The Daily Draw: Eight of Wands

One Door Closes and Another Opens

wands8

And so we continue on with what is, so far, a pretty positive wand week.

On the RWS version of the Eight of Wands, all eight rods are sailing through the air against a clear, blue sky. They are on their way back to earth having spent their energy on fulfilling whatever intention was set for th

em. Or perhaps they are bringing the wand energy down to earth to manifest intent. It’s all good—the Eight of Wands is a card of endings and beginnings.

This card can signify the end of a cycle, the result of an action, an event that has taken place or perhaps all of the above. The indication here is that whatever energy is finishing up around you is coming to a natural end. It is time to complete a project, job, adventure, etc. Everything has a cycle. This ending will create a space in your life where you can begin something new. Those plans you’ve been considering and putting off because you were just too busy? As soon as those wands land, you’ll have the time and space to move on them, and the way forward will be clear.

In other words, it’s the proverbial door closing/door opening scenario, and you are ready for both. This is just as well, because the Eight of Wands doesn’t want to see you hanging around thinking about getting started. The time to act is NOW, as in this very moment. Whatever changes are coming are already in motion, and if you want to ride the wave of this energy then you better get in the flow right away as the current is flowing past.

As exciting as all this sounds, try not to rush off into something new without first having an idea of where you are going. The eight of wands indicates that, for best results, this energy needs to be used in some sort of structured framework. Let the Fool handle the spontaneous leap of faith, this is a good time for you to have a plan.

There may be news or information coming your way that will assist you. Of course, the trick is being able to discern the useful information from the background noise. To that end, try to be aware of everything around you, and trust your intuition—Sometimes the most valuable information can come from the most unlikely sources.

The Daily Draw: Six of Wands

Feeling Bad About Doing Well

Six of Wands

This isn’t a mistake. This card did come up yesterday also. So the obvious question to myself was, “what did I miss”? So I consulted my sources and a pendulum and soon realized something big about the Six of Wands and its relationship to most of us that really needs to be said.

Success, self-esteem, confidence, pride (in a good way), these are all qualities of the energy of the Six of Wands. I believe I even mentioned that his head was held high—He is not afraid, ashamed, anxious, embarrassed or GUITY about what he’s done or how he feels about it.

How many of us can say that? Be honest.

We have been conditioned to feel bad about doing well for ourselves. For many of us, our “rearing” (what a loaded word) included admonitions to not stand out in the crowd, not draw attention to ourselves. We are told that pride is a deadly sin. We sense some people feel diminished if they see you doing something they cannot do. There are those who envy any success you might enjoy. So when we are recognized for achieving something, or being good at something, there can be negative baggage attached.

Those of us who are HSPs didn’t require much conditioning. We were already sensitive to the feelings of those around us, and having our own overwhelming and misunderstood issues about that. But we got the conditioning anyway, making us even more anxious than others about any success that we might achieve.

When we do well, should we feel guilty that there are people out there who aren’t successful? Should we feel bad that there are those who envy our success? Some people are going to feel that way.

On the other hand, no matter how badly you feel like you are doing you can always find someone worse off than you who will envy what you have, even if what you have is very little. If beating yourself up has ever made anyone else feel better, I haven’t witnessed it. So why, oh why, do we need to panic and be anxious for winning, and pretend it’s no big deal. Helllloooo, it is a big deal. Isn’t this what you’ve been working towards? How dare someone say, imply or otherwise encourage you to feel like you shouldn’t enjoy it.

Listen now. I’m talking to you. You deserve every good thing that comes into your life. You deserve success. You deserve to feel good about yourself. You deserve to take pride in what you do and to allow yourself to know you are good at it. You deserve self-confidence. Keep telling yourself these things until they are a solid, unshakeable part of who you are, and don’t let anyone tell you anything to the contrary.

The Daily Draw: Six of Wands

A Job Well Done

wands6

On the RWS six of Wands, a person sits above the crowd on horseback, head held high. Even the horse looks a bit pleased with itself. A laurel wreath hangs from the wand the rider is holding.

Externally, this card is a clear sign of success. Whatever this person has put energy into has produced results, and now it is time to reap the rewards. The focus isn’t on material gain, but on acclaim, praise and prestige. It is not only a personal victory—the people around the rider acknowledge the success.

The internalization of the wand energy is also an important part of this cars significance. Here is a person who values himself. He has high self-esteem and confidence. His accomplishment has reinforced and bolstered those feelings.

