Apr 242013
Apr 172013
May 162012
May 042012
One week ago, right about now, I was in a Master Class taught by James Wells. He took us through “The Sharing Process” using deliberately chosen tarot cards to define situations in our lives. He lead us through holding space for each other while we each expressed our challenges and gratitude with the issue we defined. Taking turns and being present with love while the other spoke with honesty was a deep and wonderful way to start this amazing conference.
James went on from there walking us through the stages of grief once again using tarot. We chose from our decks the Major Arcana that we thought represented each stage as defined by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. We mixed them back into the deck and then did a reading for ourselves based on which stage showed up first. There were more questions to ask ourselves about the situation or person we were grieving and more cards drawn and interpreted. For me, at this time, grieving a loss is not an issue. When I went through my cards “Acceptance” was the first card up. (This is why I love tarot so much. It just gets it.) Over the course of my life I have lost quite a few people. When anniversaries come around this reading will be very useful to me. I can imagine it working well with a trusted client as well.
The last part of his class was to use tarot to deal with a Curveball Experience. Sometimes awful things happen suddenly and with no warning. Getting a handle on the situation and to help yourself process it James created the Curveball layout. Again, not apropos to my life right now but the genius and gentle power of it guarantees that it will be in my repertoire should the need arise for myself or a client.
Everything about this class was strong and gentle, just like James himself. His ideas and processes are very loving and brave. Digging deep into yourself in the quest for understanding yourself, your feelings and the best way to process it all is scary work sometimes. James didn’t flinch from this. He lost his beloved father just the past January and yet held space for all of us to do this work.
This class was a truly singular experience that will stay with me for a very long time. Thank you, Sir James.
Mar 212012
Mar 142012
Feb 212012
There are many things that no one tells you about being a parent. It’s not that they are keeping secrets or candy coating the experience. It is simply that there are some things you cannot tell in a way that will make them understood. Some things need to be lived to be understood. Parenting is very much one of those things. We have five children. After each one was born and I was home that first night with our new baby there was a moment when I woke up in the middle of the night to feed the child and felt a bone-deep exhaustion I hadn’t felt since the last child was an infant. I could go on and on describing the feeling but unless you had that same sort of night you won’t really know what I mean. Letting new parents figure this out on their own is not cruel. There really is no other way to know it and that right there pretty much sums up parenting.
One of the many things you find out the hard way is dealing with illness. Try to take care of small children with a stomach virus while you yourself are afflicted and you’ll know what I mean. Thankfully those kind of bugs only last a day or two. Having a few friends and neighbors whose children have disabilities or serious, chronic illnesses keeps the whole stomach virus thing in perspective. So, when Joyful January turned into Germy January I tried to roll with it. I kept the phrase “This too shall pass” in the back of my mind and powered on.
It started when the littlest one came down with what we thought was a cold. She just turned thirteen so it’s not like caring for a frightened toddler. I didn’t give it much thought until the third morning when she wasn’t any better. She was, in fact, worse. I took her to the doctor thinking it might have been strep. He thought it was mono. It wasn’t mono. It wasn’t a cold. It wasn’t the flu. After a whole battery of blood tests we have no idea what it was. All we know is that it was/is a virus and it’s contagious. I like our pediatrician quite a bit. One of the reasons is because when he doesn’t know what the problem is he actually owns that. He is one of the few doctors I ever heard say “I don’t know what this is.” It is actually much more satisfying to hear than some made up diagnosis that means the same thing like ‘non-specific dermatitis’ which is doctor-speak for “I don’t know what caused this rash.”
Joyful January became Germy January and deteriorated into Jammies January which was the point when we gave up pretending and spent our days in our jammies. This past weekend was the first time since Christmas that I actually felt like myself. It was the first time in a month that I had a decent night’s sleep. I haven’t sneezed in a few days. Nothing is runny or swollen or achey. I managed to function at about half power for the last month or so. I didn’t feel well but didn’t really feel sick most of the time. I was sharing this feeling with three teenage girls. (Somehow my husband managed not to catch this. I think he should be studied.) None of us were very productive. The youngest one seems to have had it the worst and missed two weeks of school. The rest of us just went about our days as if we were sleep deprived and on the edge of a cold which is pretty much how it felt. According to the doctor this bug is going around. It isn’t killing anyone, just annoying the hell out of them so it may never get a name. If you catch it then you will know what I mean.
As for Joyful January, I still have all my notes but I’m not sure how I’m going to follow through. It’s obvious that I need a better blogging routine. I will be picking up where I left off with my card of the day on Facebook using the Joie de Vivre Tarot as I intended for the month of January.
Now, I’m going to go clean my house because I haven’t really done that for a month and a half and I just can’t stand it anymore.
Jan 312012
(If you’ve come here from Donnaleigh’s blog, welcome and thanks for playing along with the Tarot Blog Hop. If you have no idea what I’m talking about follow the links at the beginning and end of this post and you’ll catch on.)
“Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.” ~ The Buddha
The very first tarot reading I did for someone other than myself, wiped me out. I was surprised actually by how very fatigued I felt after just forty minutes with the cards and a cooperative friend. It seemed out of proportion with the effort I put forth and I didn’t make the connection between the reading and the tiredness until it happened the next time I read for someone else. It was confusing and discouraging. I was eighteen years old and there was a lot I didn’t know about the way energy works. To say I poured myself into those readings would be spot on. In my eagerness to explore tarot, to share and hone my reading skills, I made a fundamental mistake. I used my own personal energy for fuel.
When a candle is lit the wick catches the flame and starts to burn. At the base of the wick, caused by the heat of the flame, a pool of wax forms from the candle itself. This wax travels up the wick and is used as fuel for the flame. If you were to take a piece of wicking that was not part of a candle and lit it on its own it would have only itself to use as fuel and would burn out much quicker than its candled counterpart. In not understanding the energy I was tapping into and how to use it I was that naked wick. One reading would kick my butt. I knew I was doing something wrong. I didn’t know what it was.
As stupid as it seems to me now, I powered through and kept reading for people and sapping my energy each time. I wanted to read tarot. It called to me. I didn’t want to be exhausted all the time. After a dozen or so readings that each required a recovery nap, I put the cards aside. I didn’t give up. I gave in. It was obvious to me that I was doing something wrong but I didn’t even have the language to understand what it might be. I didn’t know where to look for the answer to the question I couldn’t frame.
“Better to light a candle than curse the damn darkness… Fiat Lux!” ~ Willow Rosenberg
The answer came to me months later from a friend who was exploring alternative spirituality. She and I were discussing the most recent book she was reading when she mentioned energy. Something about what she said and how she said it lit me up. I don’t remember the specifics of the conversation but I do remember we were on the train on Staten Island heading home from work. In the time it took to go from the ferry to our train station she had given me the solution to my problem. In that fifteen minutes she taught me about grounding and centering. What it was, how to do it and why.
A wick on it’s own doesn’t give much light for long. It’s just a piece of cotton string. Sometimes it burns out shortly after it’s lit. Without the pool of wax to draw from the flame can’t sustain itself. A candle burns best when the wick is properly secured and goes all the way to the bottom of the candle. The pool of wax, the fuel, is more readily and steadily available if the wick is in the center of the candle. Before the candle is lit the wick gets trimmed so the flame will be right-sized.
To read tarot without burning out you need to be like the candle: grounded and centered. Connect your energy to the energy of the earth beneath your feet and the source energy of all. You become more than just a naked piece of string you become the wick. You are a channel for that energy instead of the source of it. Centering brings you into balance within yourself. Just as the wick that is centered in the candle burns best you will use the energy more effectively if you are centered in yourself and in the moment. Clearing away distractions and negative energy is like trimming the wick. It keeps the flame/energy usage in proportion with the flow.
Now, before each reading I take a moment. I connect to the energy of the Earth and invite the energy of the universe in from above. I focus on the flow of this energy within myself in the moment and at the same time take myself out of the equation. I become a conduit for the energy and not the source of it. There is now an actual moment when I feel lit. I can see the light and feel the energy at the same time. I can light a thousand other candles from that light and it still burns as brightly.
(The next blog in the Tarot Blog Hop is Hillary’s. Enjoy! and Thank you for stopping by. I hope to see you again.)
Dec 302011
I don’t know how this year has been for you. The general consensus among my friends, family and clients is that 2011 cannot end soon enough.
I live in the Hudson Valley and we here are no strangers to snowstorms and blizzards but we usually only get one or two big ones a season. Starting after Christmas last year we were hit with at least half a dozen. We skipped right over Spring into a very hot, wet Summer which ended with Hurricane Irene followed a week later by Tropical Storm Lee. That one-two punch destroyed roads, bridges, powerlines, large portions of a few towns up here and many of the local farms. Somewhere in there we had a 5.8 earthquake that by our standards was unheard of but California would consider a minor annoyance. An F2 tornado touched down in our town destroying one house and dozens of big old trees in a one mile swath. Tornadoes like that almost never happen. The hot weather continued into October tricking the trees into forgetting it was Autumn so they still had all their leaves when we had eighteen inches of snow fall on them. All that afternoon and into the night we could hear boughs and limbs breaking and crashing to the ground. By Halloween most of the folks in town were a bit frazzled. There were even a few jokes about keeping an eye out for plagues of frogs and locusts. Folks are bracing themselves for what this Winter might bring.
It’s not just the weather that is rattling everyone. The economy hasn’t bounced back as hoped. There are many vacant shops in town and quite a few people are still out of work. It’s difficult not to get caught up in the low-grade anxiety that seems to be everywhere. Each person who has wished me a Merry Christmas or a Happy Holiday has added that they can’t wait for this year to be over. I completely understand.
I don’t do New Year’s Eve parties. It’s just not my thing. I spend New Year’s Eve cleaning my house, catching up on my laundry and generally making sure I don’t bring unfinished business from one year into the next. Another thing I do, that seems to be a common practice for many, is to take an inventory of the outgoing year. Some people do this in a very involved way but I’m partial to Chris Guillebeau‘s practice. He simply asks what worked and what didn’t. Truthfully I don’t even write this down. It’s more of a mental exercise for me and I go through it for a few weeks leading up to New Year’s Eve.
