--- title: Unbind Your Inner Empress description: Shadow Seekers’ Dispatch, Ed. 7 In This Edition ChaptersShadow Seekers’ Dispatch, Ed. 7Let the Empress Keep Her ShadowInvite the Empress to the TableThe G url: https://kelliejoart.com/shadow-seekers-dispatch-signup-newsletter/unbind-your-inner-empress date_modified: 2026-07-18 author: Kellie Jo Close language: en --- ## Shadow Seekers’ Dispatch, Ed. 7 ### In This Edition Chapters [Shadow Seekers’ Dispatch, Ed. 7](#shadow-seekers-dispatch-ed-7)[Let the Empress Keep Her Shadow](#unbind-your-inner-empress)[Invite the Empress to the Table](#invite-the-empress-to-the-table)[The Garden You Actually Rule](#the-garden-you-actually-rule)[52 Weeks with the Dark](#52-weeks-with-the-dark)[From the Shadow Seekers’ Journal](#from-the-shadow-seekers-journal)[Closing](#closing-thoughts-and-information) ## Let the Empress Keep Her Shadow The Empress has suffered from good publicity. She has become the tarot card of flowing dresses, glowing skin, abundant creativity, perfect gardens, and enough grapes to make lounging look like a vocation. I support the grapes. I question the rest. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, the Empress sits among wheat, trees, moving water, and the symbols of Venus. She belongs to the material world: body, pleasure, creation, relationship, food, beauty, land, and whatever grows because someone fed it. She represents creative and generative power. She also carries difficulty, doubt, appetite, excess, uncertainty, and the parts of creation nobody puts on the mood board. A garden needs water. It also needs pruning. The Empress knows how to do both. ### The Empress Creates She makes room for an idea and stays long enough to see what form it takes. She understands that creativity needs materials, time, attention, and a body capable of remaining in the room. Inspiration is welcome, but it does not get to take all the credit. The Empress works. She gets paint on the table. ### The Empress Desires She has preferences. She wants beauty, pleasure, food, touch, solitude, company, influence, rest, and the right to decide which of those she wants today. Her desire is not a decorative feature. It tells her where life has gone thin. ### The Empress Rules Nurturing is only one expression of her power. She also chooses what receives her labor. She decides which seeds enter the ground, which plants need more room, and which vines have climbed the fence and started strangling everything nearby. She does not owe endless access to everyone who calls her generous. ### The Empress Casts a Shadow Her creativity can become relentless production. Her care can become control. Her pleasure can become avoidance. Her hunger can consume everything and still insist that nothing is enough. She may confuse being needed with being loved. She may keep feeding a dead relationship because admitting the soil is spent would force her to grieve. She may build a beautiful life around herself and quietly resent every person living in it. She may also exile her appetite so thoroughly that she forgets she is allowed to want anything. The Empress contains all of this. Her Shadow does not cancel her abundance. It shows where abundance has become excess, performance, possession, or proof of worth. A woman who creates life on her own terms will eventually have to decide what she refuses to keep alive. ## Invite the Empress to the Table Choose an Empress card from a deck you own or use the image at the top of this Dispatch. Place it where you can study it. Look past the card’s beauty and notice its structure: - Where does the Empress sit? - What surrounds her? - What is cultivated? - What remains wild? - What suggests authority? - What suggests comfort? - What might become overgrown if she stops paying attention? - What can she reach from where she sits? - What lies beyond her control? Now imagine that you have entered the card. Do not become the Empress yet. Meet her first. Ask: - What are you growing for me? - What have I refused to feed? - What have I kept alive past its season? - Where has my care become control? - Which pleasure do I keep postponing until I have earned it? - What do I create because I want it? - What do I create so other people will approve of me? - What needs pruning before anything new can grow? Write her answers without polishing them. If she avoids a question, record that too. Place the card beside your bed for the next three nights. Each morning, write or sketch whatever remains from your dreams, mood, bodily sensations, or first thoughts. You may receive a clear response. You may collect three pages of apparent nonsense. Keep the evidence. Interpretation can wait. ### A Necessary Word About Pregnancy The Empress is often associated with fertility and pregnancy in contemporary tarot reading. She can also point toward creative work, bodily awareness, sensuality, caregiving, material growth, or something demanding sustained attention. A tarot card cannot confirm a pregnancy. For that, Seeker, use a pregnancy test. The Empress has many talents. Producing laboratory results is not among them. ## The Garden You Actually Rule This art exercise uses the Empress’s garden as a map of your creative life. You will draw what is growing, what has been neglected, and what has taken more than its share. ### Gather Your Materials Choose paper and any materials that allow you to work freely. You might use: - paint; - markers; - colored pencils; - charcoal; - collage materials; - fabric; - several materials together. Include scissors and glue if you want to move parts of the garden after drawing them. ### 1. Mark the Ground Draw the outer boundary of your garden. It can be a square, circle, irregular plot, greenhouse, courtyard, forest clearing, windowsill, or stretch of land with no visible end. Do not fill it yet. Notice how much room you gave yourself. ### 2. Draw What Is Thriving Add the parts of your life receiving attention, time, energy, or care. Represent them as plants, trees, fruit, fungi, water, animals, structures, weather, or something of your own invention. Avoid deciding whether these things are good simply because