ahimsa – Just the Tarot

The Strength Card and Fearlessness

Exploring quiet fidelity to our values as the greatest form of strength.

Are you living fearlessly in the midst of chaos?

In the past, I’ve written about how the Strength card beautifully illustrates the Hindu principle of Ahimsa—the practice of harmlessness. (See The Strength Card, Ahimsa, and Your Magical Anti Shit-Head Cloak.)

In its simplest form, Ahimsa teaches that when our own hearts are truly peaceful, we cease moving through the world as agents of violence. The remarkable claim of the tradition is that this inner harmlessness also becomes a kind of protection. Peace itself becomes a shield.

Today, though, I’d like to explore another aspect of the Strength card.

Fearlessness.

Look carefully at Pamela Colman Smith’s illustration. The woman doesn’t overpower the lion. She doesn’t wrestle it into submission. She approaches it with gentleness, compassion…and with a complete absence of panic.

The great lion becomes, almost unbelievably, a house cat waiting to have its ears scratched. She’s fearless and so the lion is fearless.

Strength Tarot Poster by Dan Adair – available on Etsy

What Is Fear?

Fear is not a character flaw.

It’s part of being human.

Deep within the brain are networks whose job is to constantly scan our surroundings for danger. When they detect a threat, our limbic system responds instantly. Our heart rate rises. Adrenaline and cortisol flood our bloodstream. Muscles tighten. Attention narrows.

Fight.

Flight.

Survive.

It’s a marvelous system. Our ancestors lived because of it.

Thank you, nervous system – good job!

The problem isn’t fear itself.

The problem is when we never leave that state.

Modern life has a remarkable ability to keep the alarm bells ringing. Financial worries. Health concerns. Relationships. Politics. Endless news feeds. Before long we’re swimming in stress hormones that were designed for emergencies, not for everyday living.

Eventually the body grows exhausted.

And so does the spirit.

The Western Idea of Fearlessness

Our culture loves fearless heroes.

Movies are filled with square-jawed action stars who stare down impossible odds without breaking a sweat. They defeat violence by becoming even better at violence.

It’s entertaining.

But it’s also a fantasy.

That kind of fearlessness isn’t based on peace.

It’s based on becoming more dangerous than whatever threatens us.

The mystic quietly disappears and the sociopath takes center stage.

The message becomes: “You don’t have to be afraid if everyone else is afraid of you.”

That’s a strange definition of courage.

Nothing has actually become peaceful.

We’ve simply dumped more adrenaline into the system and called it victory.

A Peaceful Heart

Whenever we declare war on fear, something curious happens.

We activate the limbic system that we’re trying to quiet. When we use phrases like, “battling our fear,” we immediately wake up our fear center. Battle? Did someone say battle?

Why do we battle something?

Because we’re afraid of it.

So we create a strange paradox.

We try to conquer fear…with fear.

The Strength card offers another path.

It doesn’t ask us to destroy fear.

It asks us to stop feeding it.

That doesn’t mean we ignore danger. It doesn’t mean we stop listening when our instincts warn us that something is genuinely wrong. We don’t need to take up nude skydiving just to prove we’re fearless.

We notice fear.

We thank it for trying to protect us.

And then we continue walking with a peaceful heart.

The lion is still a lion.

But we are no longer terrified by its roar.

Quiet Fidelity

When I think about genuine fearlessness, I don’t think about action heroes.

I think about the husband who spends years caring for his wife through cancer, quietly getting the wheelchair ready every morning.

I think about the single mother working two jobs so her children have food on the table and shoes on their feet.

I think about the husband or wife who continues showing kindness and faithfulness long after romance has faded into ordinary life.

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote that “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Perhaps.

But I think he overlooked something.

Most people live lives of quiet fidelity.

They get up every morning.

They show up.

Even when hope seems unreasonable, they continue hoping.

Even when depression whispers that nothing matters, they keep looking for beauty.

Even when illness or grief comes to visit, they continue choosing life.

That, to me, is what the Strength card is really about.

For most of us, fearlessness doesn’t mean living without fear. Perhaps the rare saint—or the rare sociopath—can make that claim.

The rest of us simply learn not to let fear become the author of our lives.

We acknowledge it.

We thank it.

We refuse to let it drive.

And little by little, we discover that the lion was never conquered.

Only our relationship to it changed.

As Joseph Campbell so beautifully observed:

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

Perhaps the greatest treasure isn’t on the other side of fear.

Perhaps it is the peaceful heart we discover while walking through it.

Tarot and the Art of Alignment – Available on Amazon

Ahimsa, Love, and John Wayne’s Therapist

I ran across an interesting quotation from Gay Hendricks, author of The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level : “If you have any sort of a problem, send love at it. If you’re dealing with a bully, send love at him. If your life is stuck, send love at it.”

