law of attraction – Just the Tarot

The Art of Receiving: A Holiday Lesson from the Ace of Pentacles

Are you great at giving but secretly uncomfortable receiving? This holiday-inspired reflection on the Ace of Pentacles explores why receiving is the true key to abundance — and how learning to allow support, blessings, and prosperity can transform your life.

We hear it every year: “It’s the season of giving.”

And while generosity is beautiful, here’s a question we rarely ask:

How good are you at receiving?

Most of us are excellent givers.

We’ll show up for others, offer help, carry the emotional load, and give until we’re exhausted…

Yet when something is offered to us — kindness, support, a compliment, an opportunity, or even abundance — we freeze. We deflect. We downplay. We say, “Oh, you shouldn’t have…”

But in manifestation, and in the symbolic language of the Tarot, receiving is not an afterthought — it’s the core skill.

And the Ace of Pentacles, with its golden hand offering a gift from the sky, is the perfect reminder that abundance can’t enter your life until you’re willing to let it in.

Ace of Pentacles Affirmation Poster by Dan Adair – Available on Etsy.

Why Receiving Is the Real Skill in Manifestation

Genevieve Davis puts it beautifully in her book, “Doing Magic: A Course in Manifesting an Exceptional Life.”

“As soon as you have asked for anything, your next immediate job is to get out of the way. You need to get out of asking and into the receiving state as soon as you possibly can.”

Most people stay stuck in:

• asking

• wishing

• visualizing

• striving

• trying harder

But manifestation isn’t powered by effort.

It’s powered by allowing.

During the holidays we pour energy outward — buying gifts, doing favors, meeting expectations — but the universe doesn’t respond only to what we give. It responds to what we’re willing to accept.

Receiving Requires Softening, Not Effort

In, “Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires” Abraham/Hicks calls this the Art of Allowing:

“Unless you are in the receiving mode, your desires will not be fulfilled.”

Receiving isn’t about deserving more or working harder.

It’s the opposite — a gentle softening.

Receiving happens when you:

• relax your shoulders

• loosen your defenses

• stop arguing with your blessings

• stop explaining your worth

• allow yourself to be supported

Winter energy itself teaches this.

The natural world slows, quiets, and becomes receptive.

There is no pushing — only opening.

The Holiday Block: Feeling Unworthy of Good Things

Here’s the core wound for many people — especially during the holidays:

We don’t believe we deserve good things.

Old stories rise up:

• “Other people need it more.”

• “I haven’t earned that.”

• “I don’t want to be a burden.”

• “I’m not enough.”

Many of us learned as children to receive less so others could have more.

So now, when life tries to hand us something beautiful, we reject it without even realizing we’re doing it.

But the Ace of Pentacles offers a different truth:

You are worthy of abundance.

You are worthy of support.

You are worthy of receiving joy, money, kindness, opportunity — just as you are.

The Ace of Pentacles: A Gift You Are Meant to Receive

TheAce of Pentacles captures this moment perfectly:

• the hand offering a golden coin

• the floral archway

• the path leading into a new beginning

• the vibrant, fertile landscape

This is the universe extending a gift — potential, prosperity, a fresh start.

The affirmation, “Receive Abundance,” is not a command.

It’s an invitation.

A permission slip.

This holiday season, abundance may appear in quiet ways:

• someone offering help

• an unexpected opportunity

• a compliment

• money flowing in

• a door opening you didn’t expect

Your job?

Let yourself say yes.

A Simple Holiday Receiving Ritual (2 Minutes)

Try this before bed or during a quiet moment in the day:

1. Place your hand over your heart.

2. Take a slow breath.

3. Say gently:

“It is safe for me to receive.”

4. Picture the golden hand of the Ace of Pentacles offering you a gift.

5. Say:

“I allow good things to enter my life.”

Small practice, big shift.

This Season, Let Receiving Be Part of the Celebration

Giving is beautiful.

Generosity is sacred.

But so is allowing yourself to be blessed.

Let this be the season you stop deflecting your good.

Stop stepping aside.

Stop shrinking back.

Let this be the season you say, without apology:

“I am ready to receive abundance.”

Because the universe can only deliver what you’re willing to accept.

Harnessing the Power of Mentalism: How the Magician Card Can Help You Manifest Your Desires

Discover how the Magician tarot card and the Principle of Mentalism from The Kybalion can help you manifest your desires by aligning thought and intention.

Have you ever tried to manifest something—a job, a relationship, a more abundant life—only to feel like nothing’s happening?

