love – Just the Tarot

Love, Therapy, Ram Dass, and God in Drag

A look at the sources of love.

I’ve been reading a book called, “Getting the Love You Want,” by a psychotherapist named Harville Hendrix. The theme of the book is basically, “We all fall in love, a lot of us fall out of love, and here’s how to fix that.” He’s a smart guy, did some excellent analysis, and I’d probably recommend the book.

But he never did get into that basic question of, “What IS love?”

Now, there’s been an awful lot of brain and biochemistry research over the last 20 years. What the scientists have determined is that when we magically meet, “the right person,” giant sparks fly out of both our genitals and our subconscious minds, then our brains start pumping huge amounts of endorphins, and – SHAZAM! – we’re in love.

That’s what we could call the, “reductionist,” approach to love. What we call love is ultimately reduced to brain and body chemicals that cause us to feel wonderful. From that point of view, love is nothing more than a biochemical reaction – probably based on the need for the species to procreate – that we dress up with a lot of romantic notions, boxes of candy, and Hallmark cards.

It’s a classic case of the whole being more than the sum of the parts, though. Love isn’t just hormones.

Love is an energy. When we have it in our lives, we don’t just feel better, our lives actually work better. Its presence seems to trigger huge amounts of synchronicity and serendipity, we suddenly have solutions to most of the problems that we encounter, and we’re harmonious with the Tao, the Universal Flow. When we don’t have it, life can feel like a meaningless slog through knee deep mud.

So the obvious course of action seems to be that we should all run right out, throw a net over someone, and fall in love with them. Unfortunately, as Hendrix pointed out, right around 50% of us fall out of love, which is extremely painful, and we’re right back where we started, only we hurt a little more than we did before and we’re a lot more cynical. Then we go back out, find another person to fall in love with, and rinse and repeat.

As much as Americans revere the idea of finding our Soul Mates, most of us are actually serial monogamists, who find one Soul Mate after another after another until one of them finally sticks.

I got a BIG clue on all of this a few years ago when I was listening to a Ram Dass talk after my partner had died. He said that the reason that we feel so devastated after a death, a divorce, or a break up is that we mistake the person for the love. The person is the vehicle that gets us to the love, not the love itself. Since we have so totally identified the love with the person, though, when they go away it feels as if all of the love has gone away.

As near as I’ve been able to figure out, there are basically three sources of love. There’s the love we derive from our relationships with other people. There’s self-love, which so many of us struggle to achieve. And then there’s the love that flows out of our spiritual connection with Source Energy, the god-head, the Tao, the Flow.

The trick is to understand that all three of the different forms are actually the same energy, the Source Energy, dressed up in different costumes.

Human beings are hardwired to receive love from other human beings. And that’s a very good thing, indeed. It’s like a built in on-ramp to Source Energy and it should be an effortless, natural process. Unfortunately, the second that we enter the world, a lot of other ingredients get added to that process. We start out with pure love and then we throw in crazy parents, cultural expectations, dysfunctional partners, etc., etc., etc, until the love becomes a shit show.

Then we find ourselves sitting in a therapist’s office, asking, “What happened? All I wanted was for someone to love me. What happened?” If we’re blessed with a really good therapist, we can start to untangle those knots and sort it all out. “Okay, this part of the shit show came from your depressed mother and this part of the shit show came from high school and this part of the shit came from your ex-husband.” As we identify and subtract more and more of the added ingredients that doomed our relationships, we move closer to that model of pure love that we were born with.

Where our culture lets us down, though, is in not identifying the actual origin of that energy that we call, “love.” When we finally realize that the love is flowing OUT of Source and THROUGH our partners, then we can wake up and realize, “Huh . . .the love is always there and it’s abundant. I can find it through my partners, but I can find it in a lot of other ways, too. I can actually love myself. I can meditate on Source. I can connect with that energy in a zillion different ways.”

That’s not to put down romantic love in any way. Romantic love is a grand sort of a feeling and it’s probably the fastest way for us, as a species, to reach that love energy. BUT . . . it’s not the origin of the energy.

Perhaps the best solution is something else that Ram Dass suggested: “Treat everyone you meet as if they were God in drag.” When we start looking at the people we love as little bits of that God/Goddess/Love energy shining out at us through their human forms, then we can honor them, honor the process, and honor the love.

Christmas Candy, the Meaning of Giving, and Tibetan Meditation Centers

Making our lives into gifts.