It’s fascinating because it makes love into an active proposition, rather than a passive state of being. He’s not talking about just sitting in a meditative state of love, he’s talking about consciously generating it and using it to solve problems.

There is a principle that’s called, “ahimsa,” which is one of the five Yamas, or ethical rules of behavior, in yoga philosophy. It’s widely translated as non-violence or doing no harm to any living thing. I know a lot of Buddhists and Wiccans who have incorporated that idea into their lives. If they find a spider in their house, they carry it outside and let it live rather than squashing it against the wall. It’s a basic measure of respect for life and not taking it or harming it.

If we dig a little further into the idea, though, we find Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras saying, “once ahimsa is mastered, even wild animals and ferocious criminals will become tame and harmless in our presence. … Ahimsa, rightly understood, is the ultimate weapon; it turns one’s enemy into a friend, thereby banishing the possibility of further conflict.”

In other words, send love at them. Use love as an active force to dissolve other people’s aggression.

One of the problems with sending love at people and things that threaten us is the limbic system in our brains. That’s that very ancient part of our brains – sometimes called the crocodile brain – which is responsible for the fight or flight reaction. If it detects a threat, it immediately dumps massive amounts of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline into our systems. Our heart rates go up, our blood pressure goes up, we become hyper focused on the threat, and our thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, pretty much stops functioning. We’re ready to fight like hell or run like hell, whichever action is most likely to help us survive.

The thing is, it’s very easy for other people to reach right past our conscious minds and our spiritual beliefs and tap into that fight or flight reaction. If someone at a business meeting makes fun of us, or a coworker is nasty to us, or a friend puts us down, we reflexively, unconsciously go into fight or flight. We can see that happening in the Five of Wands: everyone is madly swinging their clubs at everyone else and no one is stepping outside of the conflict and thinking things through.

The problem with fight or flight – aside from being a really unhappy, miserable way to go through life – is that aggression breeds aggression. If you get up in my face, I’m going to get right back up in yours. Which will make you even more aggressive, which will make me even more aggressive and on and on until someone gets hurt or someone flees. It’s a self-feeding cycle that inevitably leads to someone being wounded, either emotionally or physically.

And that’s the genius behind Ahimsa: it short circuits the fight or flight reaction by changing the energy field.

To put it in New Agey terms, incompatible energies cannot exist in the same energy field. If we’re actively generating love and nurturance and caring from our heart centers, then hatred and anger and aggression can’t enter into that field. One of two things will happen with the people around us who are generating anger: (1) they’ll go away because their anger isn’t compatible with our love; or, (2) they’ll change into more loving, mellow people in order to be compatible with the energy we’re putting out.

All of that starts, though, with our actively, consciously generating love and applying it to our problems. It’s not just a state of being that we sometimes live in and sometimes lose sight of. It’s beginning to see love as a very powerful force for change and not just some wimpy phrases on a Valentine’s card.

It makes perfect sense when we think about it. The Buddhists have an old aphorism that we don’t take darkness OUT, we bring light IN. We don’t just sit in a dark cave and imagine that there’s light – we actually light a candle.

It’s not an easy place to get to, certainly not in our society. We’re constantly programmed that violence and anger are solutions, rather than problems. Our heroes carry guns and know karate and drop bombs on other people. Love, on the other hand, is seen as something that’s weak and wussy, appropriate, perhaps, for mothers who are nursing babies but not very useful in the, “real world.” Love, when our tough guy heroes encounter it, is something that happens TO them, something that they have no control over and have to put up with, despite their best instincts to the contrary.

Changing that paradigm is going to involve embracing the idea of love as being much, much stronger than hatred and rage. As being an irresistible energy that’s an undercurrent in the universe. It’s going to involve realizing that people who are living in constant anger are the ones who are really afraid and the people who are living in love are the ones who have the courage to embrace life to the fullest.

It’s sort of like imagining John Wayne or Clint Eastwood in a bar, face to face with the BAD HOMBRE’. They’re glaring back and forth at each other, their hands are resting on their pistols, and everyone else in the bar is hiding under the tables. The music slowly builds to a crescendo and at that exact moment of the highest tensions in the scene, John Wayne reaches over, hugs the bad hombre’, and says, “I love you, man. I’m sorry that you’re having to live in such a terrible, negative space, and I know a good therapist I could recommend. Here, let me buy you a drink and we’ll talk about it.”

It works. Try it.

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The Strength Card, Ahimsa, and Your Magical Anti Shit-Head Cloak

Rebuilding trust in relationships using the doctrine of Ahimsa

Have you ever been deeply, deeply hurt by another human being?

