Live the Soft Life — Tarot Pick a Card
You may have heard of the term “soft life” before. This is the idea of living in flow and not being rushed or falling victim to hustle culture. It’s an intentional pace to life where you feel at peace.
If you want to live that way, pick one of the piles above using your intuition.
After you select your cards, scroll down to your pile or choose below.
For this reading, I’ve used the Sacred Self-Care Oracle deck. This is affiliate link, and it helps support me if you love this deck and want to buy it for yourself too.
Remember that you have free will. That means you can manifest the positive and avoid the negative of any reading.
Now let’s find out how you can live the soft life.
Pile 1: Deer
Align With Your Energy
You need to be in tune with your body. In this day and age, it’s easy to live solely in your mind. The first card, Connect With Your Womb, is a suggestion by the universe to align with your natural energy.
For women, that’s a feminine energy. For men, that’s a masculine energy. But what does that mean? Isn’t the soft life just feminine energy and hustle culture masculine energy?
No. Feminine and masculine energy, being biologically gendered here given the card, refers to creation or reproductive energy. It’s what is within you that creates instead of competes.
Masculine hierarchies are about ambitious merit. Feminine hierarchies are social harmony. Focusing too much on hustle culture is when you make ambitious merit toxic. But focusing too much on appeasing others is when social harmony becomes toxic.
For women, I want you to focus on creating something for yourself. Not for others, not even for your family. It needs to be entirely self-care. For men, I want you to work on something of value to you that no one will ever see.
Move Your Body
I also want you to Dance. Now the form this takes will be different for everyone, but getting up and moving around to music will be very beneficial to you. This may be for a few minutes in the privacy of your own home or in a formal dance class: you choose.
Going back to the natural gendered energy, the way men and women dance is different. I don’t often watch music videos, but when I do watch Korean pop videos, the choreography is distinct between the genders. Men have angular, explosive dances while women have flowing, light dances.
You’re likely to find that the way you move your body is informed by culture, but also the natural rhythm of your biology. Most who chose this pile will align with their biological sex.
If you’re dancing at home in an unplanned matter, don’t try to copy what you see in music videos. Instead, listen to your body and let it do what it wants. If you’re taking a formal class, make sure the type of movements match your natural energy.
Expand Your Mind
The last thing you need to do to live the soft life is Rest. This is standard advice you’ll hear in soft life or slow living spaces, so let me define that a little more.
Rest is not passive consumption. Your mind can’t be engaged in a passive task like browsing social media. Instead, it needs to be an activity where your mind can wander.
This include daydreaming, napping, or tasks where your body is moving, but your mind is free. Think walking, needlework, or other monotonous physical tasks. In other words, you’re not attaching your mind to the physical world.
While in rest, different areas of your brain will be activated and will help different reactions in that organ take place which can’t when you’re constantly stimulated. Specifically, your default mode network will turn on, and you’ll start feeling more imaginative and creative. You’ll know you’re at rest when that occurs.
Let me know in the comments which activity sounds the most exciting to you! You can also just leave a 🦌 deer emoji to let me know the reading resonated.
Pile 2: Swan
Be Thankful In the Right Way
I didn’t intend to pull four cards, but I decided to commit to these four instead of reshuffling. I don’t see a common thread between these cards, so see each one as a soft life suggestion.
The first card is Write a Gratitude List. The science on gratitude is that it works best as a preventative practice. Essentially, you make a regular habit of writing and/or reading your gratitude list to help alter your brain and protect you from the harshness of worse days.
Don’t write your list when you’re feeling bad and don’t write down things you aren’t truly grateful for. It’s okay to write down silly things. Just focus on what you’re sincerely grateful for.
Go Outside
Your second card is Take a Walk. Being in nature is really good for your wellbeing and is an essential soft life technique. That’s because in our modern era we see going for a walk as an unproductive task if you aren’t using it to commute. Talk about a waste!
Walking is a leisurely, immersive practice. If you can’t go outside, turn on a virtual walking tour on YouTube. I really like forest and country scenes.
