Today's Draw: The Six of Fire from the Gaian Tarot by Joanna Powell Colbert, Part 2. Do you tend to get so caught up in daily life that you lose touch with anything beyond bills, work and caring for family? What kind of activities are guaranteed to make you transcend everyday life and go into that larger place of spirit? How often do find yourself going there...often enough?
I have a tendency to become very single-minded sometimes. For example, when work is busy, I'll go into "work mode" and that's all I'll focus on until the busy patch passes. Somewhere inside my head a switch goes off and says, "you must stand your post until all work is done." So during those periods, it's a miracle if I get out and go grocery shopping, let alone do anything else.
Really, it's the same thing as saying I get so involved in life that I forget to take care of myself. I'm sure you can relate. And it's not always that I don't have time to do something for myself. Most of the time I do have time. But for one reason or another, I just don't take it.
So today's idea for Five Healing Thoughts and Practices week is to take the time. And don't just take the time, take it doing something you get lost in. See the way the woman in this card is lost in her ecstatic dance? And the others are lost in drumming? It's about going to a place in our head where clients, kids, bills, schedules, husbands and the other crap we think about the other 24x7x365 doesn't exist.
For me, this is something I simply cannot do in the home. I work here, do everything here. So I have to get away. Sometimes it works to hang out with a friend, but that doesn't always work. Sometimes that's just getting away in the body, but the mind still churns with work stuff. Really, the best place for me is in nature. I get so lost in the scents and scenery that I lose awareness of all else.
The other day I arranged my schedule so that I could take the afternoon off. And I scooped up my dogs and took them to the park. This doesn't happen that often when the weather is hot, but it was a nice day with low humidity. And it just so happened that we hit one of our favorite spots at a time when nobody else was there. The path was lined with sweet smelling white flowers. Butterflies were flitting here and there. Birds were chirping. Crickets were singing. A breeze was blowing. And since there was no one else around, I was able to let the dogs off the leash, so I didn't even have to worry about them pulling me through the woods.
Not too far down the path is a nice little sandy beach on the river with huge driftwood logs you can sit on. This is near a marina and there are a number of boats anchored off shore, so you could hear metal clanking against the sail posts and someone had windchimes on their boat. And I got lost in all that for really just a few moments, but enough to deliver healing. Enough to remind me that the stuff I get bogged down in every day is trivial compared to the larger force that was alive in me that very minute.
A neat little side story is that, at one point, one of my dogs was sniffing at a shell along the shoreline. So I thought I'd go over and check the shell out. As I got up off the log, I remember thinking "I wonder if there's any beach glass here?" I'm constantly surprised at the things you find along the shore of the river, like the rather large snail shell (or whatever critter was inside) that my dog found. Anyway, as I returned to the log, sitting right next to where my arse was just minutes before, there was a piece of beach glass! I hadn't noticed it before. It was like it appeared out of nowhere, a spontaneous manifestation from the universe!
Anyway, back to the larger force within. Life can confuse us into believing that what happens in the brief phase of time that we're here on earth is real...is what truly is. But when we lose ourselves in that part of us that transcends this existence, we discover what TRULY, truly is. Where our everyday lives can make us feel small and leave us to wonder what it's really about, losing ourselves in that higher place shows us how infinite and integral we are.
I believe we came here to live the very life we get bogged down in, rather than trying to find a way to always live in the larger place. We have all of eternity to live in that larger place. But taking these respites serves to remind us that this is not all there is. And sometimes we desperately need to know that. We don't even know how desperately until we're there...until we're truly home.
Today's Draw: Six of Fire from the Gaian Tarot by Joanna Powell Colbert, Part 1. Do you consider yourself a healer? Would you like to be someone who spreads more healing throughout your world (and, in the process, receives more healing in return)? How often do use the words "I love you" to let someone know you love them, rather than just assuming that they know?
Sometimes I feel like I focus too much on the things we do wrong on our paths, rather than the things we do right or CAN do right. That's not really the case, but it is how I feel after the past couple of weeks, which have been kind of rough. So I declare this week to be Five Healing Thoughts or Practices week.
The Six of Fire talks about generating healing energy with others and being the inspiration of healing and transformation for both yourself and others. Anytime we gather in a group, the energy rises exponentially...to more than the sum of all the individual energies in the group. So if you really want to generate some healing energy, do it in a group. (That's part of the intended meaning for this card, but I see something else in the card. So we'll work with the same card tomorrow, too.)
First let me talk about what "healing" is. It's not just physical, "get well soon" kind of stuff. It's emotional and psychic and social and every which way. So when you spend time with family and friends and feel better when you leave than you did when you arrived, that was a healing. Really, anytime you choose love over some other emotion or act—anger, judgment, gossip, indifference, frustration, convenience ;)—you're putting out healing energies and distributing healing chemicals throughout your body.
So really just getting friends together for drinks and a gabfest can be a healing. Or you could go farther, by having a group over to celebrate the beauty inside each person in the group. We don't always take the time to tell the people in our lives what makes them so important to us. We actually tend to be more critical of the people we care about than purposely making them aware of their gifts. We assume they know we love them, rather than telling them.
I remember, when I was a little girl, telling my mother that I didn't think my father loved me. And she said to me "he loves you. He doesn't always show it or say it in ways that make it obvious, but you see it in other ways." So I looked for those other ways. But it was hard, because little girls don't understand things like how hard dads work to support their families and that that's a way they show love. I would have preferred he told me and showed me in ways I could understand. And I'm still like that today.
I'm not yet 50 and I've been without parents most of my life. I've also already lost a sibling. So me and my brothers and sisters have understood loss for a long time. More than 25 years ago, we began a practice of always saying we love each other at the end of every conversation. I credit my brother Robert for starting it, but who knows who started it. Anyway, it doesn't matter if we butt dial the wrong number, if the conversation goes poorly or what—we always say we love each other before we hang up.
That's a healing practice we do in our family. We do it because we understand that you can blink and the other person can be gone. And we want our last words to be words of love. But, for me at least, I also do it because I don't want anyone wondering just because I don't say it. I learned a lesson this past spring when my brother died. He and I had issues. But those issues meant nothing when placed beside the reality of death. We healed that before he died, but had he died suddenly, neither of us may have ever realized just how much stronger that bond is than the BS we let stand between us.
Anyway, I'm guessing that most of the people reading this have become a greater force of healing for themselves and those around them over the years. It's valuable to take a moment and reflect on that to see how we've softened our edges and amplified our appreciation of those in our lives. Some of it comes with age, some with spiritual awareness. It doesn't take much more than smiling at someone who looks like they could use a smile, really. That's a very healing act. For both parties.
So we're all doing it already anyway...spreading our healing energy. And we may even be doing it without realizing it. Just imagine how much more we could do if we became more conscious of it and did it on purpose. Anytime you choose to project love over some other emotion, you're spreading your healing energy. How much love can you spread today?
I have a tendency to become very single-minded sometimes. For example, when work is busy, I'll go into "work mode" and that's all I'll focus on until the busy patch passes. Somewhere inside my head a switch goes off and says, "you must stand your post until all work is done." So during those periods, it's a miracle if I get out and go grocery shopping, let alone do anything else. 
