Today's Tarot - 3 of Wands

Foresight isn't always averting an emergency. True, forewarned is forearmed - or as a paramedic once told me "prepare for an emergency, and the emergency goes away"...

The other side of foresight is looking ahead and seeing that things are OK, for now anyway. When you see trouble on the horizon, you have something to do, you can prepare.

What do you do when there is sun on the horizon?

Be grateful. Appreciate. Savor. Relax. Recharge. Foresight is clearest when we are rested and relaxed, and ready for what we see.

Sound and Meditation

Meditation has been used in spiritual practice and personal growth for thousands and thousands of years. Even in the West, scientific studies showing meditation reduces stress (and blood pressure) is old news...

Sources:

Harvard Health Publications

American Journal of Hypertension

Mediation is also one of those easier-said-than-done kind of things. But it is also one of those you-get-out-of-it-what-you-put-into-it kind of things. It doesn't take so much effort. What you put into it is an investment of time. It can help you if you don't do it, even if what you do - to casual observation - appears to be next to nothing at all.

Entire books have been written about meditation. There is much more to meditation than one blog post can cover. Although, if anyone can come close, it is my friend Joy. In her blog and newsletter, she often talks about meditation and how it relates to intuition.

Today she reminds us of the analogy of thoughts and sound in meditation.

Thinking, "inner dialog" some call it, is a normal, natural, spontaneous part of the mind. It is just as normal and natural as sound coming from a gong when you strike it.

The tricky part is the end of the sound, the letting go of the thought.

Just as sound comes naturally from striking a gong, the sound from that strike fades away. Thoughts come as we meditate. The trick is letting them fade away. Sound comes, sound goes. Thoughts come, thoughts go. The really tricky part is not striking the gong again. The really tricky part to meditation, the part that takes the investment of time and practice, is letting thoughts go, and staying in the silence in-between. Let the naturally arising thoughts go...and not rush on to the next thought.

All I know is my own experience. Meditation is one of those things where you can read about it until the cows come home, but there is no substitute for just plain DOing it.

Imagine each though being the ring of a bell (the reason for bell and dorje in Tibetan Buddhism??? I would love to know the answer to that if any of you are knowledgeable about Tibetan Buddhist meditation). For me, if each thought was the clang of a cymbal, I would sound like one of those toy wind-up monkeys clanging away most of the time. On a good day, it is more like a wind-up monkey with a bad spring. It clangs away...then I catch myself thinking, and let it go. It might be quiet for just a second before the clanging starts again. And then catch it-stop it as second.  And so the cycle goes. A second is better than nothing, and maybe someday the wind up monkey toy will sit quiet for more than a heartbeat. But even that clanging will fade. Even that clanging can be followed by a moment of meditative silence.

So what does meditation have to do with the blog topic, Tarot? Listening to your intuition is a kind of meditation. The right side of the brain is a quiet temple of meditation compared to the clanging, thinking logic of the left side. The cards are just a tool...a doorway into that quiet place. Some problems need us to stand firmly in the doorway, using both reasoned thought and silent insight. Sometimes we need to step into silence...even for a heartbeat...to see our way forward, to know what to do with the next round of clanging monkey-toy sounds.

Wishing you both pleasant bell-rings and silent moments

One persons stuck in the mud is another person's day at the spa. Are you really stuck, or is life just telling you to rest or change directions?






www.modern-oracle-tarot.com

Today's Tarot - 6 of Cups

Innocence denotes simplicity. Sometimes things are just as they are, to be experienced purely, simply, innocently. It is a gift to have a time like that in our lives, even for a day, or a few hours, or a few minutes. Time in a mindset like that  can nourish our souls more than constant striving to learn grand spiritual lessons. There is a time to learn, but also we need time to just BE.






www.modern-oracle-tarot.com

Today's Tarot - Temperance

Temperance is the "everything in moderation" major arcana card. It has developed a little negativity around it from the old "temperance movement" of the early 20th century. It isn't about pretentious austerity, or militant piety, or painful self-denial.

Today, the part of the card that steps forward is akin to one of my favorite lines from the new version of "The Karate Kid"...."being still isn't the same as doing nothing." More on that in a minute.

Temperance is about balance. In the west, we often connect old-fashioned balance-type weight scales. In the east it might be the yin-yang symbol. For now, let's focus on the balance scales, like we saw last week on the Justice card.

On scales like that, if you have something big, like banning alcohol, it takes something equally huge to balance it...like the crime and crime enforcement the Temperance Movement of the 1920s ultimately fostered.

If you have something light on the scales, it takes less to bring things into balance. That is where we start getting back to the idea of "being still isn't the same as doing nothing."

Instead of piling on weight after weight to balance a loaded scale, as we see in the historical example of Prohibition, another solution is to take stuff off the loaded side.

Summer has a bit of a reputation for frenetic relaxation. We want to do stuff, fast. We want to have fun NOW while the weather is good and we have time off from work. We have a tendency to equate "doing nothing" to wasted time. Being still isn't wasted time.

Sometimes the answer to heat and activity is stillness. For effort to be productive, it has to be balanced with passivity. For our frenetic schedules to work, we need to be still every now and again, and be still with gusto - remember it isn't like we are doing nothing.

Being still is tough. Letting things go, being aware of the here and now..."mindfulness" is a good way to put it. Bring your mind to the task of being quiet, being relaxed, being here, thinking about only now.

Stillness is relaxation dynamite. If you are genuinely still, you aren't doing nothing...you are recharging your batteries in a big way. Five minutes of stillness is a vacation compared to whole day of striving to relax.

Vacation hard. Work, play, enjoy the summer in whatever full-throttle way you enjoy. But don't forget to balance that with a little stillness too. Done right, stillness can be its own kind of extreme.

Wishing you a day of balance, and stillness when you need it.