9/29/14—Getting Out Of The Weeds

A few nights ago when I was meditating, I asked for some insight. What I heard was very relevant and something I thought I'd share, because I'm certain I'm not alone. 

"You've gotten yourself too far down into the weeds." That's what I heard. And it sounded kind of like my father saying it. Regardless of where it came from, though, I knew what it meant. I'm putting too much thought and energy into things that have no bearing on my purpose and goals in life. I'm wasting my water and sunlight on things that won't grow and I don't want to grow. 

The more I thought of it, the more I saw all the ways I do this. I: 

• Engage in issues with people who have no bearing on my life.
• Ruminate over things I don't do as well I've done in the past.
• Think about things I wish I could have done better. 
• Think about things I wish I could have said, but didn't.
• Linger over things that have already been dealt with. 
• Worry about things that haven't happened yet. 
• Think about things rather than just do them. 
• Fear doing things that haven't been done yet. 

None of that stuff is moving me toward my goals. Meanwhile, seemingly unrelated things do, in my opinion. Like a retail therapy trip took earlier in the week. It distracted me from energy-sucking thoughts and refueled my energy. In fact, I've done a number of things in the past week that have helped me push my reset button. 

I think I've probably been in the weeds for a long time. I mean, the goals and the move toward them is ever-present, if not always successful. But they're wrapped in a fog of insignificance and distraction, which, frankly has just added stress to the situation. While distraction can lighten the load, especially if you're overly focused, some types of distraction just add weight to your backpack that is not needed. 

The first step toward recovery is recognizing there's a problem. While I knew I wasn't as focused as I could be, I never saw it this way before. If you imagine a cross section of earth, you don't want to be stuck in the thatch of weeds. You want to be up above them where you can navigate the big picture. But then you don't want to be so high that integral parts of the picture are out of sight. 

Now that I recognize this, I need to retrain myself to slough what doesn't matter and not let it distract me. It's a habit that needs to be broken. I think it's important to balance things, so nothing of value gets neglected along the way. When you consider that most of our goals touch many areas of our life, we have to pay attention to the whole tamale. 

So we have to think about where we want to be. What does life look like with your goal met? What does it look like spiritually? How does it impact your health and relationships? If an activity or relationship or way of thinking doesn't align with that vision, part of reaching your goal will have to be letting that go. 

And while you're getting yourself out of the weeds and moving toward your goal, surround yourself with people who not only support your path, but can handle your success. I learned a long time ago that there are people who, for whatever reason, hold a smaller vision for you and your world than you have for yourself. That is their issue. Don't make it yours. Anything you try to pull out of the weeds with you will just weigh you down. 

9/23/14—Honing Your Intuition

Today's blog post is part of a blog hop, where you travel from blog to blog to read diverse ideas on an assigned topic. Because it is a tarot blog hop, the topic is focused on a time when my understanding of tarot underwent a radical change or when my skill took a giant leap forward. Although all 28 blogs in the hop will speak in terms of reading tarot cards, there will, no doubt, be insights you can apply to other areas of your life. 

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The Empress from the Mythic Tarot, the deck
I learned on. Traditionally, she is the Great
Mother, Demeter and the source of creation.
She is what brings us the seasons. But intuitively,
you might decide nature holds the key, someone is
pregnant, that it's time to harvest all you've
been working on, that energy is bubbling up
within someone...whatever you see in the picture.

My journey with tarot started out more than 25 years ago. At first, I wanted to learn how to read the cards so I could tell the future. But, as it turned out, that is a naive vision of what tarot can do. 

It actually does much more. It brings you on a journey through issues and situations in your life and helps you make better informed decisions. Confining tarot to the narrow bounds of "fortune telling" would not be the only naive assumption I would make about this ancient art, skill and spiritual practice. 

As you might already know, each of the 78 tarot cards in a deck comes with a general meaning attached to it and a picture on the card. I thought all I needed to do was memorize the meanings of 78 cards and that would be enough. So I set about memorizing the book descriptions for all 78 cards and a reading from me would mean I would cough back, word for word, the meaning I read in a book about a certain card. 

