spirit guides – Just the Tarot

The Knight of Swords, Fight or Flight, and Getting Frumious Bandersnatches Out of Our Heads

Ending the endless cycle of stress.

I had a, “learning dream,” about the Knight of Swords last night and it was very interesting. Learning dreams – for me at least – are quite different from ordinary dreams. They’re dreams that answer questions that we really need solutions to, and sometimes we don’t even know it. In my world, they’re instructions from Spirit Guides and Mentors who are helping me along my path. In your world, you may see them as a sort of intuitive understanding of truths that have eluded you in waking life.

The Knight of Swords shows a Knight in full armor, sword extended, in a balls out gallop. It’s a totally concentrated, furious charge toward whatever he or she means to conquer. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the eyes of the horse are rolled backward, as if to say, “Okay, you’ve got the spurs, you’re in charge, but WHAT IN THE FUCK are you doing?”

Now, aggression is a perfectly normal part of human life, so much so that the Tarots suit of swords can be seen as representing a variety of aggressive ego states. Aggression is, after all, one half of the famous Fight or Flight reaction. There are times when it seems that we have no choice but to fight to defend ourselves or to stand up for what we consider to be right.

But what happens when we get, “stuck,” in that reaction? What happens when we live in a state of Fight or Flight?

Well, we start to break down and fall apart. Our bodies are constantly flooded with stress hormones and we develop high blood pressure, heart problems, and sleep deficits. Our minds become paranoid, habitually anxious, and we start to feel increasingly isolated and alone. It’s not pretty.

The revelation that came to me in my dreams last night is that there are really two elements operating in concert when we get stuck in Fight or Flight. The first is the internal dialogue. Buddhists refer to that as, “monkey mind,” the constant, chattering thoughts that will really mess up your meditation sessions. Eckhart Tolle discusses it quite a bit in terms of, “ego,” which he views as a sort of an artificial construct of the mind that was a result of a wrong turn in our evolution.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s there: an endless stream of thoughts that tend to operate just below the level of our conscious control. And we really can’t do much about that. As Emily Fletcher says in Stress Less, Accomplish More: The 15-Minute Meditation Programme for Extraordinary Performance the mind thinks involuntarily in the same way that the heart beats involuntarily. Thoughts are a natural by-product of the mind, in the same way that waves are a natural by-product of the ocean.

The second element in a stuck Fight or Flight reaction is the body, that wonderful amalgam of proteins and hormones and electrons that’s constantly whizzing around creating and recreating our physical selves. More specifically, we’re talking about that part of the body that’s intimately connected with Fight or Flight, the amygdala in the brain and the stress hormones.

When we’re confronted with something that the brain interprets as being dangerous, the amygdala jumps up and screams, “Holy Shit! Watch out! It’s a Frumious Bandersnatch!” And then our brain dumps about 80 million gallons of adrenaline and cortisol into our systems, our blood pressure shoots up, we become hyper-focussed and we’re ready, by god, to fight!

All of that’s good when we’re confronting Bandersnatches and Jabberwocks and we need to stay alive. But we were never meant to live in Fight or Flight for extended periods of time. We were meant to engage in intense physical activity – fighting or running – that burns up the adrenaline and the cortisol rapidly and allows us to return to a normal state of consciousness.

When we live through an extended period of stress – military combat or a marriage from hell or taking care of a loved one who is dying by inches for years – then the Fight or Flight reaction becomes habitual. It becomes our normal way of behaving and of perceiving the world.

It becomes a self-feeding cycle that operates independently of what’s really going on in our world.

The first thing that happens is that the quality of our internal dialogues change. We begin to see the world, “through a glass darkly,” and it shows up in the quiet chatter at the backs of our minds.

My life is so fucked up.

I can’t get a break.

I’m such a loser.

Why does this shit keep happening to me?

The kicker is that the Fight or Flight system in our brains is so ancient that it’s literally pre-verbal. It evolved long, long before we developed speech or nuances in thought. So it’s not hearing, “the world was a dangerous place,” or, “I’m having obsessive thoughts about something that’s over.” All it’s hearing is, “There is danger,” and it’s continually dumping more and more stress hormones into our bodies so that we can respond to the danger.

And there’s a feed-back loop that starts up. Our bodies are incredibly stressed from the hormones and our brains pick up that stress and interpret it as, “Something’s wrong. Something’s dangerous.” Which in turn makes the amygdala jump up and scream, “Holy Shit! It must be another Frumious Bandersnatch! Dump some more stress hormones!”