As you probably know, there are hundreds of manifestation methods and techniques out there, each of them 100% guaranteed to bring us happiness, wealth, and a great sex life. So why are so many of us still stumbling along, sad, poor, and . . . well . . . un-laid?

Here’s the truth: manifestation isn’t just about saying the right words, finding the right method or doing the right ritual. It begins with our minds. According to the ancient Hermetic wisdom of The Kybalion, “The All is Mind”—meaning that everything in the universe begins in thought. This is known as the Principle of Mentalism, and it’s the foundation of all true manifestation work.

Why Manifestation Often Fails (And How Mentalism Can Help)

Here are the most common reasons why manifestation doesn’t work :

• We’re trying to manifest from a place of fear or lack. We’re so wrapped up in what we don’t have, that that’s all we can think about. And whatever we think about is exactly what we’re going to get.

• Our conscious desire doesn’t match our unconscious beliefs. If we’re convinced subconsciously that we don’t deserve love, we won’t find love. If we’re convinced that we don’t deserve abundance, we’ll stay poor.

• Our thoughts and emotions are scattered or unfocused. And undoing that is a learning process. Especially if we’re already afraid or anxious, learning to calm down and focus on what we want, instead of what we don’t want, can feel like a real challenge.

Mentalism helps by bringing it all back to the source: our minds. When our thoughts are aligned, our emotions follow—and so does our reality. Manifestation becomes less about “getting stuff” and more about changing who we are inside.

The Principle of Mentalism and Visualizing

The Principle of Mentalism is the first of the seven Hermetic principles outlined in The Kybalion. A summary of it is the axiom:

“The All is Mind; the Universe is Mental.”

This means that the universe itself is a mental creation. While that’s a fascinating metaphysical discussion for another day, what we want to focus in on right now is, “Why in the hell aren’t my visualizations working?”

When we bring this axiom down to the level of our daily lives, it means: Everything begins as a thought.

Put another way, every single thought we have is creating our personal reality – the fabric of our lives – whether we’re aware of it or not.

When it comes to manifestation, Mentalism teaches that:

We are not separate from the creative power of the universe. That can be a hard one for us to wrap our heads around. We aren’t just creations of the Universe – we’re also creating the Universe because we are conscious beings with free will. We’re a part of the Universe making itself. We’re a part of that same source energy that created the stars. We are incredibly powerful – we just don’t realize it.

Our thoughts are not passive—they are active forces shaping our experience. As Mike Dooley likes to put it, “Thoughts become things.” Every single thought that we have has the potential to manifest in the physical world.

To change our outer world, we must first change our inner world. If our thoughts become things that create our lives, then it only makes sense that the first thing we need to do is to take control of our thoughts. We have to create what we want to manifest in our outer lives in our inner lives. That means that we need to quit being victims of our thoughts and learn to direct them. They’re working for us, not the other way around.

Which brings us to The Magician.

The Magician Card: Your Inner Creator

In the Rider-Waite tarot deck, The Magician stands at a table with the four tools of the Minor Arcana before him: a cup, a wand, a sword, and a pentacle. Above his head floats the infinity symbol. One hand points to the sky; the other points to the earth.

This is a card full of meaning for the manifestation process:

Infinity symbol: We have unlimited potential. Our minds are conduits for universal energy. This is what we were just talking about: we are not separate from the creative power of the Universe. We are a part of that power and that makes us much, much more powerful than we realize.

One hand up, one hand down: As above, so below—our inner world shapes our outer one. This is another way of saying that our thoughts aren’t passive – they’re active agents creating our lives right now. Whatever we create in our inner lives will manifest in our outer lives.

Tools on the table: We have everything we need to manifest—thought (swords), emotion (cups), action (wands), and material resources (pentacles). We don’t need to borrow someone else’s methods for manifesting because we already have the magic in our own lives.

The Magician is the living embodiment of the Principle of Mentalism. He reminds us that we are not a victim of circumstance—we are the creators of our experience by using our mental powers.

A Simple 4-Step Magician-Inspired Manifestation Practice

Here’s a simple practice that brings together these lessons from the The Magician and the Principle of Mentalism.

Step 1: Clarify Your Desire

Get crystal clear. Let me say that again: GET CRYSTAL CLEAR! What exactly do you want? Let’s face it – as human beings we are fully capable of wanting two things that contradict each other at the same time. For instance, if you want a full time lover but you also want a lot of time to yourself, you need to sort that out. Which one do you really want, because you probably can’t have both and if you ask for both they’ll cancel each other out and you’ll get nothing.

