lovely as it sounds. The star in the tarot represents hope. It represents inspiration. It represents patience and positivity and having a sense of affirmation, having inspiration just descend down upon us, where all of a sudden we have a renewed sense of faith in the process.

When you study the Tarot, and you study the different archetypes and you study the fool's journey, which is what the Major Arcana of the Tarot is all about, this fool who strikes out to learn and grow and adventure and discover and along the way, meets all these characters and challenges and life experiences that help grow him or her or them in wisdom and in knowledge, and learn through mistakes and making choices and learn about the different aspects of the masculine and the feminine and humanity and positivity and temptation and Liberation and Justice and strength and all these different qualities. It's really a beautiful journey that the full takes.

And I think interpreting any card, it's helpful to do it in light of the context what came before it. And so in the fulls journey, he's just passed through the tower energy. So the card that we talked about last month was the tower, and the card the month before that was the devil. And so both of those cards are some of the more challenging ones historically and the deck, and they're ones that people can feel more challenge to work with. And I love the star because it's like you've been through all the change you've been through the challenge.

You've descended into your abyss and confronted your inner fears and confronted some of the things within you that are these sticky attachments that kept you trapped, you found that liberation, and that was the devil. And then you went through the big shake up energy of the tower, and you've had some kind of disaster or unexpected surprise or huge change, shake up your life, and you were invited into bigger perspective, shift.

And whether you like it or not, the change is here, so the fool is learning how to work with it, and goes into the foxhole, maybe to lick their wounds and find their way out. And as they emerge, it's night out, and they look up and they see the stars, and they start to have a sense after all this big shake up, all this clearing out of old thoughts, old beliefs, old smaller ways of being, they realize some sense of interconnection and have a sense of spiritual awareness.

And the star is the first card in the deck where there really is this idea of bringing the heavens and bringing in the energetic, bringing in the ethereal realm and having a sense of greater connection, and that transpersonal and transcendental energies that are part of being a multi dimensional being. So there's not a lot to not like about the star. It's a very easy card to share and to talk about, it's an easy archetype for us to identify with. I don't think we have to work too hard to think about, how can we feel inspired by the star archetype? It is one of most people's favorite cards in the deck.

It's one of mine. And years ago, when I got one of my first decks of tarot, I remember it being one of the cards that I was immediately drawn to. And it wasn't just I didn't even know what the star meant at the time, but it was the hopeful nature of the card, and something about seeing this woman and having, like all these stars in the sky, and she was looking up, and there was some. Something in the card itself, I don't even remember what, but something that symbolized that. This was a positive card, and I felt that good energy and being intrigued by, well, what does the star mean?
 
[5:13] Maintaining hope during difficult times.

I want some of that. It's not an archetype that many of us have to reach for as much though I would qualify that, that if we've been in a really dark place, it might feel like a stretch. We might have given up a sense of hope or faith that good happens, that sometimes the skies part and blessings come down, or we're given inspiration, or we're given a helping hand, sometimes when we get in a really low place, or we get pressed down by life stress or trauma or tragedy, we lose touch with that hopeful aspect of ourself.

And so this card might be a really nice reminder for anybody who's found themselves in that place that good things happen to and that part of the journey of the Tarot, all the arcanas put together, is to conceptualize some of the fullness of the human experience and the human journey, I won't say the totality of it, because I don't think that can be captured in a deck of cards, no matter how strong and beautiful the archetypes.

But the Tarot does a beautiful job of giving us a frame of reference to think about all the different aspects of self and experiences that we might have, and how we can integrate each of those archetypes to draw on them to feel more whole and to feel more vibrant. So here are some ways that we can draw on the star to help support our fullness and our vibrancy. The star reminds us to never lose hope. It is a card that says, Whatever goes down also comes up. A lot of times. The adage is flipped and it says, Whatever goes up must come down. And I think that there's that sense of, uh oh, the other shoe is going to drop. And I you know, things can't stay in this really great place. And so I better not ever feel hopeful, because what if things go wrong?

I think sometimes we block ourselves from feeling hope, because we are afraid, if we attach to hope and something goes wrong, we're going to be that much more disappointed. And I don't know if that really works. I do think that there is wisdom when we learn to shift from a space of always wearing rose colored glasses and perhaps naively believing that things will always be in flow and beautiful and wonderful, that's just not the human experience.

 Part of the human experience and the evolution of ourself and the evolution of our light is the invitation to understand the lows in life and to work with them, to awaken to who we are, to disrupt our old ways of being, to open up to bigger perspectives in those lower, harder areas, we learn to reach we learn to find the light. We learn a lot about strength. We learn the lesson of no mud, no Lotus. So I do think there's wisdom when we learn to open up to the full spectrum and with maturity, just say there are highs and there's lows and there's everything in between. And I am just trying to be open to it all.

But I think that on a more day to day level, sometimes we hold ourselves back from feeling hopeful, about having a high from feeling hopeful that things can be changing or something good might be coming, because we are trying to protect ourselves from disappointment. I don't know that that works. I think that even when we are trying to prepare that things might not all be rosy, we still feel disappointed when they're not.

And so I think there's a case to be made for just holding hope and maybe letting go of our attachment to what hope looks like, and letting go of the idea that hope has to show up in a specific way. If we say, keep hope in a situation and our hope is attached to a certain outcome, then we might feel disappointed. But if we say, You know what, I'm going to keep hope, because life always has a few tricks up its sleeve, and maybe there's some solution or some resolution that I can't even see coming from my vantage point.

