The Mid-Year Mirror: A Deep Soul Health Check-In Before the Next Shedding

In this special episode of Hermetically Speaking, we pause to step fully into a mid-year mental health and soul check-in — a sacred moment to meet yourself exactly as you are before the next season of transformation begins.

As we move through the final days of Cancer season and approach the bold fire of Leo, and with the recent Cancer New Moon and the illuminating Capricorn Full Moon, we find ourselves at a powerful threshold. Together, we explore how becoming attuned to the astrological cycles, lunar phases, and seasonal rhythms can guide us into deeper self-awareness and self-compassion.

This episode is not about pushing forward or setting new goals. It is an invitation to soften, reflect, and offer yourself the compassion and gratitude your journey deserves. You’ll be guided through an immersive mental health check-in practice designed to help you ground, release, and reconnect with your heart and mind.

✨ Topics include:

•How to honor your mental health as a sacred foundation for spiritual and emotional growth

•Understanding the human, lunar, and astrological cycles and how they influence your healing journey

•The importance of seasonal attunement, solstices, and equinoxes

•A powerful listener-involved self-inquiry practice

Pair this episode with the guided meditation and energy therapy session available on the A Spiritual World YouTube Channel for deeper embodiment and clearing.

Transcript

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As within, so without, as above, so below, this, is Hermetically Speaking. Welcome, welcome, welcome to hermetically speaking with your vessel, Toriea, transmitting alchemy, mystic psychology, and channeled messaging for all of our days. Here we explore the sacred, the shadow, and the infinite spiral path of awakening. So you can remember who you are beneath the programming and rebuild yourself from the inside out. And as always, go back to episode one for my disclaimers on mystic psychology and the fact that I am not a medical professional. And everything I speak on is through experience and an energetic standpoint rooted in the ancient wisdom of hermeticism. Therefore, if you are seeking medical advice of any kind, please consult a licensed professional. Welcome back to hermetically speaking with your vessel, Toriea, transmitting alchemy and mystic psychology for all of our days. We have just crossed a very potent threshold. The human calendar has now moved us into the second half of the year. The astrological year, which began with aries at the spring equinox, is about a quarter of the way through. And the lunar year has also just passed its midpoint with the cancer new moon in early July. Each of these cycles, human, astrological, lunar, hold its own rhythm, its own voice. They are not just numbers on a calendar. They are living, breathing mirrors of transformation, spirals within the spirals, constantly inviting us to pause, reflect, and remember, and resurface who we are beneath all of the noise of the centuries and the generations in the societal programming before us. Today, these cycles aren't the main story. However, they are the sacred setup, the backdrop for what we're really here to do together. And we're here to check in, to pause, feel, and truly witness ourselves in this exact moment that you find yourself listening to this. Not to fix, not to push, simply to meet ourselves honestly and safely right where we are. So before we move into our soul check in today, let's explore these cycles a bit more deeply because understanding the rhythms around us can help us understand the rhythms within us. And we're going to start off with the human calendar, the one most of us are familiar with, the 365 day structure that guides our collective schedules. We are now in the second half of the year, 2025. The space where harvest begins and the energies slowly start turning inward. Summer brings its peak. And as we move toward fall, there's an invitation to begin letting go. For many, this half of the year feels like a gentle or sometimes not so gentle, descent into deeper self reflection. And deeper self reflection can really provoke deeper abundance, deeper manifestation. Right, like this is really where we start to gear up. That's a lot of the energy that I've been feeling is like, I've got this little limbo space right now because we're in this halfway point, the precipice. And everything I've worked for in the first half of the year is kind of culminating into the second half. So there's that beautiful kind of ambiance, nuance, knowing, whatever we want to call it, whatever word we might be drawn to utilize it, right? Because those words that we're drawn to are unique for our paths and they definitely give us this insight that we need as we move forward and take these steps to walk into the second half of this human calendar. Then we have the astrological year, which begins at the spring equinox with aries. Hey aries, the fiery spark of initiation around March 20th or 21st usually. Right now we're about a quarter of the way through this cosmic journey. We've moved through aries, tares and Gemini and we're just finishing our sacred passage through cancer, the nurturing, emotional, deeply intuitive sign that invites us to come home to ourselves and soften into our own inner world. As the sun now prepares to move into Leo, we begin to feel the call toward bold expression and radiant selfhood, stepping from the sacred waters of cancer into the bright, courageous fire of Leo. This is where we can see how all the cycles serve us in synchronicity. We were literally just talking about how we're at the halfway mark of the human calendar and how that shift really starts to invigorate everything that we've worked for in the first half. Then, however, coming into this courageous fire of Leo, stepping out of the sacred waters of