9/10/12—Surrendering to Something Higher

Today's Draw: Two of Swords from the Victorian Romantic tarot. Is there a struggle in your life you're willing to give up in order to reach a higher state of being? Is there a way in which you've placed conditions on your own self love? What are you willing to do to put these issues behind you?

First, I'd like to invite any of you on Facebook to please "like" my new author page, K. Tierney Sadler, Author. This is where I'll be posting updates about my books, including The Deck of 1000 Spreads due out in Spring 2013 from Llewellyn and now available for pre-order. My apologies to those of you who are among my Facebook friends, because you've now heard this a few times. :)

OK. On to the business at hand. This week is One Card Challenge week at the Daily Draw. And by that I mean I'm going to choose one card and do the entire week on that one card, posting a different message every day. I'm doing this for a few reasons. One is to show my students (and anyone else) how this can be done. Another is to challenge myself, because I'm not sure I can do it. And a third reason is because I often do a couple of days with a single card and I thought it would be interesting to see what I might get revisiting a card for an entire week. 

So the deck I've chosen this week is the Victorian Romantic. I chose this deck because it's one of my three main reading decks. That doesn't make this task easier, imo. It makes it harder, because I already have automatic ways I read the cards in this deck. 

I always say to my students, "Forget about the card's meaning. What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you turn the card over?" With this Two of Swords, on this particular day, my response is "devotion". Devotion in the sense that the woman seems transfixed, blind to what is going on around her and intoxicated by whatever is happening before her. This is not the traditional meaning of this card, nor what the author intended. I will be addressing those aspects later in the week. "Devotion" is just my first impression of the card upon seeing it. 

Devotion to something is surrendering to it. There is no resistance. Nothing to question. No conditions. Surrender is the same as the unconditional love I spoke of last week. In this particular card, I see surrender to either a higher power or surrender to some aspect of life. In those cases, surrender brings the added gift of freedom from a lot of emotional pain. 

So, lets go back to the fictional example of the mother of the Colorado shooter (seeing as how I have no knowledge of his real mother). But assuming she has total unconditional love for this child, she is likely not in pain because he hurt HER by killing people. She forgave him for everything he may ever do when he was still in her womb. That's how unconditional love works. You love without condition. You forgive without condition. Which is not to say she's not in pain, but her pain is likely for how he has hurt himself, how he has hurt others in the family and how he has hurt all the people touched by the tragedy. 

What she is not suffering over is this—Can I ever forgive him? How can I continue to love a son like that? Of course my example is that of an imagined ideal, but really consider where much of your pain would be as a mother were there even a question about conditions. It would be in "can I turn away from him when he needs me because what he has done is so horrific?" When you've surrendered, the answer is no. It's not even a question. And if you can forgive the big stuff, you're wasting energy bothering over the small stuff. So you gotta forgive that, too. The same is true when you're devoted to God, yourself, a pet...anyone. 

So as not to sound like a re-hash of last Friday's post about the healing power of unconditional love, I do specifically want to make the point about God and yourself in today's entry. If you feel resentment toward God for something, your love is not unconditional. If you blame him for your pain, your love is not unconditional. And you do need to take responsibility if you ever thought it was. Because if it was, your love and confidence in him would have never come into question. 

Next, the point about YOU.  Ask yourself if and why you've ever turned away from yourself. Are you engaged in an addiction or dangerous or self-destructive behavior? That's turning away from yourself. Are you beating yourself up for your infractions? Are you mistreating yourself? I'm among those who will admit to not being devoted to myself, not surrendering to myself and not loving myself unconditionally. And I have no good reason to give as to why. 

I have no good reason why I allow myself to suffer over myself, except that I must feel a need to suffer for some imagined infraction. Because frankly, I've never done anything worthy of treating myself the way I treat myself, nor would I allow anyone else in my life to cause me the pain I've caused myself. It has long been time to love myself for who I am, starting with the way I am now. 

So if you find yourself in a cycle of pain with yourself, with God or with another, it's because you haven't *decided* to love them unconditionally. Because if you had made that decision, no condition could have come along to change your mind. You don't have to love everyone unconditionally. But if you have a child, pet, god or self that you continue cycling in pain around, you may want to make that decision. It doesn't come automatically just through your relation to that person. It's a decision you have to make and never go back on. A decision to forgive and love, no matter what. A decision to put that love above the ego...above the need to be right. A decision to surrender to what is and what may come. Then acting in integrity to that. It's a verb that never stops verbing in your life. 