Write it down in a present-tense, emotionally charged sentence. For example:

“I am joyfully attracting a lover and friend who is filling my life with meaning.”

Step 2: Align Your Mind

Close your eyes and visualize your desire as if it’s already happening.

Feel the emotion of it. Say your intention out loud. In this example, you could imagine that you’re spending the day with your lover, having a wonderful time, and planning for a sensual evening together.

Step 3: Act with Intention

Now take a small action that reflects your inner belief.

It could be creating a vision board, applying for an opportunity, or simply saying “no” to something that no longer fits. In this case, it could be writing out 20 affirmations that say, “I am loved and treasured by my partner.”

Step 4: Meditate on the Image of The Magician Card for a Few Moments

Do this while you’re visualizing your goal. This helps us to remember the lessons here: everything begins with our thoughts; we have unlimited potential that we’re using to create our dreams; everything that we need to create our dreams is contained within us.

It also goes a step further and helps us to connect with that archetypal energy of The Magician. It’s a symbol that pulls power into our visualization and engages the Universe in helping to create our desires.

Final Thoughts: You Are the Magician

You don’t have to “become” powerful—you already are.

The Principle of Mentalism and The Magician card both remind you: your reality is a reflection of your consciousness.

Want to change the outside? Start on the inside.

Start with your thoughts.

Start with your intention.

Start with you.

Want to Go Deeper?

If this topic speaks to you, I invite you to check out my new ebook:

“The Alchemy of the Mind: Transforming Your Life With the 7 Principles of The Kybalion.”

In it, I explore how each Hermetic principle can help you reshape your beliefs, emotions, and daily experience. It’s part philosophy, part practical guide—and 100% dedicated to your growth.

Your Turn

Have you used The Magician card in your manifestation work?

What has Mentalism taught you about the power of thought?

Drop a comment below—I’d love to hear your experience.

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The Secret, The Law of Attraction, and Game Show Gods

A look at manifesting what we think we want when the Universe has different ideas.

Once upon a time, when I was in my mid-forties, I found myself standing beside a wild, rushing stream in Northern California. It was a chilly Autumn day and the forest was a wonderful mix of giant redwoods, twisting madrones, and towering, ancient oaks.

I was alone that day and the feeling of magic seemed to positively vibrate through the air. I came to a rocky promontory where the stream poured over a limestone outcropping and dropped twenty feet into a crystal clear pool. I thought that if there was any place in the world where the Fairie Folk would be likely to hide their enchanted treasures, it would be in that mystical glade. And so I asked them, “Fairies, show me your gold!”

Seemingly out of nowhere, there was a powerful blast of wind in the tree tops and thousands and thousands of golden leaves fluttered to the forest floor.

I learned two valuable lessons that day. First of all, don’t get uppity with the Fairies, particularly on their home turf. Secondly, Fairies may have an entirely different idea of what’s really valuable than humans do. I suspect that they may find a shower of golden leaves far more precious than a lump of yellow rock.

I was cogitating about all of that today because I just discovered that the movie, “The Secret,” is now available for free on YouTube. If you haven’t seen it, it’s all about how we can have absolutely anything that we want in life, if we really, really understand the Law of Attraction. It has a sort of a breathless, Dan Brown meets Norman Vincent Peale feeling to it, but it was a groundbreaking film at the time of its release and it’s been a positive force in many people’s lives.

The thing about the Law of Attraction is that it definitely works. Sometimes. And sometimes it doesn’t. For most of us, it works just enough for us to scratch our heads and think, “There’s something going on here and I want to know what it is.”

There is a general principle that if we think positive thoughts, more positive events and people will enter into our lives. If we become more loving, then we’ll start to encounter more loving people. If we’re grateful for the abundance that we have right now, then more abundance will flow into our lives. On the other hand, if we’re constantly depressed and anxious, then the Universe will flow things into our lives to get anxious and depressed about. If we’re constantly cynical and negative, we’ll attract cynical and negative people.

So, yes, “like attracts like,” and the energy we’re putting out will attract energy just like it. The problem seems to be that the Universe may have very different ideas than we do about what we’re looking for.

I have a friend who was completely jazzed when, “The Secret,” came out. She literally watched it several dozen times and took reams of notes so that she could get The Method of Manifesting down perfectly. She made vision boards and spent many hours visualizing and writing out affirmations and she was so relentlessly positive that it was irritating to be around her.

Shortly after that, her husband lost his job, their house was repossessed and they had to live in a travel trailer parked at a camping site in the forest.