Pick walking locations that are natural or have awe-inspiring sights. This will uplift you and put you at ease.
Treat Your Body
A Massage is in order. You can book a professional massage or learn how to do it at home. You can do targeted massages for different areas of the body or even use tools.
Just be aware that not everyone can get a massage. When my father had a pacemaker inserted, he learned the sad news that he could no longer use his electric back massager! You should also avoid massages if you have a fever, blood clots, an injury, pain you can’t explain, or varicose veins.
I don’t normally give such warnings on standard advice, but I’m thinking not everyone who chose this pile can do deep massages while others can. Or there at risk of doing unsafe massages at home. Look things up before you try something new.
If you’re wary to apply a lot of pressure, you can do gentle massages or even stretches as a substitute.
Connect With the Natural World
I can’t think of the last time I pulled this card which is Look For Fairies. These are spiritual beings in nature. Most people can’t see them, even those who are spiritual and can sense them.
Another fairy card I have in a different deck essentially says you’ll only find fairies if you intentionally look for them. So when you go out in nature, perhaps on that walk, be open to the spirits in nature around you.
Try to feel their energy and be in their presence. I bet you’ll realize that there’s a fairy in a tree or behind a rock that you never considered before.
You’ll start to appreciate the enchantment of the natural world… and that’s a major part of the soft life. If you can see the spirits around you, you’ll live differently than before.
Recently, a fairy ring appeared in my yard during Halloween. These are mushrooms that grow in a circle. So be especially on the lookout for unusual natural features like that.
Let me know in the comments which activity sounds the most exciting to you! You can also just leave a 🦢 swan emoji to let me know the reading resonated.
Pile 3: Ladybug
Listen to Music
There are some specific, fun activities you can pursue that will help you live the soft life. The first card is Music. Not a surprise. But music for the soft life is a little different. Keep listening to whatever you already like, but try to spend at least thirty minutes throughout the week, it doesn’t have to be all in the same session, to listen to softer music.
That’s because music can change your psychology. And you can use that knowledge to your advantage. What you need to listen to here is calming music that is slow and low tempo. Your anxiety will be relieved and you’ll be more relaxed.
Classical, lo-fi, and ambient music is great. Since you’re likely a spiritual person, opting for meditation music is excellent which means you can pair it with an existing meditation practice.
If you would like vocal music, make sure you’re picking slow songs that are happy. That’s surprisingly difficult, so perhaps that’s why any recommendations I see tend to stick to music without lyrics.
Connect With Your Body
The next step is to Ground Yourself. This is a practice where you’re present with your body or connected to the earth so you can benefit from a transfer of electrons.
There’s some research that indicates the nature-based grounding could have a minor healing effect. To do that, physically touching the earth with your bare skin, usually your hands or feet, is how that experience occurs. But mats and even sheets exist to do this inside.
But the other method to ground is about presence with your body to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and allow emotional regulation. Many therapy techniques utilize this. At home, you can try meditation, breathing exercises, routine and monotonous tasks like laundry or making tea, and going outside.
Pick whatever sounds most exciting to you. Not every activity will work for every person, so be willing to experiment. The soft life is also about choice, after all.
Build Your Body
This card may be a surprising one for you, but you need to Build Strength. Right away, the routine and monotonous act of strength training can also be a grounding exercise… so you could kill two birds with one stone there.
But, of all the possible fitness routines you can do, strength training is slower paced than most. Here you should focus on functional strength, not being a bodybuilder. Bodyweight exercises, pilates, resistance bands, and free weights are an excellent example of slow life strength training.
Even if you choose heavier weights though, what strength training does is make your body stronger when you aren’t working out. That will make everything you do easier just by spending an hour or two a week building strength.
Strength training also helps to improve your hormones and blood sugar. You’ll have more stable energy levels throughout the day even if you may snack on some sweet things now and again.
And again, you could listen to some peaceful music while doing this. So you’re killing three birds with one stone. A win-win. Well, maybe not for the bird.
Let me know in the comments which activity sounds the most exciting to you! You can also just leave a 🐞 ladybug emoji to let me know the reading resonated.