Easy? No. But it gets easier once you get past the struggle to surrender...once you start making choices in alignment with love. The woman in this card can be seen putting the emotions (water), mental struggles (clouds), worldly concerns (earth/rock) and impulse (lightning) behind her, and surrendering her focus to a higher state of being. So what struggle are you willing to give up in your life for that higher state of being? And what choices are you willing to make to get yourself there?

4/30/12—Loving Like You Were Dying

Today's Draw: The One of Water from the Today's Journey Tarot. Who or what do you love unconditionally....meaning no matter what they to to you or others? Do you think unconditional love is something reserved just for family members, or just for certain types of family members? How different would your life be if you were able to open your to more people without condition?

This One of Water (Ace of Cups) depicts an intensity and range of emotions, from calm to chaotic. This card also speaks of unconditional love. 

If you had asked me a year ago what kind of impact the loss of my brother John would have on me, I wouldn't have predicted the way I've been feeling the last five months. 

The first part of our lives, he and I didn't see much of each other. He was just enough older that our paths didn't cross in school or on playgrounds. Then, when I was in college, he was living at home again and we became closer. We were pretty good friends through my 20s. After he started having children, his focus changed and we had less in common again. 

To a sensitive person like myself, his "sense of humor" could be unnecessarily hurtful. On top of that, it seemed like a lot of things got lost in communication between us. I think it's fair to say that neither one of us quite trusted the other. So, for the past 10 years of his life, I didn't seek opportunities to be around him. I never lost sight of how good a father he was, along with other good qualities of his. But I was happy to admire those qualities from afar. 

Pop psychology would say that the reason I've taken this so hard is guilt—guilt over lost opportunities and blah, blah, blah. But that's not the case at all. I don't feel bad or unjustified about any of the choices I made in regard to him. But what I think I didn't realize until I turned over this card today is that, even though it really didn't look that way, there was unconditional love between us. I never would have guessed it, because on the surface I would think all my love with my brothers and sisters was conditional. But now I'm rethinking that. 

My oldest brother, Bob, is someone who emanates unconditional love for his siblings and I always thought he was a bit sappy for it. But today I'm realizing how wise he is. He is a good example of how you surrender to something like that. He'll get mad at you, but he won't hate you. He'll always be gentle with you. He's the one who will always say, "don't say you don't love him. He's your brother." I finally get that.

When John found out he had cancer, all the walls that caused him to say some of the hurtful things he said tumbled down. Actually, he had already been working on it when he got sick because it pushed more than one of us away from him. But when he learned he had cancer, he surrendered. Anything that was in the past was in the past. 

That made an imprint on me, because when you're faced with death, all those other struggles with the ego don't matter. And he got that immediately. I never would have predicted that of him, either. But he got it immediately. Although "grace" was not a word you would normally use in conjunction with him, there became a grace about him. This opened the door for both of us to set bygones aside and let each other know how we felt about each other.

My mother was the same way when she was dying. Both she and my brother made sure nothing was left unsaid. Both found the courage to express themselves in ways they couldn't when they still held the illusion of having limitless time on this earth. They played that song "Live Like You Were Dying" at my brother's funeral. But I wonder how different this world would be if we could all LOVE like we were dying. How different would your life be? 

I've known for a while that I hold on to hurts way too long. Right now there are a few people who have really let me down. One is a family member. When I surrender to the notion that I love him unconditionally, regardless of whether I like him or not, it softens my position. Much of my inner tension regarding this relationship is in trying to convince myself I don't need him or love him. I think if I could believe that was true, then his actions wouldn't hurt so much. But what really causes the pain is fighting against that part of me that can't NOT love him. His thoughts about me still hurt, but there can be less of a struggle around them when I'm not trying so hard to hate him back. He's my brother. I'm stuck loving him. 

There's a part of me that wants to be someone who can open up their heart enough to love everyone unconditionally. I'm nowhere near that, but I've made progress over the years. I may not ever make it to "love", but I'm pretty sure I can make a dent in "accept". My position on this topic has changed considerably over the years. I used to think unconditional love was only for parents and their children (or pets). But now I'm seeing it can be more. Certainly the Dalai Lama has unconditional love for everyone and everything. What do you think about all of this?