Here in the United States we’re just finishing up the annual emotional and commercial orgy of Christmas, also known as, “the season of giving.” It started me thinking about the nature of giving and, oddly, a Tibetan meditation center I toured over 20 years ago.

Our guide was a woman who lived there with the improbable name of, “Candy.” I’m guessing that trying to explain the intricacies of Buddhist philosophy to a group of tourists in Bermuda shorts was not the highlight of her day, but she was pleasant, kind, and patient. One of the concepts that she put in a nutshell for us was the idea of accumulating merit.

“We get up in the morning with the idea of helping other sentient beings and, if we do that, it earns us karmic merit. And then, instead of clinging to that merit for ourselves, we dedicate it to the good of other sentient beings. Which accumulates more merit, which we dedicate to the good of other sentient beings.”

I glanced around at the people I was with and their faces were frozen in expressions that pretty much conveyed, “I don’t know what in the fuck you’re talking about, but you seem relatively harmless.” To me, though, it was a major revelation. In just those few sentences, I understood the concept of giving with absolutely no expectations of getting anything back. It’s been something I’ve gone back to again and again over the last two decades. A lasting treasure.

Now, here’s the thing: I feel absolutely sure that Candy had no idea that she was making a major impact in another person’s life and thoughts. We spent maybe 30 minutes with her and I’ve never seen her again, but I still remember that moment like it happened yesterday. It was a gift, and the gift was her just living her life and telling her truth.

We tend to think of giving as being something that’s transactional and we can see that idea illustrated in the Six of Cups. The little boy is giving a gift of love (symbolized by the Cup) to the little girl. Implicit in that image is the next step in the transaction, where the little girl is going to say, “Oh, hey! What a nice cup! Thanks so much for thinking of me.”

And then we feel good because we’ve made someone we care about feel good and we feel good about ourselves because, after all, we were thoughtful enough to give something nice to someone we care about. When we put all of the commercialism and forced jolliness aside, that’s part of the sweetness of Christmas – it’s a chance to give something to others and tell them we love them.

Most of us feel pretty disconnected with that in our general, everyday lives, though. We may get up in the morning with the intentions of being, “good,” people. We’re loving with our life partners, we don’t snap at the cashier in the grocery store, we smile at our co-workers and try to work hard at our jobs. As near as I can tell, right around 90% of us are good people, in the sense that we make some effort to not be shit heads and to be decent to our fellow humans.

Still, a lot of us are afflicted with a sense of meaninglessness. We feel like we’re slow walking through life in a sort of a daze and we’re not really making any difference. It’s like we’re born, we eat a lot of t.v. dinners, and then we die and we wonder if anything we’ve done actually matters.

That’s where synchronicity and a leap of faith comes in. That’s where giving with no sense of attachment to the results comes in.

Each one of us is absolutely unique. There’s never been anyone exactly like us before and there will never be anyone exactly like us again. To the extent that we celebrate that uniqueness and share our own individual truths in our lives, we become a walking, talking, breathing gift to the world.

But we almost HAVE to detach that gift from results. If we make our giving transactional – which is to say, someone saying, “Thank you for being you,” – we’re setting ourselves up for a lot of disappointment. The fact of the matter is that most people don’t even see us, in any sort of a meaningful way. Like us, they’re hustling and bustling through life, trying to pay their bills, hoping they’ve got some clean socks, trying to figure out what in the hell they can cook for their kids that isn’t a t.v. dinner.

And if they do notice us, the odds are that they’re seeing us through so many perceptual filters that they don’t see who we really are. As the old Indian adage goes, “When a pickpocket looks at a saint, all he sees is pockets.”

So, we have to make a little leap of faith that we ARE being seen without knowing that we are. And that we ARE making a difference in other people’s lives and in the world, without any proof that it’s so. Sometimes it may be like Candy at the meditation center, where words we speak become seeds that grow in other people’s lives. Sometimes it may be as simple as smiling at a person we pass on the street, never knowing that they were depressed and suicidal until they saw our smile.

We can see that in another card, the Ace of Cups. The cup represents love flowing into the world, but, unlike the Six of Cups, it’s not attached to anything. It’s not something we have to earn. It’s not dependent on being thanked or being noticed or appreciated. It’s just there in the world and it makes life better by its very presence.

