the high priestess

Empath Ethics 101: Don’t Help?

Why respecting emotional boundaries is essential for empaths—and how not helping can sometimes be the most loving choice.

If you’re an empath, you’ve probably been in this situation: you’re having a perfectly normal conversation with someone, but your intuition is screaming that something’s wrong. You sense they’re deeply hurting. Their emotional shields are up, their energy has pulled inward — but underneath it all, you can feel the pain.

The first instinct of an empath is to say, “Hey, what’s wrong? What can I do to help?” Especially if it’s someone we love, we want to reach out and offer comfort.

But sometimes, that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.

⸻

It’s Not Intrusive… to Us

The first thing to understand is: we’re not being deliberately intrusive. We channel other people’s emotions as naturally as breathing. When we’re in a one-on-one conversation with someone we care about, we pick up on their energetic patterns — even if they’re trying to hide them. It’s not something we try to do. We just do.

But to someone who isn’t an empath, that does feel intrusive. It can feel like we’re reading their private diary without permission.

Expecting an empath not to process someone else’s energy is like telling someone not to notice faces or colors. It’s simply how we experience the world. But we have to remember: “normal” people don’t operate this way, and many feel invaded or exposed when we reflect their hidden emotions back to them.

⸻

Language as a Boundary

For most people, language functions as an energetic boundary. Let’s say we’re sitting with someone and sense something is wrong. The conversation might go like this:

“How are you today?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“So everything’s good with you?”

“Yes, it is.”

That’s the moment we need to stop. We’ve given them a verbal cue that we’re open to listening. They’ve responded by clearly saying they don’t want to talk about it.

That doesn’t mean our intuition is wrong. We can trust what we’re sensing. But they’ve drawn a boundary with language — and emotionally healthy people honor boundaries.

⸻

Don’t Get Loopy

For empaths — especially intuitive types like INFJs and INFPs — this can trigger a kind of informational loop. Our intuition says something’s wrong, but the person says everything’s fine. It feels disorienting — like being told the sky is green and the grass is blue.

This can easily lead to obsessive thinking. We replay conversations, analyze patterns, try to intuit what they won’t say. When we can’t resolve it, we go over it again and again.

It becomes a loop — rearranging the same puzzle pieces, but still not seeing the picture. It’s a huge drain on time and energy.

The truth is: if they want to tell us what’s wrong, they will. If they don’t, it’s not our business.

⸻

Give Them the Gift of Space

Sometimes, the greatest gift we can offer someone we love is space.

Yes, we may know — deeply, clearly — that they’re hurting. And we want to help. But we must also respect the context of our relationship.

If you’re a therapist and they’ve asked for support — of course, help them.

If you’re giving a Tarot or psychic reading and they’re open — of course, help.

But outside those contexts, no matter how close we feel to someone, it’s always up to them to invite us in. If they don’t, we honor that. We don’t push. We don’t intrude.

⸻

Yes, It’s Confusing

Yes — this can feel confusing as hell to empaths.

In many ways, we’re always intimate with those we love. We feel their emotions. We know how they’re doing even when they’re not physically present. Sometimes it feels like their pain is our pain.

But we must remember: feeling something doesn’t mean we need to act on it.

If someone we care about is struggling, and they don’t ask for help, we let them be. We can still support them energetically — by holding space, sending love, offering healing from a distance.

But anything more? That’s up to them.

The Alchemy of the Mind – Transforming Your Life with the 7 Principles of the Kybalion – by Dan Adair.

⸻

Veiled Wisdom: How to Live Intuitively in a Linear World — Lessons from the High Priestess

Learn how to live intuitively in a fast-paced, logic-driven world through the symbolism of the High Priestess Tarot card. Discover practical tools, ancient wisdom, and insights for intuitives and spiritual seekers.

In a world obsessed with logic, speed, and quantifiable results, living intuitively can feel like trying to speak a forgotten language. For those who rely on inner knowing, symbolism, and emotional depth to navigate life this can be truly disorienting. You may feel unseen, misunderstood, or even accused of being irrational.

