Navigating Inner Landscapes

We explore the Ninth House card from the Star Codes Astro Oracle, focusing on exploration as both an external and internal journey. The card's imagery of compasses, telescopes, and hot air balloons invites us to lift our gaze beyond boundaries and examine the uncharted territories within ourselves.

• October's theme focuses on journeys and journeying, with each week highlighting a specific deck
• The Ninth House card symbolizes maps, movement, curiosity, and possibility
• True exploration often involves examining our unexamined beliefs, tucked-away emotions, and unspoken desires
• Mental health struggles can deepen when we focus only on our external world while neglecting our inner landscape
• Self-exploration requires courage to examine darker corners of our psyche with compassion
• Healing isn't a straight line but requires movement, sometimes just a single degree of change
• Practice: Take 10 minutes this week to wander without a goal—walk your neighborhood, revisit old journals, or watch clouds
• Notice what captures your attention when you loosen your grip on direction

For more reflections and a closer look at the cards themselves, you can find me on Instagram @the_cardcast.

For a closer look at the cards, follow me on Instagram @the_cardcast. For more about mental wellness and psychology, sign up for my newsletter at www.natashasheyenne.com.

Thanks for listening!

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome to the Cardcast

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hi there and welcome to the Cardcast. I'm Natasha and I'm so glad you're here. Together we explore the art of noticing the symbols, stories and quiet patterns that surround us every day and how they connect to our mental health and well-being. Each card becomes a way to pause, reflect and anchor ourselves more deeply in the present moment. Reflect and anchor ourselves more deeply in the present moment. So take a deep breath, settle in and let's see what today's card has to offer. We're going to try something more focused. Moving forward. For the rest of October, we will explore the theme of journeys and journeying, and each week we will focus on one specific deck. While I love pulling a random card daily, which I do, I also tend to have a focus deck that speaks to me for a week or so before I rotate another one into the mix. So this will reflect that practice a bit more In the spirit of starting our journey theme. Today's card is from the Star Codes, astro Oracle, and we got the Ninth House, exploration. When we look at its imagery, we see a great compass, a wheel of direction, a telescope pointing outward and hot air balloons rising into wide skies. This is absolutely a card of maps and movement, of curiosity and possibility. The card itself, I think, is a compass and a telescope, a map unfolding in the hands of the curious. It's inviting us to lift our gaze, to step beyond the boundaries we've quietly built around ourselves and to wonder what else might be possible. Exploration is not always about boarding a ship or crossing to distant lands. Sometimes, to distant lands, sometimes the most vast landscapes are the ones inside us the unexamined beliefs we hold, the emotions we've tucked away, the desires we've never spoken aloud. And you may have known that I was going to say that because you know I love inner exploration. But if we think of how easy it is to become familiar with the surface of our lives, meaning our routines and our roles and our responsibilities, there are entire continents within us that go unmapped, old stories that are buried like forgotten ruins, feelings you never allowed yourself to feel could wait quietly like different undiscovered parts of the ocean, and dreams that you've silenced might shimmer just beyond the horizon, waiting for you to return to them.

Speaker 1: 2:59

Not long ago, I found myself in one of the most difficult stretches of my mental health journey, which is always ongoing. It was not the first time that I've walked through struggle, of course, but it was perhaps one of the most intense. In the midst of it, I kept trying to navigate by tending to my outer world, so I was pouring my energy into responsibilities and appearances and all the things that I thought were going to keep me steady. But the more I focused outward, the more I felt something hollow within. It was as if I had betrayed my own inner landscape, leaving it unattended, allowing parts of myself to just grow stagnant and silent, and that was where the real struggle lived. So it wasn't in what was happening around me, but in what I had abandoned inside. And it was then that I realized that I needed to return inward to pick up the inner compass that I had set down and explore the neglected corners of my own being, those emotions that I had numbed, the truths that I had silenced and the needs that I had overlooked. And going through this process, slowly and gently, I began to follow that inner compass, learning to navigate both the external demands of life and the deeper terrain of my soul, and what that looked like for me. Now, like I said, I've been on these types of struggles and journeys before, and sometimes we're like oh, I've got it, I definitely learned that thing, I've definitely evolved past that, and then we have different experiences and things change us, and it's not that we stepped backwards, it's that now we're a more evolved version of ourself. So sometimes those things have to be revisited again. For me, eventually, balance came, not, of course, as a final destination, but as a clearing. It was a place steady enough that I could stand in so that the real work that I needed to do could begin. And the ninth house reminds us that exploration is not only about those new horizons in the world around us, but also daring to chart that vast and uncharted inner world, or to rechart it, because the terrain has changed over time.