Quite understandably, she threw up her hands, pronounced it all, “New Age bullshit,” and even went so far as to become a dedicated atheist. So what went wrong there?

Most Americans approach spirituality and religion as if it were a television game show. For most of us, those are issues we don’t much think about right up until we get our asses caught in a crack. We float right along through life, mostly happy, mostly decent to other people, mostly content with our new cars, new computers, new lovers.

And then – KABLAM!!! – something awful happens. We learn that we have some terrible illness or our life partners leave us or we get fired from our jobs and our houses get repossessed. That’s the point where a lot of us get POWERFULLY religious and we suddenly remember that there’s a God-person who’s supposed to fix everything that’s bad.

We might call that particular God-person the, “Let’s Make a Deal God.” As in, “Let’s make a deal, God. If you’ll just get me out of this mess, I PROMISE I’ll never be bad again. I’ll be a lot better person, God, and . . . and . . . I’ll start going to church and I’ll adopt a puppy and . . . I’ll be good, God. Just PLEASE get me out of this!”

Now, here’s the thing: the God-person (or the Fairies or the Angels or the Universe or Jesus or whatever our particular religious configuration is) does answer our prayers, just not necessarily in a way that makes any sense to us at the time it happens. Like the Fairies on that Autumn day, the Higher Powers out there may have a very different idea about what constitutes gold in our lives than we do. And so, we don’t get exactly what we wanted.

When that happens, we tend to carry the Let’s Make a Deal scenario even further and get really pissed off at the God-person for not holding up his end of the deal. “Look, I wanted the shiny new Jeep that was behind Door Number Three and you gave me the crappy toaster oven that was behind Door Number Two. Well, just forget that part about me adopting a puppy, God. In fact, I just won’t believe in you anymore. Neener, neener, neener!”

Many people approach visualization, manifestation, and the law of attraction in exactly the same way. They think that if they can just find THE method that will make it all work right, they’ll suddenly own a mansion, a sports car, a private jet and they’ll get laid every single night and perhaps every morning, too.

Let’s face it, though: if there was ONE method that worked EVERY SINGLE TIME for EVERY SINGLE PERSON, we’d all be millionaires and we’d be so tired from having great sex that we could barely crawl out of bed. Hell, our butlers would have to serve us our meals in bed, only there wouldn’t BE any butlers because they’d all be millionaires, too.

What a conundrum!

It’s very possible that there’s a guardian angel standing at our shoulders saying, “Yes, dear, I know that you wanted the shiny new Jeep but you really can’t afford the payments or the insurance and you don’t know how to drive a stick shift. On the other hand, we could put some bread in the toaster oven and, look: I brought butter and raspberry jam and Red Zinger tea.”

Or perhaps my friend’s guardian angel was saying, “Yes, dear, I know that you wanted a pot full of Krugerands to appear in your living room, but maybe what you really need is to stop sitting in front of a t.v. watching a movie 30 times in a row and have a little adventure. Life is short. Here’s a nice travel trailer and there’s a beautiful forest. Go.”

Einstein said, “Either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle.” It can be really hard to wrap our heads around the idea that we’re getting precisely what we need, when we need it, even if it’s not exactly what we wanted. The key seems to be to realize that miracles are constantly unfolding in our lives, but they tend to unfold slowly and in their own peculiar ways.

Just be patient, wait for the magic to work it out, don’t try to make toast with a Jeep, and don’t get uppity with the Fairies.

Remember that my ebook, “Just the Tarot,” is available on Amazon for less than a jar of raspberry jam.

The Wheel of Fortune – Good Luck, Bad Luck, Flying Monkeys and Eckhart Tolle

A closer look at good luck and bad luck in The Wheel of Fortune

Luck. It seems to be a universal concept, found in every human culture. There are blues songs bemoaning the fact that, “if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” People talk about how their luck’s been so bad they’d have to look up to see the belly of a snake. Then there are other people who seem to live enchanted lives, lives where one good thing after another happens to them for no apparent reason other than they’ve got really good luck.

The Wheel of Fortune Tarot card is obviously about luck, but the modern, Waite Deck depiction of it is really just about good luck. It shows a wheel bedecked with Egyptian deities and surrounded by symbols of the four elements or, perhaps, the four apostles. There’s nothing threatening or scary about this version of the card.

