Halloween Fun and Frights

 Posted by
Oct 292018
 

This is the time of year when the thoughts of even the most straight-laced among us turn toward the otherworldly. Most people will play around the edges. They will tell ghost stories or visit “haunted” places telling themselves it’s all make believe. It’s harmless the way a zoo animal is harmless: there are barricades between you and the scary thing so you can feel safe.

The more adventurous might break out a Ouija board, half hoping something will happen, and completely freaking out when it does. That’s a bit riskier. It’s like finding a black bear wandering through the RV Park you’re camping at. It’s a real brush with wild nature but still within the relative safety of society.

When I was eleven I bought a Ouija board at a church flea market. I kid you not, a church flea market. I couldn’t believe it was just sitting there. My friend and I couldn’t wait to try it out. The next time I slept over her house I brought it with me and we went right to her room to see what all the fuss was about. Neither of us personally knew any dead people at the time and it was around the Bicentennial so we tried to contact one of the Founding Fathers. It might have been Jefferson or Franklin. I don’t remember. We were weird kids.

I will never forget when that planchette started moving. I accused her of pushing it and she accused me and we both came to the terrifying realization that something else was moving it.

We probably screamed. We were two eleven year old girls. I know we both backed away from that board. I think we threw a blanket over it. I’m not sure what we thought that would accomplish. We gathered it up, put all the parts, including the box, into a garbage bag, and took it outside to the trash can. There may have been some holy water thrown at it for good measure. Her mom was Catholic enough to have holy water in the house. We went back inside good and properly spooked. That experience cured her of dabbling. Me? not so much.

It got me curious. Once I calmed down and realized that nothing terrible had happened, I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what could make that device move and what else was out there. It was my introduction to how much bigger and stranger the universe was compared to what I’d been taught and I wanted to explore it.

That exploration is not unlike a wilderness hike. There are dangerous things out there and you need to know how to avoid them or at least to not piss them off. An experienced guide is quite useful. An education of what is and is not safe is important. Understanding of and respect for entities you will encounter and the territory you will traverse is also key. There are plenty of cautionary tales about people who go into the wilderness unprepared or with misguided ideas about the threat posed by wolves and bears and things. There are also stories about people whose wits are damaged by wandering into the metaphysical wilderness unprepared.

So, this Halloween enjoy your ghost stories and haunted houses. Even play with a Ouija board if you dare. But, if you have your interest piqued by the experience, be sure to educate and prepare yourself before you take it any further.

 Tarot  Comments Off on Halloween Fun and Frights

So Much Weirder Than You Know

 Posted by
Oct 222018
 

 

There are two things I know to be true:

  1. The Universe is much weirder than we’ve been taught to believe.
  2. A real thing doesn’t stop being real because you choose not to believe it.

In the general population, these two things collide all the time.

The average person, in the western world, experiences an apparition, and their first instinct is to explain it away. They’ve been taught that this isn’t real so they process the phenomena in a way that is culturally acceptable. It wasn’t a ghost. It was a trick of the light. I didn’t hear someone call my name. I must just be overtired and hearing things. Yes, it is chilly right here. There must be a draft. I didn’t really just smell my mother’s perfume. It’s a coincidence that I was thinking of him and that song came on the radio.

Maintaining the illusion, that our perceived physical reality is all there is, can be quite comforting. There is no challenge to our foundational beliefs about the world if we can file the weirdness away in a safe place. It’s a culturally promoted form of dissociation and for most of us it works most of the time.

Some of us, though, don’t play along. We don’t pretend we didn’t see what we saw. We talk to our dear departed and then keep an eye, or an ear, out for the response. We know there are things living in the woods and wild places who don’t leave tracks behind. We know that for millennia humans communicated with the Others and that we can too … if we’re careful. We know some of these things can be very dangerous if we’re not. Most importantly we know that training and respect are required to do this well. We also know that if you don’t know what you’re doing it might be best to pretend that was just a breeze you felt.

 Spiritual  Comments Off on So Much Weirder Than You Know

Stop Looking For Your Soulmate

 Posted by
Oct 152018
 

 

For the longest time I only had the title of this post written. The topic of soulmates comes up all the time. One blog post is probably not enough to explore it fully, but trust me on this: stop looking for your soulmate.

I’ve heard all the stories you’re telling yourself. I’ve had dozens of dreamy-eyed clients share them with me in hopes that the cards can give them a date and time for Prince Charming’s arrival. It doesn’t work that way.

The idea of soulmates has been around for ages. Plato discusses it in his Symposium. He has the gods splitting multi-limbed humans into the bipeds we are now, leaving us longing for our missing half. There is the idea of Twin Flames which is one soul in two bodies. Edgar Cayce has you hooking up life after life with the same soulmate. I get the appeal. It’s sort of romantic to think there is someone out there who is the ideal fit for you. Add to this, romance novels and movies that revolve around the idea of a perfect mate who swoops in and they live happily ever after, and you have a persistent idea that won’t go away.

As a concept it’s lovely. As a way of operating in the world it’s problematic. It actually gets in the way of meaningful connection. If you think there is a perfect person waiting out there for you then you also think you know exactly what that looks like. This creates a template that all potential mates have to fit into or you reject them as not being ‘the one.’ Expecting perfection from people is unreasonable and sets you up for disappointment and them for frustration. Depending on what you believe about soulmates you will end relationships because of disagreements, or even simple misunderstandings. You tell yourself that your real soulmate would never do this or that or the other thing and you decide that behavior is proof that the person you are with is not right for you. Relationships don’t work this way.

Humans are flawed. Each and every one of us is imperfect. Having a wonderful, fulfilling relationship with someone is not effortless, even if that someone is who you are destined to be with. Expecting another person to intuitively know what you want and how to be with you is unrealistic and unfair. No one can do that and especially not before you really know each other. If you chase them off or ghost them you will never get to really know each other.

