Today's Draw: The Hermit from the Pen Tarot in the Action to Take With Your Partner position from the Deck of 1000 Spreads. Does your partner sometimes feel "absent"? Whether single or attached, do you often feel lonely? When was the last time you took as good care of yourself as you do everyone else?
I recently went on an awesome day trip with a couple of my friends. And one of them mentioned something she'd heard about the secret to keeping a relationship going. And it was this:
Learn to be alone when you're together and together when you're alone.
You really have to put some thought into that for it to sink in. Being alone when you're together is about having separate interests and not depending on the other person to fill your time....or fill your life.
I think that's an easy trap people fall into when they get married or coupled. They think "now I'll never have to be alone". They stop pursuing singular interests because they feel being married means you turn your time over to your partner. In some cases, being partnered for some is a way out of ever having to be alone with oneself and look within. The truth is, however, that there's never a circumstance in your life in which you won't have to be alone. Moreover, you may have others gathered all around you and still FEEL alone if you lose your identity and your singularity to a relationship.
Life is a solitary journey. And we can have companions along the way, but we can't push the responsibility of driving our journey off on anyone else. Well, we can, but we won't get far. We came here for a purpose that serves our soul and we need to nurture that relationship, too, in order to fulfill our purpose.
Another thing I see especially women doing is putting everything "me" aside for their children. Of course there's a line you need to walk, but for some it seems like being alone and having alone things to do is a betrayal to the children. They feel like they have to be there and be available to the children at all times. But what they're really doing is teaching their children how to abandon their own needs for the needs of others further on in their lives...that the only time someone's needs are important is when they're children. Either that or they're setting their children up for disappointment in a world that doesn't stop to handle their every need.
In my opinion, being alone—being singular and nurturing an identity that doesn't revolve around anyone else—is a skill we all need to master in our lives, just as being with others is. Neither of those skills should be left to atrophy in a lifetime. Whenever you FEEL lonely in life, it's wise to ask which of those two things you've been neglecting.
The second part of "learn to be alone when you're together and together when you're alone" is the ability to carry another in your heart and consider them even if they're not there. Again, you don't want to be so dependent on someone that you have to be with them physically to feel their love, nor do you want to be so independent that they and their needs cease to exist when you're not together. But you do want to be able to venture out in your aloneness without feeling lonely.
As a person who spends a lot of time alone, being together when you're alone is important in any kind of relationship. When you're navigating life as a single person, it's easy to feel alone when you're not. There are plenty of people out there to reach out to if you let yourself do that.
Ultimately, the words on this Hermit card sum it up, "what is bliss, and which the way?" Bliss can happen in many ways in our lives. It can come through another and it can also come through ourselves. We owe it to ourselves and others to nourish and model both ways. Both are tools essential to life.
Today's Draw: Aloneness from the Osho Zen Tarot. When was the last time you took stock of who you are and who you've become? Is it possible some of the things you believe about yourself are no longer true? Are you the only architect of your life or has it been shaped by pretty much everyone who's ever had an opinion about you?
For today's draw, and possibly for the entire week, I want to focus on the whole "false limitations" thing we discussed yesterday. Briefly, that was about having notions from the time of childhood that certain realities were not meant for us. We might not even realize that some of these ideas have taken hold...we just pushed certain possibilities aside and never thought of them again.
The relevance of today's card is that, at some point in our lives, we have to see ourselves from our own frame of reference. You're probably thinking you do that now. And maybe you do. I'm guessing all of us have some sort of self belief that came from someone else, though. Maybe someone described you as gangly when you were young and your self image, weight, exercise routine, choice of clothing, etc., on one level or another, has all been affected by that belief. Being self referenced is shedding all of that and assessing what YOU think of all that. It's not as easy as it sounds, because how do you shed the echoes of 40 years?
Of course, body image is just one of those things. What we talked about yesterday are the things that do or don't limit you from goals in your life. Unless you learned to believe differently, if you were told men didn't like gangly girls, you either fixed your gangliness or believed that romance would always be limited in your life. So maybe you settled for less than you deserved, were too shy to approach the men you were interested in or just focused your energies elsewhere. Over time, it stopped being about being gangly and just became your lot in life. Because you believed it, you created it.
So today's card is about going inward and really examining what's true about yourself...what you're good at, what you want, what you're capable of, what's not in the cards for you, etc....from YOUR point of reference. From what you know about yourself.
And this process isn't just a one-time thing, either. What you wanted and believed about yourself at 30 is different than at 40. Our interests change. And even our capabilities change. You may not suddenly become a math whiz, for example, but you may have developed a deeper focus that helps you concentrate on math problems better. And maybe now the person who shouldn't be let near a tax return might be a good person for the job.
So Aloneness not only reinforces the idea of self-reference, but also of the journey of going within and determining who we are today, rather than just plodding along mindlessly, living a life that someone else helped you define. Of course there will always be influences that color who you are. Your parents, chief among them. But the distinction I'm making is between choosing to adopt those things because they make sense to you and just accepting them as what is.
Ultimately only one person knows what's best for you and can deliver the contentment you seek. We've spent a lifetime listening to the opinions of others, trying other people's routes, suggesting routes for others and looking over the fence for new ideas. Today's card comes to remind us that the signposts we seek all lie within.
