I was doing an amazing job following my motherly instincts around my baby’s sleep until he started to wake up every 40 to 60 minutes. I was about to drop thousands of dollars on “sleep school” when a chance encounter brought me back to my senses and my own gut. Here’s one way to deal with a sleep regression gently.

What is your relationship to time? Do you have patience or do you dig up the seeds just planted to see if they are growing yet? Notice your relationship to time and growth and ask yourself if it’s working for you or not.

You’re knocked up. Congrats! Let’s explore the insights tarot can provide for you and that growing bump.

There’s a lot of chat out there about what tarot is, but what is it REALLY? And can tarot cards ruin your life? Girl, you already know the answer to this question. But let’s break it down.

I began using cards just for fun, pulling them for friends and at informal gatherings. Initially I had to rely on the definitions I found in books and from teachers but with practice, I became more and more able to let the words flow through me during readings. The definitions of the cards were a starting place that opened up into a vast territory of meaning that would come to me as I opened myself up and trusted.

After walking away from the PhD I sat on my meditation cushion for a month, crying and feeling like a failure. Meanwhile, the Universe was busy dropping hints: several people told me I would make a good birth doula, a friend gave me a book on midwifery and I met several doulas in person. After a while, I listened and signed up for a training. It felt less like following my intuition and more like being bashed over the head with a baseball bat, but I suppose it counts.

During my entire graduate school career I had a hunch that something didn’t fit right. What brought me clarity was entering a 12 step recovery program similar to Alcoholics Anonymous where I was surrounded by people who shared directly from their own experience of life. Furthermore, nobody gave me a grade or asked me to quote my sources. It was liberating in the extreme.

It also put me in a bind as far as academia went. If I had learned the most valuable and profound lessons of my life from my sponsor - a man who had never finished high school - then what the hell was I doing spending 23 years of my life studying?