At a certain point it really does become almost like an independent, autonomous personality that we can’t control any longer. Our circumstances may change completely. We may be OUT of combat, we may have divorced the horrible, abusive spouse, we may have gone through the death of a partner and emerged on the other side of the grief. But that Fight or Flight personality just keeps on trucking.

The problem is two pronged – the inner dialogue and the body – and so the solution needs to be two pronged. First of all, we need to be very, very conscious of our inner dialogue and start transforming it. It’s like a radio operating at a very low volume that we only half hear. TURN IT UP. Listen to it. Start flipping every negative thought into a positive affirmation. When we can turn that constant stream of negatives into a constant stream of positives, it interrupts the self-feeding cycle and starts to shut down the stress reaction.

Second, soothe the hell out of our bodies. I mean that literally. If we’ve lived through years of stress, our bodies are pretty tortured by it. Take the time for hot baths, listen to quiet, peaceful music, take naps, lie in the grass, visualize beautiful scenes, masturbate or make love, BE GENTLE. The more we soothe our bodies, the fewer stress hormones we’ll have. The fewer stress hormones we have, the more our inner dialogues will change to healthy, grateful thoughts.

Like any big change in behavior, it can feel very complicated at first, but it’s not. It’s really just a matter of transforming ourselves into the kinds of people that we’d LOVE to live with. Because . . . you know . . . we are the people we live with, and who wants to live with a depressed roommate?

Finding Meaning With Synchronicity

I’ve really been getting into investigating synchronicity lately. Which is probably totally appropriate because reading Tarot cards is all about synchronicity. You shuffle the cards, you lay out a reading and somehow the Tarot tells you what’s going on in your life, what’s probably going to go on in your life, and what factors you should be paying attention to as you move forward.

There is absolutely NO logical reason why the Tarot should work, but it does work. And when you get to a space in the Universe where something works for no particular reason, that’s the space where synchronicity lives.

For those of you who aren’t into synchronicity, it was a phenomenon that was first seriously documented by Carl Jung. He noticed that some things seemed to happen together in a meaningful way, even though there was no direct cause and effect relationship.

The most commonly used example for that is that you’re thinking of a long lost friend you haven’t seen in years when suddenly the telephone rings and – shazam – it’s your friend. The two events occurring at the same time are definitely linked but they defy logic because there’s no visible cause and effect relationship. Scientifically minded people would label them as, “coincidences,” which is scientific short hand for, “I really don’t know what the fuck just happened.”

Now, I recently – and synchronistically – stumbled across a book called, The Power of Flow: Practical Ways to Transform Your Life with Meaningful Coincidence. I’d been thinking about synchronicity and how it worked and why it worked in the back of my mind. I had pulled up an article on my tablet that was totally unrelated to that subject and, in the middle of the article, there was a reference to this wonderful book about synchronicity.

If you haven’t read the book, I really recommend it. What’s been intriguing to me about its’ discussions is the idea that we can sort of cause synchronicity to happen. Or, at the very least, we can set up our lives so that they are fertile fields for synchronicity. Among other things that the author recommends are journaling, therapy, meditation, dreaming, basically anything that opens us up to Deep Mind.

One of those things that really leapt out at me, though, is INTENT. Having the intention of having synchronistic experiences can increase the probability of them happening. Or, perhaps I should say, “expectation.” If you expect them to happen, they’re more likely to occur.

Well, I decided to put on my metaphysical-scientist hat and test that hypothesis using the most stringent experimental methods possible. By which I mean, I went for a walk downtown. I didn’t just go for a walk, though. I went for a walk with the full expectation that the Universe was going to give me some sort of a sign, some sort of direction.

I was actively looking for it.

And I immediately ran into three of the people I care most about in life. Boom, boom, boom – there they were.

I went back home and mulled that over. It certainly seemed to have worked. What were the odds that I’d immediately encounter those three people? On the other hand, I thought, we live in a small town and people do run into each other. On the third hand, I reflected, I’m an extreme, dedicated introvert. I can go for weeks and not have the phone ring or have anyone knock on the door. So. . . I step outside my boundaries for a change and there are my three friends. Hmmmm . . .

I repeated the experiment and went for another walk the next day. And, boom, boom, boom, there were three more friends just like they’d been waiting for me to happen along.

