my miscarriage and shaken spiritual beliefs

Trigger warning: This blog post discusses pregnancy loss, miscarriage, and disordered mental health. If you find these topics difficult to read about, consider skipping this one.

For the last five years, I’ve relied upon my personal spiritual belief system of life-after-death. I formed this belief through a series of personal experiences I had during my early days of sobriety, and my spirituality has served me incredibly well since.

Spirituality has been the linchpin of my life, and without it, there’d be no Sunlight Oracle.

Not only have I been able to heal lot of subconscious issues, but I’ve also been able to feel more connected to aligned people.

But what happens when one becomes a litttttle too certain of/comfortable with his/her beliefs?

The Universe, at some point, may try and rip that rug out from underneath you.

I’m talking about the kind of energy that’s embodied in the The Tower tarot card. And damn, a surprise pregnancy and spontaneous miscarriage was a total Tower series of moments for me.

From Palladini’s Aquarian Tarot

Last fall, I found out I was (surprise!) pregnant, and my first instinct was to hide. I could not work or function due to extreme exhaustion and other gnarly pregnancy symptoms.

While I was overwhelmed with the amount of change my husband and I were about to experience, I was also overjoyed and full of hope and vision. The idea of being a mother was magical, and I truly felt honored and excited to become someone’s mom and collaborator.

I started imagining an entirely different life for myself and my family.

However, around week 8, I got an intuitive feeling that the pregnancy was not viable. I knew it wasn't “the hormones”, as they say. And I knew it wasn’t anxiety. My profession has long depended on my very ability to decipher intuition from anxiety, and I’m good at it.

But I quickly learned that if I actually wanted to see a doctor, and receive confirmation, I was going to have to “advocate for myself” (i.e. appear insane). The system I’d fallen in line with did not want to see me until my second trimester.

After forging my will on the American health care system and waiting in purgatory for 15 days, my intuition was confirmed when my pregnancy was medically-diagnosed as a failure at 13 weeks. I naturally miscarried days later at home.

Five of Cups, Aquarian Tarot.

The depth and complexity of my emotions during the pregnancy/miscarriage chapter was more than enough to make me doubt my whole spiritual belief system and my conviction that Spirit had my best interest at heart.

I reflected on the thousands of mediumship readings I’ve given over the past four years, the thousands of spirits I’ve met, and the remarkable blessings I’ve received as a result of this work.

But the overwhelming emotions made me doubt, more than ever before, whether any of what I provide to this world is real or of value.

My emotions formed into thoughts: If Spirit/ancestors/The Universe sent me this child — why then did they retract the offer? What did I do to deserve this sort of suffering? What was the point of this extremely painful emotional and physical rollercoaster?

Emotions can be overwhelming, and many generations of Americans have been conditioned to suppress, repress, ignore and avoid them. But when we demonize our emotions, we fail to recognize the gifts they contain.

Here’s where I could write about the whiplash. I could write, in detail, about the rage that passed through me for days on end. I could write about all the trauma sustained and the trauma that resurfaced. I could write a book about hell.

But I don't really have to get into all of that here.

My reframe for my suffering has always been to share it with others (publicly, I guess), because the act of storytelling is a real medicine we have the birthright to dispense.

Good storytelling often demonstrates how a person came to to identify, name, and create action (for better or worse). And we, too, can learn this valuable human lesson by reading about others’ experience with it.

Strength from the Aquarian Tarot.

So perhaps the point of my suffering is to understand that being a deep-feeling person is actually a revolutionary act in the a culture that’s conditioned to deaden itself only to benefit its oppressors.

Maybe the point of this shitty experience was to realize the backbone of my spiritual belief system is not actually my personal and direct communication with Spirit, but my ability to channel the essence of Spirit into communication with other humans.

Maybe the point was to experience knowledge as a bandaid and wisdom as the cure.

But I am not a martyr. And I’m not here merely to suffer and transmute that suffering into art and writing for my niche audience online.

I’m here to motivate other deep-feeling humans to use their emotions in advancing human consciousness. Thus my consciousness must evolve too, and I have come to understand that emotional pain is really good at doing that, — quickly and in times of collective strife.

Join me for my the workshop, TAROT AND EMOTIONS on Saturday, Feb. 1, 2025 at 10 am CT on Zoom. Because it’s time to prepare for the age of Aquarius now.