Back then I owned maybe three decks and only used the one I memorized for readings. While that's one way to do it, I nonetheless felt stuck. Stuck, because I realized that the same card could have different meanings depending on what position it landed in a spread. I came to admire many other decks, some with meanings that didn't track to the meanings I memorized. I discovered that each card speaks in a unique language to the reader, so one person's Empress card may not be another person's Empress card. And I learned that there was a whole other use for the cards that I had never considered—as a means to access the intuitive voice within that bears knowledge beyond what is seen and known. 

The Empress from the Stolen Child Tarot is not
pregnant. She embodies more the protective,
nurturing aspects of motherhood. Intuitively,
you might decide someone has "become their
mother" or is over-bear-ing...haha. 

I also felt stuck because my memorization of the cards had an unanticipated side effect—the minute I'd turn a card over, the rote meaning would immediately pop into my head as it would if I had memorized multiplication tables or anything else. So logic and learned response was my knee-jerk reaction to seeing a card. And because that was my knee-jerk reaction, any intuitive hit I might have on the card got lost. By the time you bring logic and memorized meaning in, the opportunity for your first intuitive hit is forever lost. You can't go back and get it. Only one impression can be first. 

So to "fix" this problem, I got a deck of what are known as Soul Cards and read them exclusively for a couple of years. Soul cards have no fixed meaning. It's just a picture on a card and you have to come up with the meaning from inside you. By focusing on Soul Cards, I was able to re-train myself—to take the intellectualization out and put the intuition in. Today my readings reflect a combination of both...intended meaning and intuitive meaning. 

More than that, though, these days I own hundreds upon hundreds of decks. Really. It's a pathetic display of hoarding and consumerism. And because I lead with intuition, because I have developed my own language with the cards and because I know what all the traditional meanings are, I  I can read every single deck I own without ever having to pick up the book (though I do find book meanings very valuable, too.) 

This is a Soul Card. It has no name or
meaning. Depending on the reading you might
decide it speaks of intuition, looking within,
open communication, radiating energy, being
at peace or whatever else strikes you. 

I can also read smudges on paper, shapes in a cloud and the inside of my eyelids, not to mention pretty much anything else you can imagine. Because that's another naive belief I dispelled over the 25 years I've been a reader. The cards themselves have no power. They have some meaning, but the real meaning and interpretation comes from within the reader. The cards only trigger your intuition, they don't give it to you. And once your intuition is triggered, you can apply it to anything...anything can trigger it. 

I did consider giving up when all I knew was memorized meanings. I mean, all that work and it did nothing to make me "psychic". I still teach students that it's important to eventually memorize all the meanings. You'll do that anyway if you read enough. But I stress the intuitive hit. I'm amazed at how many people who have never even touched a tarot card before can accurately intuit the meaning just by looking at the picture on the card. It has never once failed in a class I've taught. 

Which brings me to the bigger point for my "usual" readers. I wasn't born with any special gifts. Some people are and, while they still have to work at it, they don't have to work as hard. It flows like water. No, I was born with the base-model intuition package, just like most of you. So 25 years ago I was stuck. My intuition wasn't flowing at all. Today, however, I can be pretty flowy. And whether you believe this about yourself or not, you can be too. 

We all have intuition. It's built into our DNA. And, just like a muscle, the more we work it, the more powerful and responsive it can be. You can learn to read tarot. You can learn to talk to dead people. You can learn to communicate with animals. You can learn to channel spirits. You can learn to have two-way conversations with God. The ability for all of that resides in your intuition and your ability to trust. 

Over the centuries a lot of fear has been connected with things like tarot or mediumship. Certainly it's weird to have someone SEEM to get inside your head and tell you stuff they couldn't possibly know. But whether you choose to use it in that way or not, intuition is vital to our survival. It's how we "feel" something is wrong. It's how we "sense" a person standing behind us. It's how we suspect someone is lying to us. It's an absolutely critical part of our biology that can atrophy or be built up, just like a muscle. 