I’m not talking about someone, “hurting your feelings,” a phrase that we all use to describe occasional, usually minor, pain or unhappiness. I’m talking about a deep, horrible, traumatic pain that feels like you may never recover from it.

For example, finding out your lover is cheating on you and has been lying to you about it for some time. Or, perhaps, your partner suddenly leaving you without even affording you a chance to process it. Or realizing that the person you’re still madly in love with has fallen out of love with you.

There are really two elements there: the first is the pain that you’re going through; the second is a profound sense of betrayal, a feeling that your deepest trust has been violated. Of the two, the sense of betrayal can be much, much harder to recover from. The betrayal of trust can be world changing for us, in a very dark way.

It’s not at all unusual for people to withdraw from intimate connections with other humans after something like that. Younger people may declare a hiatus on dating and say that they only want to be, “friends,” for a while. Older people may pull into a thick, impenetrable shell and become totally socially isolated.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s our Deeper Self taking care of us. That’s our Inner Wisdom saying, “You’ve been badly wounded. You need to rest and cry and heal.”

There comes a time, though, when we may realize that we need to reconnect with the world. Getting back out there can be scary and intimidating. There are, after all, no guarantees that it won’t happen again. If we loved someone with all of our heart, if we trusted someone with all of our being, and they betrayed us, how do we know that our trust and love won’t be misplaced again? And if our judgement was so flawed, so . . . totally wrong . . . about the person we loved, how can we know that we won’t just make the same stupid mistakes with the next person?

We might find at least a partial solution in the Yogic doctrine of Ahimsa. Ahimsa is the idea of total, complete, harmlessness. It’s the idea that if we emanate a vibration of nothing but love, we can attract nothing but love. We literally CANNOT attract aggression because we HAVE no aggression.

The Strength card from the Tarot is a wonderful image of this. The woman in the card is gently closing the mouth of one of the most ferocious predators on the planet. She’s almost caressing the lion, rather than trying to overpower it or force it in any way. The lion is calm and peaceful because she’s living in the vibration of love and he’s responding on exactly the same vibration.

So what the fuck does that have to do with your lover ripping your heart out of your chest, stomping on it with hobnailed boots, and serving it to you on a Ritz cracker? You might ask . . .

Part of the answer lies in the quality of the love that’s involved in Ahimsa. Ahimsa involves absolute unconditional love. In other words, there are no strings attached. We’re not loving people because we expect to get something back. We’re just loving them. And that’s very unusual in our society. Most of what we call, “love,” involves a definite quid pro quo.

If you don’t believe that, try telling people who are just acquaintances that you love them. You’ll find that the usual reaction is something along the lines of, “Uh, huh . . . what do you want?” I mean, if you’re saying you love me, you must want something, right?

When I look back on my deepest emotional wounds, I have to admit that a large part of the pain was based on the idea that I hadn’t been treated fairly. I loved someone with everything I had and she walked away from that love and that JUST WASN’T RIGHT! In other words, I had strings attached to my love. Yes, I love you deeply THEREFORE you are supposed to love me back just as deeply and, if you don’t, you’ve betrayed my love.

All of that’s perfectly human. Most of us are not Ram Dass or Mother Theresa or Saint Francis and we don’t just walk around with huge amounts of unconditional love bubbling out of us. Most of us expect that if we make a deep emotional commitment to someone, it will be reciprocated. And it hurts like hell when it isn’t. Conditional love seems almost hard-wired into us and – if it isn’t – it’s sure as hell soft-wired with some big, thick cables.

The funny thing is, though, that unconditional love can be terrifically liberating. If we go into relationships with the idea of, “I don’t want ANYTHING from you,” it frees us from that whole expectation that we should be getting something back. It frees us from constantly worrying about whether we’re being treated fairly or if the relationship is equitable or if the other person loves us just as much as we love them.

And it frees us of the probability of being hurt again, which is what this post is all about.

Sticking our toes back in the relationship water can be scary as hell if we’ve been deeply, deeply hurt in the past. But if we can consciously remove that idea that we’re always supposed to get some sort of an emotional payoff from our relationships, if we can consciously stay in that state of openness and love WITHOUT WANTING ANYTHING BACK, we effectively remove the other person’s power to hurt us.

That’s a hard concept to grasp. I know it’s been hard for me, but it works.

Now, if all of that doesn’t work for you, if all of the reasons for unconditional love I just talked about don’t ring your chimes, then just think of it as a Magical Shield to protect you when you’re moving out into the relationship world again. The more you can keep your heart in unconditional love, the more likely you are to attract people who are in the same vibration.

Put another way, the more you can live in unconditional love, the less likely you are to attract shit-heads and narcissists.