When we look at the old, Marseilles deck version of the card, though, we see a different story. Instead of Egyptian deities, we see . . . um . . . monkey critters. Wizard of Oz flying monkeys, one perched atop the wheel, wearing a crown and wielding a sword, one being carried upward on the wheel and one being cast down by the wheel. This is really much more in keeping with that very primal perception of luck that we humans have always had about luck. It’s something kind of creepy, magical, and outside of us, outside of our control. We can never tell when a flying monkey might swoop down out of nowhere and carry us away in its nasty little talons

Humans are always trying to find a way to harness luck, to somehow bring it under our control. There are dozens of gods of good luck that we’ve worshiped through history – Hotei, Fortuna, Lakshmi, etc. – hoping that they’ll bless us with strong luck. Many people carry a rabbit’s foot or a lucky penny or have, “lucky socks,” or jeans that they favor. A lot of obsessive compulsive behavior flows out of a ritualistic quest for luck. OCDs may feel an urgent need to wipe the counter exactly seven times or wash their hands three times in order to avoid something catastrophic happening. Most of us were taught the basics of avoiding bad luck as children. Don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back. Don’t walk under a ladder. Don’t break a mirror. Oh, shit, it’s a black cat!

The older Tarot card shows both good luck and back luck – one monkey is rising on the Wheel of Fortune and one is descending. The two phenomena seem to go together, to be attached, one rising from the other. The second verse of the Tao Te Ching alludes to this when it says:

Once we know beauty, we know ugliness.

Once we know good, we know evil.

High and low, long and short—all these opposites support each other and can’t exist without one another.

That duality, that sense of opposites always going together, seems to apply to everything on the material plane, including luck. Good luck seems to give way to bad luck and bad luck gives way to good luck, or that’s the way that we conceptualize it.

Eckhart Tolle suggests that, at least to some extent, it really is just about the way that we conceptualize it. Many times, what we view as bad luck is just the end of a cycle. Everything grows and then it diminishes and then it grows again. We don’t view plants dying at the onset of winter as a tragedy, but we do view humans dying at the end of their incarnations as tragic.

Louise Hay has much the same view of the ends of relationships. When we break up with someone or we get a divorce or our partners die, it feels like a horrible, painful tragedy. It feels like bad luck. She suggests viewing it instead as a sort of a graduation. At the point the relationship ends, it means that we’ve learned everything we were supposed to learn from the dynamic of that relationship and it’s time to say, “thank you for the wisdom,” and move on.

The Law of Attraction people tell us that good luck and bad luck can actually be learned behaviors, patterns that we get into that, “attract,” more of the same. If we can learn how to maintain a positive, healthy outlook on life, we tend to attract positive, healthy people and things into our lives. In the same sense, if we see life as a terrible, crappy experience where we’ve got nothing but bad luck happening, that’s what we attract. Even worse, we attract people with the same negative vibes and then we get to deal with their shit in addition to our own. That can go a long way toward explaining why some people always seem to be lucky and some people seem to have a curse on them.

Pema Chodron said that life is all about being constantly thrown out of our nest. Constantly forced to give up our security and adapt to new experiences. Quite a bit of what we call, “bad luck,” is that simple, elemental human experience of not wanting things to change. We envision an idyllic, static existence where nothing new or challenging ever happens to us because change is scary. Getting fired from our jobs, losing our partners, having to move out of our houses – these are all bad luck because they’re changes that we don’t want.

There are a couple of things worthy of noting about that, though. The more that we resist change – the more that we say, “no,” to the end of a cycle – the more dramatic that change is eventually going to be. It’s almost like an explosive force that just keeps getting more and more powerful the longer we sit on it, until it eventually blows our existence into tiny, smoldering pieces. A small change that we resist can easily grow into a catastrophe that we could have avoided.

The other thing to note is that good luck so often grows out of bad luck. After we’ve had a period of seriously rotten luck, we frequently find our lives being showered with blessings of all sorts. It could be that, as the Taoists assert, good luck is attached to bad luck and one inevitably gives rise to the other. Or, as Tolle said, perhaps we’re just ending one cycle and plowing the dead weeds under the ground to make room for the new growth.

That can make a huge difference in how we experience those periods of, “bad luck.” We can realize that The Wheel of Fortune is a wheel that’s constantly turning and that we’re never stuck in one place. It just feels like it. Being thrown out of the nest may feel incredibly uncomfortable emotionally. It may be terrifying. It may feel like horrible luck. But it’s the only way we learn how to fly.

Dan Adair is the author of, “Just the Tarot,” available on Amazon.com at a very reasonable price.

The Law of Attraction, The Magician Card, and Dumping the Scientific Method

Looking at the wonderful messiness of magic.