Fortunately, there is an archetype that understands you perfectly: The High Priestess of the Tarot. She doesn’t live by surface appearances or external systems. She lives behind the veil, where symbols, patterns, and quiet truths guide her every move. If you’ve ever felt like your way of knowing doesn’t fit the world you live in, the High Priestess is your ally.

This post explores how her symbolism offers powerful guidance for anyone trying to live more intuitively in a linear, left-brain world.

The Veil: Honor the Unseen

Behind the High Priestess is a veil covered in pomegranates—a symbol of mystery, fertility, and hidden truth. The veil marks the threshold between the seen and the unseen, the conscious and the unconscious.

In daily life, this reminds us to respect what can’t be measured: feelings, dreams, body language, synchronicities. Not everything real can be proven. Living intuitively means acknowledging the unseen world as just as valid as the visible one. In fact, if you’re an intuitive, your inner world may frequently seem more important than your outer world.

The Moon: Trust Emotional Cycles

The crescent moon at the Priestess’s feet is a classic symbol of intuition, emotion, and cycles. In contrast to the linear, upward march of modern life, the moon reminds us that all things move in rhythms—inner and outer.

This is actually one of the oldest principles of occultism and is discussed extensively in The Kybalion. Everything on the Earth Plane – everything – moves in cycles. The tides go in and out. The Moon waxes and wanes. Spring gives way to winter. Even great nations spring up and then fade away.

To live intuitively is to trust your emotional tides. Some days are for action; others for withdrawal, reflection, or stillness. Honoring this inner rhythm—even when it defies external expectations—is a revolutionary act.

The Scroll: Keep Inner Wisdom Sacred

The scroll in the Priestess’s lap is partially hidden and marked “TORA,” suggesting sacred knowledge that isn’t meant for everyone—or even always fully for yourself. This teaches a key lesson of intuitive living: you don’t have to explain yourself.

In a linear world, people often want justification, proof, or evidence. But intuition doesn’t always offer that. Like the scroll, your inner knowing may be incomplete, symbolic, or private. Protect it. Don’t feel pressured to decode everything aloud.

Intuition is frequently about knowing that you know something without knowing how you know it. You don’t have to defend that to anyone who wants to pick it apart with linear logic. Sonia Choquette offers a wonderful tip for dealing with it when someone is attacking your intuition: just smile at them and say, “It works for me.”

The Pillars: Balance Inner and Outer Worlds

The High Priestess sits between two pillars marked B and J (Boaz and Jachin), drawn from the ancient Temple of Solomon. They symbolize polarity—light and dark, masculine and feminine, logic and intuition.

To live intuitively in a linear world, you must balance both forces. Intuition doesn’t reject logic; it expands it. Learn to speak the world’s language when needed, but stay rooted in your own. The magic is in integration.

The Solar Cross: Stay Centered

On the High Priestess’s chest is a solar cross—an ancient symbol of wholeness, representing the four directions, seasons, and elements. Unlike the Christian cross, this symbol is universal. It tells us to stay centered within the circle of life, grounded in your own compass.

Living intuitively means checking inward before reacting outward. It means making decisions from alignment, not anxiety. The solar cross reminds you: you carry your center within you.

It’s also worth noting that the cross is centered over her heart chakra, the energetic mid-point between the lower chakras and the upper. Intuition pulls in insights from the universe but grounds them in daily life.

Practical Ways to Live Intuitively

Create space for silence and solitude: That’s where intuitive messages come through. Remember to be patient with that, too. Intuition speaks in symbols, not type-written messages. When we sit down to meditate we probably won’t get a telegram from the Universe telling us what to do. But . . . a particular book that we need to read may fall off of a shelf or a friend may casually say the perfect word to trigger insights.

Journal or use symbols: Tarot, dreamwork, or creative writing can help you listen inward. The Major Arcana of the Tarot in particular is crammed with archetypal symbols. Every one of those speaks to Deep Mind and starts a dialog with intuition.

