Tag: healing

Donald Trump Voodoo Dolls, Recovering from the Election, and the Burning Times

Developing a strategy for dealing with Christian Nationalism and recovering from the trauma of the election.

Well, it’s been a few days since the United States election and many of us are still trying to get over the shock, sadness, and anger of what happened.  Still, it’s important to focus on how we’re going to survive for the next couple of years.  That’s especially true for people who are empaths and intuitives.

IT’S A GRIEF PROCESS

First of all, it’s important to realize that this is a genuine grief process.  Millions of us are experiencing this just as if something we’ve loved deeply has died.  There’s a sense that the America we believed in, the America that we thought we knew and could depend upon, is gone.

If you’ve experienced the death of someone you treasured, you know this feeling.  It’s as if the entire world has tilted off of it’s axis and nothing will ever be the same.  There is deep sadness, anger, and fear.

So the first step is to be as gentle with ourselves as we can be.  Acknowledge and honor our emotions.  Try to do all of the things that a therapist might recommend in the midst of grief.  Stay in the present moment.  Take care of ourselves physically.  Deal with the sadness without descending into depression.  Deal with with the fear without descending into anxiety. Deal with the anger without losing our compassion. 

We have a little over two months to move through the grief and heal our energy.  We need to use that time wisely.

RECOGNIZING REALITY

Healing our energy and staying positive does NOT mean being foolishly optimistic.  We can and we must contribute as much light and love to the collective energy as we can.  That doesn’t mean that we can visualize this election out of existence or immediately change things here on Earth School.  There are some harsh realities ahead and we need to be prepared for them.

IT ISN’T DONALD TRUMP

Donald Trump is a gibbering idiot.  He’s always had serious personality disorders and they’ve gotten much worse.  This is a 78 year male who is morbidly obese, in a constant state of narcissistic rage, and is suffering from dementia.  It’s obvious to any objective observer that he is not going to last for four years in the White House and will either die or be replaced because of mental incompetence.

In a word, Trump is nothing more than a figurehead.  He was used by a political group to seize power in the United States, but he is not in charge of them.  They are extremely intelligent and have planned this meticulously, so there can be no doubt that they know Trump is a paper tiger.

THE CHRISTIAN TALIBAN

The people who are really in charge of this political coup d’état are Christian nationalist extremists.  Many people refer to them as, “the Christian Taliban” because they share so many views with that group.  They are misogynistic to a point where they’re determined to turn women into breeding livestock and take away all of their basic rights.  They are racist, they are xenophobic, and they are fascists.  They have already taken over our Supreme Court and at least one branch of our legislature and now they’ve claimed the prize of the Presidency.  

These are the people who are now running our country and Donald Trump and his supporters mean nothing to them.  

THE BURNING TIMES

Wiccans and Witches refer to the Inquisition as, “the burning times,” in obvious reference to the thousands of people who were burned at the stake.  It’s important to remember that it wasn’t, “only,” witches who were massacred in that period of madness.  It was also Jews, Gypsies, Wise Women, Heretics, and anyone else who didn’t fit in to the mold of, “good Christians.”

We saw a reiteration of that in Hitler’s reign of terror.  The, “norm,” is defined very narrowly as a certain entitled class of people and anyone who is outside of the norm is, “the enemy within.”  Any time that a fascistic movement takes over the rule of a population, they will immediately start weeding out anyone who disagrees with them and they don’t care how brutal they have to be to do that.

IT’S OUR FIGHT, TOO

Am I suggesting that the Christian fascists who have taken over our country are going to start burning people in the public square?  No.  I’m simply saying that – left unchecked – they’re fully capable of it.  

If you’re a Tarot reader, or you like to toss the I Ching or play with Oracle cards, you’re on their list.  It may not happen immediately, but they WILL get around to it.  It’s in their book:

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” – Exodus, 22-18

They will first go after the marginalized minorities and the people who are powerless, but they will eventually go after us, as well.

SPIRITUAL WARFARE

I have no doubt that a certain number of my brothers and sisters here have already unpacked their black candles and voodoo dolls and are busily sticking pins into Donald Trump effigies.  That’s certainly one way to approach the coming threat and I totally understand it if that’s where you’re at.

The problem, though, is that you can’t be an empathic person or an intuitive and carry hatred in your heart at the same time.  Not for long.  It’s not our energy.  It’s not our essence at our core. It will eventually destroy who we are rather than change who they are.

A STRATEGY FOR RIGHT NOW

At this moment, there are only 4 things that we can do:

1 – Heal – Give ourselves time to heal psychologically and spiritually.  If our basic energy is fucked up, we’ll be much less effective when we need to be.

