Welcome to Inner Work, a spiritual growth podcast.

I'm your host, Josephine Hartman.

I'm an intuitive healer and certified Akashik Records reader and teacher,

driven by the purpose of helping others become more powerful by reconnecting to the healer within.

To explore my work or connect with me, you can visit josephinehardman.com.

If you feel called to support the podcast, please leave a rating or review on Apple Podcasts.

I so appreciate your presence here, and I'm honored to serve as a guide or companion on your path for a little while.

Now, on to the episode.

In this episode, we're going to explore what it means to brace yourself against something,

whether that is against the world, against life, against other people, against criticism or rejection,

against pain, whatever it might be that you're bracing yourself against.

We adopt the stance or psychological posture of bracing against something to either push away unpleasant things,

push away discomfort or even potential discomfort, and or to hold on tightly to the things and

relationships and people that we already have in our lives, typically out of a sense of anxiety or worry

that we might lose those things or people or relationships. So bracing is an act that can be done

either to push things off, to push them away, or to hold things tightly to us. And it's really with the stance of holding

things that we value really tightly to us that the idea for this episode came to me. I was pondering

on a tarot card, the four of pentacles, and that's where I started thinking about

bracing. So first, if you don't work with the tarot or you don't know this card, that's totally

okay. I'm going to describe what it looks like and what it means, how we can interpret it. So on the

four of pentacles, we see a man holding onto four pentacles,

as the name implies. And these pentacles are like gold coins. So he's got one pentacle underneath

...