Let go of constant justification: Trust what you know, even if you can’t explain it. If other people don’t understand what you plainly see, then fuck them. You’re not the extrovert-whisperer and you don’t need to explain your inner vision to someone who’s blind.

Honor emotional and energetic cycles: Don’t force productivity; honor your timing. Despite the many New Age gadgets and programs that we may encounter now days, there is NO way to force intuition. In fact, quite the opposite: the more relaxed we are, the more likely we are to have a free flow of intuitive insights. The more we force it, the more it flits away.

Balance logic with knowing: Use your left brain to support your right-brain insights—not to silence them. Think of left-brain logic as a sort of an editor that connects the dots for you. The first thing that comes is the intuitive flash: “Hmmm . . . I think this is how it actually is, even though it looks differently.” Then we can use logic to figure out where the insight came from or to explain it to others, but we should never, ever, let logic tell us that our intuition is wrong, simply because we can’t justify it.

It’s Not Impractical – It’s Sacred

The High Priestess doesn’t offer quick answers. She teaches us to dwell in questions, to honor mystery, and to trust the quiet voice within. In a culture addicted to speed and clarity, living intuitively is a radical form of wisdom.

If you feel like you see through the veil or live just outside the edges of ordinary awareness, you’re not lost. You’re listening. And you’re not alone.

Let the High Priestess be your reminder: intuitive living isn’t impractical—it’s sacred.

My new ebook, “The Alchemy of the Mind: Transforming Your Life With the 7 Principles of The Kybalion,” is now available on Amazon.

The High Priestess, Affirmations, and Writing Your Own Story

“I realized many years ago that I was an absolute genius at manifestation . . . with one big problem. My problem was that my genius was hitched to my unconscious programming instead of what I consciously wanted to create.” Gay Hendricks, “Attracting Genuine Abundance,” DailyOm

I grew up in one of those families from hell. Alcoholic, abusive father, detached, depressive mother, a military family so we were constantly moving and never growing roots.

And, as Melody Beattie said in, “Codependent No More,” one of the real curses of that is that you accept the insanity you’re living in as, “normal.” Being beaten, screaming fights, drunks passed out on the floor – it’s all perfectly normal in YOUR household. Doesn’t everyone live like that? Hell, you’re just a kid, how are you supposed to know the difference?

Someone once said that your parents always know how to push your buttons because they installed the control panel. There’s a lot of truth in that – on a primal, cellular level no one knows you better than your parents. And, in addition to installing the control panel, they also installed the programming.

If you were raised in a less than benign household that programming can be pretty awful. You probably grew up hearing things like:

“You’re a very, very bad girl.”

“Why did you do something so stupid?”

“I don’t like hitting you but you don’t leave me any choice.”

And your poor little subconscious, your subconscious that was too young and too trusting and too inexperienced to know any better just soaked that shit up and believed it, the same way that you believed that drunken, crazy parents were normal. And – voila! – you end up as an adult who believes that he’s very, very bad, stupid, and deserves to be abused. After all, your parents told you so, didn’t they?

I was talking with a therapist about all of that subconscious, self-defeating programming and I asked if affirmations and visualizations were a way to sort of short circuit it. She looked very thoughtful for a minute and said, “No, I think of them more as a way of writing your own story. Who do YOU want to be in your story? How do YOU want to live and feel in your story?”

That’s a wonderful distinction that we miss too often. Affirmations and visualizations aren’t just ways of overcoming negative beliefs that we absorbed in the past. They’re also ways of consciously creating what we want our futures to look and feel like.

A great deal of The High Priestess is about the deep mind, the subconscious and unconscious part of our minds that holds both our creativity and our self-defeating beliefs. Too often it’s like a one way door. Magic, symbols, dreams emerge from the Right, feminine, side of the brain, but we don’t consciously interact with it, we don’t, “input,” data, we just passively receive content.