Each of us acts as a receiver and transmitter of energy. That's why you can feel it when someone is angry or keeping something from you. Every single thought or action creates a wave of energy that can be detected. Everything is energy. So the stronger your ability to detect and read that energy, the better prepared you are to navigate the intricacies of life. 

For anyone who would claim intuition in any form—whether it's aided by cards or bubbles up organically from within—is the Devil's playground, I submit that being blind to your intuition is the real Devil's playground. If you can't sense him knocking at the door, you may just let him in.

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9/22/14—Chasing Sasquatch

Although I've lived all over the eastern half of the US and have many roots in the midwest, I've lived within a five mile radius of where I'm living now most of my life. So it has surprised me this weekend to learn two new things about this area that I never knew before.

The first was actually a well-kept secret for over 60 years. My favorite tree resides at Fort Hunt, a local park I've visited all my life. At the park there are prison cells and a watch tower, but the stories I always heard was that the park's role in anything exciting was fairly benign. It provided some defense during the Spanish American War and some training for other wars but not much else in terms of wartime activities.

Turns out, though, during WWII, the fort was code named PO Box 1142 and its mission was to extract secrets from German POWs, mostly scientists. They got all kinds of groundbreaking secrets out of them involving things like rocket science and microwave technology. And they didn't beat it out of them. They cajoled it out of them.

The other thing I learned was about something called the Mount Vernon Monster. In the late 1970s, local residents heard strange noises coming out of the woods in the region of George Washington's home. Some say it was kids playing recordings over loudspeakers. But some people witnessed a bigfoot-like creature and many others had encounters with the creature nearby, but not visible. They swear that there's no way it could be a hoax from the way things happened...the way the sound moved through the woods.

Now, I didn't live here in the late 70s, so I can see why I wouldn't have heard of it. But Bigfoot is, like, my favorite "mythical" creature. And to think one might have lived here? Exciting. Right now, in the very same area, people are saying there's a cougar on the loose. Maybe Bigfoot never left. Maybe he's a shapeshifter! :D

I don't consider myself much of a historian, so I'm not surprised I don't know everything there is to know about my little suburb. But it did surprise me to learn two BIG things in a single weekend—perhaps the biggest things ever to happen here (outside of George Washington himself.)

It's interesting all the layers of stories and lore that form like layers of sediment over time. Everyone focuses on our founding father's role in the immediate area, but there were layers of history stretching hundreds and millions of years before him. Indigenous people were all up and down this part of the river before the Brits even arrived. Dinosaurs, no doubt, drank from our waters. We're just about an hour or so as the crow flies from the some of the world's oldest mountains and, right here in the same state, is a river known to be older than those mountains and considered by some to be the second oldest river in the world. (In a bit of irony, it's called the New River and it runs backwards, just like the Nile, the world's oldest river, does.)

If you sit with nature long enough, you can feel mysteries yet untold. And not just because of backwards running rivers, ancient mountains and Sasquatch sightings. You'd feel it in the middle of the desert or along the Panama Canal, in the center of New York City or in the depths of Asia. There's magic and mystery and history everywhere there's earth. You don't have to dig to know it's there, because it's part of the vibration.

Many years back I had a "paranormal" experience in that park where the POWs were held. Now I understand more about why that happened. Whether you have the data in the form of recorded history  and artifacts or not, the body always knows. We just have to learn to use what we have and trust it.

9/18/14—Making What You Have Work

There's this tree in my neighbor's back yard, behind their shed. It's an evergreen...a cedar, I think. It's sort of a Charlie Brown tree in a way. It's not symmetrical. The branches reach every which way. It's top heavy. Awkward. Lopsided.

You might consider this tree "unfortunate" were it not for the fact that it has somehow managed to grow quite healthy with a shed on one side blocking the afternoon sun, a fence a fence and vegetation on the other side blocking the morning sun and a bunch of bigger trees above it blocking the daytime sun. But I've seen this tree grow pretty big over 15 years with all these obstacles remaining constant.