Wonderfully weird, right?

And, if we’re able to stimulate the occurrence of synchronistic events by our intent or by our expectation that they are going to occur, then that establishes a direct link between what’s going on in our minds and what’s going on in the outside world. Which is amazing.

Now, to be clear – WE ARE NOT ACTUALLY CAUSING THE SYNCHRONISTIC EVENTS. They are occurring spontaneously with our intentions, but they aren’t mere reflections of our inner states. Rather, it’s as if the Universe is responding to our inner states and giving us clues and pointing us in different directions.

In this particular instance, the inner state was my question, “Can you show me that synchronicity works?” And the Universe responded, “Yep, we can arrange that.” My friends, who, “appeared,” on my walk are all free, independent entities and I couldn’t MAKE them appear in any sense of the word, but the Universe could bend the rules a little bit and put us all in the same section of the same town at the same time.

In other words . . . there is something out there and we can have a dialogue with it about our lives. You can conceptualize that any way that you want to. You can call it spirit guides, angels, the universe, the Tao, being in The Flow, Whatever it is, you can ask it a question and it will give you an answer. “Hey, you’re puzzled about this, so look over there . . .”

When we really get into that framework, when we make that shift into realizing that we’re interacting with the Universe in a meaningful dialogue (we’re asking questions and we’re being given answers) it makes a HUGE difference in how we approach our lives.

Here’s how the authors of, “The Power of Flow,” put it:

“By using synchronicity for guidance, confirmation, and validation, people’s lives become a dance of energy with the Universe, a give and take with their environment that fills their days with insight and zest.”

Life, at that point, becomes a book that we know how to read and it’s full of amazing answers. As Albert Einstein put it: “There are only two ways to look at life – as if nothing is a miracle or as if everything is a miracle.” With synchronicity, everything becomes a miracle.

Ulla Suokko, author of Signs of the Universe: A Practical Guide to Shift Your Story gave an amazing Ted Talk on the synchronicity that has occurred in her life. She reiterated Einstein’s point but took it a bit further. “Choose to live as if everything is a miracle.”

When we consciously make that choice to LOOK for the miraculous, it appears. We can talk to the Universe and it talks back. How cool is that?

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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.”

Angels, Spirit Guides, and the Tarot

We seldom see the Tarot referred to as, “a Spirit Guide.” Which is weird.

There are many, many online courses about contacting your angels and spirit guides. Thousands of videos online telling you how to do it and/or how to maximize your contact with your spiritual helpers. Dozens and dozens of books on the subject.

So . . . it’s pretty widely accepted that (a) there are benevolent, loving beings out there who want to help us; and (b) we can learn how to be in touch with them. But, curiously, the Tarot isn’t usually included in those discussions.

A part of that, of course, may stem from the fundamentalist christians horror of all things occult. We’ve seen the ghost hunter shows on television where a couple of little girls are playing with a Ouija board and two minutes later thousands of creepy demons and ghosts are whizzing out of the kitchen cabinets. Tarot decks have been painted with the same brush for decades despite the fact that the images in them are chock full of angels. (See my previous post, “The Angels of the Tarot.”)

Another element is that most people who read the Tarot don’t really THINK of it as a means of getting in touch with our angels or spirit guides. We just think of it as, “Asking the Tarot for advice.” Of course, that begs the question of who or what is giving the advice. Is an inanimate deck of cards somehow capable of cogitating about our problems and giving us the best insight and solutions?

In one of the better online courses about contacting your spirit guides and angels, Roslyn Light suggests journaling as a means for receiving messages from them. There are some people among us who are able to be in direct contact with higher beings and see them and hear them. Others may receive guidance through synchronicities and so-called coincidences that occur in their lives. A book falling out of a shelf and opening to a certain page with a pertinent message, for instance. For others answers and solutions may appear in the writing they do in their journals.

And, for some of us, the very best way to get in touch with our guides may be the Tarot. Which makes a lot of sense when you actually think about it. It’s said that beings from the higher planes communicate with us in symbols and images rather than verbally. There is probably no other source on earth that is richer in images and symbols than a deck of Tarot cards. In other words, it speaks their language.

Indeed, it seems entirely possible that this is exactly what the Tarot was designed to do. It may well be a tool conceived by minds far greater than ours to allow us to have direct communication with the higher spiritual realms and the beings who dwell there.

And all we have to do is ask.