When we dream or meditate that realm of magic that resides in the Right Brain flows into our lives. When we visualize or do affirmations, we’re talking directly to the Right Brain. We’re dropping what we want our lives to be, what we want our stories to be, into our subconscious and then it performs the magic and makes it real.

In my original definition of The High Priestess, I wrote this about what happens when the card is reversed, when we’re ignoring that interactive process with our subconscious:

The creative, intuitive, feminine right side of the brain is being overpowered and held hostage by the logical, sequential, male left side of the brain. Intuition and creativity are being ignored in favor of so-called rational thinking. There is a need here to reconnect with your primal self. Take the time for meditating, long hot baths, dancing, art. Get back in touch with your creative energy.

We need to take the time to visualize, to affirm what we want in our lives, to have a nice, quiet talk with the High Priestess. We need to take the time to write our own story or someone else will write it for us.

“Just the Tarot,” by Dan Adair, a book of basic Tarot definitions available on Amazon.com.

The High Priestess and Growing Your Intuition

A discussion of intuition as a function of the right hemisphere of the brain making sudden contact with the left hemisphere and The High Priestess as a representation of that mid-brain connection.

The High Priestess represents our connection with what some people call, “deep mind.” She is our – frequently unconscious – connection with the higher realms of spirit and magic. She is the exact point where the truth travels through the creative, feminine right brain and emerges in consciousness in the linear, masculine left brain as a flash of, “intuition.”

It all sounds very complicated but it’s not. It’s actually hardwired into our system but we’ve taught ourselves to ignore it. Our language, however, is replete with phrases describing it.

“I had a hunch . . .”

“I just had a feeling . . .”

“Something told me . . .”

“I just knew . . .”

What all of that describes is suddenly reaching a firm, undoubtable conclusion without any preceding rational thought. And, yes, it seems magical for exactly that reason: it seems to burst out of nowhere.

Another way that it manifests is as a, “sixth sense.”

If you’re hiking in the woods and a predator is watching you, you somehow, “know,” it and the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Combat soldiers describe the same feelings just before the enemy starts shooting at them.

A classic example is thinking of someone you haven’t seen in years and the phone suddenly rings and it’s them.

A silly example is that if a man is walking behind a woman and stares at her butt she will always know that someone is staring at her butt. I don’t know how women do that, but it’s true.

Now, to a rationalist all of that is impossible. You can’t, “sense,” that a mountain lion is watching you or that a guy is staring at your butt or that an old friend is about to call. But we still do. It happens and we all KNOW that it happens.

So, two thoughts on, “intuition,” that we should probably keep in mind. First of all, we live in a society that denigrates it and treats it as if it’s irrational. It’s not irrational, it’s NON rational, or perhaps META rational. It has nothing to do with the left brain, logical, linear thinking process that the western world worships. It, “arrives,” out of thin air, like a telegram from an angel. But it’s also not a metaphysical belief.

It’s important to be clear about metaphysical beliefs. I’ve known christian fundamentalists who believed that Jesus is right there at their sides 24/7 to solve each and every problem that they’ll ever have. And that this beautiful world of ours is positively dripping with devils and demons who have nothing better to do than make people have, “impure thoughts,” about their neighbor’s wives.

I think fundamentalists are total fruit cakes but, hey, they’re welcome to believe whatever they want.

I believe in ghosts and spirit guides and totem animals and the Goddess, and I’m sure the christian fundamentalists think I’m a total fruit cake.

The point with either set of beliefs is that they are metaphysical and totally unprovable one way or the other. They are NOT demonstrable facts. They are beliefs.

Intuition, on the other hand, operates daily in the physical world. There are millions of reported incidents of it and anyone who says it’s not real is either in denial or an idiot.

Second, we can all do it. And we can get better at it. That’s important.

We tend to think that some people are psychic and some people aren’t. Some people can read Tarot cards and some people can’t. Some people can achieve enlightenment and some people never will.

