Ask A Cowgirl N° 1
Ask a Cowgirl is an “Ask Polly” style anonymous Q&A where you can ask questions about anything and receive advice, answers, and insights. If you want to ask a question you can do so here.
How do you make time for writing? I feel like I have so many ideas and when I sit down to write I feel like I only have 30 mins and it’s never enough lol
I think first of all, we need to use what we have. Any endeavour, especially creative isn’t about having perfect circumstances. It isn’t about it being our dream scenario or getting everything we want out of it. In order to find progress we need to first look at where we are hoping to find perfection - here, for you, writing is about having the perfect amount of time. Sometimes I literally have 30 seconds to write an idea down. Sometimes I only have a cue card handy to get what I need down - I don’t always have the luxury of hours to get invested in it, but I do always have the power to make space to write down a notion or an idea. Writing, like any practice, requires us to keep coming back. And it is my experience that the more I use the time that is available, the more time becomes available.
Maybe start with acknowledging that you do have 30 minutes - and use it! How much time do you think you need? How much time do you want to be available to you? What are you spending time doing that isn’t writing - like perhaps scrolling? Or watching TV? etc.
How I make time is actually more about how I live my life in general. It’s taken many years to carve out the time, space, and support I need to be a person who can write luxuriously for many hours. It wasn’t like I just woke up one day and was like “wow, I’m just going to stop doing all of these other things so I can write more!”. Writing is and always has been deeply important to me, and even though my lifestyle is formed around moving slowly and having time to stretch out into, sometimes I’m not able to access it the way I wish I could.
I think the main thing is to ask how can we accommodate our desires without putting pressure on them? I started with knowing I wanted to write every day. Maybe it’s an IG caption, or a poem on a cue card or a blurb in my notes app on my phone. And then you build from there. As for ideas, I have literally 40 drafts sitting in my folder of things I want to write about, ideas that I have. I think that’s sort of the crux of being a creative person sometimes and being tapped in - so much flows through you and you have to really choose every moment where it feels good to put your energy. Make lists of little blurbs. Allow yourself to be with what thoughts are there today - not yesterday or tomorrow. Writing, and having “enough” of what we need in writing is so much about gratitude and presence more than anything else. Completion is the marathon, sitting down at the page is the training.
TLDR; before “making” time, look at how you are using your time, and then choose if that is how you want to be using it.
My intuition is off… How do I get it back?
Well, lets recognize that we’re not going to be ~on all the time. There will be moments and conditions and circumstances where we don’t feel as aligned or connected or driven. I think this is normal - there is nothing bad or wrong about not being connected.
Next, what are you avoiding? Lol. I know that’s a little aggressive but usually - 9/10 times - when my intuition is “off” it’s because in some way I didn’t listen to it in the first place. Trace yourself back to when you started to notice that your relationship with your intuition was changing. What happened? What didn’t happen?
After that, check-in with how you’re caring for your body. Your body is your vessel, it’s what your intuition lives in and communicates through. If you’re not feeding yourself well, don’t have good sleep hygiene, aren’t connecting with people you love or engaging in practices that nourish you then you’re basically fraying the ends of your connective tissues. Get outside of what your habits are right now and change things up, see what shows up for you. Maybe you put a lot of effort and intention into a meal, maybe you go for a really long walk, maybe you call someone you want to talk to, maybe you write down everything on paper, or go through your clothes or re-organize your kitchen. Do something to shift the energy, do something to shift the expectation.
When we aren’t connected there is a block, right? So again, I come back to the what are you avoiding question… chances are your intuition is recognizing there is a challenge in what it is/was asking of you and needs you to process that before it can resume. Maybe it’s just a big cry, maybe it’s a decision you need to make…. I feel here, intuitively, there is something you need to let go of. It feels like it is something lingering - maybe you realized this a while ago and gaslit yourself into believing it wasn’t true or possible or it was a huge mistake and certainly not your intuition that was telling you to do this. Your intuition isn’t just at your disposal for funzies. It is here to guide you and often it is really fucking uncomfortable because intuition is not our fantasy. It asks us to give up a lot, to make big changes, to embrace the fear, and to move through to the other side.
Give us your top 3 astrology placements please!!
Okay I’m interpreting this at the top three placements to look for/get curious about (that aren’t the big three!). Mostly when I’m looking at astrology I’m not looking for it to tell me how that person is so much as I’m looking for it to inform me of how I can best connect with them. Sun/Moon/Rising do give us some really good info, but they are almost surface level in a way. It shows a lot of how people are perceived, how their thinking works, and the way they emote and while so valuable I think aren’t really adequate in the face of deep and genuine connection like we can get if we are looking outside of this. Of course, I think it’s valuable to look at the whole chart if you can but these are my favourite three placements to look at and know about.