This person also takes pride in what they have done. Pride can be a positive thing, part of feeling good about oneself. But too much of it can make a person cocky and arrogant. If there is a slight downside to this card, it is a caution to not let success go to your head. As high as you might be riding right now, remember that tomorrow is another day, and in the eyes of the public you are only as good as your last project, show, or match, for example.

So enjoy the feeling but try to stay grounded.

The Daily Draw: Five of Wands, Reversed

Conflict Avoidance is Not Conflict Resolution

Five of Wands Reversed

The fives in the minor arcana are all about change and challenge—there’s no room for complacency. Maybe that’s part of the reason the Fives of Wands can seem to take such a wide variety of positions on the theme of conflict, competition, inconvenient hassles, especially when reversed. Maybe it’s about conflict erupting into chaos. Maybe it’s about the quiet that falls after one of those arguments where everyone in the room gets up on the soap box, does their rant then sits down, not having listened to anyone else in the room. Maybe competitive spirit is doing more harm than good. Maybe that match you were going to see next Sunday was cancelled. As usual context, context, context.

What is calling out to me today about the reversed Five of Wands is its aspect of conflict avoidance, a subject any HSP is familiar with. Some people quite enjoy the energy of competitiveness, and even conflict. They get a buzz out of it. It gets their adrenalin pumping. HSPs, on the other hand, typically become nauseous in that energy and seek to avoid it.

Engaging in conflict for the thrill of it is not necessarily something to aspire to. On the other hand, there are times in life when we want or believe something different than the people around us and expressing our opinions or behaving in a way consistent with our beliefs puts us in conflict with those people.

Being in conflict with someone does not make either us or them good or bad, just different. We are who we are, and no one has the right to ask or require us to be anything else. However, to an HSP the mere concept of conflict can show up as bad, nevermind what the conflict is about. Instead of speaking our truth we shut our mouths, telling ourselves we are keeping the peace. We go with the flow and try not to make any waves. In short, we attempt to do the reverse of what the Five of Wands shows us.

And it just doesn’t work. Oh, it might work for the people around us, for a while anyway. They might not even know there is an issue because we never told them there is an issue, or pretended it didn’t matter. But it did matter. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but eventually this unresolved tension is going to leap out and bite someone, and maybe even bite you in the process.

Avoiding unnecessary conflict is A OK. Avoiding conflict that directly affects you and requires a resolution, or at least acceptance, is like putting a land mine in the living room, dusting it occasionally and hoping it never goes off.

As uncomfortable as it seems, some conflicts need to be engaged with and worked through.

The Daily Draw: King of Pentacles

Sometimes it happens that the card for this blog comes up multiple times in a short period, which means this energy is trying to get my attention. It can also mean that I don’t have much to add to what I said last time (Nov 4th), except maybe that with this Gemini full moon and the days that follow the solid, Stabilizing and, dare I say, predictable energy of the King of Pentacles might be a much needed counterpoint to the swirling full moon energies that are likely to bring on change and revelation at a personal level and perhaps a global one.

Perhaps the King of Pentacles is here to remind us that,whatever happens over the next few days, you would do well to stay grounded and try not to be sucked up into any passing dramatic storms.

And now I shall say what I said a few weeks ago…

Reiki Flow

The King of Making Things Happen

This energy of the king of Pentacles does not feel as intense as that of the King of Swords (yesterday’s draw). The King of Pentacles lives more in the body whereas the King of Swords lives more in the mind. The realm of the King of Pentacles is creating, manifesting, building, doing.

This king is deeply connected to the earth plane. That energy flows through him effortlessly. It’s a big planet, so he could represent a farmer who works with the soil, a fitness instructor, a geologist, a brick mason or someone who just enjoys being outdoors to name a few examples.

The King of Pentacles is reliable, determined, and hard working. He is also a good mentor, provided the apprentice is willing to work at least as hard as he does. This king has been known to put in 60 hour weeks, but…

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The Daily Draw: Ten of Swords Reversed

After You Hit the Bottom

There’s no denying that the Ten of Swords is one of the scariest looking cards in the RWS tarot deck. A lifeless figure lies on the ground with all ten swords sticking out of that person’s back, a robe the color of blood draped around the lower extremities.. Devastating and dramatic with a touch of overkill – wouldn’t one or two swords have done the job?

As much as it looks like one, the Ten of Swords is not necessarily a harbinger of death or other tragic circumstances (although it can be one depending on the context). It is just as likely to indicate a person’s emotional state, which may or may not correspond to actual events. The person may feel like they’ve hit rock bottom, but the way in which they got there will depend on their own internal make up —one person’s inconvenience is another person’s personal hell.