When we finally get it that we’re giving to the world around us and making a difference just by being us to the fullest extent that we can, then we shift into having meaning in our lives because we ARE making a difference. We may not see it. Perhaps no one will ever tell us. Maybe it will take twenty years for that good to ripen in someone else’s life, but we DO matter. Every single day.

My e-book, “Just the Tarot,” is still available on Amazon for less than the price of a meaningless t.v. dinner and it’s twice as nutritious!

Cheatin’ Horndogs, Vibrators in the Refrigerator, and Tarot Cards that Indicate Infidelity

Tarot cards that indicate infidelity in a relationship.

“She just started liking cheating songs,
And what’s bothering me,
I don’t know if it’s the cheating she likes,
Or just the melody.” – John Anderson

If you read Tarot cards for other people, you’ll find that one of the major topics that those people want to know about is love and romance.

Is she the right one for me?
Does he feel the same about me that I feel about him?
Should I ask her out?
Should we move in together?
Are we meant to get married?
Will this relationship last?

And, of course, with love and romance there are frequently questions about fidelity and cheating. Most marriages and relationships are, “monogamous,” which is derived from the Greek, meaning, “keep your dick in your pants,” (except when you’re with me.) A very large part of the marital and partnership contract is that when we fall in love we’ll be sexually and emotionally exclusive to that one other person.

Having sex with or becoming emotionally attached to a third party is seen as a major violation of that contract and is grounds for terminating it. And there are major penalties that go along with that violation, such as being locked out of your house in your bathrobe, or having your partner pour maple syrup all over your best clothes just before she throws them out into the front yard. And many times, it’s not even REAL maple syrup, it’s that cheap, artificially flavored crap like Mrs. Butterworths.

Quite naturally, then, people who are cheating on their partners will go to great lengths to conceal it. And, quite naturally, the partner who’s being cheated on will somehow know, on a very deep, almost psychic level, that their mates are being unfaithful. There may be extremely subtle, subliminal clues, such as your husband having a giant hickey on his neck, or finding a pair of jockey shorts under the pillow when you wear boxer shorts. Or perhaps coming home early from work and seeing a naked man running out your back door, or finding a strange vibrator in the refrigerator next to the carton of eggs.

Those are the kinds of subdued, low key signals that will often make a person stop and ponder if there’s something more going on in their marriage than meets the eye. Still, their partners will tend to deny it. The vibrator in the refrigerator must have accidentally fallen into the grocery bag at the supermarket and really belongs to someone else. The naked man running out the backdoor was the plumber, who was sleepwalking, and was completely shocked when he awakened without clothes while he was working on the dripping faucet in the bathroom. The hickey on your husband’s neck was the result of a near tragic vacuum cleaner accident at work. The jockey shorts under the pillow were meant to be a present and now you’ve gone and ruined the surprise.

Even though these are all perfectly rational, reasonable explanations, there may still be lingering suspicions and so your client will want to consult the Tarot cards to determine the truth. Here are a few cards that may indicate that the questioner’s partner is what is clinically referred to as a, “cheatin’ horndog.”

THE LOVERS REVERSED

The Lovers is obviously THE romantic relationship card in the Tarot deck. It shows that period of time when you’re first together with your romantic partner and the whole world seems magical and glowing. It’s just the two of you, in your shining little garden. Just you and the angels and . . . um . . . that pesky snake climbing up the tree. When it’s reversed, the party’s over, baby. You’ve been thrown out of the garden and it’s time to deal with reality.

THE DEVIL (UPRIGHT OR REVERSED)

The Devil card shows the same two figures from The Lovers card, only things don’t seem to be as peachy anymore. For one thing, instead of an angel hovering over them, there’s a great big horny kind of a goat/bat demon thingie. They’re chained to a black stone or altar and they have tails which are on fire. (Having your tail burst into flames is another one of those subtle signs that there may be something wrong.) The Devil card can mean a lot of rotten things, such as addictions, super negativity, etc, etc,, but in this context – cheatin’ horndogs – it probably indicates a sexual affair that’s going on and it probably indicates that it’s a pretty heavy duty affair that may have strong elements of BDSM. I mean, horny goats, chains and flaming tails? Really?

THE TOWER (UPRIGHT OR REVERSED)

The Tower, as you might guess, is NOT a positive card. It usually indicates a freaking disaster that’s happening right in the middle of our happy little lives. The flash of the lightning bolts indicates that it’s sudden and shocking. It tends to destroy our lives right down to the foundation and then we’ve got to start rebuilding them, piece by piece. Having this show up in a reading about fidelity would indicate the sudden knowledge that your partner has been unfaithful and the relationship has been completely destroyed by that lack of fidelity.