Mercury - the planet of communication! But this doesn’t just tell us how people communicate, it tells us how they connect in general. Are they fluid, do they need structure? Are they linear or spiralling? How do they feel safe communicating? What is their communication style? This, especially in relationship to Venus, can also tell us a lot about love languages as well. Looking at the element and quality (cardinal, fixed, or mutable) can give us a sense of also how they take in information - do they like solid facts? Are they more adept at telling you how they feel in abstract ways? I really think that everyone is in some way compatible with everyone else, it’s just a matter of finding out what the people around us really need and how it differs from what we need. I think mercury can also show up a lot in expressions of the home and personal style as well.
Venus - venus is the planet of “beauty and love” but I like to think of it as where we form our values, and from our values what is it that makes our life beautiful and worth living. Yes, this can be where we find romance, aestheticism, and more “surface” area info, but Venus is actually deeply heart rooted. It tells us what is important to a person, it tells us how they need to be seen and valued, it tells us even what their values are. Looking at this in relationship to the house it’s in can also tell us what area of their life this beauty and value is focused on - for example my Venus is in Leo, conjuncting my Sun in Leo in the second house. This is a lot about possessions, material value, money - so it’s important for me to be comfortable and to be able to express myself through my material life. It doesn’t mean that material good are what matters to me, but that I find a lot of value in expressing myself authentically (which is leo energy) and that with the sun there is also some safety tied up in that as well (the sun being the ego, the ego being how we keep ourselves safe). It also means that I am inclined to be a gift giver, wanting people to feel at home in their own worlds and with my Mercury in Virgo I want these things to be beautiful and thoughtful but also precise and practical. I don’t ever want to give people things they don’t need or won’t help them express themselves fully - so a lot of the gifts I end up giving are quality time, tarot readings, etc. It’s not necessarily material world related so much as a recognition in the value of being held in this space and sharing/luxuriating in the possession of knowledge I have. I love sharing what I know and see in people so they can see it, too.
Chiron - the wounded healer. This lets us know where people need help and support seeing and healing themselves. I think this is such a tender, vulnerable placement that can really help us see past the facades people put up and into the heart of their soft places. It’s not that we can’t heal ourselves in Chiron placements, but that the work we do there is so much more adequately supported when we don’t have to do it ourselves. A lot of the time people tend to hide these energies because it’s so vulnerable, so being able to see it and know how to support them, where to hype them up, and also what to be careful around are really valuable. I deeply believe as humans we’re all here to support each other and I feel that Chiron reminds us we’re all human and we all need each other and no-one is invincible. This is often where we can offer the most genuine and tender support for the people we love - again, looking at the house or area of life this shows up in is also really impactful. My Chiron is in Aries in the 10th house of reputation, so I am really tender about how people see me and often think the worst of myself when it comes to public image or how I’m perceived. I appreciate it so much and genuinely need to be told of my positive impact and the good that people see in me with this placement.
One thing you can’t survive without
Woah what an existential question for real. Are we talking literally one object? Are we talking about the collective abundance of a “thing”? An idea? A topic? As always, I’m going to answer this how I see fit.
I think at the core of everything, I couldn’t live without hope. As cheesy as it is, belief and faith are built on hope. Dreams are built on hope. Ambition is built on hope. Everything I have created in my life has come from a place of hope. Without hope what is our motivation to build our lives? What are we really striving towards? Hope created medicine, design, roads. The hope for a world to be a certain way, for life to exist in a certain way. In the darkest times of my life the smallest sliver of hope for what could be is what truly saved me and allowed me to continue when everything else felt empty.
And I don’t think this is just me, I think this is a human thing. We innately and inherently need hope to survive.
How do you approach ethics in the “industry of spirituality”?
Basically like I would if I was in any other health profession, specifically mental health. Not that I am a professional in that way, but ultimately you have to know that integrity, privacy, and safety are three of the most important things to human interaction especially in really tender and intimate settings. I’ve done a lot of research in psychology and to be trauma informed - how to speak to people in a way that empowers and educates them, that gives them autonomy.
This is why I will never be a “predictive” reader or someone to tells you what/how to do something. I simply do not believe it is a safe way to operate and actually find it incredibly harmful to remove peoples free will by telling them what “is”. Instead I focus on what could be, and how they are empowered to interact with it.
I think also knowing that while spirituality overall is essential to human nature, I don’t think that it needs to be dogmatic and it is still a huge privilege to be able to invest in it monetarily.
I don’t believe that convincing people they need to do a certain ritual or buy into a mastermind or feel a certain way in order to be worthy of their spiritual experience is healthy. A lot of the spiritual industry is really predatory and is based on people trying to validate their own experience and growth through commodification. People are like “I am doing this thing, if you want to know everything I’m learning while I’m doing it then pay me $3k for this mastermind on how” and it’s very…. woah okay then. And don’t get me wrong I’m here for people to value themselves, the work they put in. their experiences and building/maintaining community but it is a completely unregulated field of work and it’s hard to have discretion especially when vulnerable people are coming to you for answers.
Ultimately, you have to know you’re working with vulnerable people, around sensitive topics and themes, there IS a power dynamic and your utmost job is to keep them safe NOT make money off them.
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