Rest doesn’t always have to look like more sleep. When we listen to the body’s needs and triggers, we can better understand what true restfulness looks like.

It’s easy to be busy in our modern world, which puts so much value on productivity. Many of us believe somewhere deep inside that we are human doings, not human beings. That if we rest, take a break, or don’t work for a while, we lose our right to exist.

And yet rest is important medicine. Our bodies are capable of healing so many ailments and injuries without much more intervention than rest. Additionally, stress is implicated in something like 90 percent of acute and chronic illnesses.

The way we carry ourselves in the world is powerful and can reflect deeper spiritual truths about the way we live our lives. What’s the spiritual meaning of your posture?

What do you notice about your posture right now as you are reading this? Are your shoulders hunched forward or tensed up to your ears? Are your legs crossed? What is your lower back doing?

Everyone’s posture is a little bit different, and of course if you have pain or other concerns, it’s a good idea to ask your doctor about it. But posture can also tell you a lot about what you’re feeling in your deepest inner self. What’s the spiritual meaning of your posture?

The Tower tarot card is one of the least-loved cards in the deck, but it offers powerful wisdom about big life changes. What’s the spiritual meaning of the Tower tarot card?

The Tower tarot card can be a little scary—maybe even scarier than the notorious Death card. It usually shows some version of a burning tower, with people jumping out of it to get away from the flames. It symbolizes something like the Tower of Babel, a story from the Bible about a time when humans were building a tower high enough to reach into the sky. God didn’t like this, so he scrambled the human’s languages and dispersed them across the earth, making it impossible for them to communicate well enough to continue building the tower.

The Tantric goddess Dhumavati is a dark aspect of the Great Goddess and offers great teachings about rejection, disappointment, and despair. Explore what we can learn from her story.

Before psychology, there was spirituality. People turned to god and goddess archetypes to help them get through the most difficult parts of their lives long before there were therapists. Goddesses are feminine archetypes that have existed in almost every culture throughout the world, and they can provide inspiration that can help us with our everyday heartaches.

Panic attacks can be scary and require care, but they can also teach us a lot about ourselves. Explore the spiritual meaning of panic attacks.

A panic attack is a sudden, extreme, and concentrated experience of anxiety. All the physical symptoms of fear can appear at once: racing heartbeat, cold sweat, hyperventilating, constriction in the chest, and so on. Panic attacks are not life-threatening, but they can feel that way—specifically, they can feel like a heart attack.

Ringing ears? It may be connected to your intuition. Learn more about the spiritual meaning of problems with the ears.

The ears—most of us don’t think much about them unless something goes wrong. Our ears are easy to take for granted. Unlike our eyes, which we can close to block out sight, for those of us with full hearing, our ears are always “on,” constantly receiving information. As always, talk to your doctor if you have concerns about muffled hearing, have difficulty hearing, or hear ringing in the ears. But what might be the spiritual meaning of ear problems?

At winter's halfway point, take time to honor the past year's losses and harness the cleansing power of fire. Learn more about the spiritual meaning of Februalia.

In ancient Rome, before our modern calendar became what it is today, the year began in March, the month named for the war god Mars. Ten months of the year were counted up until December, which held the winter solstice, and what we now call January and February were unnamed, a dead zone in the year.

January is one of the hardest times of year to establish new habits. Instead, use these compassionate intentions to support your body through the hard winter.

While the practice of New Year's resolutions was once a commitment to spirituality and community, it has evolved to frequently focus on things like diet and exercise. While setting intentions can be wonderful and the New Year can definitely feel like a fresh start, it’s actually a terrible time to be making big changes, especially when it comes to adding exercise and reducing calories.

Overwhelming emotions are common but often feel insurmountable. Try these five techniques to ground yourself and unwind.

Big feelings are a part of life—and not just for toddlers, either. It’s normal and natural as a human being to have big reactions to the inevitable difficulties of life.

Unfortunately, our culture is not so good at handling our big emotions, and many of us have gotten the message that we should suppress and repress those feelings so we can continue to function. This is a bad idea, partly because those stuck emotions end up coming out in other ways, often as physical symptoms. When we’re constantly trying not to feel what we feel, we create a consistent stress response in our bodies, and that can make us really sick.

We are living in an era when pagan religions and personal spirituality are having something of a revival. Organized religion is still very powerful, but many people have been turning away from an official hierarchical religious structure and exploring spirituality on their own terms.