FIVE OF WANDS

The Five of Wands may show up in a relationship where there’s a LOT of emotional turmoil. In the South, they talk about, “fight and fuck,” relationships. These are relationships where the two people involved have huge fights with much screaming and throwing of plates, and then they reconcile and have make-up sex that’s incredibly good. There are spoken phrases in there like, “Oh, baby, I’m so sorry,” and, “I promise this will never happen again, ‘cause you’re the dumplings in my chicken soup, honey buns.” Yes, I know honey buns and chicken soup are a disgusting combination, but you get the idea. There’s cheating going on, but they’ll probably reconcile and spend the next week in bed.

QUEEN OF WANDS REVERSED

The Queen of Wands has a lot of good characteristics and, among them, is fidelity. If she shows up reversed, there’s a very good chance that someone isn’t practicing that virtue.

ACE OF CUPS REVERSED

The Ace of Cups shows pure, unadulterated love pouring into the world. It tends to appear when someone is just starting off on a new romantic relationship and their hearts are full of love. When it’s reversed, there’s a good chance that their love got adulterated by a cheatin’, adulterating horndog.

THREE OF CUPS REVERSED

Obviously, this is very much of a party hardy card. When it’s upright, it’s healthy, joyous and free partying. When it’s reversed and shows up in this kind of a reading it can indicate that the joy is leaving or that your partner is partying with someone else.

TEN OF CUPS REVERSED

Among other things, the Ten of Cups is the Happy Family card. When it’s reversed it can be a sign that the happy family is breaking up, particularly if it’s a family with children involved.

KNIGHT OF CUPS REVERSED

The Knight of Cups is riding out on a sincere quest for love. Reversed, it indicates that the love wasn’t found.

THREE OF SWORDS

LOL – well . . . yeah . . . that one’s pretty obvious. Stabbed right in the heart.

SEVEN OF SWORDS

The Seven of Swords is all about sneaking around and stealing someone else’s power. This is the kind of person who has an affair right in front of everyone’s eyes and somehow gets away with it. This card also shows up frequently when you’re involved with a malignant narcissist who’s just using you for their own ego gratification.

TWO OF PENTACLES

The Two of Pentacles may show up in a reading like this to indicate someone who’s trying to juggle two different love affairs and keep both of them going.

SIX OF PENTACLES

This may indicate a lover who’s not really giving with a whole, loving heart. Love is being measured out very carefully.

Those are just a few of the red flags that may show up if your questioner wants to know if his or her partner is running around.

Remember to be very careful with these types of readings. Many people are in a great deal of denial when relationships are falling apart and really, really DON’T want you to tell them what you see in the reading. What they want is for you to tell them that they were wrong and that the vibrator in the refrigerator is really just a whipped cream dispenser. If you’re doing a reading for your best friend and you tell her that her husband is playing hide-the-sausage with his secretary, she may not be pleased with you. At all.

And, of course, it’s always possible that the questioner’s partner might NOT be a cheatin’ horn dog. He could just be a rat faced dingleberry, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. In either case, approach this topic with caution. Practice using phrases such as:

It seems that all may not be as it appears.
There’s a certain murkiness here.
There appears to be a fork in the road of life.

Avoid using phrases such as:

I think he’s dipping his wick with your best friend.
She’s a real bottom feeder and believe me, I MEAN bottom.
You should have listened to your mother. By the way, does your mother still have that spare room?

I hope that this little guide has been useful to you and, if it has, you should consider buying my book on reading Tarot cards, which is still available, DIRT CHEAP, on Amazon.

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 Lovers, The Devil, and Being Thrown Out of the Garden

Karmic relationships and how to leave them.

The Lovers Tarot card is a sort of a snapshot of a story we’re all familiar with: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The image is all the more poignant because we know the end of the story. This picture was taken when the beautiful angel was hovering over them as a guardian and protector. The very same angel would later cast them out of the garden because – horror of horrors – Eve munched on an apple and that pissed off their psychotic, bipolar god.

In many ways, this is a perfect metaphor for the process of, “falling in love.” And falling out of love.

When we first meet that perfect someone and fall in love, our brains and bodies are absolutely saturated with pleasure hormones like oxytocin. We become enchanted with the mere presence of our love object and the entire world seems to glow with a peculiar brightness and joy. Basically, we’re high as a kite and we feel like we’re living in a beautiful garden.