they are growing. Some weeds are extremely committed to their personal development. ### 3. Show the Neglected Ground Find the barren, damaged, shaded, fenced, or forgotten areas. Ask what belongs there. Do not rush to repair the space. Give its current condition a visible form. It may be empty because something was abandoned. It may be resting. It may have refused every seed you tried to force into it. ### 4. Add the Overgrowth Draw what receives too much of you. Look for the work, relationship, responsibility, fear, habit, or public role that keeps spreading beyond its proper boundary. Show what it covers. Show what it consumes. Show whether its roots belong to you. ### 5. Place the Empress Put the Empress somewhere in the garden. Study her position. Is she working, eating, resting, watching, hiding, directing, destroying, planting, or waiting? Can she see the entire garden? Does she belong there? Does she appear to rule it, serve it, fear it, or feel trapped inside it? Let her posture answer before you do. ### 6. Give Her Shadow a Tool The Empress’s Shadow may arrive as a second figure, an animal, a stain, a weather system, a voice from underground, or a change in the Empress herself. Give this Shadow one tool. It might carry: - pruning shears; - a shovel; - a match; - a fence post; - an axe; - a watering can; - a basket; - a key; - an empty bowl. Ask why it chose that tool. Then ask: **What are you prepared to do that the Empress has avoided?** Add the answer to the artwork. Do not force the Shadow to be helpful. It may be greedy, destructive, frightened, furious, or wrong. Let it reveal its intention before deciding whether to follow it. ### 7. Change One Boundary Alter the garden’s structure. You might: - cut away an overgrown section; - move a neglected plant into the light; - build a wall; - open a gate; - add water; - remove a throne; - give the Empress a different seat; - take something out of her hands; - return an invasive root to the place it came from. Make one change. Notice who gains room because of it. ### 8. Examine the Evidence Set the artwork down and describe what you can see. - What received the strongest color? - Which area contains the most detail? - What grows closest to the Empress? - What did you place outside the boundary? - What appears hungry? - What appears exhausted? - What is thriving at someone else’s expense? - What did the Shadow bring into view? - Which part of the garden feels most honest? Complete these sentences: **The Empress in this garden wants *__*.** **Her Shadow is tired of *__*.** **The first thing I am willing to prune is *__*.** You do not have to destroy anything today. Name it accurately first. ## 52 Weeks with the Dark [https://kelliejoart.com/product/52-weeks-with-the-dark](https://kelliejoart.com/product/52-weeks-with-the-dark) ### Indelicate Prompts from Your Shadow *52 Weeks with the Dark* contains shadow-work journal prompts for people who are done pretending the uncomfortable parts have nothing useful to say. The 52 seasonal prompts examine what hurts, haunts, repeats, and still holds power. The Shadow does not flatter. She does, however, keep excellent records. Learn more about *[52 Weeks with the Dark: Indelicate Prompts from Your Shadow](https://kelliejoart.com/product/52-weeks-with-the-dark)*. ## From the Shadow Seekers’ Journal This edition originally appeared during April, a month containing several awareness campaigns connected to trauma, abuse, stress, and mental health. Awareness has value. It can also leave survivors surrounded by explanations of pain when they already know exactly what pain costs. The following pieces use art, archetypal figures, symbolic objects, and imagination to approach difficult material from different angles. They cannot guarantee recovery or spare you every hard feeling. They can give experience a form you can examine, question, alter, or refuse. ### Your Inner Healer Has a Message for You Create an image of the part of you that knows something about repair. It may arrive with medicine, limits, instructions, anger, or an empty bowl. ### The Wounded Healer: Embracing Your Story Through Creativity Examine the wounded-healer pattern without turning pain into a requirement for wisdom or service. Your injuries do not obligate you to become useful to everyone else. ### Powerful Intuitive Rituals to Uncover Your Strengths and Virtues Use ordinary objects, bodily responses, and symbolic choices to examine the qualities already operating beneath your conscious explanations. ### Powerful Intuitive Rituals to Uncover Your Strengths and Virtues Use ordinary objects, bodily responses, and symbolic choices to examine the qualities already operating beneath your conscious explanations. ### Shadow Work Journal Prompts to Scrape the Truth from Your Soul Use seasonal prompts to question what hurts, haunts, repeats, and still controls more of your life than you would willingly hand over. *Some of these pieces work close to the wound. Read your own condition before choosing one. Curiosity can wait until you have enough ground beneath you to follow it.* ## Closing The Empress has no interest in becoming smaller so everyone else can remain comfortable in her garden. She creates. She feeds what deserves to live. She enjoys what she has made. She watches for the moment care turns into control, growth becomes invasion, or generosity becomes the price she pays for permission to exist. Then she reaches for the shears. Your inner Empress does not need another tribute. She needs room, authority, and an honest account of what her abundance has been feeding. Give her the whole garden. Let her decide what stays. **With you in the work,** **Kellie Jo Close** Artist & Author For Women Who Want to Know What They Buried. And Why. [https://kelliejoart.com](https://kelliejoart.com) | [https://linktr.ee/kelliejoart](https://linktr.ee/kelliejoart) ***P.S.** If you made it this far, I will give you a free copy of “52 Weeks with the Dark: Indelicate Prompts from Your Shadow”. Simply [contact me](https://kelliejoart.com/contact/) by April 28, 2025 and let me know you read this Dispatch all the way to the bottom!*