You remember the Invisibility Cloak in Harry Potter? When he put it on, he could walk right past people without being seen. In the same sense, if you’re living in Ahimsa, if you’re keeping that no-strings-attached love in your heart, you can walk right past the shit-heads and THEY WON’T EVEN KNOW YOU’RE THERE because you’re wearing your Magical Anti Shit-Head Cloak.

“All you need is love,” – The Beatles.

The Strength Card in the Tarot

The meaning of the Strength card in the Tarot, including definitions for the upright and reversed positions.

This is, obviously, first and foremost a card denoting strength. It is, however, a quiet, gentle, enduring strength rather than a blustering, muscle flexing type of strength. Note how gently the woman is closing the lion’s mouth. She almost appears to be petting it, rather than subduing it.

The lemniscate hovering above her head indicates that she is channeling the Higher Power and the realm of spirit. This is very much the strength of the Goddess, loving and nurturing to all of her creatures and conquering with enduring love rather than brute force.

This card shows that the questioner will overcome challenges and be successful in the long term. The key to this is quiet perseverance rather than an all out frontal assault on the problems. The urge to fight – represented by the lion – is overcome and supplanted by the loving strength of her higher nature. So, too, the questioner should approach problems with loving kindness rather than aggression and will win out in the end.

On a simple physical level this card may show an individual who has been ill for some time but is slowly recovering and gaining strength.

REVERSED – A lack of strength and resolve. The questioner may be overcome by foes and enemies because he or she isn’t strong enough to stand up to them. If conflicts arise try to delay and retreat.

This may also show a person who is chronically ill or fatigued and is failing to get better. A long term, serious illness.

If you have questions about this card or its meaning in one of your readings, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

A FEW MORE THOUGHTS ABOUT STRENGTH:

Strength has some of the most cliched definitions attached to it of any card in the Major Arcana. It’s a woman closing a lion’s mouth. So the lion is an animal, right? And the woman is, well, a woman. And, hey, she’s got the symbol for eternity floating over her head! So . . . um . . . it must be about using our higher nature to control our animal instincts, right?

And, of course, the second someone mentions, “animal instincts,” being the good little puritans we are, we immediately think of . . . you know . . . S-E-X. And somehow this rather interesting portrayal of a woman quietly closing the mouth of a lion morphs into a morality play about being more spiritual and less sexual because, of course, sex and spirituality are opposites.

It’s my belief that Strength is actually about a state of being called, “Ahimsa.” For those of you who aren’t familiar with it Ahimsa is a phrase which basically means, “being harmless,” or, “doing no harm.” It’s practiced in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism and is mentioned prominently in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. And, yes, it’s usually described as a practice but it’s also a state of being. It’s a state of projecting absolutely no harmful or aggressive vibrations at all.

Let me give you an example. My life partner Carol had an old Persian cat who liked to lie out in the sunshine during the summer. I glanced out the kitchen window one day and was astonished to see this large, white cat stretched out on the ground and completely surrounded by birds. They were strolling around, pecking at the ground, grooming themselves, and literally within inches of one of their worst predators, a cat.

They had absolutely no fear of the cat because they somehow knew that the cat had absolutely no interest in harming them. The cat was practicing kitty-ahimsa and the birds were responding in kind.

You find similar scenarios in the tales from India. Ferocious tigers and snakes who become completely docile in the presence of a master practicing ahimsa.

Here’s what Swami Kriyananda said about it: “Ahimsa, rightly understood, becomes the ultimate weapon; it turns one’s enemy into one’s friend, thereby banishing the possibility of further conflict.”

You could call it the ultimate weapon, as he did, or the ultimate STRENGTH.

I told the story about the cat and the birds to a conservative friend of mine. He sneered and said, “Well, it’s a good thing that cat has someone to feed it or it would starve to death.”

He didn’t get it. The cat was fully capable of killing those birds in seconds but the cat chose not to. Instead of spreading blood and gore all over the back yard the cat chose to enjoy the sunny day and, perhaps, the songs of the birds. He projected peace and peace is what was projected back at him.

Violence, aggression, anger, fear, those are all ultimately choices that we make. If we put out those vibrations the beings around us respond on the same vibrational level. If we put out peace and harmlessness the beings around us respond with peace and harmlessness.

Ahimsa can be a difficult concept for Westerners to grasp. We tend to think of strength as something we’re doing, some positive action, or at least the ability to endure something unpleasant. Ahimsa, on the other hand, is not-doing. It’s a deliberate withdrawing from any actions that might cause harm, anger, or fear. It seems totally paradoxical: you are ARMING yourself with peace. And thus you overcome violence.

This card calls for taking a good, deep look at what we mean when we use the word, “Strength.” Is it aggression? Dominance? Walking over people who disagree with you? Or is it quite the opposite?