6/27/12—Viewing Life from the Perspective of the Soul

Today's Draw: Ten of Swords—Ruin—from the Rohrig Tarot, Part 1. Do setbacks have a tendency to really set you back? On the flip side, do you bounce back from things so quickly that you don't even take the time to honor their passing? Have you ever spent way too long mourning the loss of something in your life?

Day three of our weeklong reading on how to find more peace is the card "Ruin", a card of negative and unproductive thinking. So don't do that! OK? :) Actually, this card holds so much input into the matter of creating peace in our worlds that I'm going to address it in two parts, with the second part happening tomorrow.

Listen, not one of us is going scrape through life without something bad happening. We may be the victim of violence. Someone we love will die. Our marriage might end. Whatever it is, suddenly the life we knew is no longer. And we have no control over this. It's over.

Regardless, we will lose our sense of peace and balance over this. We need to feel. We need to mourn the old. But the key here is how long. And how we see the event in the overall context of our lives.

Some people will live for years telling themselves "my life is over" or "everything I cared about is gone". Some people will slip into depression or turn to drugs, numbing themselves to the pain. And some people will feel what they feel, take their lessons, then bounce back. This last quality has been cited on lists of things in common with both successful people and unusually old people. Your ability to bounce back contributes to both your success and longevity.

The faster you bounce back, the more peace you'll have, too. Buddhists teach that much of our suffering comes from attachment to things...non-acceptance of reality...wishing things were different. I also refer to it as pushing back against what is. Again, things need to be mourned. But things also need to be accepted and integrated.

Your marriage failed? Your life isn't over. Some might say it's really just beginning.

Someone you love died? You can love again. Dr. Phil once said something very good on this topic...the length and depth of your mourning has no relation to the length and depth of your love. They are two separate things. Being happy is not a betrayal of that love. In fact, anyone who loved you would want to see you happy, so it honors that love.

You were the victim of a crime? There's a lot to heal there. There's also a lot to learn and triumph over.

Most of the negative thoughts we think after a trauma are not true. They reflect our fears and feelings at the time. But there is a whole school of thought that can bring you back to peace. One thought is that there are no mistakes, only learning experiences. Another is that nothing is ever lost, it's just transformed. These two perspectives alone can bring you more peace, learning and healing than wallowing ever could.

There simply is no such thing as "ruin". Ruin happens when the foundation upon which you've built something is not substantial enough to hold what you've built. So ruin happens to show you where you need to build stronger foundations in your life. If someone died or a relationship ended and you "simply cannot go on", then your foundation of self-confidence, self-reliance and self-identity wasn't strong enough to support the relationship in the first place.

Nobody *is* your life. No state of being *is* your life. Nothing is permanent beyond your soul. And when you view life from the perspective of the soul, then you'll see "ruin" does not exist. And a world in which ruin does not exist is a more peaceful one, indeed.

2/21/12—Honoring Struggle and Strife

Today's Draw: Five of Wands from the Rosetta Tarot. Do you see struggle and strife as necessary things? What gifts have these moments given you? What have they taken away?

This card depicts Sekhmet, an Egyptian warrior goddess and goddess of healing, standing with hands clenched. Behind her are a scythe and a phoenix headed wand, then two lotus wands. The phoenix symbolizes renewal through fire and the lotus wands speak of healing through destabilization. 

What it comes down to is that sometimes you've just got to go through unpleasantness in order for change and healing to happen. Sucks, but it's true. When I look back through my life and look at the worst stuff that's happened to me, all those moments of conflict, struggle and discord have given me the biggest opportunity for growth and evolution. And—this is the important part—the amount to which I've clenched my fists against the strife or opened myself to experiencing the fullness of it was key to what kind of a net impact those circumstances would have in my life.

From those moments I've become less needy in my relationships. I've become more able to stand in my own sense of accomplishment and capability. I define myself more by what I feel to be true of myself than what others project upon me. I've become less gullible. More honest with myself. Stronger. More forgiving. More compassionate. And, through struggle, I found a set of beliefs that define my character and spirituality, regardless of circumstance. 

On the flip side, I would say those same instances have made me less trusting, more jaded, less "available" in the romantic sense, less likely to trust in the American justice system and, while these times may not have built any new walls within me, they certainly didn't do anything to chip away at the ones that were there. And I also have to admit to losing years of progress in one case in particular, due my inability to just let the experience flow. I clenched my fists. I got stuck.

For me, the thing I mourn the most from my own most difficult moments, though, is the loss of innocence. And I mean that in the sense that "ignorance is bliss". Struggle and conflict often begin with the lifting of eyelids...and often end with eyes wide open. You gain a new vision of the world that is less Utopian—and more realistic—than the one you had before. The reality makes you more capable of dealing with the slings and arrows of the world. But the loss of innocence leaves callouses where there was softness before. I'm glad to be who I am today as the result of the struggles in my life. But I'm also sad for the bits of fairy dust that were shed in its wake. 

A new chapter of struggle and strife has begun for my family over the past couple of months, as one of my siblings is seriously ill. I have a good idea of what I'm losing in terms of innocence and human loss, but not quite sure of what gifts will come in its wake. My greatest wish is that, once the focus moves from the pain of our loss, the opportunity for healing and growth that this phase brings will be used to its fullest...that everyone involved will approach this new phase of our lives not with clenched fists, but with open arms.