While I was thinking about this and how best to get out from under the anxiety it occurred to me you may want to join in. January is usually a down month for people. Business is slow. The weather is harsh. The excitement of the holidays is gone and there is the inevitable crash that comes afterward. Instead of New Year’s resolutions I prefer to come up with ideas to explore in the coming year. There is much less pressure with this approach and much more joy. What better way to start this off than to make January be about joy.
This will be simple and we can do it together. Little things every day or so to shift our focus. Rethinking exercises to bring us back to joy and squash the anxiety. Are you in?
Great! On January 1st I will post the 25 things I am grateful for from 2011. I invite you to do the same either here in the comments, on my Facebook Page or on your own blog (please link back here so everyone knows what’s going on). In keeping with the theme of Joyful January I will be using the Joie de Vivre Tarot as my deck of the month. Here’s to making it a very happy new year.
Dec 162011
“Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?”
“It isn’t that,” said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self. “It isn’t that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count ’em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.” ~ A Christmas Carol
I was having a conversation with Debbie yesterday on Facebook chat which is most frequently how we have our conversations. We had each pulled a card of the day that had knocked us for a loop and we both really needed to talk about it. (Click on her name and you can read her experience on her blog) I’ve been using The Steampunk Tarot and yesterday pulled the Seven of Wands. She’s a pretty fierce depiction of this card. To understand why and how this hit me so hard I need to explain a few things.
I started this blog in the Spring of this year after taking a pretty eye-opening class about working online. I knew a blog was a good idea but I wasn’t clear exactly why. The class gave me the why but that turned out to be insufficient. As with anything new I deferred to a trustworthy expert and followed her advice. That didn’t seem like enough so I branched out and explored the advice of other experts. Over time a few things dawned on me. Social media is not that old and is constantly changing. Those calling themselves experts are much better at this than I am but strictly speaking they are not experts. Another interesting thing happened during the course of my explorations. I found that one ‘expert’ led to another and then another but eventually it formed a circle. It was hard to know if I had moved onto a different circle of experts or not. There is a lot of overlap and therfore a lot of redundancy. What I also began to realize is that these people all seem to have similar personalities and, most importantly, it’s a personality that is very different from mine.
I have spent most of my reading time over the last six months reading and learning about social media and online marketing. I have attended online webinars, received newsletters, video courses, read a few books on the topic and I even follow a few folks on Twitter and Facebook. In six months time what it has done is make me cringe a bit. I get the value in this. I really do. I’m sitting here as the sun comes up, wearing my bathrobe, drinking my coffee and typing up this post. You will read this at a different place and different time. You may even comment. We will have a slow motion conversation each of us participating at our own convenience. That is pretty cool. I can ‘meet’ people through the internet that I would never have the opportunity to actually meet in real life. My in person practice is very personal with my clients and we work one on one. This feels like a one on one conversation. It seems like a letter to a friend. I like that. It is in keeping with my personality and my in-person business practice. It’s the other stuff I’m having a hard time with.
The focus of most of what I read was about growing your business online. I do want that but not for its own sake. Many times as I’m reading and listening to these things I keep thinking of that quote by Edward Abbey: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Most of the self-professed experts focused on the growth potential. There is a lot of good information on other aspects of running a business and I had no problem with most of that. It was the how and why of growth that bothered me the most. I felt myself getting defensive the last six weeks or more and pulling back from all of it. I’ve resisted the idea of a newsletter because I find them irritating and intrusive. Every expert swears they are necessary. I thought about it and of the few that I actually allow into my inbox I have never once made a purchase because of a prompt in a newsletter. The ones I like the most are the ones that are short and infrequent. A sure fire way to turn me off is to email me all the time. Twitter is another thing I can’t quite get the hang of. It seems like the world’s largest, loudest cocktail party and anything you post there is gone within the hour. Again the experts tout Twitter as a great connection tool. I don’t see how.
Yesterday, I pulled this card and while I was finding appropriate quotes to illustrate the meaning it hit me. I feel a bit under assault because the way online business is taught is not the way I want to run my online business. All those wands poking up at her are the experts telling me to be something I’m not. She is standing on a carefully crafted platform. That is the life and values she has and has built. It is that which she is defending. I liked her even more. This is a card about being under assault where you can see your attacker. It’s also about being defensive in an emotionally fragile way but also defensive in that you are standing your ground. As I was expressing all this to Debbie, she immediately understood. We are very similar in this regard, which is part of why we get along. I told her about a very wonderful interview I recently read. Michael Ellsberg interviewed Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby and it was a breath of fresh air. Here was guy who had an online business and my life philosophy. Then Debbie said one little sentence that summed it all up. “He’s a Fezziwig not a Scrooge!” Yes! Exactly! That was the perfect analogy to me. His focus was on doing what he was doing the way he wanted for his own reasons. It’s his business and he’s providing a service for his customers because he values them and they value him. They are not a means to an end for him. Growth and ‘making it big’ are not the goal. One of my favorite quotes from him “None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding. They want you to keep your attention focused on them.” Exactly!
I feel much better about all of this now.