Soothe your Shadow with the Star card

This summer, I’m guiding you through a tarot takeover of my book, THE SHADOW PATH. Each Monday, I’ll pair a key theme from the book with a tarot archetype to share fresh insights on shadow work (and play). Today, we’re diving into Week Six: Soothe Your Shadow with the Star and I’m sharing my notes on how this card invites us closer to the Shadow below.

These brief Monday field notes are free to read. To deepen your journey through the book with access to a private chat + live & recorded Sunday journaling sessions, become a paying subscriber to The Shuffle.

Last week, we reach out to hold and be held by our shadow. In Week Six of our tarot-informed journey through The Shadow Path, we’ll continue that work, learning to soothe our shadow… and through that work, ourselves.

Our guide this week is the Star, a card that shows up to care work, even when it’s hard and vulnerable.

Need to catch up? All past weekly resources and recordings can be accessed via the Summer of Shadow Playlist here.

Over the past few weeks, the more you’ve gotten to know your Shadow, the more intentionally you’ve been peering into your depths and confronting parts of yourself that have been hidden away, the more sensitive you may have felt yourself becoming - it’s a raw experience!

After all, the Star follows the Tower in the tarot - its placement acknowledges that after a shake-up (and what is this journey if not that?), care, tending, and vulnerability can guide us toward healing. In the image, a maid, naked and vulnerable, pours water into a pool representing the unconscious, and the earth, representing the material world. It’s a moment that recognises how self-awareness and spiritual tending also create more fertile ground in your outer reality. As within, so without.

You’re at a juncture now where you can choose to celebrate and care for that sensitivity, rather than banish it out of sight. This is critical work as you continue to reclaim and integrate your shadow. Showing those hidden parts of yourself that they deserve intentional and sustained care is the pathway toward deeper self-compassion, understanding, and empowerment.

It’s worth noting, too, I think, that the Star’s place after the Tower isn’t just encouragement to be kind to yourself after hardship. It’s an acknowledgement that we are always tearing down old patterns and building new understanding, responding to new parts of ourselves that need care. Shadow work is not a one-stop cure-all… the act of putting a bandaid on and leaving it to heal. It’s a conscious, sustained effort (depicted in the physical strength of the Star maiden as she pours from both pitchers while lunging over the pool)… an ongoing maintenance we continue to do - confronting and soothing ourselves again and again, and growing in the process.

Tip: If you only do one exercise from The Shadow Path this week, aim to complete “Shadow first aid kit”

At the left-hand edge of Pamela Colman Smith’s Star, a bird perches on a tree branch. Rachel Pollack observes that this is “an ibis, a symbol of the Egyptian god Thoth, who was considered the inventor of all arts, from poetry to pottery.”1

She suggests that the ibis, as a symbol of the inventor of art, points to the power of creative expression when it comes to accessing and integrating unconscious energy (ie, the shadow).

I wholeheartedly agree, and that’s why I’ve encouraged art making throughout our Shadow Path journey - both within the book and with the optional art prompts in our weekly journaling sessions.

Art offers our shadow not just care, but a voice. Here is an invitation to the silenced part of ourselves to be heard and appreciated. What action is more soothing than that?

Tip: Make something today. Just put pen, marker, or paint to page. Don’t overthink it, just let what comes out come out.

If you’re following along with The Shadow Path book this week, you’ll know there’s some hard work to do - coming to understand your shadow triggers, and taking steps to prepare for hurt feelings and missed signals is a key part of the process.

But for good reason: the steps you take toward care and recovery this week are the new foundations upon which you’re building a brand new relationship with your shadow. One based on shared understanding, trust, and curiosity rather than suspicion, judgment, and dismissal.

In 78 Degrees of Wisdom, Pollack describes the Star as “the inner self joyfully experiencing itself”2 - this can only happen when we’re soft, open, and kind to the parts of ourselves that have felt neglected or misunderstood. By giving those parts a voice, we get to witness what they have to say, engage with it, and become more fully a version of ourselves that we get enjoy fully, unfiltered, unedited, unrepressed.

Tip: Check out different versions of the Star card from your own deck collection, or use my favorite resource of all time: Comparative Tarot. Which version of the card best represents soothing energy?

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• A companion workbook with bonus spreads for reflecting on each week of the journey

• A discount code for my limited edition Summer of Shadow reading