2 – Think and Ask for Guidance – We are much more creative than they are.  We need to come up with new solutions for dealing with this new reality and I have every confidence that we will.

3 – Stand Up and Speak Out – We can’t let this temporary loss silence us.  They are planning to start setting up concentration camps in our country in about two months and that’s just the beginning.  We have to speak out against every single injustice and atrocity that they have planned.

4 – Love – Yes, I understand that getting our heads and hearts into a place of love right now is extremely difficult.  Think of it as energy, though.  The collective unconscious has been filled with a flood of hatred and the ONLY spiritual antidote to hatred is love.  That doesn’t mean we need to go out and hug a Trumpster or even try to send healing to them.  It does mean that we need to generate as much love in our hearts, our auras and our environments as we possibly can as a counter force to their energy.  If they’re the disease, we’re the cure.

And finally, I would just like to say, “Namaste’” to all of you who are reading this.  That translates as, “I bow to the sacred within you.”  Let’s keep that sacred light burning bright.

PEACE AND LOVE – DAN

The Ten of Wands, Energy Healing, and Over-Thinking Enchiladas

Using energy healing to overcome overthinking.

I find myself understanding the poor dude in the 10 of Wands more and more as time goes by.

In the Tarot, the four suits of cards represent different realms of the human experience.  Swords = personal power.  Cups = emotions. Pentacles = material possessions.  And wands = ideas.

So we see this guy in the 10 of Wands who has SO MANY ideas that he can barely stagger along under the weight of them.  His head is pressed firmly into the bundle of wands and he can’t even see what’s going on around him.  He’s just trudging toward a distant destination, hoping he’s going in the right direction and trying to put one foot in front of the other.  His ideas own him, not the other way around.

I was watching an interview with Eileen McKusick, author of, “Electric Body, Electric Health,” and she flat out said, “Overthinking is a cultural brain virus.  Overthinking never, ever solves anything.”  Naturally, my reaction was, “I’ll need to overthink that statement.”

She’s right, though.  What we refer to as, “thinking,” usually means shuffling around a lot of different concepts, trying to make them fit some sort of a coherent pattern.  It’s like a Rubik’s Cube that we keep flipping and flipping and flipping, hoping that all of the squares will line up. 

But conceptualizing is just one part of a much larger process and when we get stuck in that one part, it doesn’t work.  We can never, ever solve anything by just thinking at it.

Somewhere along the line in human evolution -probably about the time we began to develop alphabets and writing – we started to pull out of our bodies and into our heads.  Which is to say that we started to think of our heads, our brains and thoughts, as being somehow separate from our bodies.  Philosopher Gilbert Ryle referred to that as, “the ghost in the machine.”

That name is so apt because most of us suffer from this incredible, mass hallucination that there’s some separate, non-material, “self,” much like a ghost, that sort of rides around in our bodies, as if they were machines that we’re driving.  The ghost, of course, lives in our heads and we peer out at the world through our eyes, just as if they were windshields.

We call the ghost in our heads our, “selves,” or our, “personalities,” or even our, “souls.”  So there’s a ghost that’s our REAL self and then there’s the body, which we’re sort of temporarily driving around in.  That scene is very much like our real self landed at the Earth Airport and went straight to the Hertz Rent a Body so that we’d have a cool ride to tool around in.  “Hey, I’ll take something with fins and a lot of chrome.  Bucket seats.”

We even see that dualism in New Age philosophy, right?  How often have we heard that expression, “You’re not a body that has a Soul;  you’re a Soul that has a body?”  Which is a nice shift toward the spiritual, but it still maintains that strange hallucination that our bodies are somehow NOT our real selves. 

Which is exactly what McKusick was getting at:  we’re not just our brains and we’re not just our bodies – we’re our body/brains/nervous systems/emotions/thoughts/memories, Soul – the whole enchilada.

Or perhaps I should say, “the Soul Enchilada.”

She’s an energy worker who uses the energy of sound to heal us.  Like most energy workers, she heals from the outside in, which is contrary to some New Age thinking.  The basic New Age formula for life runs like this:

Our beliefs create our thoughts.

Our thoughts create our emotions.

Our emotions create our vibrations.

Our vibrations create what we draw into our lives.

New Agers have tended to jump in at the level of thought and say, “Well, if we change our thoughts, we change our emotions, which changes our vibrations, which changes our lives.”  Also known as the power of positive thinking and it’s true.