That oxytocin high lasts about two years (coincidentally, about the same time it takes to conceive a baby, gestate it, and get it on its feet) and then it just disappears. Suddenly our brains go back to normal. This is the, “reassessment period,” in a relationship where we take a good, hard look at our partners and decide if we really want to stay with them. If, all in all, we feel satisfied and happy with them, we stay in the relationship. If, after we come down from our oxytocin high, we discover that we’re living with a frog rather than a prince, we leave.

In other words, we fall out of love. We’ve been cast out of the enchanted garden.

I’ve been thinking about that process because of a subset of relationships that the amazing Sonia Choquette refers to as, “karmic relationships.” In her videos, she explains that these are relationships that involve a sort of a, “Soul agreement,” with the other person. The agreement is that we and the other partner are going to teach each other some serious lessons that will help us grow into our spiritual evolution.

And, “serious,” is the salient word there. These tend to be very, very heavy relationships.

There’s an element of compulsion in them, for one thing. We meet someone and suddenly feel a deep compulsion to be with them. It may not even be someone we particularly like. They may have values that are completely at odds with our own, or perhaps they’re physically or emotionally someone who is just not our type, not someone we would normally EVER be attracted to.

Yet, we are. It’s a feeling like two magnets suddenly coming into alignment and pulling us toward each other with an irresistible force.

They also tend to be . . . uncomfortable . . . relationships. In a romantic karmic relationship, we may feel a HUGE sexual attraction toward someone, but really, really NOT enjoy living with them. Or we may feel a strong emotional attraction to them but have a terrible, terrible sex life.

In one way or another, it feels like a bad fit for us, because it is. We’re not there to have a perfect relationship, we’re there to learn some heavy, hard lessons from being in each other’s lives.

That’s where it gets interesting because the timeline on a karmic relationship, the duration of it, is determined by when we learn those lessons and are ready to move on. It may happen in six months or it may take decades. In Sonia Choquette’s case, it took 31 years of marriage for her to get the lessons she needed to learn from her ex husband.

Which brings us to one of the most fascinating features of karmic relationships: leaving them.

When a karmic relationship is over, when we’ve finally learned the lessons we were supposed to learn, it becomes massively uncomfortable to stay in those relationships. As Sonia said, the price we pay for overstaying in them is absolute emotional misery. We really experience it as if we’re being spiritually expelled from them, as if we’re being thrown out of what we mistakenly thought was a garden but was actually full of weeds. The same forces that compelled us to enter into the relationship are now compelling us to leave. Lesson learned, relationship over.

If we ignore those compelling forces, if we insist on staying in the relationship even after the lessons from it have been learned, then we devolve into the couple from The Devil card. This is the same couple of people from the The Lovers card, but now they’re living in misery and pain. They’re chained to their karma, refusing to move on from the relationship and grow spiritually.

And, of course, if we examine The Devil card closely, we can see that the chains are very loose. They could easily lift them over their heads and be free if they CHOSE freedom. Instead, they cling to their misery.

Both Sonia Choquette and Louise Hay point to a very simple truth which our culture likes to deny: relationships end. And they end frequently. When they d end, we can either choose to be miserable, choose to stay ensnared in the karma, or we can stop to absorb the lessons that we learned from the relationships. We can either be bitter or we can bow gracefully toward our former partners and thank them for the lessons they helped us to learn.

And if we mutter under our breaths, “Thank you, you son of a bitch,” that’s alright, too. We’re just humans and this is just a school. We don’t have to get an A on our report cards every single time.

Old Souls, Young Souls and Reflections on the Death of Thich Nhat Hahn

Upon the death of Thich Nhat Hahn . . .

The great spiritual master, Thich Nhat Hanh, just died. And the world took little note of his passing. There was a brief note from the Dalai Lama. The United States State Department put out about a three paragraph memo recognizing him. The Pope, as near I can tell, didn’t say a word.

I actually scanned through the pages of my FaceBook friends and found a total of three people who mentioned his death. There were far more discussions of the death of a rock star named Meatloaf than there was of Thich Nhat Hanh.

Initially, I was fairly dismayed. And saddened. And a wee bit shocked. I can’t tell you how many memes I’ve seen on FaceBook over the years that were quotations from Thich Nhat Hanh. I’m sure you’ve seen them, too. They’re usually posted with a picture of someone meditating or doing yoga or sitting blissfully under a tree. I would guess that the number of them I’ve seen runs into the hundreds or possibly the thousands.