For some of us, this means cultivating certain powers we didn’t know we had—listening to our bodies, intuiting other people’s emotions, hearing the voice of gods (or goddesses) through meditation or plant journeys, and sometimes even having access to our spirit guides or ancestors who have passed over to the other side. These experiences are powerful and fascinating—and a little confusing.

While wasp stings can certainly be random and unfortunate, they can also teach us about ourselves and our perspective on life. What is the spiritual meaning of a wasp sting?

Stung by a wasp?

Whatever your reaction, a wasp sting sometimes feels like it’s trying to tell you something. What is the spiritual meaning of a wasp sting?

Sadness, while deeply uncomfortable, has a purpose and lesson to teach us. What medicine can your sadness offer you?

Feeling sad is a natural, unavoidable, but often deeply uncomfortable emotion. Many of us would prefer to feel angry than sad—anger has energy, and sadness can feel like it saps our life force. So what’s the point of feeling sad?

Spirituality and therapy have been intertwined since before psychotherapy became a respected field of study. Explore some of the complexities at the intersection of spiritual life and therapy.

Since psychotherapy was essentially invented by Sigmund Freud in the 1900s, the therapeutic industry has tried to present itself as hard science; as something that can be studied and that can produce predictable results. This idea has been touch and go, with some therapies showing great promise in scientific settings, and others falling flat.

The Harvest Moon, the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox, brings potent magic and wisdom. Learn what this year’s Harvest Moon has to teach you.

Each full moon of the year has a special name that comes from cultures all over the world. Usually, these names refer to the season, and the moon’s appearance shifts depending on whether we’re in a year with twelve or thirteen moons. The Harvest Moon is a special name, as it refers to the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox (in the Northern Hemisphere). It’s called that because, at this time of the year, the full moon tends to rise around sunset for several nights in a row, giving farmers that little bit of extra light to work by during the vital harvest season. It usually rises sometime in September, but it can land in October as well.

When we are attracted to unhealed people, it’s often because of unhealed wounds within ourselves. Learn more about working with intuition to unravel conditioning in relationships.

What, exactly, is attraction? We often think of it in terms of a romantic draw towards someone with particular looks, or a type, but as many of us have experienced, our romantic interest in someone has so much more to do with things like the way they talk, what they are interested in, their mannerisms, and other mysterious factors. What if one of those mysterious factors is our own deeply held attachment wounds? What if attraction actually is our wounds trying to heal?

What we react negatively to—even and especially the foods we eat—can offer us deep wisdom. Learn more about the spiritual meaning of food allergies.

Food allergies are common and can range in severity from slight discomfort to anaphylactic shock. Food allergies can be life threatening, and it’s important to work with your doctor on managing these allergies appropriately. In the meantime, it can be useful to consider what your food allergies might be trying to tell you on an energetic or emotional level.

Learning this won’t necessarily cure your allergies, but it might help show you how to support your body to lessen the effects of allergies or even change something in your life for your greater good. What’s the spiritual meaning of food allergies?

The Law of Attraction empowers people to think more positively, but at what cost? Explore the complexities of the Law of Attraction.

The concept of the Law of Attraction, which is often called “manifesting,” refers to the idea that we can create our realities and make our dreams and wishes come true through the power of thought. Imagine hard enough, the theory goes, and you can get whatever you want.

The Blue Moon offers an opportunity for contemplation, completion, and tapping into divine femininity. Explore the spiritual meaning of this special full moon.

The length of a moon cycle is around 29.5 days, while the average length of a calendar month is 30.5 days. We usually have just one full moon per month, but every two or three years we have 13 moons in a year. This 13th moon is usually a Blue Moon, either the second full moon in a calendar month or the third full moon in a three-month season with four full moons. So what is the spiritual meaning of a blue moon?

Empaths often have a history of childhood trauma. Explore how empathy is both a gift and a challenge, and learn how to navigate your past experiences for a brighter future.

Empaths are people who tend to be very sensitive to other people’s moods, emotions, and energy. They can tell when what you’re saying doesn’t match what you’re feeling. They’ll feel other people’s emotions—both good and bad—as if they were their own. You won’t tend to find an empath in a crowd—it’s so overwhelming to have everyone’s energy coming in at once that many empaths would rather stay home with a few people they feel safe with (or only in exactly the right crowd).

And sometimes things don’t shift. Sometimes we’re stuck in a rut for a long long while and nothing seems to change no matter how many full moons pass us by. I’ll be honest—with everything I’ve been dealing with this year, I am in a sort of self-imposed, restorative rut. I’m in day-by-day mode.