Energy healers like McKusick, though, are flipping the script on that.  They’re saying, “If we change our vibrations, we change our emotions, which changes our thoughts.”  She’s taking the same holistic approach – we’re all one great big electromagnetic vibration and if you change one thing, you change all of it – but she’s working from the vibration inward to the thoughts.

Her idea is that sound is a form of energy and so are we.  When we listen to certain sound frequencies that are coherent, solid frequencies, it reorganizes the energy in our bioelectric field into a solid, coherent vibration.  As our vibrations become more coherent, so do our emotions and our thoughts.

Does it work?  I don’t know, yet.  I’m spending a significant part of my day banging away on my Tibetan meditation bowl and grooving on the rising and falling of the sounds.  It does seem to be very soothing and it does take me out of my head and into my body.

And now that I’ve over-thought it, I like it.  I really do.

Please remember that my amazing e-book, Just the Tarot, is still available on Amazon for MUCH less than an order of enchiladas. Hell, it’s less than a side of refried beans. What an incredible bargain!

The Ace of Cups, Love Without a Pronoun, and Purple Thongs in the Back Seat of the Mercedes

A look at love as existing independently from people.

In the esoteric system of the Tarot, Cups represent emotions and the Ace of Cups represents pure love.  This is a card of love-as-an-energy, pouring into the world out of thin air, magically filling our lives with wonder and ecstasy. The love isn’t, “attached,” to anything, it’s just there, existing by itself.

Love-as-an-energy is a notion that’s foreign to most Westerners, so it takes a little bit of work to wrap our heads around it.  We can see a similar notion in Reiki energy healing. The Reiki practitioner directs healing energy (which we could call, “love”) to the person or situation that is sick.  BUT . . . and this is a subtle and important distinction . . . the practitioner doesn’t tell the energy what to do.  She just sends the energy and the energy solves the problems.

Huh?  What in the hell does that mean?

Well, suppose we’ve got a friend who’s got kidney problems, or at least that’s what the doctor told him.  So we sit down and light our white candles and incense and we try to visualize as much healing and love flowing toward our friend’s kidneys as we possibly can.  Only the doctor our friend saw was distracted that morning because his mistress had left her purple thong in the back seat of his Mercedes and his wife found it and now his wife and his children aren’t speaking to him and his mistress wants her thong back and his life has just turned into a shit burger.  So he accidentally grabs the wrong chart and diagnoses a kidney problem when our friend actually has exhausted adrenals.

There we are, then, sending tons of healing energy to our friend’s kidneys when his kidneys are perfectly fine and it’s his adrenals that need a little TLC.  Instead of helping, we’re accidentally short circuiting the healing process because we decided what the problem is and we were wrong.  

The Reiki practitioner, on the other hand, just sets the intention of sending the healing energy to his friend but lets the energy figure out what the real problem is and what really needs to be healed.  In other words, he views the energy of love and healing as something that exists independently of the healer and something that has its own intelligence, an intelligence that’s far greater than ours.  You send it, but you don’t direct it.

All of which seems completely weird to most of us, because we view love as coming out of SOMEONE.  We view love as always being attached to a pronoun.  I love YOU.  YOU love me.  SHE loves him.  We view it as something that people generate themselves and bestow on others, not something that flows THROUGH us, but isn’t really ours.  Even when we talk about divine love, we view it as a very personal transaction where God or the Goddess or the Angels or the Guides are personally sending us love because, you know, we’re really nice people and why wouldn’t they?  We don’t just want the love, we want the hug that goes with it.

Ram Dass expressed a lot of the same ideas when he talked about love and relationships.  What happens when we fall in love?  We’re tritty-trotting down The Great Road of Life when we suddenly see another human being and, for whatever reason, something inside of us says, “YUM!!!  I want some of that.”  So, penises get hard, vaginas get moist, we leap into the nearest bed at the first opportunity and make love like bunnies until we fall over in an intertwined heap of sweat and hormones.  Big, silly grins for everyone.  Yay!

There’s a lot going on beneath the surface, of course.  Our brains are pumping out oxytocin and we feel high as a kite because, “we’re in love.”  That very feeling and all of those pleasure hormones predispose us to view the other person favorably and as someone who’s wonderful and magical and the source of that amazing feeling of being in love.  Many times we’re totally puzzled because our friends see our love object as a schlub with a bad haircut, instead of the Amazing Wizard of Love and Happiness that we perceive, and so we begin to cut our friends out of our lives and our lover becomes the SOLE source of love in our existence.

What happens when our lovers die or we break up because we caught them playing hide the sausage with the neighbor’s teenage daughter?  Grief happens.  Deep, devastating, profound grief.