I found myself wondering – did all of those quotations actually mean anything to the people who posted them? Did they read his books? Did they watch his videos? Did they in any way absorb anything that he said or believed?

I remembered a few months ago when Ram Dass passed over and there was very much the same reaction. “Oh, yeah . . . I heard something about that. Oh, well . . . he was pretty old, wasn’t he?”

Between the two of them, these people had a MASSIVE spiritual transmission. They brought concepts and perspectives to the table that have helped millions – literally millions – of people across the world. I don’t know what I expected at the news of their passing but it wasn’t, “Man, did you hear Meatloaf died?”

I know as I’m writing this that they’d both be laughing at the idea that their deaths were somehow important. Both of them stressed throughout their decades of teachings that the whole, “my death matters,” rap is just an ego trip. Ram Dass said that, “death is not an outrage,” it’s the most natural thing in the world. Thich Nhat Hanh said that there is no death and no birth, just transitions of our forms.

Still, I think they were both exemplars of the fact that LIFE matters. That the way we live our lives, that the amount of love and compassion and caring that we manifest matters very much. In the middle of an ocean of pain and suffering and cruelty and despair, they continued to repeat that one simple, brave message: love each other.

So . . . I ponder over the fact that this beautiful human being, this compassionate, loving, deeply insightful man could pass away and it made such a tiny ripple on the consciousness of the world.

I think that the answer is probably that people have become accustomed to NOT having any sort of a spiritual practice, in the sense of consciously integrating spiritual values into their daily lives. There’s a sort of a cliche’ in Texas about the good old boy Southern Baptist businessman who goes to church on Sundays and Wednesdays and screws people over the rest of the week. When you ask him why he’d behave that way, the response is, “Well, that’s just binness (business).”

In other words, there’s a clear demarcation in his mind between spirituality – which happens on Sunday and Wednesday – and business, which happens on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. There’s a sort of a spirituality cubby hole in his existence that needs to be filled, but he manages to keep it very much in the background for most of his life.

I would guess that, for many people, posting, “spirituality memes,” on FaceBook operates in much the same way. It’s a way of saying to others – and to ourselves – “Hey, I’m actually a deeply spiritual person. See – I just posted a meme from Ram Dass or Thich Nhat Hanh or Pema Chodron.” And then our friends shine that right back at us and that fills that spirituality cubby hole.

Spirituality becomes a sort of a bon bon rather than a steady diet. It’s something we post, not something we live. It’s scratching an itch, rather than wondering why we’re itching to begin with.

I know that neither Ram Dass nor Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “Yeah, people are pretty much shallow assholes.” I suspect they would say, “Yeah, there’s still a lot of work to do. We need to get back on to our part of it.”

I’m finding a lot of comfort in a paradigm from the 1960s, which is that there are Old Souls and Young Souls. If you’re an Old Soul, if you’ve been around the reincarnation cycle a few thousand times, then people like Thich Nhat Hanh resonate a lot more deeply in your heart than they might for a Young Soul. This isn’t to say that being an Old Soul is somehow superior to or better than or wiser than a Young Soul. It’s not an elitist trip. It’s not a superiority trip. It’s just being in a different place on the path.

The world seems to be awash in Young Souls right now and the best thing to do seems to be to constantly and consistently repeat that message from Ram Dass and Thich Nhat Hanh: love each other.

Ironically, they’d both agree with the assessment of the Young Souls that their deaths didn’t really matter. But their lives did.

Love each other.

Namaste’ Thich Nhat Hanh.

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 Knight of Cups and Love as a Class Room

Developing a healthier model for love and romance.

The Tarot suit of Cups is the suit of emotions and particularly of love, the grandest of all of the emotions. The Knight of Cups shows a Knight riding forth on a quest, his cup extended in front of him. He’s on a quest of some sort having to do with love, but we can’t see the contents of his cup.

Is it full of love that he wants to share with someone else?

Or is it empty and he wants someone to fill it for him?

Kind of a crap shoot, isn’t it? And it’s pretty much like what we go through when we start a new relationship. The other person is on his or her best behavior and we can feel quite certain that their armor is buffed to a high polish and their horse has been carefully groomed. They look mighty good at first glance. But what’s going on with that cup? Are they full or are they empty? Do they have something to share or do they want us to somehow fill up their emptiness? Or maybe a little bit of both. . .