cancer, that transformational pivotal moment, we're gearing up. And that brings us to the lunar cycle, a subtle yet profoundly powerful teacher, Mother Moon. The lunar year began with the first new moon of 2025 back in late January. And earlier this month, we experienced the cancer new moon marking the midpoint of the lunar year. And as we arrive at this moment in late July, we're moving through the illumination of the Capricorn full moon, a time that invites us to reflect on our emotional foundations and our external structures to balance softness with strength. The moon's phases remind us of continuous renewal, constant death, constant rebirth, holding an intimate, deeply personal frequency that many of us feel in our bones, even when we can't quite name it. I think the lunar cycle is a anchor point, right? We don't forget who we are. We turn back, we're talking about, even though we're looking to accomplish great things externally and internally, this kind of grounds us down into who we really are, remembering our sovereignty at all times, remembering our integrity, our compassion, non-judgment, non-duality, all of those things, right, as we're uncovering them, which helps us progress on the rest of our soul mission throughout these other cycles. And personally for me, the lunar cycle has been the loudest in my life since succumbing, is the word that wants to come to mind succumbing to this journey. It's been a cosmic drumbeat that literally, physically, tangibly in my own mind shifts my mental and emotional framework each year at the lunar new moon. And especially around that third week of January, it announces itself like a divine bell, inviting me into new levels of sovereignty and softness all at once. It is truly a magnificent experience for me and I look forward to it every year. And every year it actually has gotten a little bit softer since the psychosis. It's actually pretty much the marking point of when I fully entered into the psychosis. So of course, the beautiful, you know, afterwards, it's also marks the time that I really came out of psychosis the years later. And it has still been a pivotal marking point of transition for me. And it's not to say that these other ones don't hold high credibility. It's just the one that over time that I've noticed has the deepest invocation of sovereignty activating within me. And the human calendar, it brings me into a season of death and dragons and all of those things of deep knowledge and wisdom that we cycle through. A kind of mythic shedding that I meet with reverence rather than resistance because before I used to meet it was so much resistance. And the human calendar really reminds me of like, you know, we were really taught from a young age to do the new years commitments and make the changes and all of that stuff. And there would be times that, you know, of course, I wouldn't do those things. I would set the goals and I would never meet them. And now my higher self is setting achievable goals for me every year. And I haven't gotten it perfect every year. That's for sure because I still, you know, am unveiling and unremembering programming and things like that. And however, when that cusp comes, especially the death season, which is like right there, August September, third week of August maybe, it, you know, it calls to me like, I know, like I can feel the shift, I know it, I get the transmission of it. And at that moment, I start to just release, whereas before I would always resist. I would still try to fight and finish these things that I hadn't even really paid any attention to. And instead, I'm like, okay, this, this pivotal moment, these last, you know, four months of the year are really about reflection for me. And understanding that I did the best that I could and that I achieved so much and that, you know, come the next cycle, I'm going to be able to go right back at it again and achieve even more. And releasing what I didn't do right. And I put that in air quotes. And in those final months, right, I surrender to the hibernation, to the quietness, to the beautiful breakdown that prepares me for the renewal of the astrological new year. And it's so interesting because the astral, like the end of the human calendar for me, I mean, the end of the human calendar obviously ends at December, but my hibernation and my recovery and my release actually go through the entire winter and start to get, they become reborn on that spring equinox when the astrological cycle actually kicks in. And so to me, this is a vivid, like, image of the snake eating its own tail, right? Like there's no beginning and there's no end. And they are all like a part of the same cycles spiral within the spiral, right? The mind within the mind of the all. All those fun, fun understandings of the, the Russian nesting dolls, right? Or the layers of the onions. And so just continuous movement in rebirth throughout every single cycle, no matter which one you're drawn to, no matter which one you work with. And I know that there are an infinite number of cycles out there that align with the seasons, that align with nature, you know, depending on if you're into plants, things like that. The Chinese new year, that's a big one too. I really, really love that one and I check that one out every single year. However, I'm not as familiar with it to talk about it in this episode. These were the three that really came out, along with, of course, you know, mentioning the equinoxes and the solstices as being a marking point. And so each of these cycles offers a different invitation, a different lesson, multiple lessons, all within, you know, the same year, the same spiral. And I invite you to feel into which one speaks loudest to you, which ones hold your hand as you move through your becoming, which one transmits to you on the loudest frequency for you to understand your channeling abilities, your preminutes or your abilities, all