Earlier in the week I asked my tarot deck, “How do I upgrade my vibrational placeholder?”
What’s a vibrational placeholder?
A vibrational placeholder is kind of like your energetic set point. The ever-grasping mind naturally defaults to the reptilian vigilance states of anxiety, worry and rumination. So even if we’re enjoying ourselves, once the enjoyment ends, we’re back to: “What was that thing again I was worrying about? Oh yeah… time to steep in that again.” This feeling state becomes a vibrational placeholder always waiting for us.
We’re at a point where we’re evolving past these set points into a more conscious affiliation with the creative life-force principle. A part of this evolution is replacing our low vibing placeholders of worry, anger and fear with higher ones like joy, peace, love and ease. It takes conscious effort to retrain ourselves out of a default that served an egoic purpose for so long. But many of us are beginning to understand we have a choice of what we focus on thereby creating life affirming energetic set points.
Upgrade the set point
Like everything, this takes practice. When I asked my deck how I can upgrade my vibrational placeholder, I pulled Awakening Reversed (also known as Judgement). Here’s the blurb I wrote for Faunabelle Tarot when I wrote the guidebook For Awakening upside down ? :
Life is asking me to evolve, but I feel safer where I am. I don’t want to risk being sad or scared by leaving something I know, even if it’s no longer good for me. When Awakening Bears appear upside-down, they nudge, “Picture yourself in the future being confident and proud of the changes you’ve made. If you can imagine it, you can be it!” The hardest part of big change is the first step. Today I can begin inching towards the future I want to enjoy.
What great advice! To upgrade my vibrational placeholder I need to imagine the future I want to live and then become an energetic match for it.
Awakening corresponds with Pluto
It’s interesting that Awakening—called Judgement in other decks—is associated with Pluto. Pluto transits tend to correspond with times in our lives where events, people and circumstances conspire to purge away everything that we are not. It’s not an easy time for most; but the process offers a catalyzing opportunity to truly step into our power.
Pluto is the cosmic plumber, unclogging stagnant energy, clearing away corrosive obstructions and installing better piping so that our life force can express our truth with greater fluidity. The methods in which Pluto purges varies with what natal planet he’s aspecting, the aspect itself, the houses involved, other planets Pluto connects with and the native’s relationship to their own Pluto placement.
Soul searching leads to wholeness
Pluto transits often accompany two years of intense soul searching as the person goes through a healing metamorphosis which often includes tilling unconscious landscapes and finding buried trauma that was stored for safe keeping long ago. The work now is to realize how these buried parts of ourselves have been consuming our energetic bandwidth and how we might integrate it into our psyche to restore our wholeness.
The tarot card Awakening ruled by Pluto shows a mama bear and her cubs emerging from a long hibernation. This emergence of a waking Self signals the end stages of a successful Pluto transit. We’re renewed and revitalized. In pulling the reversal, we’re asked to leave behind the carcass of the past and begin to envision the feeling tone we’d like to inhabit. So when I asked how to upgrade my vibrational placeholder early this week, I couldn’t ask for a better piece of advice than Awakening upside down. ✨
Photo by Corey Dupree from Pexels
Tarot Card: Awakening upside down from faunabelle.com