There is also, of course, the ass end of relationships, where they’ve ended, our hearts have been broken, and we’re recovering and trying to move on. In the Tarot, that’s represented by the Three of Hearts reversed, showing that our hearts have been pierced with pain but the swords are falling out and the pain is going away.

Oddly, those two phases – the quest for love and the end of love – are very intimately connected in our culture. They’re connected with what we might call the, “til death do us part,” model of love. The idea is that love is for life, that it’s a permanent, life-time commitment.

Of course, the divorce statistics tell us – plain and simple – that that’s a bullshit idea. Most relationships are NOT for life and about fifty percent of them end up in parting.

Still, we cling to that idea that a romantic relationship is for a lifetime. That belief causes us unbelievable amounts of pain when reality rears its’ ugly head and we have to split the sheets with someone we loved. And then we beat the hell out of ourselves.

What went wrong?

What’s wrong with me?

Am I just totally unloveable?

Louise Hay, in her wonderful book, You Can Heal Your Life ,proposed a different model of love that takes away a lot of the pain, and it’s just a matter of having a different perspective on relationships. And a different perspective on ourselves.

“Being needy is the best way to find an unhealthy relationship.” Louise Hay.

That’s a pretty powerful statement when we take the time to think about it because it focuses straight onto the question of why we feel that we need (as opposed to want) a romantic relationship. What is it that we’re trying to get from the other person? Why is it that we feel so devastated when we don’t get it?

She suggests a simple exercise: get out a pen and a pad of paper and make a list of all of the qualities that you want in your lover. What should he or she be to make you feel fulfilled?

Compassion?

Tenderness?

Strength?

Humor?

Empathy?

Now flip it around and ask yourself: how much of those qualities do I have toward myself? Do I treat myself with compassion? With tenderness? Am I strong and reassuring to myself? Can I see the humor in my life and laugh out loud when it’s just me here? Do I really have empathy and understanding for my self? And then start working on building those qualities, in your self.

You get the drift: the more we have those qualities in our own lives, the less we’ll feel the desperate need to find them in someone else. And the less devastated we’ll feel when the other person goes away.

The other person going away is also a part of the process.

As I said, the divorce statistics don’t lie. In our culture, nobody gets married with the idea that it’s for six months or a year, or maybe a three month contract with the option to renew. It’s for a freaking lifetime. Til death do us part.

Which means that if you’re not RIGHT THERE AT MY BEDSIDE WHEN I CROAK at the age of 186, then you didn’t really love me, you bastard! Uh, huh.

So . . . getting back to reality . . . as Hay said, all relationships eventually end, except for the one that we have with ourselves. If we can get our heads around that reality and honestly say to ourselves, “I’m going to be with this person for a while,” then love gets a lot easier and relationships, paradoxically, become a lot more meaningful.

Because then we begin to really focus on why we’re with this person for this limited period of time and we don’t take it for granted that we’ve got forever to get it right.

It also changes the meaning of what it means, “to get it right.” Getting it right no longer means simple longevity. It no longer means that our relationship with that person was somehow, “good,” just because we managed to hang in there through decades of not being heard or not being seen or not being loved back or putting up with a rotten sex life.

It shifts the focus to, “why are we here?” We’re here, as two autonomous, strong, healthy human beings sharing our space, energy and love for this period of time – and that can be a month or sixty years – for a reason. What lessons are we here to teach each other? In what ways can we help each other grow? In what ways can we support each other to evolve?

In other words, the relationship becomes a life lesson. And when we’ve learned that lesson, class is over, we graduated, time to move on to another lesson.

There’s nothing inherently sad about that. We’ve just been taught that it’s sad. If we view the relationship as a life lesson, then we can be grateful to our ex-partners for what they taught us and for allowing us to teach them, and move on with gratitude and love in our hearts.

It ain’t easy. The beliefs that love relationships are supposed to be permanent, that we’ve somehow failed if they aren’t, and that we should just go right back out and do the same stupid thing again, are so deeply ingrained in our culture that it takes a lot of conscious effort to pull out of them.

As Hay says, though, relationships ending is NORMAL AND NATURAL. We don’t need to put up with a worn out relationship just to avoid the pain of the parting. We’ve learned what we were supposed to learn.

I love her affirmation for ending relationships, which I shall keep near me in the future: I bless you with love and I release you – you are free and I am free.