of your clairs and the telepathy and the intuitive knowing and the remembering of who you truly are, the guru within the guru within the guru, because that is what you are. A spiritual world, the guru of your own spiritual world, embodying everything, living in a spiritual world with other gurus that can illuminate pathways for you, but never quite tell you exactly what to do. And so now that we've explored the cycles, framing our lives, I want to turn it inward for the purpose of this podcast, right? Well, I guess the second purpose, first purpose, second person purpose cares. And this is the heart of our time together today. And so if it feels safe and comfortable, I invite you to pause whatever you're doing, and if not, you can just listen and come back to it later. That's not a big deal. If you can, find a cozy seat, lie down, grab a journal even, or simply just, you know, do what you're doing and just take a slow gentle breath in and then let it release softly. We're going to really tap into our nervous system. If it feels good to you, you can place a hand on your heart, your belly, or anywhere that feels nurturing. And if you feel called, you can close your eyes or soften your gaze. We're going to go through what I like to call just, you know, a check in, a soul check in, a mental health check in, a checkpoint check in, right? We're in all these different cycles. We have checkpoints that come up. Make sure that we have done the work that we needed to do. And it's not that anything's been done wrong or right. However, it's that path of alchemy. Concocting the ingredients in the ways that they need to be within you for our chemical transformation and mastery. And becoming the philosopher's stone that you, my friend, are. And so I invite you to ask yourself this first question. How am I really doing right now? Not how you think you should be doing. Not what you want others to believe. Not what you think you would have to tell your boss or your part. Well, hopefully you can tell your partner in pure honesty how you're really doing right now. However, there are still sometimes depths that we need to figure out for ourselves. And this is where I want you to go. I want you to go deep. How is your soul? How is your heart? How is your nervous system? And let whatever arises come up without judgment. Allow it to just present itself to you. Be seen just for even a moment. It could come in words, images, sensations, or even nothing at all. And all of that is perfect. I'll give you just a moment here. Really just allow yourself to dig into your own soul. And as we take another breath, we're going to move into the next question. Asking yourself, where am I holding tightness or resistance? Maybe it's a physical tension in your shoulders or your jaw. Maybe it's an emotion that you've been suppressing, a sadness or an anger you haven't had space to feel. Allow the previous question of how you're really doing right now to feed into the second question of where you're holding this tightness or the resistance. Because the nervous system, the soul, this heart, these words, these images that showed up, they can point you to where this tightness or resistance are held. And when you find it, can you soften just 5% into that space? Not to force change, just to offer it presence, just to let it know that you are there, you see it. You will not ignore it, you want to work with it when the time is right. And then next, gently ask yourself, where do I need compassion the most right now? And this could be that same spot, that tightness, that resistance, or it could be a totally different part of you that feels unworthy or a part that's tired of trying so hard. Imagine holding that part as you would a small child, offering warmth and unconditional acceptance. And as you hold that part or parts of you, nurturing it, if you feel called to, give yourself a hug. Wrap your arms around yourself, just as your visualization of wrapping your parts in your arms, cradling it like a young child. We're going to move in to the gratitude section of this check-in. And that starts with, as we shift into gratitude, thanking the parts of ourselves that have spoken to us in the first half of this check-in. Thanking those parts that are crying out for compassion, for being able to be vulnerable, thanking the parts that showed up as tightness or resistance to be honest and unveiling. And thanking the honesty of our soul, our heart, our nervous system of how we are truly doing right now. And as we shift further into gratitude, ask yourself, what am I genuinely grateful for and my journey at this point in this year? It could be something monumental, a relationship of breakthrough, a spiritual awakening, or it could be something tiny and precious, which still equals monumental. Whatever you look at it, a warm cup of tea, a deep belly laugh, a morning when you felt a bit more alive or free. Maybe you achieved a new level of safety. Maybe you would score a new job or a new increase in pay. Let this gratitude expand through your whole being like golden light. See that golden light in your heart space. And as you breathe, watch it grow, expanding out across your chest, expanding down into your solar plexes, expanding all through your body, all around you, bright and shining like a star. The universe sees you. And the universe is grateful for your gratitude. And finally, ask, where can I offer myself more tenderness moving forward? Where can you release any harsh self-talk, any harsh thinking, any pressure to constantly improve and instead invite in the pause, the relaxation, the peace, the softness and trust? Allow this question to settle in your bones as a gentle vow, a quiet promise to meet yourself as you are. And as this question settles more and more into your bones, allow it to activate new and deeper truths to surface along your journey. Of every time that you need a reminder for