For example, anyone who knows anything about depression realizes that it can be precipitated by a relatively benign event or by nothing at all. Yet the person who is suffering it might feel every bit as bleak as the person on this card. and while the Nine of Swords might be more of an indication of a pure mental state, the Ten of Swords might refer to the reality a person has created around themselves born of that mental state. (i.e. law of attraction).

The Ten of Swords can also indicate someone who has a victim mentality, where life has become something that happens to them and no longer something that is lived. And maybe something has happened, perhaps even repeatedly, to cause this person to feel like a victim. Staying in the victim mentality will not do anything to help the situation. Taking responsibility and control of one’s own life is a mandatory part of the process of getting away from the victim mentality.

Which, to my way of thinking, brings us to the reversed Ten of Swords, which seems to say, “OK, you really have hit the bottom, so there is only one way to go from here, right? “ At this angle, those swords will soon fall out. There will be scars, and you may continue to feel the pain. You may continue to feel emotional pain when the physical wounds have healed. But you are alive. It’s up to you now to get up and get moving away from whatever brought you here. It might not be easy, but it is possible. You might need help, but in the end it is up to you to do the work.

The Daily Draw: Queen of Pentacles reversed

Mommy Dearest

The Queen of Pentacles has the qualities of being big hearted, nurturing, resourceful, practical, generous, and well grounded. She is perhaps the most motherly of all the queen cards.

When reversed, the Queen of Pentacles is someone who is motherly in ways that result in years of therapy for the children. She is nurturing to the point of micromanagement, which can be stifling. Children need to experiment, to explore, to make their own mistakes in order to learn, but good luck with that in this house. You will do things her way because that is the way they are done.

She is giving, but always expects something in return, such as being the person she wants you to be as opposed to being the person you are. If you don’t give her what she wants you will know about it, and it will quite possibly be communicated through passive aggression with a side order of martyrdom.

The reversed Queen of Pentacles can be quite overbearing and domineering. This matriarch rules the roost. She may protest otherwise, but the proof is in the way nothing happens without her consent. If something does happen that she didn’t sign off on there will be trouble, even if it is a benign or even positive occurrence—it didn’t get official approval.

Spend enough time around this energy and you will be tempted to feel responsible for it, as though it is your fault she is behaving the way she does. If you would only act differently, say the right things, mind your manners, take out the trash without being asked, etc. then everything would change for the better. Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. Whether or not you’re exacerbating the situation, this card will remain upside down until the Queen of Pentacles takes responsibility for herself and her feelings, then acts accordingly. Only she has the power to turn this card right side up.

The Daily Draw: Two of Wands, reversed

Baa Yourself

I stand with everyone — Synchronistically found on my wall after writing this post.

The Oxford English dictionary defines the word “sheeple” as “people compared to sheep in being docile, foolish or easily led”. I was surprised to find sheeple in the Oxford dictionary. I was also surprised to discover that it’s been in use for over 70 years. Social media had me convinced that it was a relatively new, derogatory term used to describe people who do not agree with you.

And that is just one of the ways in which social media tries to mislead and misinform us. My Facebook wall contains a daily barrage of lies, exaggerations, half-truths, misrepresentations, and regurgitated dogma. Some of it is amusing. A lot of it is just annoying. Most of it is incredibly divisive.

And the sheeple who look at this stuff believe and share what they already agree with, then make derisive and often hateful comments about things they do not agree with. But who are the sheeple? Are they, for example, the people who think Donald Trump is the answer to America’s problems and Hillary Clinton is the Antichrist in high heels? Are they the people who believe that Bernie Sanders is the only sane person running for President and that all the Republican candidates came to the race in the same clown car? Are they the people who believe we should love all our enemies all the time, even when they are shooting us in cold blood for some imagined political gain? Are they the people all Muslims are potential terrorists?

To a large degree, the answer is “all of the above”. And I could go on and on about the 1%, European refugees, gun violence in America, globalization, etc. that are presented in a two-dimensional, simplistic way that implies you are 100% correct to agree and 100% wrong to disagree. Get a grip people. The world just isn’t that simple.

Yet these memes, videos and slogans keep flooding my wall. How can this be? To me, it seems that is because many people have either lost the capacity, or just don’t want to put in the time to think for themselves and form an honest opinion. Why bother when there are so many people willing to provide you with “authoritative” opinions that you agree with before you even read them.

