3/18/13—Making the Right Choices for Our Bodies

Today's Draw: Seven of Cups from Infinite Visions in the What Your Body Wants You to Know position from the Deck of 1000 Spreads. Do you listen to clues from your body, and do you act on them? Are you a good steward of the vessel your soul inhabits? What is your body trying to tell you?

You could also read today's position pair as What to Know About Your Body. Or even What Your Body Needs to Know. However you interpret that, the answer is there are a lot of options available to you—just don't spend so much time mulling over your choices that you do nothing. 

I've written on this blog before about how I've struggled with my weight for most of my life. While I believe that cutting calories and exercising are really the only natural way to lose weight, there are so many possibilities within that, it's mind boggling. What calories do you cut? Fat? Carbs? Do you cut across the board? The right answer is different for different people. 

Then there's exercise. What kind of exercise should you do? What time of day? How long should you do it for? The options are endless. And no answers are wrong. But it's so easy—and convenient—to get into a situation where you think about it a lot and end up doing nothing. I know this because this is where I've been for years. I've basically told myself that anything I do won't be "enough". Meanwhile anything I do will be more than I'm doing now. 

Just looking at these cards, it seems to be saying "your body wants you to know you've become complacent and indifferent." And this can apply to my healthy friends, too. Let's say you're a jogger and you like jogging, but you're not getting the same results from it that you used to. You can vary the lengths of your runs and your venues. You can lengthen your stride. You can do something to shake yourself out of the routine and up the ante on your workouts. You have many options—just don't get so caught up in them that you just continue with the status quo. 

Let's face it. Very few of us will ever make all the right choices for our bodies. Likewise, very few of use will make all the wrong choices. What these cards want is for us to make conscious choices, as opposed to choosing through inaction, because that's a choice, too. And it's not just about diet and exercise. It's about anything you put into your body and anything you do with it, not to mention the vigilance you put into it through doctor visits and whatnot. 

Another element of this is that our bodies try to communicate with us all the time and we need to listen to that, too. My aches are my body's way of saying, "I need more flexibility and exercise." A craving for OJ, which I have now and again is my body asking for added vitamins. Everything from heartburn to loose stools is trying to steer you toward making a different choice. 

A lot of people in the spiritual world tend to have weight and/or health issues. There can be a lot of spiritual reasons—or excuses—for this. For example, some healers might take on some of the health issues of their clients over time. Or some might say holding extra weight is something people do when they otherwise have issues "grounding" themselves. I used the word "excuses" up above, because there are options to circumvent these issues...stronger boundaries, better protective measures, better spiritual techniques. But by not choosing those options, we choose the unhealthy option by default. We're not victim to our spiritual path. 

So I know this combo has come to tell me to "just do it". And to become a more conscious steward of this body. And maybe it's come to tell you something, too, whether you need big tweaks to the choices you make for your body or not. One thing I know from having a 30-year-old spirit trapped in a 70-year-old body at the age of 50 is that if I don't do something about this now, I'll drag my youthful spirit down with me. And I just have too much I need this body to do. 

8/29/12—Examining Your Story

Today's Draw: The Seven of Holy Water from Robert Place's Vampire Tarot. What tempts you? How often do you make choices that you know are bad for you? Do you still find yourself making bad choices without realizing they're bad choices?

The Seven of Holy Water corresponds to the Seven of Cups. It's a card of choice. In traditional decks, each cup would be filled with a wonderful thing. And your job is to choose among all the options available to you..to make a decision...to take a stand. 

But in this card, it's a little different. There are three doorways, only one of them leading to escape. Do you choose the one with all the money and see where it goes? Do you choose the one with the vampire...maybe he's guarding the exit? Or do you choose the third one?

Life is often like that, isn't it? Full of difficult choices. Heck, the empty doorway could be clearly marked "Exit" and we may still choose the one with the money. Or even the one that promises eternal life. Or maybe we think we can scoop up the money, be given eternal life and still make it out exit!

In one of the questions up top I asked if you still find yourself making bad choices without realizing they're bad choices. I asked that because it seems like there comes a time in our lives where we see the clues to a bad choice and can keep from choosing it. This, of course, isn't 100%. But we do get to a point where we know the earmarks of all the bad choices we've made in the past and we, nonetheless, make them again. We make them consciously. 