tenderness and compassion, softness and trust, allow your bones to reverberate that out through your being from the inside out saying,"Aa, pause. Wait a minute, invite in peace. Peace leads to clarity. One of the things that I always have to ask myself is do I want to be right or do I want to be at peace and every time I choose peace?" And it works. It's magic. It's tenderness. It's clarity. It's an unspoken promise that meets me where I am every day and every night, no matter what I'm going through. So take a final slow breath in and hold it at the top for a moment and when you're ready, exhale it fully. Feel the ground beneath you. Feel the life force moving through you. You can stay here as long as you need or come back to these questions anytime you feel called. And if you need more time, go ahead and pause here and hit the play button when you're ready. Otherwise, get ready for the reflection and invetational part of this episode. As you moved through these questions and felt into your inner landscape, I invite you to reflect and take note. Which question felt the hardest to answer? Which question felt like a relief, like an exhale you didn't know that you needed? And which one brought softness or even a surprising sense of peace? This is your personal mirror, your private snapshot in time. It is not meant to judge or fix you. It is here to witness you, to remind you that you are a living, breathing, evolving work of art. You are a masterpiece. And if it feels right, I encourage you to journal about everything that came up, anything that came up, something that stands out in your mind that came up, or voice record your reflections. Sometimes hearing your own voice express these truths can be deeply healing. Another favorite of mine is mirror work. Make these answers of these questions into the mirror, making eye contact with yourself, speaking directly to your soul, invoking a level of healing that is so profound. Or maybe you prefer to move your body, dance it out, create art or simply sit and quiet contemplation. There is no wrong answer. There is only action, reflection, accountability, honesty, and all of it starts within. Now I also want to invite you to share with me and with this community, anything that you discovered today, maybe where you found compassion for yourself that surprised you, and what you're grateful for in your becoming. You can share in the comments, you can send me a message, or even share with someone you trust in your life. Let this be an act of vulnerability and connection. Because when we share our process, even in small ways, we create ripples. We remind each other that none of us are walking this path alone, even if our journeys look and feel so different. Your voice, your reflection, your truth, it all matters. And as we begin to close today's episode, I want to bring us back to the cycles, these beautiful cosmic and earthly rhythms that frame our becoming. Becoming a tune to these cycles, the lunar, the astrological, the human, the seasons, is not just about tracking dates or spiritual checklists. It's about learning to move with life rather than against it. When we become sensitive to these shifts, we start to see that transformation is not a linear staircase upward. Instead, it reiterates the spiral that we know for it to be. Sometimes descending, sometimes pausing, sometimes exploding into the lotus bloom that you are. The solstices and equinoxes mark powerful gateways in each spiral. The solstices winter and summer represent the peak of darkness and the peak of light. They invite us into deep rest and into full expression, honoring both the Yin and the Yang within us. In those equinoxes, let me tell you, spring and fall remind us of balance, of transition, of the dance between the scene and the unseen. They teach us to move gracefully through change, to honor both birth and decay. The sacred parts of the very same whole. By honoring these thresholds, we learn to meet ourselves with more patience and presence. We begin to see that each season brings exactly what we need even when our minds resist. This podcast episode is actually being recorded at the beginning of July, just a couple weeks shy or after the summer solstice, long season, hello. I'm not surprised if when you hear this episode, you're coming out of that period of rest because I am still in the midst of that period of rest, waiting excited to bloom out of it. And that's how we know we read it, just like we record, just like we hone in or intuition, and we start to trust that the shedding is necessary for the next bloom and dive into it instead of running or resisting. That the darkness is the womb of new light and that stillness is never stagnation. As we walk forward from this check-in, I invite you to continue feeling into these rhythms. Notice how they speak to your body, your emotions, your spirit, let them become allies in your healing and your unfolding. May you meet each season, each inner and outer cycle with softness, curiosity and reverence. May you remember that you are not separate from nature? You are a living expression of its divine intelligence. And may you trust that every descent is followed by a new ascent. And every ending is the soil for a new beginning. Before we close today, I want to offer a gentle reminder, a loving disclaimer about your mental health. Your mental health is not separate from your spiritual journey, your physical wellness, your relationships or your purpose. It is the quiet foundation that supports every other aspect of your life. And for centuries, mental health was demonized, misunderstood, avoided or simply unknown. Wounds were passed down silently, hidden beneath layers of shame and secrecy. And we are blessed to have incarnated during a time of unprecedented awakening, a pivotal moment in human history when mental health is finally being seen, spoken of and honored as an essential part of being alive. And