5/1/13—Opening to the Possibilities Within

DAILY DRAW ALERT!!!

Remember to come back to www.tierneysadler.com on 11am on Wednesday, May 1 for an EXTRA post. It's part of a Tarot Blog Hop and from that one post, you'll be able to access 20 blogs that are all part of the same Blog Hop. So there will be TWO posts on Wednesday and if you're a tarot person, it will be fun for you to hop from blog to blog and discover other sites! Now on to the show...

Today's Draw Classic*: The Sun of Life and Queen of Stones from both the Greenwood and Wildwood Tarots. What might be lying dormant within you, just waiting to burst forth? What are you beginning to become more spiritually aware of? And if you had a mystical superpower, what do you think it might be?

So today we're going to do something a little different and delve into a bit of tarot lore concerning two decks—the Greenwood Tarot and the Wildwood Tarot. Before I begin my scholarly report, however, I would like to point out that I didn't do too well in my Journalism classes at Indiana University. I tended to dramatize, make assumptions and muddy the waters between truth and legend too much for their tastes. So I changed my major to broadcasting where you can get away with that shit.

That said, there once was a deck called the Greenwood. It was a Celtic/Earth-Centered deck printed in 1996 that really captured a pagan, shamanic niche of the tarot marketplace that hadn't previously been explored. Many of the Major Arcana cards were re-named and re-numbered. And, instead of the court cards being humans, they were represented by animals. So, in a way, it had its own "system". Many people felt the deck had a very special mystical/tribal/prehistoric feel and when the deck went out of print, the legend of its "powers" grew. A deck that probably originally sold for $20 skyrocketed in price. If you're interested, there is a new one available on Amazon today for $1500.

Anyway, legend has it that the original artist, Chesca Potter, became a born-again Christian and is no longer interested in having anything to do with tarot. Her art can't be reprinted without her permission, so the original writer, Mark Ryan, teamed up with John Matthews and Will Worthington to recreate and rethink the deck. The new deck, the Wildwood Tarot, follows the same basic structure or system of the Greenwood, reusing many of the changed names for cards and even, in some places, closely mirroring the art. While it is, for the most part, its own deck, I would classify it as being strongly based on the Greenwood. Even the book for the Wildwood borrows text from the Greenwood book. Certainly nobody denies or even tries to hide the close connection between the two.

So here we are with today's draw and I decided to draw two cards to give you more of a feel for the two decks. The cards above are from the Wildwood, the new deck. And the ones right here are from the Greenwood. (If you're viewing on Facebook, go to www.tierneysadler.com to see the bear cards.)

I would interpret the two cards the same whether they came from the Greenwood or the Wildwood. The Sun is about giving life and illuminating parts of yourself that you either intentionally or otherwise keep in the dark. In both Sun cards, the sun is burning through the man, activating his heart center and electrifying him with universal power. A nice touch in both Sun cards is the Uffington Horse. Legend has it if you stand in the horse's eye and turn three times, you can receive illumination, power and the life-giving healing energy of the sun.

There's a nice tie-in between the Sun and the bears, because bears often symbolize hibernation, which is dictated by temperature fluctuations and food inavailabilities caused by the absence of the sun. In both bear cards, the bears are waking, but in the Wildwood, the bear is already up and greeting the dawn of a new adventure. Another tie-in is that both the sun and bears are symbolic of power, one of earthly strength and the other of universal power. The suit of stones is specifically focused on monetary power or prosperity.

Taken together, I'd say it's time for all of us to burst out of this sleepwalk we're in and reclaim our divine power. There is so much that lies dormant within us that we never access. The "2012 thing" that passed without incident last December was actually supposed to draw a line in the sand where we will no longer be able to deny the advanced abilities that rest within us. Whether it drew a line in the sand or not, I believe we do need to rely more and more on our inner powers. I feel this is a long-term awakening that has been going on for years, alerting us to the need to rely on our higher powers for survival.

Regardless of whether you believe that or not, there isn't one among us who is living at our full potential. There may be many who go through life "firing all engines" as far as their energy is concerned. But this is less about expending energy than it is about using the fullness of the capabilities that lie within. And what I mean by that may include your ability to spontaneously manifest your desires, utilize your sixth sense, heal energetically, increase your capacity to learn and other "miracles" of the mind and body.

I think only the most conservative people will deny there are savants out there who are especially blessed with one of those talents. I'm a fan of Lisa Williams, the British medium. I've seen her in action and felt the energy she draws out. She is WAY more accurate in her readings than the statistical mean. Then there are intellectual savants who have a significantly greater capacity to learn and understand. There are also physical "geniuses" that can push their bodies beyond the realms of other humans.

While there will always be people at the extremes of any ability, we all have abilities far beyond our consciousness. What happens is that we find early on that our talent for math or basketball or painting is less than extraordinary, so we pursue other areas where we feel we have more talent or interest instead. In doing so, we stop developing those other areas. The capacity to develop those areas still exists. So while we can learn to be a better artist, if we think we have little affinity for it, we don't develop that talent. Our minds are littered with abandoned playgrounds.

Another thing that happens is that we're told the imaginary friends and spontaneous insights we have as a very young child are imaginings and not real. So we suppress many of our inborn instincts because we're told they're fantasy.

These two cards together are saying that there's something within you that's ready to emerge and see the light. You may know what this is...it might be something that's been marinating for a while. Or it might be something you abandoned a while back. Or it may be something you don't realize you even have a capacity for. 

The first step is to open the door to all possibilities. For example, I don't believe in fairies. So I will probably never see a fairy. Fairies may be twinkling all around me, but I've closed off the possibility to them. Opening yourself to all possibilities is opening yourself—genuinely—to things that may seem silly or childish to you.

After that, just observe and don't discount any imaginings you may have. Once you start noticing "coincidences" or "spontaneous manifestations", for example, the more often they appear in your life. Once you hold a space for the "impossible" to fill—and the more you believe there is no such thing as impossible—the more magic is able to flow into your life. There are entire worlds that exist within our own that we don't see and can't access, simply because we shut ourselves off to them through our disbelief. It's time to stop the sleep walk—or sheep walk—of our lives and allow the sun to illuminate entire new worlds of possibility.

For those wanting to try a meditation for this, try this: Close your eyes and imagine a dimly lit landscape within. With each breath, imagine the sun creeping into the landscape more and more, illuminating more and more of the landscape. Take your time with this. Imagine it as being akin to the daily lengthening of sunlight of this time of year (in the Northern hemisphere). Let the light seep further and further in, illuminating shadows and secret hollows within you. What do you see? What reflects the sun's light most? What has been hidden by the walls and hedges you've built within? What can you see in the sun's fullest light that you've never been able to see before?

*Taken from a post originally written on 12/30/11