The knees are often understood as a highway joint between the hips and the ankles. Sometimes hip and ankle issues can show up in the knees through what is known as “referred pain.” Energetically, knee pain may indicate that there is a conflict between where one part of you wants to go and where the rest of you actually is—for example, is your heart yearning to go somewhere your feet do not?

When we engage in counseling or other forms of healing work, we often have a story to tell. We talk about what happened to us, how we feel about it, and what we want next. It’s an intellectual exercise of pulling out the useful details and lining them up so someone can understand where we are coming from and where we want to go.

This is useful, as there is plenty of good insight and information that can come from that kind of narrative. But what about the body? How would the body tell that story?

Did you pull the High Priestess card? Learn the meaning of this major arcana card and how it can help us heal the “witch wound.”

In the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, the High Priestess is a robed woman sitting between one black pillar and one white pillar, a moon at her feet, and a veil decorated with pomegranates (a fruit that is associated with femininity, fertility, and death) behind her.

She is the gatekeeper of the Divine Feminine, the subconscious mind, and the secrets that become available only to the initiated who know how to enter this realm. Anyone who enters must understand the duality represented by the black and white pillars: dark and light, masculine and feminine, conscious and subconscious.

As we turn to moon season, we head inside, slow down, and tend to want to sleep and dream more. This is a time for reflection and inner work, and many of us find that we naturally turn toward our spirituality. As the masculine rests, to a degree, in the fall and winter seasons, Divine Feminine energy is free to roam within us in our dreams, our spiritual connections, and our learning and healing selves. Fall and winter are not times for “doing” as much as they are for “being”: for integrating, processing, dreaming, and crafting intentions we will not yet act on. It is an inward time, and that should be honored and appreciated.

The winter solstice, which falls on December 21, is the pinnacle of moon season. This is the darker half of the year when we tend to see the moon more often in the sky. From a spiritual perspective, this is the time for inward work, like learning, reflecting, meditating, and praying, while the brighter half of the year is better suited to external practices, like producing, creating, and expressing. The winter solstice also comes with the holiday season; the ancient pagans called this month’s moon the Moon Before Yule.

However, dance is a nearly universally accepted form of self-expression. When we dance, we make shapes with our bodies. We can shake, stretch, jump, walk, run, or curl up into a ball. These shapes can express emotions that have been caught inside of our bodies and need to be released.

The Hanged Man tarot card depicts a figure hanging upside down from one foot, usually by a tree or some sort of wooden cross. Despite the explicitly uncomfortable position, the figure often looks peaceful and at rest, sometimes even with a halo around their head. The general interpretation of this card is to rest within chaos, confusion, or uncertainty. To allow yourself to learn from being stuck somewhere you never wanted to be.

November is the month of the full Beaver Moon, according to Indigenous and European traditions in North America. Around this time, beavers settle into the lodges they so diligently built in the spring and summer, preparing for the colder season. The Cree and Assiniboine people refer to November’s moon as the Frost Moon, while it’s called the Freezing Moon by the Anishinaabe, referencing the cold shift we often feel so sharply in November.

The November full moon is the perfect time to wrap up projects and turn inward for the winter. Explore the spiritual meaning of the Beaver Moon.

November is the month of the full Beaver Moon, according to Indigenous and European traditions in North America. Around this time, beavers settle into the lodges they so diligently built in the spring and summer, preparing for the colder season. The Cree and Assiniboine people refer to November’s moon as the Frost Moon, while it’s called the Freezing Moon by the Anishinaabe, referencing the cold shift we often feel so sharply in November.

Do you ever have those kinds of days where every glass you touch smashes, you are constantly stubbing your toe, and you find yourself covered with mysterious bumps and bruises? Some of us are clumsier than others, but we also go through clumsy phases from time to time. There might even be a spiritual meaning to your clumsiness.

The lungs are particularly associated with grief. One of the likeliest times for us to get a respiratory illness is when we are going through a period of loss or sadness. Let’s talk about the spiritual meaning of respiratory issues and illnesses.

According to TCM, lungs have an association with the emotion of grief. (Read the Spiritual Meaning of Lung Illnesses). When we do not take the time to rest and fully process our grief, it can get stuck in the lungs, making us more vulnerable to coughs and respiratory illnesses. Overthinking and being overly busy can sometimes be a defense against the emotion of sorrow.

These beliefs also give us a sense of control over our lives. When bad things happen to good people—or, specifically, when we ourselves align with goodness and bad things happen anyway—we’re left adrift, feeling abandoned by our gods. Many of us have no choice but to blame ourselves for tragedies. “If only” and “what if” haunt our day-to-day lives. We can’t find a good reason for why something bad happened, so we start to believe we must be bad in some deep, unchangeable way; that we must have deserved this pain. What else could possibly explain it?

Many people experience September as a kind of spiritual New Year—Jewish people, for example, celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, during the September New Moon. There is a freshness as the cool air sets in and a new energy that may feel quite exciting. Though most of us may not literally be hunting, this time of the year is appropriate for setting clear intentions to achieve our goals, especially in terms of work or learning, and take action on reaching those goals.

To align with the spiritual meaning of the full Hunter’s Moon this October, complete your internal harvest.

The Hunter’s Moon is one of the few traditional moon names that isn’t associated with the month itself, but rather with the timing of the autumnal equinox. While the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox is always the Harvest Moon, the moon that follows is referred to as the Hunter’s Moon, and it makes its first appearance in either October or November.

When we are in a state that requires patience, we are, by definition, uncomfortable. We want something to change because we don’t like the way we feel while waiting. Rather than try to focus on the future change, what if we used compassion for ourselves to explore what the waiting experience is bringing up for us in that present moment?

We all have values, whether we know it or not. Some of them come from our family, some come from our culture, and some are all our own. When we get a sense of what those values actually are, it’s much easier to set goals in accordance with them. If you’re facing a decision—especially a big one—knowing what your values are can go a long way towards helping you decide. When you can see your most important values right there in black and white, you can ask yourself which decision most closely aligns with those, and the decision often becomes clear right away.

The last card is the Star, which is an energy of hope, especially after a difficult period. It’s the energy of early spring, which is when the first flowers start to break through the melting snow and frozen earth. In this image, this woman is surrounded by chaos but calm, at one with it. One of the students in the class pointed out the bird holding a flower resting on her hand, which calls to mind the myth of Noah’s Ark. After God flooded the earth, everything was gone but Noah’s family and his menagerie of animals, floating in an ark on an ocean of nothing for over a year. Noah sent out a raven who didn’t come back, then a dove, then another, until one finally came back with an olive branch, indicating that their long wandering was finally coming to an end.

The word equinox is a Latin word meaning equal night. The Autumn Equinox, usually falling around the 22nd of September, is a time when day and night are roughly equal in length. At this turning point, the fall season begins and nights become longer than the days in the Northern Hemisphere. (In the Southern Hemisphere, the Autumn Equinox falls around March 22nd.) Energetically, the Autumn Equinox is a time of balance and pause, a transitional moment between the bright half of the year and the dark half of the year.

Many early therapeutic strategies were developed by privileged white men like Sigmund Freud. They were revolutionary at the time, and there are undoubtedly helpful pieces in them all. But therapies are always a product of the society they come from, and they tend to reinforce the values of that society. When a patient lies on a couch to be judged by a more powerful figure taking notes on them, they are experiencing authority, judgment, and hierarchy, which are all colonial values.