One thing that helps is that it's an evergreen. When everyone loses their leaves, the evergreen gets to bask in the sun. I have a pear blossom in my yard that buds and blooms before the maple above it gets its leaves. Otherwise it wouldn't get the sun it needs to do all that. Once it has leaves, it's happy to live under the maple, but if the maple grew leaves sooner, the pear blossom never would have made it.

Both the evergreen and pear blossom are able to get what they need to survive, partly because of the kind of tree they are. The evergreen is evergreen, so it gets a good five months out of the year without any competition for sunlight. The pear blossom is an early bloomer, so it gets a valuable month's head start on establishing its leaves and gets all the power it needs to bloom while the maple is still making whirlybirds.

But beyond the tree type...what's in its DNA...the evergreen thrives as an individual by poking its branches out wherever it can to catch sun and rain. Which is why it's so oddly shaped. It is, in fact, NOT oddly shaped, but instead, perfectly shaped to take advantage of its environment. Same with the pear blossom. It's grows thin and tall with more leaves higher up because it competes with two much larger trees and has to find that bit of clear airspace available to wash as much surface area with sun and rain to keep it going.

So there's a tall, fat tree using its tall fatness to make the most of its mission on earth—growth and light. And there's a tall skinny flowering tree that's tall and skinny for the same reasons. They focus what they have on the light, instead of wallowing in the dark focusing on what they don't have. 

Most of my life I've resented the body I'm in. Like the evergreen, I'm an apple...leaner legs with all my weight around the middle. It's no mistake I have this body, though. Like the evergreen, the universe planted me where it did for a purpose and I grew as I did—not just size-wise, but every which way—for a purpose, too. Some of the evergreen's awkwardness isn't awkwardness at all, but what that tree needs in order to face the light...how it copes to both protect and expose itself to the right elements. I suppose I'm the same way.

Same with my pear blossom. In fact, one day the maple will have to come down and that pear blossom will change in all sorts of ways because of it, just as the evergreen would change if the shed or one of the trees around it came down. But then again, we don't know what other issues something like that may trigger. Right now, everything is thriving just as it is. 

And as long as we allow our special kind of DNA and our weird and awkward ways of coping to keep focusing on our unique missions of growth and light, it's likely we'll continue. What the trees don't have to struggle with, but we do though, is accepting that they will never be an oak or maple—tall with an impressive canopy to drink in the elements. Oaks and maples have their own issues to contend with. The lifespan of a maple, for example, is centuries less than the lifespan of a cedar. But that's just it...the trees don't struggle at all. They just work with what they have and make what they have work.

This is a repost that was originally published on 2/24/14.

9/15/14—Contemplating the Hard Questions

Symbolically, spring is the time of great renewal. But in my life, that time is autumn. I emerge from my cocoon, head into winter, which is a favorite season for me. Then when spring rolls around, it's a time of preparation to weather the long, miserable summer. 

So I dug up this classic post about feeling lackluster about your life or in a rut. That's often how I feel at the end of summer. And with autumn's energy sweeping in this past weekend, I thought I'd revisit some questions that can help us see a way out of the rut.

A sad fact of life is that we can everything we want and still not be happy. Sometimes it's because we're depressed. Or maybe you're someone who likes the process of creating something, but feels restless once the world is done. It could be for a lot of reasons. But more often than not, I'll bet, it's because the things you want and have aren't the things that make you happy. Or things that once made you happy no longer do so. 

I think we all feel that way now and again. I used to take a lot of interest in my tarot deck collection and card reading, for example, but those things just aren't calling to me anymore. And because we tend to grow and change over time, it's a good idea to take stock of ourselves now and again and ask questions like: 

• How have my values changed in the past five years or so and what in my life has not changed to greet those new values?
• What do I believe about who I am and what I deserve? How has that changed and do I act in alignment with those changes?
• What practices or actions no longer feel genuine or comfortable in my life?
• What drains my energy and what fuels it?
• Do I ever find myself doing something I used to not question, and now I wonder why I'm doing it?
• Are there behaviors or actions or attitudes I'm ashamed of...or feel it's time to let go of?
• What is missing in my life?*

These are just a few of the kinds of questions that are good to take time to ruminate on as we move toward our own personal "renewal". I know for a fact that we all know someone who hasn't changed their hair style in 30 years. I know this because I'm that person...haha. And sometimes we tend to do with our lives what some of us do with our hair...we tend to pick a course of action and stay on it until the bitter end. 