Maybe something spontaneously shifts, maybe something beautiful comes from this, and I just can't see it. Now, if we can release our attachment to what it looks like, we have lots of room to keep hope and to remind ourselves not to lose our sense of hope and to know that if we've been in a down place, life does go up. The energy moves. In cycles. Our world moves in cycles. We moves in cycles we can track so we can expand. If we've been in a down place, we come back up after a time, and hope happens. And so that's the reminder of the star.

And I think right now, the world itself probably could use quite a bit of star energy, because there's a lot going on that we don't feel hopeful about, and we don't see solutions. We don't see how humanity is going to get through this. And I think that being able to maintain a sense of hope and foster a sense of hope, even when we have grave uncertainty and grief and sadness over some of what we're seeing.
 
[10:43] Hope, inspiration, and renewal through the tarot card "The Star."
 
I think that is a gift that our heart can teach us how to do, and that our spiritual connection can support us in doing. And we're not doing it from a naive, rose colored it's all going to work out kind of way. We're doing it from a space of being steadfast and just refusing to give up on hope and saying, I don't know how, if, when, if a resolution is even possible, but I still have hope that the greater heartbeat of this universe, the greater heartbeat of the Earth, the greater soul of humanity, will find ways to move towards wellness on this will find a way to move towards healing.

Will find a way to move towards wholeness. And I don't have to know what that looks like in this moment. I just have to be willing to hold space for the possibility of hope in my heart. And that is one of the gifts that the star asked us to do, to hold space for the possibility of hope. The star also invites us to look up. And as I said earlier, it is the first card and the journey of the fool that opens to the heavens and opens to more of the spiritual and the ethereal and the energetic.

And I think that when we have been in a place where we're looking down, we forget to look up. We forget to open up to receiving from something bigger than ourselves. We forget to open to receiving from the universe or from spirit or from the collective energy around us, we forget to open up and look up and receive inspiration. Oftentimes, I found that if we just ask, inspiration will show up and meet us. If we just say, universe spirit, I am in need today of something that gives me some star energy. I need a little bit of inspiration from my heart that something will happen, and we have to pay attention.
 
We have to be looking up. We have to be in a position where we can stop fixating on our path, and stop fixating on whatever it is that we're ruminating about or over focusing on and look around us. Look up and look around and see, where is inspiration? Where is hope already happening? Where is there already star energy and the world around me? Where is there something that I can tap into? That energy and find a sense of hope, find a sense of optimism. Nature is a beautiful teacher of this. And I think nature has inherent star energy. I mean, no wonder the star is part of nature.

The card is named after an element in nature, an element in the solar system, an element in the natural world. And so, of course, going into the natural world, and paying attention and looking at nature and the gifts of nature as a source of inspiration is a beautiful way to work with our star energy. But ultimately, what I love about the star is that it's the reminder that hope just happens, that there are times that we look for it, and if we want to be intentional about bringing star energy into our life, we can, we can go do all the things that we were just talking about with how to open to that energy.

But the star itself is not something that the fool went and looked for. It just happened. He happened to look up and felt this wave of inspiration, this wave of renewed optimism. There was a blessing that is an element to this card, and it is an important part of the star, because it's a reminder that sometimes life just shines down. There are times where we are hit by a wave of inspiration, we have a sense of renewed optimism and faith.
 
[14:44] Hope can arrive unexpectedly, shifting energy and inspiring forward movement.

We have a sense that there's light at the end of the tunnel after a dark season, and we start to see what that light is. And so I think it's important to distinguish that there are times in life that we have to be very intentional about keeping hope. And create a hope box in our heart, and foster the energy of hope and find the things that make us hopeful, we have to look for the good.
 
We have to make space to receive hope when it happens. Hope can happen to any of us, and if we don't have an openness inside of us, it's hard for it to get through. So when we do the work of preparing a space for hope and cultivating the energy of hope, we're also clearing space. So if hope does shine down, we're all the better able to receive it. But I love the energy of blessing and good fortune in this card that just says, even if you're not looking for it, hope might just come along and like, bop you on the head and be like, Hello. Here I am. Here's some inspiration. Here is something to lift your spirits and renew you.

We wake up one day and the energy's totally shifted. Nothing changed, except we feel different and we're able to find our way through something that felt stuck before, and so it's that beautiful reminder that sometimes, out of nowhere, we might not see it coming, we couldn't have made it happen, but hope happens, and it just shows up, and it is a blessing to us that allows us to surge forward on our path. And oh, I think that's such a beautiful message, and the perfect place to end this. Today,
we'll end on a high note.

So thank you so much for joining me in this archetype at the Tarot episode and allowing the star to bring through a little bit more inspiration for all of us. Next week, I will be back with a new mental health toolbox episode. I don't know what the topic is yet. I haven't chosen it, but it will be something to do with our mental well being and sharing some tools that can support you and moving towards greater healing and wholeness with yourself. So with that, have an amazing week. Everyone may hope just happen to you and find you in the most delightful ways. And of course, be well, be love, be you and be magic.

You've been listening to your heart magic with Dr bethanne kapansky Wright, tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your light you.