I love this little section from Genevieve Davis’ Becoming Magic: A Course in Manifesting an Exceptional Life (Book 1)

“Is magic unscientific? I don’t care two hoots one way or the other. I have no desire to make what I do fit with a scientific world view. I don’t give a flying fig whether it does or doesn’t fit in with quantum physics or Newton’s Laws.”

We all grew up learning the scientific method and so we know the general ideas involved with it. In order for something to be a scientific law, it has to be predictable and verifiable and universal. In other words, if we’re talking about the Law of Gravity, then we have to be able to predict that when an apple – any apple – falls off of a tree it’s going to come straight down and hit the ground. Over and over and over again. And everyone has to be able to see that that’s the way that apples fall and they have to fall the same way in Tierra del Fuego as they fall in Texas.

If some apples fall halfway to the ground, turn sideways, and zip off into the horizon, then we’re fucked as far as gravity being a universal law. Then we have to go back and re-examine our theories, do thorough, scientific studies on apple-ness, and try again. That’s called, “revising your hypothesis.”

Now, for some reason, many people who are involved in metaphysics and spirituality have ALWAYS craved the approval of scientists. I don’t really know why, because most of the scientific folks I’ve met have been pretty boring, one dimensional people with whom I would not care to share a beer or a joint. Perhaps it’s because scientists are always hopping up and down and screaming, “You can’t PROVE that there are ghosts (or angels or fairies or spirit guides or the astral plane, etc., etc., etc.)” Perhaps some people who are involved with spirituality have developed a sort of a Stockholm Syndrome where they really, really want their abusers to love them.

Or maybe they just really, really want for magic to be predictable and verifiable and universal. Which it isn’t.

There’s that word, “magic,” again. Let’s talk about it a little bit, in terms of the famous, “Law of Attraction.”

The Law of Attraction IS, essentially, magic. If you can make something appear out of thin air with the power of your mind, that’s magic.

The Law of Attraction is NOT a law, and that’s where a lot of us get screwed up and where a lot of us give up.

The point is that it’s a Not-A-Law that works most of the time, which is why we shouldn’t stop using it and exploring it.

When we first learn about the Law of Attraction, this is how it usually works. We encounter someone who says something like, “If you only think of good things, then only good things will come into your life.” And so we try it and it works pretty well and we’re feeling pretty damned jazzed about it. “Hey, you know, only good things come into MY life!”

Then life turns into a shit sandwich and we go back to the person who told us that we should only think good things and ask them why all of this crap just floated into our lives. They start suggesting flaws in our approach to only thinking good things, such as:

-Did you write down exactly 25 affirmations in the morning and 22 and ½ before you went to bed?

Did you use a vision board?

Maybe you were thinking 7 good things and 285 bad things and your bad thoughts overwhelmed your good thoughts.

Do you put a lot of emotions into your visualizations?

Did you try dancing on one foot when you were visualizing and holding an amethyst in one hand and a tourmaline in the other?

Again, that’s called, “revising your hypothesis.” If only good things are supposed to come into our lives when we think good thoughts and bad things start happening, then it must somehow be our fault. We must be doing something wrong, because the Law of Attraction is a LAW, by god. And that means it always works and it’s predictable and it’s verifiable.

Eventually a fair number of people become dejected over the fact that the Law of Attraction doesn’t always work and they just quit trying. Which is a drag.

It’s not a Law. And that’s okay. It’s magic. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but a lot of the time it does. Just like magic.

Let’s take a look at the Magician cards from a couple of different decks.

The first is the Magician from the Waite Deck, which was designed about the turn of the 19th/20th century, the dawn of the Scientific Age.

He’s dressed in perfect, dramatic ceremonial robes, he’s holding a wand aloft to gather in Universal Energies and he’s directing those energies into manifestation on the material plane, as represented by the four objects on the table. He’s magnificent, he’s powerful, he’s in control. His magic is verifiable and predictable because he KNOWS HIS SHIT. His magic works every single time.

Now let’s take a look at the Magician from the ancient Marseilles deck.

He’s kind of goofy looking, his clothes look like they were sewn together from rags, and look at all of that weird stuff he’s got spread all over the table! The expression on his face isn’t so much one of being in command and control as of, “Um . . . did I forget something? Was there an Eye of Newt in this spell? I just can’t remember . . .”

The Magician from the Waite deck really exemplifies the type of magic that many purveyors of the Law of Attraction would like us to believe. The Universe is an orderly, positive place and if we behave in an orderly positive manner, then only orderly, positive things will happen to us.