Ram Dass looked at that whole process and said, “Yup, that’s what happens,” but he put an interesting twist on it.  He said that it isn’t the loss of the person that we’re grieving, it’s the loss of love.  The person was just a vehicle in human form that GOT us to the love that we craved and we thought he or she was the source.  Put another way, we mistook the car for the destination.  

That’s basically seeing love-as-an-energy.  It isn’t an energy that comes FROM our lovers, it’s an energy that flows THROUGH them.

None of that denigrates or diminishes the wonderful process that we call, “falling in love.”  Falling in love seems to be one of the ways that nature has hard wired us to reach that state of love that heals us and makes us whole.  It’s a good thing.

What it DOES do, though, is to remove a lot of the negative qualities that too frequently go along with that process.  When we realize that love is out there, that it exists independently of other people, then falling in love loses its addictive and dependent nature.  We don’t view the other person as the source of love, we view them as a portal in our lives – sometimes temporary and sometimes lasting – through which the love flows.  We don’t depend on them for our source of love, like a junkie depends on his dealer for heroin.

If the other person goes away, that’s okay, because the love remains and we can tap into it any time that we want to, just by opening our hearts to that energy.  In a very real sense, we become the source of our own love, because we’re the ones who are making the conscious decision to stay open to that amazing energy, no matter what happens or who comes and goes in our lives.

And then we’re living in love, instead of falling in love.

It’s a good thing.

The Three of Swords and Healing a Broken Heart

Did you know that having a broken heart can actually . . . well . . . break your heart?

There is a medically recognized condition called, “broken heart syndrome,” that can cause all of the symptoms of a heart attack and lead to hospitalization.  Although it’s most commonly associated with middle aged women it can strike anyone and it’s brought on by intense grief such as the death of a loved one, a divorce, or breaking up with a lover.  One side of the heart actually enlarges for a period of time and fails to beat normally causing chest pains and shortness of breath.

The Three of Swords is a perfect illustration of that pain.  Most of us have been there: being deeply, completely in love with someone who betrays our trust, or falls out of love with us, or, sometimes, dies.  It literally feels as if we’ve been stabbed in the heart, wounded to our very core.

The question then becomes, how do we recover from that?  Or do we? One strategy, of course, is to just swear off falling in love and vow that we’ll never be suckers like that again.  Oh, sure, maybe we’ll have sex every once in a while – maybe a LOT – but we’ll never fall in love with or completely trust another human being again.  Ever!

Probably not the best plan.  In one of her always excellent podcasts called, “The Courage to Love,” Tara Brach asserts that moving away from love is actually moving away from the best and most authentic part of ourselves.  Which is not hard to recognize when we stop and think about it. When do we feel best about ourselves? When we’re loving and kind.  When do we feel best about the world? When we’re receiving love and kindness. It really IS hard wired into us: even a baby happily recognizes a smile and is frightened by a scowl.

As Brach points out, though, it can be difficult to remember that.  We are right now JUST starting to evolve out of that fight, flight or freeze response that’s always lurking in our amygdalas.  When someone shuts us down, when someone breaks our hearts, it feels like danger, like a terrible threat to our very being and we want to fight back against them, run away, or become emotionally frozen in place.  (Never again! Ever!)

We do have a couple of assets that we’ve evolved into, though, that can help:  consciousness and intentionality. We can consciously recognize our emotions and just sit with them.  “Okay, I hurt like hell. I feel betrayed. I feel like I can’t trust anyone.”  And that’s okay.

And we can intentionally move toward love.  “Okay, I really hurt but I recognize that I’m a loving, caring person and I’m not going to let someone else remove love from my heart.  I claim my autonomy and I choose love.”

We can also remember that the Heart Chakra just feels love and it doesn’t discriminate about where it’s coming from.  It’s wonderful to receive love from another human being but it’s not the only source.

When we’re broken hearted we can bring in a lot of self-love.  We can write out affirmations about what good, loving and deserving people we are.  We can visualize ourselves bathed in love and compassion and we can be especially nourishing and kind to ourselves.

Divine love can be another source for many people.  In Red Tara practice meditators will visualize Tara hovering before them, sending golden beams of love into their bodies and hearts.  We can do the same practice and replace Tara with the deity, spirit guide, or angel of our choice.

And, of course, we can just love.  Love generates love. The more we act with loving kindness and compassion toward our fellow travelers on the earth plane, the more the heart chakra opens and heals.  The more it opens, the more love we attract and receive.

“Neither be cynical about love;

for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment

it is as perennial as the grass.” – The Desiderata