Why do I say stop looking for your soulmate? Because, the quest for a life partner is not a pursuit; it’s more about being the right person than it is about hunting for the right person. Stop looking for your soulmate and focus on being the best version of you that you can be. Learn who you really are and what you really want. Most importantly: Trust. Trust the Powers That Be to arrange the meeting at the optimal time. Trust that a guy who meets the good guy checklist is worth the effort even if he doesn’t conform to your notion of perfect. Trust yourself enough to allow for imperfection.

 

(photo by Joe Yates on Unsplash)

Ancestors

 Posted by
Oct 082018
 

 

“Each time my feet touched the earth I knew my mother was there with me. I knew this body was not mine, but a living continuation of my mother and my father and my grandparents and great-grandparents; Of all my ancestors. Those feet that I saw as ‘my’ feet were actually ‘our’ feet. Together my mother and I were leaving footprints in the damp soil.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh from No Death, No Fear

My daughter worked in the marketing department of a local company for the past three years. There were months in there where she was the entire marketing department all by herself. They loved her. She received great evaluations and several raises over the years. Then they hired a new manager who decided to change things up. He fired her. (He fired a few other people too but I’m not their mother and this story is about my girl.)

This was the first time she was ever fired from a job. She was so hurt and angry. They didn’t even give her a reason, which they don’t have to, but it would have at least helped her make sense of it. Life is like that though. Shitty things happen and you don’t always know why. It’s difficult watching your children go through life’s hard times.

She took a day to regroup and then set about finding a new job. We live in the Lower Hudson Valley and a lot of people here commute into New York City for work. It would be soul crushing for her to have to do that but we both knew if there were no bites locally she would. To help her out I did some road opening work on her behalf. She found lots of local jobs to apply to but no one was biting. After a month of this I decided to call in the big guns. I asked my dad for help.

My father was a corporate headhunter. He had spent his whole career in personnel work of one kind or another. He wrote amazing resumes and helped a few of my friends find work when they found themselves unemployed. He would have been thrilled to help her navigate the waters of job hunting. I really wish I could have just picked up the phone or had her call him, but he died in 2012. A phone wasn’t going to work.

In my home I have a nice bookcase full of books and family photos. If you were to visit me you wouldn’t think you were looking at my ancestor altar. But you would be. I know the names of many of my people on my father’s side going back about two hundred years. On my mother’s side I know less. I have photos of my grandparents, one set of great grandparents, and even one set of great-great grandparents. They sacrificed a lot so I could be here today. I thank them for that on a regular basis. On a recent day I asked them for help. I asked on behalf of my daughter, who is their child too. I asked them to help her by lining up the opportunities she needed. She would do all the mundane work. I had a conversation with them like I would have if I could have phoned them. They were told the finer details of the situation and how it fit into modern life and her life. I asked my dad specifically for whatever help he could give her. He understood the finer points of personnel and hiring better than any of the rest.

The next morning she called me. She had an interview. A resume she sent out nearly two months ago landed on the right desk and they were excited to talk to her. The job was perfect for her and by the end of the week they offered it to her. It was more money than she was making at the previous place and the commute was the same. She was overjoyed and so were we.

Family is family whether they are here or passed on. They are ours and we are theirs. The ancestors are the suffering, wisdom, and love of generations of our family. Thanking them for making your life possible and occasionally asking the loving members for guidance and help is a way to honor them. We are the family they built. We are blood of their blood and bone of their bone. We are the result of their love and their sacrifices, and they are our allies.

Autumn is Here

 Posted by
Oct 012018
 

I’ve been seeing lots of posts regarding a phenomenon called Autumn Anxiety, so named by a therapist in Wales, Ginny Scully, who was seeing a lot of patients with similar symptoms this time of year.  It’s attributed to the crush of responsibility that a lot of people feel when summer ends and the “real world” comes crashing back in. Some say it has to do with the shortened days and a feeling of anticipation but they can’t quite pinpoint what they are anticipating. There are lots of articles online with decent advice for dealing with this but none of them address the thing I think is partially at fault here.

There is a primal part of us that is still very much at work in our lives. It is the animal part of us that we like to pretend doesn’t exist. The fear response we have to perceived threats dates all the way back deep into prehistory; to prelanguage days actually. It’s function is to keep you alive by warning you of dangers. The brain of a modern human still has this fear response because it worked so well for our ancestors that they passed it down to us. Yay! It’s a wonderful thing when it keeps us from getting killed by a bear or burning ourselves in a fire. It’s when this response is triggered by things that aren’t really dangerous that we have problems. This sometimes manifests as anxiety.

With the changing weather comes the end of the harvest. For thousands of years this was the time of year that our ancestors either put by enough food for the coming winter or they didn’t. They knew that a bad growing season meant a hard winter. If, in February, they were out of onions, that was that. There was no supermarket to run to. The shortening days meant time was running out to put away grain for the coming months. It meant that they had only a few more weeks before the frost and freezes drove them indoors and they had to be prepared for whatever might come so they could survive the winter. Our ancestors operated like this for millennia. It had to have a lasting effect on our human psyche.

In the modern world we have outsourced almost all our basic needs. We don’t hunt, gather, build our own homes, sew our own clothes, chop our own wood; at least most of us don’t. Some of us do these things as hobbies now. We work for money to pay others to do these things for us because they can do it more effectively for the most part. But deep in our brains is the primal us. The part that knows that winter can kill you. The part that knows we didn’t grow any food this year. That ancient relic from our ancestors is triggered when the days get shorter and the air gets colder. I think acknowledging this instinctual response to the season is helpful in handling the change.

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