Welcome to off the grid, a podcast for small business owners who want to leave social media without losing all their clients. Hello, lovely off the grid listeners, and happy Halloween or Samhain or anything that you celebrate at the very October as we tiptoe into November. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby And on this podcast, I normally talk a lot about the practical and political sides of marketing, of creativity, of big tech, and the Internet. But every so often, we also get a little spiritual.

We get magical. And in fact, the past two episodes have been magical interludes and spiritual conversations about self employment as an initiation, about self publishing as a spell, and so much more. And today, I wanted to pop onto your pod feed to bring back something really special that I shared on the show last year for Halloween, and that is a tarot spread from Cecily Sailor of Typewriter Tarot. Last year, Cecily shared a reflection on meeting the spirit of your business and a Tarot spread that we can pull to convene with our business spirits during this magical time. And she also gave us a collective reading as she pulled this bread with and for us.

And I was listening back to this episode recently and just felt like it still rang so true. And I wanted to share it with you here on the podcast today. I'm also excited to bring Cecily's voice back to the show because I will be giving away a copy of her book, Tarot for Creative Spirits at the Off the Grid Retreat that is happening next week. So this is also your final call to get your free ticket to the Off the Grid Retreat. It's only free if you buy a book bundle.

So to get your ticket, you do that by purchasing a bundled copy of my book, Your Attention Is Sacred, except on social media, which you can find at yourattentionissacred.com or linked in the show notes. This is really the first time that I'm gathering the off the grid community around some really special ideas and two brand new workshops that I'm hosting. One on how to feel better on the Internet and one on the keys to making your work resonate. Alongside those workshops, I will also be joined by special guests, Grace Allardyce, Varina Burrell, and Taylor Elise Morrison. And I will have special giveaways from worthwhile paper, cyclical roots, Ray Serafina Barker, and Cecily herself.

Cecily's book is amazing. You should definitely head to the show notes and check it out whether you're coming to the retreat or not. But I truly hope that you do come to the retreat and that maybe you, dear listener, will even be the lucky person who wins a copy of Cecily's book. So once again, this is your last call to purchase a book bundle. They will be leaving my website after November 3.

So you only have until Monday to purchase a bundle that comes with a retreat ticket and then to join us live on Zoom next week on November for the retreat. There are a lot of amazing, heartfelt, soulful people RSVP'd, and I really wanna count you among them. So please buy a book bundle. Please get a ticket. Please come hang out with me and the crew next week.

And while you do all of that, let's listen to Cecily's community tarot reading to connect with the spirits of our business.

Hello, everyone. My name is Cecily Sailer I'm a creativity coach. I'm a writer and tarot reader, and I run a business called Typewriter Tarot, which I think of as a sanctuary and learning community for creative mystics. It should come perhaps as no surprise that the practice I want to offer is a tarot reading to help you connect with and communicate with the spirit of your business.

I like to think of my business as having a spirit of its own. I imagine it's actually existed as a spiritual presence for centuries perhaps. Perhaps it's manifested as different businesses throughout the centuries. And at this time, it's chosen me as its steward. And so we're working together to support creative people to help creative folks find the mystical and spiritual part of what it means to be creative and how we can be creative in a way that's really aligned with something higher and greater than just the everyday, frankly, crap the capitalism forces upon us.

So that's how I imagine the spirit of my business. But I invite you to just take a moment and think about if your business has a spirit, what kind of spirit might it be? Do you imagine it like an animal or a light being or some character from history or a movie or a book you've read? Anything is fine, and this is an imaginative exercise. But just see what comes to you initially when you think about the spirit of your business and what it might be like.

And just go with the first image or idea that comes to you. This is an imaginative process, so it can change over time. And you might see the spirit of your business in different forms, in different ways as time goes on, and all of that is beautiful. But I think of the spirit of my business as my business partner, and we work together to guide our work, to show up in the spirit of our mission, and to keep moving forward even when things feel difficult. So I encourage you too, if you like this idea, to consider meeting with your business spirit regularly, whether once a week or once a month or definitely once a quarter.

And the spread we're gonna use is just meant to help you have a conversation with the spirit of your business to ask some questions and see what it has to say. So kind of like, again, meeting with your business partner, getting on the same page. Where are we going together from here? I'm gonna pull cards for all of us and make this a reading for the collective even though there are many people out there listening with many different kinds of businesses. But take the messages that work for you.

If they're helpful, please take them as messages specifically for you. They are for you. And if not, then I encourage you to pull cards for yourself and see what comes up. I will also finally encourage you, if you're new to tarot, to make sure you're centering your own experience with the card first and foremost. Really give yourself some space to look at the image, really study it, connect with it, look at what's going on, what's moving, what's still, what characters are there, what colors are coming forward.

And rather than going straight to the guidebook to try to get an answer, really center your own initial responses to the card. Tarot is a really beautiful and powerful way to grow your connection with your intuition. But if you jump straight to the guidebook, you're kind of robbing yourself of that opportunity to some degree. So with all that said, let's dive in. This is a five card spread.

And the first question we're asking the spirit of our business is how are you arriving to meet me today? So how is the spirit of our business showing up to the meeting? What kind of energy are they bringing? What's their mood? What's their vibe?

What should we notice about how they're walking in the door? And in response to this question, we have the seven of wands, which is a fire card. Fire is like passion, creativity, adventure. And in this card, I'm using the fifth spirit tarot deck by Charlie Claire Burgess, a really wonderful, queered, fun deck. And in the seven of wands, we see this single wand in the middle, and it's kind of floating in space.

