3/12/13—Loving the Hard Love

Today's Draw: Ace of Cups in the What to Know position from the Sola Busca Revisited by Elaine Wilkinson and the Deck of 1000 Spreads. Do you know love? Can you feel it for a stranger? Can you feel it for your enemies?

If you took today's cards literally and simply, they'd say "love is what to know". Yeah, yeah. I know what you're thinking..."phew, I can skip today's post because I know love." 

But don't exit the building just yet, missy. Because I say back to you, "naw, you only know easy love." 

*ducking to evade all the rotten tomatoes being thrown at me by members of the local chapter of Spouses of Difficult Spouses*

Truth is, "easy love" is all that's expected from us in this life. Opening our heart to God or Oprah is easy. Gazing lovingly at our children and pets is easy. And, hard as it may seem sometime, wishing goodwill for our partners is easy. 

What's slightly hard is loving yourself. Harder still is loving a stranger you've never met. But the really hard thing is to look into the eyes who has hurt or harmed you and wish them the same joy you wish for yourself. 

When I pulled today's pair, I immediately thought of the Buddhist practice of loving kindness or metta bhavana. This practice is key to the Buddhist religion and cultivates goodwill for all living beings. For you and me, doing a metta meditation can be a very emotional and enlightening practice.  

The guided meditation from Sharon Salzberg on this page will take you through the steps: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3uLqt69VyI

Basically you visualize different people, open your hearts to them and wish them goodwill and happiness, as you would wish for yourself. It starts out with the easy people...people you already care for. And it gets harder as you move toward people who have hurt you. Ultimately you open your heart in love and goodwill to all beings on earth. 

This meditation can be a good way to let of issues you have with a particular person. It's also a good way to give yourself an attitude adjustment when you hate life. And, done regularly, it can really up the ante on your spiritual practice. Few things compare with the ability to love all sentient beings. 

We're all familiar with the common kinds of love—familial, platonic, romantic, motherly/fatherly, god-centered. These kinds of love flow through us effortlessly and are usually returned. But I think we can't really KNOW love until we know how to love universally and without the kind of payback we're used to receiving. 

When you love everything, most things don't even know you're loving them. So don't expect them to send you flowers. But do expect it to change the way you see your world and what it reflects back at you. 

2/25/13—Shining Your Light More Broadly

Today's Draw: Sun from the Deck of the Bastard in the Finances position from the Deck of 1000 Spreads. Do you feel like you don't have enough money right now? How about love...do you have enough of that? Is it possible that neither love nor money have anything to do with the problem at all?

The Deck of the Bastard is a self-published deck by Seven Stars, aka Elaine Wilkinson. Elaine has done a couple of things here I've never seen before. She's taken vintage deck images and photo manipulated them to create new images, creating a single deck from elements of a couple or a few. The deck's name comes from her "bastardization" of those decks. And while I've heard of customized backs before, what I haven't seen is that she will customize the backs with your name, so it's a truly personalized deck. If you're viewing this on my blog, you'll see the customization I chose. 

There are other custom features, like you can choose whether or not to have the Major Arcana labeled. As you can see, I didn't. But I will say I'll probably wrongly guess what some of them are, because they're not all as easy to recognize as the Sun here. Anyway, Elaine's doing some cool things with decks, as you'll see on her Etsy page. Some of her choices are enough to make more anal tarotists reach for an oxygen mask, but I love rule breakers. And that, she is. 

So now on to the Sun in the Finances position. This is a combo that most would love to receive. It means financial success. Or it could be saying the economy is rebounding. You get the idea. Money. Good. Yay!

Every card in the tarot has a positive side and shadow side. And one of the downsides of the sun is that it shines too bright a light on things, including all the dark little corners we'd like to keep dark. So the Sun in Finances can also shine a light on places where you've been misspending. Or it could be talking about the focus we're putting on our finances during tax season. Or where you might not have the funds to do all you want to do. 

If the fear of failure is one of the biggest fears in life, the two areas in which that fear is most prevalent has to be in love and money. We fear we'll never HAVE enough in those areas. We fear we'll never BE enough in those areas. We feel we will fail at love and money. 

One of the things I've learned in life is that #1 cause of falling short in either of those areas is the belief that you don't have enough or you're not being enough. For example, I used to feel I didn't have enough love in my life...that I was falling short in that area. And as long as that's where I shined the light, that's all I was able to see. 

I not only chose the back design, but see my name up there?

But one day I challenged that belief and fear. And I started looking around me...at family, at friends, at my dogs. Listen, ANYONE who has three dogs and tells you they're not loved is not shining their light on the right things. Turns out that I may not have romantic love in my life, but the dearth of that is more than made up for by what just one Magick Moonbeam (my middle dog) brings into my life every day. So one day I don't have nearly enough love in my life. And and another day I'm the most blessed woman on earth. Nothing changed except where I shone the sun in my life. 

The same thing works for money and resources. I'll tell you this much. If you want to live 17 years as a freelancer, you can't have the luxury of worrying about money all the time. You'll never make it past the second year. Your reality follows your thoughts. Believe you don't have enough and you will not have enough. Of course, it's inevitable fear will creep in now and again. And for those times, that's when shining a light on all you have can come in handy. 

My personal list is...I have equity in my home. I can always sell it. I have room on a credit card that I can use. I can get a loan or a home equity line of credit. I have an old car I never drive that I could sell. I have a spare room and could take a roommate. I have things I can sell. I have my tarot skill and can do readings if I need money. By the time I get through that list, my anxiety is usually gone. But there's one more thing on the list—I could always get a regular job. And none of that even considers all the discretionary spending I do that could be restrained or the bills that could be cut.

When you really take a look...really shine the light...the fears you have are just that. And the more you entertain them, the more you shape your reality. Someone very close to me went through a time a couple of years back where they were unemployed, owed more on their house than it was worth, could not find a new job and had run out of unemployment. Even then, they had choices. They could have declared bankruptcy. They could have moved in with me, into a better job market. And they had other options, too. Before they had to resort to any of that, they got a job. They don't earn as much as they did years ago. They don't own a home. And I think they would say they feel pretty free and devoid of material attachments now. Blessed for their situation. A lot of external things changed, yes. But ultimately the most important change happened within. 

Unless you're literally on the brink of homelessness with nowhere to go, chances are you have more than you're shining a light on right now. The more fear you have, the narrower your light. So if you're seeing your finances—or anything else right now—through a pinhole of light, bring in more light. You'll see you have more than you give yourself credit for. And when you see that, hold it in your vision and you'll find you're richer than a king.