There’s a particular kind of moment that a lot of women in midlife know intimately — not a gradual shift, but a sudden break. Not the slow fading of something that wasn’t working, but the moment where the curtain gets pulled back and you realize: this is not what I thought it was. And now I have to figure out what’s actually true.
Spiritual deconstruction in midlife is rarely something we plan for. It usually arrives wrapped in something else — a divorce, a health scare, a job that finally breaks us, a loss we didn’t see coming. But for many women, it’s also the beginning of something real.
Listen to the full episode here: https://youtu.be/nk3_LnQAhPU
The Curtain Gets Pulled Back
In Episode 19 of Fate, Forty, and Beyond, Gen pulls the Ten of Swords and Five of Cups for guest Lisa Eva Zack — and immediately gets a specific image: Dorothy stepping out of black and white into color. The main event, survived. The perspective, permanently shifted.
Lisa’s story had all the elements of a perfect storm. She was working the equivalent of five jobs for her brother’s company, in the middle of two divorces simultaneously, raising five children as the primary provider. She told her brother for a year that it was too much. He didn’t listen. And eventually, something in her said: I don’t care what happens next. I cannot keep doing this.
She gave four months’ notice, trained her replacements, and leaped.
It took at least five people to replace her. But more importantly, the leap cracked her open to a new understanding of intuition, spirit, and what she was actually here to do.
That’s the thing about the Ten of Swords — the card that looks the most dramatic, the most final. It’s not about defeat. It’s about having survived the thing that you thought might be the end of you, and finding out you’re still here. Still standing. Changed, yes. But still you.
Self-Love Isn’t Soft — It’s the Foundation
One of the most resonant threads in this conversation was about self-love — not as a wellness buzzword, but as an actual skill, a prerequisite for everything else that follows.
Lisa had the opportunity to sit with a traveling monk named Bonte, who has been practicing loving kindness since he was eleven years old. He offered her a reframe she’s carried since: loving yourself is like putting on the oxygen mask first. Not because you don’t love the people around you. But because when you know what love actually feels like — in your own body, your own life — you can recognize it when it shows up externally. And you stop accepting things that aren’t it.
Gen talked about a moment when she and her partner were finally moving in together, after years of on-again, off-again, and she cried. Not because she was unhappy. Because she had fallen so deeply in love with her own life that she was genuinely mourning the version of it she was leaving behind. That’s not codependency in reverse. That’s what it actually looks like to know yourself.
The tarot card that reflects this beautifully is the Ace of Cups — the overflowing vessel. You can’t pour from empty. But when you’ve done the work to fill yourself first, what naturally spills over into your relationships, your community, and your purpose is something completely different than what you were giving before.
Building Something Real for Other Women
What Lisa is building now is concrete. She wants to buy land in North Carolina and create a sanctuary for single mothers — a vegetable farm, a fruit orchard, a free market where women can bring their kids to shop for food and clothing at no cost. Tiny homes where women in the middle of a divorce or a transition can land for a while, catch their breath, and get back on their feet.
The Goddess Oracle pulled Vesta — the Roman goddess of home and hearth, a fire goddess who brings warmth to households. Her card says: your household situation is improving through a move or a healthy change in occupants. Call upon Vesta to oversee any changes you’d like to make in your living situation.
Gen laughed when she read it, because Lisa wasn’t talking about her own home at all. She was talking about home as something she wants to create for women she hasn’t met yet. Complete strangers. People whose names she doesn’t know.
That’s The World card energy — and it showed up in the reading too. Moving from saving yourself to going back out for others. It’s not that the work on yourself is finished. It’s that you’ve survived enough to have something real to offer.
The Wild Offering deck closed the reading with a card on loneliness: When you stop fearing your aloneness, you stop settling for less than you deserve. May I embrace and love my solitude. And that’s when kindred spirits can finally come.
That’s the invitation for anyone in a period of uncertainty right now. The break isn’t the end of the story. It’s the part where the curtain comes down and you finally get to see what’s actually there.
If you’re curious about what it might look like to do that kind of work — through tarot, mediumship, or past life regression — I’d love to connect with you at soulfulexistence.com.
Fate, Forty, and Beyond 
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