And the top half of the wand has these pink flowers growing out of it and green leaves, and there's this cute little red salamander kind of curled around the back peeking out to look at us. And the bottom of the wand has a bandage around it. So at the bottom, it's kind of wounded, but at the top, it's very alive and vibrant. And then down in the bottom part of the card are these six other wands that are kind of reaching toward that main wand that's floating there. And these other six wands are on fire.

A few of them, one's pointed like a spear. One has nails hammered through it like a club. So this kind of aggressive energy reaching toward this beautiful wounded wand there in the middle. And so this card is telling me that our business spirits feel a little bit beleaguered, and they've really been doing a lot of work trying to stake their claim in the world and say, I'm here. I belong here.

I'm beautiful. Have something really beautiful to offer. And I just see these other six wands coming at the the main wand as kind of like all the insidious, again, crap from capitalism that makes it difficult to be a business owner, a solopreneur, a creative business owner who's trying to do something really interesting and different. We don't get a lot of support in our society for being out on our own trying to make money doing something that we love. So I see the spirit of our businesses showing up still strong, still vibrant, still growing and thriving, but a little bit tired from really always trying to have to, like, put ourselves out there and really, really work overtime to say, like, I'm here.

I'm available. I would love to help. I would love to be paid for my work. Our next question asks, how am I arriving to meet you today? So how are we, the business owners, showing up to this meeting?

And here we have the seven of pentacles, which is really interesting. We have two sevens, one for the business, one for us. So there's a parallel going on there. And in the seven of pentacles, which is connected with Earth, we see this really beautiful bush growing on a trellis. It's labeled peas.

So this is a pea plant, and there's strangely seven pumpkins growing from this pea plant. There's a shovel nearby and some gardening scissors on the ground. The plant looks very healthy. It's grown all the way up to the top of the trellis. It's producing these lovely fruits.

And so we might be arriving to this meeting really trying to kind of look at what we've harvested over the course of the year. You know, this is the final harvest time of the year. At least in ancient times, it was considered the final harvest. And so we're also moving into winter when it becomes more difficult to really, like, produce and put a lot out there. And so this might be a time when we're really kind of running through what have we accomplished?

What have we created? What are we harvesting? Did we accomplish the goals that we wanted to? Which ones did we accomplish? Which ones did we miss?

What other things did we create that surprised us? So our business spirit might be coming a little tired and bedraggled, and we're trying to come with like, hey, look what we've done. Look what we've accomplished. Let's check-in about that. Our third question is how can I best support our mission today?

And here we have the 10 of cups, which shows this pyramid of cups with water overflowing in all of them. The top three cups have little beautiful goldfish splashing up and out. This is a really lovely card, lots of movement and flow. And so this makes me think that we can best support the mission of our businesses by really connecting with what brings us joy, noticing where the flow is happening, and really appreciating what has already come into the business, whether that's new community members, new clients, new connections, and also just taking a moment to really appreciate what we love about the work that we do, what brings us joy, what are those really beautiful satisfactions from doing work that you love and really putting a lot of your energy behind creating something that you truly believe in. Our fourth question is, what advice or guidance do you have for me?

So we're asking the spirit of our businesses for some advice or guidance. And here we have the knight of swords, which is the fastest moving knight of the four knights. This knight is riding downhill on a bicycle, going very quickly, holding a sword, their braids flowing behind them in the wind. And so the advice I think we're getting is to keep taking action, to keep doing the things that you think need to get done to execute the vision of your business. You know, like I said, we're coming closer to the winter season when things tend to slow down for many businesses.

So this may be a really important time to not sit on the things that you wanna get done, but actually keep plugging away such that your energy allows. Let it all come together and be really committed to the vision that you're having for what's coming next in your work. And then our final question is how are we moving forward together? Business owner and spirit of the business in this partnership, how do we move forward together? And here we have the emperor, which shows figure holding one hand up in front of their face, and there's some tools and cogs kind of floating there.

By the right arm, there's a blueprint rolled up as a scroll. There's some pencils and measuring tape and a screwdriver and some nails and a cube. And the emperor is really about taking up the space that we need to take up. The emperor is a very confident card. It's one of self ownership and self possession.

And so even in this difficult time trying to run a small business in a system that economically doesn't support that, Our work is to show up in belief of what we want to share and what we've created to keep creating the ecosystem of your business that works for you. And this is a very powerful card to see for this question. How are we moving forward together? This is really a card of claiming and naming and setting out the boundaries of your business and the systems of your business that I imagine are gonna help us succeed and flourish in the coming year. So really quick, once again, those questions are, how are you arriving to meet me today?

How am I arriving to meet you today? How can I best support our mission? And what advice or guidance do you have for me? And then finally, how are we moving forward together? If you pull cards for yourself, I recommend taking some time to journal about the cards you get and the messages you see, and I hope this is helpful.

If you're interested in learning more about my work, you can head to typewritertarot.com. If you join my email list, you'll get the first three journaling prompts from my workbook, Tarot for Creative Spirits, which is designed to help you learn tarot through your own personal experience and perspective. And I also invite you to check out my podcast, your creative and magical life, where we explore tarot archetypes through conversations with creative and magical humans. You can find your creative and magical life on Apple and Spotify and all the other spots, and I'm wishing everyone out there lots of magic and creativity and success in your work. Thank you for doing what you do and bringing your magic into the world.

Take care.

Thanks for listening to off the grid. Don't forget to grab your free living social media toolkit at offthegrid.fun/toolkit. This podcast is a softer sounds production. Our music is by Melissa Kaitlyn Carter of Making Audio Magic, and our logo is by N'Atelier Studio. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby.

And until next time, I'll see you off the grid and on the interweb.

Let's go off the grid. Okay. Let's go off the grid. Okay. I know that you really wanna put your phone away.

Yeah. Let's go off the grid.