It’s not true. It’s just a function of time and effort. I guarantee you that if you sit down every day and concentrate on your brow chakra for 15 minutes you WILL start to see some magical, astral scenes. If you read Tarot cards over a period of time you WILL become more psychic.

It’s exactly the same deal with intuition. It’s something that you were born with and it’s just a matter of practicing. Start paying a little more attention to your feelings. Start asking the universe (or your angels or your spirit guides or your totem animals) for answers when you’re puzzled about something. And the answers will appear. Just like magic.

You are The High Priestess. You just forgot.

The meaning of The High Priestess card in the Tarot, including definitions for the upright and reversed positions.

There is no other card in the deck that took a deeper dive into Hermetic imagery than this one. The two columns represent Boaz and Jachin, said to have guarded the entry to King Solomon’s temple. The TORA scroll represents the divine wisdom and secrets of Jewish Kabbalism. One imagines that the exact directions for this card came from Arthur Edward Waite, rather than the fertile imagination of Pamela Colman Smith, who painted it.

Leaving aside the rather glaring irony that women were not even ALLOWED in the inner sanctum of Solomon’s Temple (unclean creatures, doncha know?) we can move right along and affirm that the Lady on the card is a lunar Goddess. The crescent moon at her feet is a common symbol of the lunar Goddess and is found even in Christianized versions of her such as the Virgin of Guadalupe’.

The real message in the imagery of this card, though, is about balance between opposites and the center point where intuition reigns. The cross on her chest is the solar cross rather than the Christian cross, its’ four arms all of exact equal length from its’ center. She sits exactly between the white and black opposites of the columns. The crown she wears is a solar disk surrounded by crescent moons, emphasizing the opposites of night and day.

By now most of us are familiar with the left brain/right brain dichotomy. While not absolute, the left brain tends to be more involved in so-called rational, logical thinking, while the right brain tends to be more involved with imagery, emotion, and artistic endeavors. Mysteries, omens, subconscious patterns tend to percolate and grow in the right brain. At a certain point they may cross over into the left brain and become a conscious realization. That phenomenon is often described as the, “Ah, ha!” moment when something which was previously puzzling and odd suddenly makes sense. It’s also described as intuition and intuition is what the High Priestess is all about.

When the High Priestess appears in your reading it means that it’s time to start paying very careful attention to your intuition and subconscious. Answers to problems which have been bothering or blocking you can be found in dreams, sudden insights, or hunches. This card points out the need to trust your deep Self. Listen to your inner voices. If you’re having trouble hearing them then take the time you need to meditate or go sit by yourself in isolation. Let the answers bubble up from your subconscious and trust those answers.

If the card applies to a person in the questioners life it may be a very intuitive, mysterious, but fairly asexual person.

Reversed: The questioner isn’t paying attention to his or her intuitive nature. This is a card of being out of touch with your inner Self. The pomegranates on the tapestry in this card hearken back to the myth of Persephone, a Goddess of crops and Spring who was kidnapped by Hades, dragged into hell, and then forced to live there half the year because she had eaten a single pomegranate seed. It was a myth which was meant to explain the changing of the seasons: when she was living in hell the world turned into winter and the crops died.

It can have a deeper meaning with the reversed presence of this card. The creative, intuitive, feminine right side of the brain is being overpowered and held hostage by the logical, sequential, male left side of the brain. Intuition and creativity are being ignored in favor of so-called rational thinking. There is a need here to reconnect with your primal self. Take the time for meditating, long hot baths, dancing, art. Get back in touch with your creative energy.

Just as an interesting side note it’s been absolutely fascinating watching the rise of the new women’s movement in the United States. Starting with the massive march on Washington, D.C. right after Trump’s inauguration and running through today’s Me Too movement, we’re seeing a massive awakening of Right Brain perception in the United States. The Divine Feminine is asserting itself and the Goddess is alive and well. No doubt the High Priestess is hiding a smile.

If you have questions about this card or its meaning in one of your readings, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.