Speaker 1: 5:37

Exploration of the self, I believe, is an act of courage. The self, I believe, is an act of courage when we lift the lantern into the darker corners of the psyche, when we turn over a belief and ask if it still belongs to name a longing that you once hid, to walk the paths of memory with compassion rather than judgment. These are all acts of courage because you don't know where it's going to lead or how you're going to change in the process. And just as explorers in the outer world set out with maps and compasses and telescopes, we too have our own tools. We have our breath, our ability to reflect, our curiosity, we have our kindness and with those tools we can navigate that terrain of our inner life, discovering that the unknown isn't something to fear. Often it's some of the best, most interesting and most beautiful parts of ourselves For our mental health.

Speaker 1: 6:46

Exploration is, I would say, a gentle antidote to stagnation. It reminds us that we're not meant to live only in repetition, circling the same thoughts and routines until life just feels narrow and dim. Exploration breathes space back into our days. When we're caught in autopilot, it's easy to ask ourselves only harsh questions like what is wrong with me? Why can't I get it together? But exploration actually shifts that lens. It invites us to soften the question and instead to just ask what's here for me to notice and what's here for me to learn or to try?

Speaker 1: 7:34

The compass on this card reminds us that there's no single right direction. Healing is not a straight line and growth is rarely a perfect map. What matters is movement. Sometimes all it takes is a single degree of change. That could be a new perspective, a small shift in your routine, one different choice today that set us on a different horizon. It's asking us to be curious with ourselves and not be critical, to see our inner life not as a problem to solve, but a landscape that we're walking through, and sometimes we're walking slowly and sometimes we're able to walk with wonder, but it always takes courage to be on that walk.

Speaker 1: 8:27

The ninth house also encourages us to travel light, and by that I mean to release the heavy baggage of needing these perfect answers or neat conclusions and certainty at every turn. When we're burdened with the pressure to figure it all out, the path becomes more rigid and overwhelming. But exploration is not demanding that of us. It's asking us to loosen our grip, and by that I mean to walk with curiosity rather than trying to control. We can notice things the way the light shifts through the trees and the way an unexpected thought opens a new doorway, and even the way that confusion can lead us to somewhere meaningful. Because we don't know the answer, we're confused about it, so we're asking different questions and we're searching in a different way. Healing is not a puzzle to solve, but it's a process that we experience. We don't have to know exactly where we're going in order to keep moving, and then curiosity in that becomes our compass and it points us towards these greater understandings, not only of the world around us, but of our internal world.

Speaker 1: 9:47

Today, let's reflect on where in my life have I stopped being curious, and what would it look like to explore that part of myself again? A simple practice that you could try is to take 10 minutes this week to wander, without a goal right, so it could be just a walk in your neighborhood, a gentle scroll through old journals, or even just letting your mind drift while you're looking at the sky, like when we were kids and we would just kind of watch the clouds and see what kind of shapes we could identify in them. And as you do any of these things, just notice what captures your attention. This is the small act of exploration that we can do every day to make us more comfortable with it. It's allowing these new insights to emerge when you loosen the grip of direction. That's it for today's card. For more reflections and a closer look at the cards themselves, you can find me on Instagram at the underscore card cast. I'll see you in the next episode.