We rarely take the time to proactively examine who we are, who we want to be and what to clear out of our life to get it. Instead, we allow cobwebs and clutter to accumulate within our spirit and then end up like the guy who has everything but contentment. So if you're feeling that way, maybe take a look at who you are today and start living for that person instead. It can take time to figure out what kind of things "the new you" enjoys, but it can be an adventure all along the way. 

*This last question is almost always a trick question. The thing that is almost always missing is connection with "source", however you define that to be—a higher power, nature, whatever. Gratitude and meditation/prayer are the best ways to reconnect with our higher power, our significance, or mission and/or our role here on earth. While we often feel alone and powerless, the opposite is true at all times, whether we choose to embody that reality or not. May as well embody it. 

This post was adapted from one written October 18, 2012.

9/11/14—Discovering My Inner Risk-Taker

I recently learned something new about myself and it's kind of a boost to my self-esteem. 

See, I've always viewed myself as not much of a risk-taker. Sure, I've taken risks. Self-employment is a risk. But I don't take risks often and try to avoid them best as possible. The way I see it, navigating life itself requires enough risk. No need to go all crazy. 

In fact, I've been accused of being a fraidy cat, before. Two ex-boyfriends told me I needed to find myself a nice banker when we broke up...haha. I was never sure what that meant, but always assumed they meant it to mean that I can't handle rebels such as themselves. If you were to replace the word "rebels" with the word "assholes" in that last sentence, they were probably right. But the point is, I always took comments like that from them and others as being critical of my low-risk preferences. 

But recently I've come across things on social media that have me re-thinking where I stand in the risk-continuum. Like someone posted a picture of a scary roller coaster and everyone was saying they wouldn't ride it. But I would. And someone mentioned the Grand Canyon Skywalk. I'd do that, too. I even posted something myself about doing a lock-in at a haunted location and was surprised at all the people who said they'd never do that. 

Of course, all of this is theoretical. I say I'd do it. But in the moment? Yeah, I think I'd do it, but who really knows? I'd be scared, but I'd do it. All of those things are fairly low risk in my mind, though. I mean, how often do people die or are maimed on roller coasters, skywalks or by ghosts? Sky diving or those wing suits? That's a whole other level of risk and not one I'd take. 

So, based on the reactions of others to things that feel fairly safe to me, I'm more of a risk-taker than I think. One day you think you know yourself and the next day things are different. It's not often you learn something new about yourself. Or maybe I'm just learning that society is more of a wuss than I think...haha. Either way, it makes me feel better about where I stand in the continuum and might even mean I'll be more likely to take risks in the future. When you perceive yourself differently, you behave differently. 

And, see, nothing in me has changed but the perception. I spent too much time listening to the people who wanted me to *think* I was a wuss simply because I didn't follow their plan for me. So I thought I was a wuss. I bought it hook, line and sinker because it was plausible enough. It's not like I'm any kind of a daredevil. And, to me, sitting at the edge of a cliff isn't a huge risk when there's half a mile of rock underneath you and little chance of falling from a sitting position. But it turns out that would terrify a lot of people. 

All of this makes me wonder what other self perceptions I've adopted over the years that are off base. And not just the ones where I under-estimate myself, but the over-estimates too. And since we can just as easily fool ourselves that we're smarter than we are, why aren't we taking advantage of that? If the power of perception is that strong, why aren't we all perceiving we're hugely popular and desirable? What if we used our talent for delusion to believe we're good enough and happy enough and just plain "enough"? What a shift that would be for mankind!

So, if you could choose to delude yourself, what delusion would it be?

9/9/14—Talking About Manifestation

Here's a new radio program from the Three Muses, which are me, Sheila Cash and Mary Phelan. We're talking about manifestation. I think you can download this as a podcast, but I'm not sure how. 

Check Out Spirituality Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with 3 Muses and a Universe on BlogTalkRadio