If I’m doing a magic spell, then I MUST draw a circle that is EXACTLY nine feet across and place four white candles in each of the cardinal directions. I have to have a knife and a chalice on my altar and a specific kind of incense burning and the spell has to happen at a specific time of the month or IT JUST WON’T WORK. If I do all of those things just exactly right, though, then my magic will be predictable and verifiable. You know, like a Law.

The old Magician from the Marseilles deck is much more like what magic is really about. He’s slinging together odds and ends and making it up as he goes along. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but he’s NOT going to walk away from his table because most of the time it DOES work and he’s having a hell of a lot of fun.

The old Magician recognizes the Sacred Dictum passed down to us from the Ancients: sometimes weird shit happens. Magic, like life and emotions and love, is NOT always predictable. That’s why all of the old cultures had trickster gods like Loki and Coyote and Raven, because sometimes life just jumps up in our faces, yells, “BOO!” and then laughs it’s ass off at us.

Here’s another interesting passage from Genevieve Davis, this one from her book Doing Magic: A Course in Manifesting an Exceptional Life Book 2

“There is a reason that women are particularly good at magic . . . the slightly chaotic nature of women, often negatively deemed ‘irrational,’ is actually a desired trait when doing Magic. Embrace irrationality, embrace chaos, allow things to just turn out in whatever higgledy-piggledy pattern they please and you will find this SO much easier.”

The Law of Attraction ISN’T a Law. It’s a general principle that if we act and think in a mostly positive manner then mostly positive things will mostly come into our lives. Most of the time.

And that’s not only good enough, that’s GREAT!

We don’t need no stinking laws!

The Four of Cups, The Five of Cups, and Finding Gratitude in Painful Times

There are a lot of people out there right now talking and writing about how to create abundance. One of the things that they all agree upon is the need for gratitude as a part of the process of manifestation.

Whether you’re working with angels and spirit guides or an agnostic trying to get the hang of the Law of Attraction, all of the teachers and financial gurus will tell you to start with a grateful heart. If you’ve only got a few bucks in your pocket, be grateful for them before you try to manifest more. If you want to have stronger, more positive people in your life, start by telling the people who are already in your life how much you appreciate them.

But sometimes we get stuck and it’s really hard to pull up that attitude of gratitude. It could be that we’ve had some sort of a terrible loss. It could be that our lives are going through one of those phases where everything just sucks and we finally have to say, “Jesus, why is this shit happening to me?” Or it could be that it’s just one of those times when we need to feel sorry for ourselves a while.

Gratitude is an emotion, just like love, hatred and anger, so it’s appropriate that the two cards in the Tarot deck that deal with a lack of gratitude are in the suit of emotions – the Cups.

In the Four of Cups we see a man sitting on the ground, arms crossed in defensiveness or rejection, staring at three cups standing on the ground before him. A fourth cup is appearing out of thin air but he doesn’t even see it. The Three of Cups is, of course, a card of celebration and happiness so we can conjecture that the cups he’s staring at represent the loss of some major source of happiness in his life. Perhaps he’s broken up with a lover or he’s been fired from a job that he really liked. In any case, he’s so focused on the past that he’s not perceiving the new opportunity, the cup floating in the air.

Contrast that with the Five of Cups. This is a card of MAJOR, life changing loss and deep, deep grief. He’s dressed in the black cloak of mourning and the wine from the three cups is spilled upon the ground, gone forever. And, again, he’s so focused on his loss that he can’t even see that he has two cups left which are quite full. An example might be a man or woman who can’t focus on their children because they are too deep in grief over a spouse who has died. She has literally turned her back on happiness for the time being.

So, knowing that gratitude can be a major factor in manifesting an abundant, spiritually satisfying life, how do you even GET to it when all you can feel is a sense of loss? Sometimes cognitive and spiritual reframing is the answer.

In the case of the Four of Cups – the loss of a relationship or a job – try to see that cup that’s hanging in the air. Ask yourself WHY it happened. Is it clearing the way for a deeper relationship or a better job? What employment or relationship skills did you learn by going through this? How is this going to make you a better or a stronger person in the future?

You can even take it to a deeper level of analysis if you like. Is this some kind of a script from a childhood trauma that you’re playing over and over again? Are you subconsciously manifesting lovers who will reject you or make you miserable? Are you seeking out jobs or bosses who won’t appreciate you? Can you bring that to full consciousness and turn it around? Can you feel grateful for the growth?

In the case of the Five of Cups, it’s a much rougher road. It’s hard to find anything positive about someone you love dying. True, deep grief is devastating. It can actually make us physically ill and sometimes it drives us to a despair that’s so deep we can’t imagine it will ever end or we’ll ever smile again.