I feel like when I make bad choices these days I know when I'm doing it. I mean, I'm not blind to the fact that that piece of chocolate cake is not nutritionally equal to a sprig of broccoli or that smooth talking misunderstood playboy is going to turn out to be genuine and loyal. Obviously there's a shadow side issue at play when we knowingly make bad choices, even if we're only marginally conscious of it. We have to search ourselves and ask, "What story is this keeping me stuck in? And how is that story serving me?"

By story, I mean the stories we tell ourselves, like "I only ever meet the wrong men!" or "All the good men are taken!" or "But his smile was just so irresistible!" Your story can also point to a cycle or pattern. For example, one ex was a drunk, another a womanizer and another a workaholic. They're all different, right? No, they're all the same. They're all unavailable. So why do you keep going for unavailable men? And, more pointedly, what is unavailable about you that you only attract unavailable men?

Shadow Week ain't easy. Oprah once said she had a breakthrough about her weight issues when she realized they weren't about the potato chips. Whatever it is that's recurring in your life...whatever bad or limiting choices you're making, it's not about the potato chips. It's about something far beneath the chips. The good news is that, if you're making the bad choices consciously, you're way ahead of the people who are going through life blindly wondering why bad things always happen to them. 

Other shadow issues with a Seven of Cups might be an inability to make a decision for fear of making the wrong one. Or wanting/needing to have it all. Choosing and regretting. Or worrying you've made the wrong choice and so you take the choice you made for granted. Or not showing gratitude for the options you do have. The Seven of Cups doesn't offer the kind of choices you're meant to regret. It only offers cup after cup of enjoyment. Your job is to choose the ONE that works best for you and be happy with it. 

5/9/12—Fueling The Machine

Today's Draw: Seven of Cups from the Druidcraft Tarot. Have you ever glimpsed into a whole other possible reality? What did you see? And what do you see in Tierney's Dark and Wild Adventure Into the Subconscious?

The Seven of Cups is one of those cards you can see in many ways...an abundance of choices and a lack of decision making, visions for the future turned into mere daydreams and emotions that turn into manifestations. Another meaning of the card has to do with illusions and the many facets of emotion. 

I've spoken before about this amazing emotional/spiritual music evoked healing thing I do with a woman in Maryland. What happens in the session is that we set an intention, then she chooses music to fit the intention. She relaxes me and puts me in a meditative state and plays the music, which is almost always classical. And, in this relaxed state, images form as I listen. I describe the images I'm seeing and she writes down everything I say. Then we analyze what has happened at the end of the session.

I've been doing this with her for a couple of years now. So it has become common for me to go into a really deep hypnotic/subconscious state during the session. During these times I get really cold. It's odd. It takes a lot to make me cold. And it was pretty cool in the room today, but not THAT cool. Anyway, I always put the blanket on me before a session, because it's inevitable that, at some point, I'll leave consciousness and get really cold. 

But this isn't about my body temperature. It's about my session today. Like I said, I've been doing this for two years. And while this isn't a literal interpretation of what happens, it has always conjured angels and glitter and Jesus—that type of imagery. The sessions are always very expansive and reassuring. And yes, even though I'm not a Jesus person, I have seen Jesus in these sessions. I've had angels joke around with me because I act so human as a human, when in fact, I'm one of them and I've just forgotten. I've flown as a bird. Sat with wise men. And experienced my soul as the magical, transcendent, immortal thing it is. 

For as light and ethereal as all my sessions have been, however, today's was surreal and dark. While I recognized there was a purpose to the human situation, I saw us as being imprisoned. Stored. Warehoused. Our brains were used to power the universe, not for the benefit of humanity, but for the benefit of biology. And while we're all connected as one, we are all just chemicals used to power the machine. 

Some of the things I said when I was in a subconscious state today were really deep. Usually when I go that deep my mutterings are random and don't seem to have meaning. An example might be "marshmallow butterfly elephant". Who knows what that's supposed to mean? But here are a few things I said in the subconscious state today that were actually quite lucid, and I thought I'd share:

• You can't look at something from the outside and expect to understand it.

• It's like the other side of this place [the things we see] doesn't exist. 