I just like to make a little note here. I just spoke about the mental health that is not separate from your spiritual physical wellness, your relationships or your purpose. And humanity has lived that in like a kind of a backward stringent, like so the purpose, the relationships, the physical wellness, all of that came first in the centuries before us. And now it's paradoxical. It is flipping. And we are here for it. And no matter what the past holds, no matter what the future brings us, we, you, I, me, you, we are not weak. for tending to our minds and to our hearts. We are not behind for needing support, and we are not broken for feeling deeply. Let us normalize tending to our mental health the same way that we care or that we build corporations, governments, all of these paradigms created before us, the energy put into them, to make them so astounding, so revolutionary, so amazing because they truly are. Coming from where we were just a few centuries ago, we have to give ourselves credit where credit is due. However, let us put the same care and energy into our mental health, and in to our physical and our spiritual health, into our relationships, our homes, our loved ones, however, it starts with us. It starts internally. Let us move beyond trauma bombing, the urge to share our pain from an unintegrated place seeking validation rather than healing. Instead, maybe learn to honor our experiences tenderly, to process them safely and to share from a place of embodied wisdom when we feel truly ready. You deserve to heal your being fully, patiently, and compassionately. You deserve to know that your inner world is just as sacred as any temple, ritual, or any spiritual practice that you invoke or bring in to your being. May this be your invitation to make your mental health not a burden, but a sacred part of your wholeness, because the reality is, is that if you ever feel that you're a burden or anything that you are going through is a burden, it is a mirrored reflection. It means that the weight that you are carrying feels too heavy for yourself. It doesn't mean it's a burden externally. It took me a long time to understand this, to witness it, to embody it, and to realize it. I used to think I was a burden to everyone and everything, and it fed myself destruction more. However, now I understand that if I feel something is a burden to anyone outside of me, it means that it's heavy on me, and I need to lighten my load, which means taking gentle care of myself as I am during this time period, and I hope that you are too. So, lastly, I will leave you with a channeled blessing from the mantis frequency and ascended masters blend together. Beloved soul, may the breath of the cosmos move through you like a soft wind, clearing the dust of old stories. May the cycles wrap around you like a cloak of stars, reminding you that you are both the wave and the ocean, the seed and the bloom. May your heart remember its ancient rhythm, the one that pulses beneath all the noise, calling you back home to yourself again and again. May you find the courage to meet your own shadows with kindness, and to dance with your own light without fear. May every tear be an offering to the earth, every sigh, a prayer to the sky, every small act of self-compassion, a portal to the divine. May you feel held in the cradle of the great mother, guided by the wisdom of the stars and rooted in the gentle embrace of this earth. And above all, may you remember, you are not here to be perfect. You are here to be alive, to feel, to unravel, to become. To love and be loved over and over again in a thousand silent ways. It is safe to soften, it is safe to receive, it is safe to shed and to be reborn. We see you, we honor you, we love you. Thank you for journeying with me today, and for choosing to witness yourself so fully. Until next time, keep listening, keep softening, and keep choosing the slow, sacred path home to yourself. I invite you to explore the paired guided meditation and energy therapy session that accompany this check-in, and they will be released on their regularly scheduled days of Wednesday and Friday. These are designed to help you move from mental reflection into embodied integration, to clear, soothe, and reconnect with your own inner essence on a deeper level. And if you're feeling extra curious, the library over at a spiritual world's YouTube channel is starting to bloom with even more supportive tools, deep clearing protocols for those heavier energetic moments, drive time affirmations to keep your frequency aligned, even when you're on the move, and additional guided meditations outside of the paired podcasting, to help you navigate the subtle and not-so-subtle waves of your becoming. Each piece is there to hold you in a sacred container, to remind you of your own capacity to return home to yourself again and again as many times as you need to. You can find these tools on the YouTube channel at A Spiritual World. May these tools meet you exactly where you are, and walk beside you as you continue this beautiful, messy, sacred path of remembering who you truly are. Until next time, Namaste and many blessings along your way. Remember you are the temple, you are the flight, you are the frequency. Let us find each other in our feet.[Birds chirping] If this episode spoke to your soul, be sure to like, share, and subscribe to our new YouTube home at A Spiritual World. That's A Spiritual World. Your support not only fuels the Hermetically Speaking podcast, it also nurtures the growing library of meditations, energy therapies, readings, and transmissions I offer to help us all walk this healing path together. Your presence, your listening, your evolution, they ripple out farther than you may ever realize. Thank you for being here. Thank you for becoming who you truly are. Until next time, keep speaking the truth your soul remembers. Namaste and many blessings on your way.