Yet, it can cause a major and ultimately beneficial shift in our perspectives. If we are at all honest with ourselves it will drive us to real and permanent reevaluations of our lives. It causes us to ask what in the hell it’s all about. Is there really life on the other side? Did my loved one survive in some form? Are there spiritual beings? If she was taken and I was left behind, what am I supposed to be doing with my life now? Surely I have some life purpose that’s higher than watching television and eating junk food.

It’s like a ball of yarn that’s come completely unraveled and you have figure out how to roll it back up. Or a jig saw puzzle where you have all of the pieces but you’ve lost the picture of the assembled puzzle. All you can do is start at the edges and try to put life back together in a way that makes sense. Eventually, though, it adds a much greater depth and meaning to life.

Gradually, horribly slowly, we do begin to recover from grief if we choose to go on living. And, yes, it gives us a sense of gratitude for life and for the love we experienced with the person we lost that’s more profound than we could have ever imagined.

Gratitude can always be discovered. Sometimes we just have to look for it a little harder.

The Wheel of Fortune Reversed and Turning it Over

I recently made a decision to start turning some of my problems over to my Higher Powers. And I found that for me – as a Wiccan who tries to be emotionally and intellectually honest – that was a surprisingly easy decision.

Sometimes life turns into a shit sandwich. It happens to everyone sooner and later and this was my turn. Within a period of just a few months I’d lost my beloved life partner to cancer, I was embroiled in a nasty probate process to settle her estate, and the unpaid bills just kept piling up like malevolent imps that had taken up residence on my desk.

In other words, The Wheel of Fortune Reversed. A prolonged period of bad luck.

I was beat up, beat down, and hung out to dry. Emotionally and spiritually exhausted, I knew I needed some help from the higher realms to keep walking down my path, and getting to that help turned out to be more of a revelation than I could have anticipated.

The first realization was that I actually trusted my Higher Powers. I had drifted a long way from the little boy kneeling in a catholic church, being taught that god loved us so much that he let his only son be murdered just to prove it. My view of the universe no longer included some scary, bipolar, vengeful, patriarchal god who might be equally inclined to toss you into eternal flames or welcome you to heaven, depending on how much you’d prayed and how little you’d masturbated.

Somewhere through the many years I’d lived, my view of Higher Powers had morphed into angels and spirit guides, fairies, elves, and gods and goddesses (with a lower case, “g,”) who actually loved and cared about us. The face of Jesus, writhing in pain and covered with blood, had been replaced with the smiling, tender faces of Lakshmi and Tara.

It was kind of a shock to me, to tell you the truth. Despite all of the poison that had been planted in my subconscious mind when I was a child, despite the fact that I was going through a terrible, terrible time in my life, I found that I had unquestionable faith in a loving and nurturing universe.

And that brought along a second, equally powerful revelation: I can live – for the most part – without the need for a constant cause-and-effect spirituality. The universe doesn’t always have to be a comfortable place for me to trust it.

Cause-and-effect spirituality is the basis of all organized religions and has a large part in New Age spirituality. The idea is that if you’re a really, really good person then really good things will happen to you. And if you’re a really, really bad person then really, really bad things will happen to you. And there’s a lot of truth in that.

But then you look at someone like Donald Trump and you think, “Huh . . . what happened there? Why has this tangerine colored, demon infested, piece of human excrement who’s never caused anything but misery been blessed with all of this material wealth?”

Or you have a friend who is a kind, loving, wonderful person who lives in poverty and dies an agonizing death and you think, “Huh . . . what happened there?”

As I said, cause-and-effect spirituality appears to be true a lot of the time. But not always. People have been trying to come up with explanations for why good things happen to rotten people and vice verse since the beginning of human existence. Maybe it’s karma from past lives. Maybe they forgot to say their prayers or slaughter an ox and two sheep and offer them to god. Maybe they masturbated too much. Who knows?

That’s what The Wheel of Fortune Reversed is really all about. Shit happens. It doesn’t put any value judgements on it, it doesn’t say shit happened because you were a bad person or you brought it on yourself. It just quietly observes that shit happens, sooner or later, to all of us.

And that’s a Spiritual Law, just as surely as the Law of Attraction. It can be scary if you need to view the Universe as a neat and tidy place where everything happens for a reason, the good are rewarded, and the evil are punished. Or it can be a strong motivator to deepen your spiritual resources and to cultivate your inner strength and resilience BEFORE it happens. As The Desiderata says, “Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.”