• It's the modern thing to be invisible. 

• I look out a window and there's no "there" out there. 

• [Someone] has got a broken foot, but we can replace that. 

• On a computer screen I see a progress bar that is making progress. And, on a pull-down menu, I'm given the option of "advise".

Another thing I said in that state was a musing about how we buy nice things, then don't use use them because we don't want to ruin them. And then they just go to waste. 

I know that seems like a lot of disconnected mish-mash. But the overall feeling of the session was that we are basically automatons within a grand machine. We think we're free, but we're imprisoned and destined to fulfill the purpose intended by the machine. That the chemical reactions in our brain that produce thought are the fuel for this machine. It doesn't really matter what we think. It's the energy produced by thinking that matters. And that (and this is how it ties back to the tarot card) everything is illusion. There is no "other side" to this place, because it's like a movie set, arranged to be the backdrop for our chemical thought process to reflect against, thereby producing more energy for the machine.

Depressing, huh? Part existentialist, part futile and part really bleak and disappointing...haha. It suggests that the importance of humanity and the ego of man is a veil created to ensure we pump out enough fuel to power "the machine", which could be God, the universe or an actual machine for all I know. But it also offers up the notion that, while we're here, we get to benefit from this really cool veil, instead of living in the reality that we're slave fodder. So we should appreciate the veil while we've got it. 

Anyway, I thought it was really interesting. It's not the normal thing these sessions reveal to me...this dark underbelly of the human psyche...of MY psyche. On the upside, though, I wasn't dismembering babies or anything awful like that...haha. It could have been darker than the feeling of futility in the service to some great machine. What does all of this conjure in you?

3/5/12—Making a Big Ball of Gratitude

Today's Draw: Seven of Cups from the Infinite Visions Tarot. Do you feel vaguely dissatisfied, even though there's nothing in particular going wrong? Do you find yourself looking outside yourself for things to make you happy? Are you happy with what you have?

This is always an interesting card to me. It's a card of being blessed with too many options and so, as a result, you're overwhelmed. Or you don't make a decision. Or maybe you're not jazzed by any of them. 

In a way, we're all always blessed with too many options. We tend to see things in black and white...this or that...but the truth is, there are almost always countless more options available to us. Maybe we can't see them. Maybe we're not thinking imaginatively enough. Maybe we don't want to see them. But they're there. 

When I see this particular Seven of Cups, however, it always conjures certain images in my head. To me, this woman's got everything she could ever want. She's got this amazing river vista. The sun is preparing a beautiful sunset for her. She's in a great dress, curled in a comfy chair. There are plenty of liquids to keep her hydrated. There's a footstool to help ensure her comfort. And about three nostrils away from her nose, there's a beautiful, fragrant lily in bloom. Yet she has her back turned to the beautiful view and looks bored, if not completely disenchanted. 

There are two things in particular I could talk about with the mood of this card. One is gratitude. She doesn't seem to be grateful for what she has. She's surrounded by riches but she's almost disdainful of it. The second thing it makes me think of is when you buy stuff and there's that rush from buying, but then when you get everything home, you realize it doesn't make you happy. Sure, there's that thrill from buying, but you're looking for happiness outside of yourself...where happiness can't be found. 

What it all really comes down to is the first point, however—a need for gratitude. I can't say enough about maintaining a regular practice of gratitude. Not only does gratitude gift you with total abundance from the universe (because the universe gives you more of what you focus on and if you focus on gratitude, you get more to be grateful for), but gratitude also helps you see really how much you have to be grateful for. 

It's like the snowball effect in that the more you're grateful, the more fulfilled you feel and more new gratitude rolls in. This one practice alone can entirely change your life. The idea is to find five things to be grateful for each day. So what are your five things today?

Mine are: 

1. I taught a tarot class today and it went really well. 
2. On the way home, I got a great idea for another class to teach. 
3. I enjoyed nature and my back deck this morning over a wonderful cup of coffee. 
4. My little girl, Magick Moonbeam, counts one thing more important than food, treats and walkies in her life—me. And she has no problem making that clear. 
5. I have a sister visiting town next weekend and she wanted to swing by and see my brother, who is ill. Well they decided to theme the evening around my birthday. So I'll be spending my birthday with my family. And cake. :)