What makes people sheeple is not what they believe, but how they come to believe it. If you agree with something just because you like the sound of it, then it turns out you were misled and misinformed, it is your own fault. If you’re not sure about the veracity of something, look it up—you’re sitting in front of a Google machine for f#ck sake!

The Two of Wands is a card that represents personal power, boldness, originality and individuality. It is not a card of the sheeple. It invites you to take control of your life. Reversed, however, it can indicate handing over your power to someone else and letting them take you in whatever direction they want to lead.

This seems to me to be a perfect time to unplug from the constant onslaught of opinions, each demanding your obedience. It doesn’t have to be a permanent hiatus, just long enough to hear yourself think or remember how to. Read a book, do some research, talk to real people, go for a walk, meditate, think. Get away from the cacophony of social media for a while. When you come back, question everything you read, look for evidence, test its veracity yourself. Don’t let social media have its way with your emotions. It turns out it can be quite the vampire.

The Daily Draw: The Sun, Reversed

Paris

Usually I like Mondays. I look forward to getting into the office, being able to sit down, have a cup of coffee, and concentrate on something for more than five minutes without being pulled in several directions at once. (luxury, as my stay-home partner keeps telling me). I love my family, and I love my peace.

However, this morning comes hard on the heels of a particularly nasty weekend globally and personally (the landlord has decided to move back in and we need to move out by the end of January). To finish up, one of the three-year-olds was awake for the day at such an hour this morning that I am operating on about 3 ½ hours sleep. So I’m feeling a bit ratty and may start hallucinating before this post is fully written.

Am I surprised I drew the Sun reversed this morning. Not really. It would have been nice to see something different, but I will work with what I have, which is all one can do. And indeed, this card in reverse indicates a certain lack of vitality, success, and general sunshine. As usually happens with reversed cards, those energies are there to be had, I just can’t get to them at the moment. In some ways this is due to events outside of my control. In other ways it is due to my reaction to these events.

What happened in Paris is an horrific tragedy, the scale of which no one expected and no one was prepared for. It is as frustrating as it is heart breaking. It’s frustrating because the natural, human reaction to such an act is to be angry and want vengeance, which in fact has already begun in the form of air strikes over Syria. Yet that is a continuation of the cycle – more martyrs will be created and more impressionable young people will be recruited. In the meantime there is the potential for similar events to be repeated across the western world, especially since there is no way of knowing how many terrorists came through with refugees over the last few months. We already know of a few, but it is seemingly inevitable there are others.

The goal of terrorism is to instil fear, and that comes from the belief that at any time, in any place, for no apparent reason any of us could be victims. People who live in such fear behave defensively, panic, practice hate and want blood-soaked vengeance, all of which perpetuate the darkness. Only by filling the darkness with light, staying or making our thoughts and actions positive, raising our collective vibration will we break the cycle.

This is easy to say, but what does it mean? How do we reconcile these acts of violence with the knowledge each of us are connected to each other, that we all spring from the same creative source, that we are all part of the whole? Evidence suggests that most people do not believe that, and yet it is true. When we hurt someone else we hurt ourselves, even though our egos are screaming that they bloody well deserve it.

I don’t know what will work for this world, but I do know a few things that don’t work. We, as a people, keep doing those same things over and over again hoping for a different result. That is the definition of insanity.

We do not know what the answer is, yet, but that is a piss poor excuse to stop looking for one. Unless you like what you experienced, some people do seem to. Or maybe they just like the seemingly valid excuse to go to war. Most of us could live without it if we could only find a way to do so.

Maybe Batman can help us (here comes the aforementioned hallucination). No, wait, his Butler. “Why do we fall down Master Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up.”

The Daily Draw: The World

Ascending Up the Spiral

Today’s card is The World, and it is a spectacular energy to come up on the heels of the Scorpio new moon, which is such a wonderful opportunity for self-discovery and growth.

Life tends to operate in spirals – you begin a journey, start a project, take a course of action. You start out, you learn, you stumble, you grow, and eventually you get to the energy represented by this card. In a way, you have come full circle to the manifestation of the vision you had when you began the journey, and you have also elevated, raised your vibration, ascended a bit more, realized a bit more of yourself in the process.

You have accomplished what you set out to do. You have integrated and assimilated the lessons on the path to reaching this point. You have that sense of peace that comes from being where you are meant to be, and knowing you are there, feeling it, being completely in tune with the energy all around you. Feeling one with the all and connected to all who are also part of the all there is.

Enjoy this feeling. It is a beautiful gift. Carry it with you as you go, soon to begin another journey up another round of the spiral.