Yes.

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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 Fool, The Buddha, and the Corona Virus

Some Tarot interpretations say that the bag or satchel that dangles from the end of the pole on The Fool card is his karma. That he is a new born soul dancing into life and the memories of his experiences and actions – both good and bad – are carried with him into his next incarnation in that little bag.

And that’s a good question for all of us as we face this very profound experience of a world wide pandemic: What will we carry with us when it’s finally over?

Shit happens. We all know that. A lot of the time we experience life less as the Captains of our Fates and more as the silver ball in an old fashioned pin ball machine. We aren’t thinking, we aren’t planning, we aren’t really conscious of what’s happening to us or why. We just keep hitting and being hit by those paddles, bouncing around from one place to the next until a bright, neon sign lights up and says, “GAME OVER.”

And then we’re dead.

Did it make any sense? Did our journey through all of the joys and pains, the triumphs and shit sandwiches actually MEAN anything? Or was it just a random series of events that left us bruised and battered and ultimately puzzled over why it all happened?

A large component in that equation is consciousness. Actually being aware of what’s happening to you right now, right this moment and actively SEEKING for meaning.

Let me give you an example from personal experience. My life partner, Carol, died a couple of years ago and eventually I joined a bereavement support group, also known as a Grief Group. Basically, it’s a small group of people who have lost a loved one and we sit down together once a week and talk about that experience. In other words, we’re trying to find some meaning, some understanding of what we’ve gone through and where we go from here.

One of the most positive things I’ve carried out of that group is the realization of how very much alike we all are in the face of something that is as monumentally dreadful as death. It doesn’t matter if you’re an 81 year old great grandmother or a 25 year old newly wed; death is experienced in much the same way. There are periods of shock, then numbing, then panic and horrible anxiety, overwhelming sadness, and the feeling of being totally lost in the world. There can be great nobility and growth in that process if you can somehow stay connected to your feelings and look for answers. What does it mean? Why did they die? Why am I still here? What am I supposed to do with my life now?

And, sadly, there are other people who experience very little growth and get no spiritual or emotional insights from the process. They throw themselves into a flurry of social activities right after the funeral and, when they have to be home, they turn the t.v. up as loud as it can go and stay on the phone as much as they can. They spend as little time as possible in that Sacred Silence that follows death and they think as little as possible about what it means. In a phrase, “they move on,” from the grieving period as fast as they can. If they’ve lost a husband or a wife, they remarry or re-partner within a year, as if their loved one was an interchangeable part rather than a precious human soul who intermingled with their life stream.

In other words, they don’t carry anything out of it.

Perhaps that’s a form of basic, animal wisdom. As the Buddha said, all sentient beings seek to be happy and to avoid suffering, so there’s nothing unusual about not wanting to hurt. But he also said that suffering is inevitable. No matter how much we might wish otherwise, we each have our portion of pain and how we deal with that suffering – IF we deal with that suffering – that moment in time is the anvil on which we forge our karma. It isn’t just what we go through – it’s how we consciously integrate what we go through. Did we learn anything from the experience? Did we grow and evolve as human beings? Did our compassion and ability to love others increase or diminish? Did we make what happened to us MEAN something in our lives?

So . . . here we sit in the midst of a major historical event. And none of want to be in it. I haven’t met one single person who has said, “Damn, this is exciting! I’m so glad I’m here to see this happen!” But, we’re still here, like it or not. A lot of people are going to die before this all over. Many more will lose people they love with all of their hearts and souls. There’s going to be suffering and we know that.

Right now, millions of us are locked away in our houses and apartments, waiting for the storm to blow through, hoping we won’t be one of the people who are swept out into eternity by this goddamned virus. I guarantee you that many of us are spending this time with the television turned up as loud as it will go, constantly on the phone, constantly on the internet, constantly trying to be too busy to think or feel. They can’t wait to, “move on,” and, “get back to normal.”

In other words, they won’t carry anything out of it.

Right now, we are ALL fools dancing on the edge of a cliff. We can take the time to sit down and meditate, to read, to journal, to REALLY talk with people we love, or . . . we can turn up the volume on the t.v. If there’s one thing we should all know right now it’s that life is precious, time is precious. We can fill that little bag The Fool carries with some new found wisdom, compassion, and meaning. We can actually ask what all of this means, why we’re here, and what we’re supposed to do next.

Or not.