What did my favorite skincare company teach me about my tarot biz? Read on to find out.
Once again, a “wisdom from the shower” post.
After my whole stint becoming a B-Schooler, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to brands, what I like about my favorite ones, and what I can do to incorporate everything I love about them into my own business. One such company (and this is why it’s a “bathroom wisdom” post) is LUSH.
The topic for this first round of the TarotBlogHop is “How I Can Be a Better Candle”. For more information about the TarotBlogHop, see Donnaleigh’s great explanation at http://www.donnaleigh.com/tarotbloghop.htm.
Before you retaliate with anger... think first.
Yes, this is a tarot blog, and I will always incorporate the tarot into any content found here. But I cannot let October pass without addressing the bullying problem. After all, October is National Bullying Prevention Month. I cannot think of a better time to address this issue.
Oftentimes, bullying is considered a childhood problem, and brushed away by generalities like, “boys will be boys”, “kids are so cruel”, “it’s a phase”, and comments from adults that reminiscence about their own problems growing up getting picked on and how they can laugh about these experiences now, knowing they are behind them. Yes, bullying is a serious problem for children, especially when children aren’t built for long-term thinking and could turn to short-term solutions to remedy their bullying problem. I am not belittling the cause. But we cannot neatly place bullying in the “childhood only” category. There are some adults out there that have a thirteen-year-old girl’s mentality and capacity for cruelness. Unfortunately, bullies are at our jobs, within our professional field, online, and even our own family members.
How can we change this situation? What solutions are there when you are confronted with a bully? What support can you offer those that are being bullied?
A few suggestions:
Let’s bring it back to tarot (as usual). I’ve come up with a very simple three-card spread to use in a bullying situation.
Card 1: The Victim Card 3: Healing the rift Card 2: The Bully
Shuffle the cards while picturing the bullying situation in your mind. When you are ready, separate the deck into two piles. Pull the top card from the two piles and turn them over. The first card is the victim. The second card is the bully. Lay them out with room in the middle to provide space for upcoming third card. Combine the two piles back into one pile and shuffle. While shuffling, imagine the victim and the bully co-existing peacefully with the situation resolved. When you are ready, stop shuffling and pick the card from the top and turn it over between cards 1 and 2. This card represents what can be done to heal the rift.
Also keep in mind that I have used the labels as “Victim” and “Bully”, but some situations are more fluid and simplistic labels don’t do them justice. Play around with the idea of the bully being the victim, and the victim being the bully. Does this change the reading? Does it change how you feel towards these characters in your own life story? How?
I hope this brings greater understanding to these issues. If you try out this spread, let me know what you think!
‘Til next time,
Hilary
www.tarotbyhilary.com
Image: graur codrin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Feel free to share your techniques on dealing with a bullying situation or what you learned from the spread I shared in the Comments section.
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Tarot was not my first expression of my intuition. Dreams were. (Surprise!) I think the reason for this was that I wasn’t ready to receive premonitions on a conscious level, so my intuition used the back door of my mind (my dreaming self) as a means of communicating with me.
I realized I loved the song “These Dreams” by Heart because the lyrics “every second of the night I live another life” was completely true for me. When I saw that my hyper-realistic dreams came true a few weeks after I dreamed them, I realized not everyone received information like that in the same way. Unfortunately, only the tragic and bloody ones I remember. I remember dreaming about a roller coaster derailing and killing everyone. Fortunately, my dream would blow things spectacularly out of proportion, so that the reality was much less extreme than the dream. Two weeks after the dream, people were trapped on a roller coaster for hours… long enough so that it was reported nationally on the news. I’m glad reality didn’t follow my dreams to the bloody conclusion.
The dreams led me to invest in a dream journal (which I still have to this day). Sometimes I will get what I consider a “wish-fulfillment” dream, a lovely outlet to walk hand in hand on a romantic beach with a hunky celebrity I will probably never meet. Those are usually not the dreams I record in my dream journal, but if you start one, you should write all dreams down so you can analyze them at a later date. In that way you will start to recognize the feeling that comes with a precognitive dream as opposed to a flight of fancy.
The dream journal led me towards researching ESP and psi phenomena, devouring book after book at the library on paranormal subjects. Somewhere in that time period was when I started reading tarot. I also started to hear people’s thoughts as clear as day if they were “thinking loudly” (a phrase my boyfriend is now extremely familiar with me saying). I would often answer questions asked that were never asked aloud, or turn my head and ask people to repeat something only to find they never spoke anything verbally. I’m a very wordy person, so my kind of telepathy sounds like someone actually spoke. Sometimes I can get whole phrases. At first it was hard to block out, but now for ethic’s sake (and for my boyfriend’s sanity), I don’t prod around in anyone’s brains.
My point in all this is there are many ways to access your intuition. Mine started hollering to me in my dreams. I didn’t start out reading tarot, but I ended up reading tarot… and extrasensory information still comes at me from different sources outside of tarot. I don’t think I’m all that different from everyone else. I think in the end you find what works for you… or sometimes, it finds you!
I didn’t have a clue what I was going to write about today for the blog. I promised I would post every Wednesday, but that promise is difficult to keep when I feel like I have nothing to write about.
And then as I was driving home tonight, I heard on the radio that Steve Jobs has passed away. I didn’t want to believe it, so I rushed home and turned on every news channel I trust. Sure enough, he had. I looked on the Internet, and then everyone started to speak out about Steve Jobs. Liked him, hated him… whatever the personal opinions were, everyone agreed on one word: Innovator.
What makes this quality so sought after? Is it possible that the seed of innovation lies within all of us, or is it a rarity? Questions for another day, but always something to keep in mind. (My opinion… everyone is capable of great things.)
If anything, Steve Jobs taught everyone that you must follow your passions. Following your passion may very well lead you to innovate in your field. Following your innovation then leads to your legacy. I don’t know about you, but I feel compelled to leave a legacy. I don’t think I’m the only one.
I was really struck by a quote from Steve Jobs that one of my friends on facebook posted this evening. I’ll bring this back to tarot now… I always say that in any reading I do, I like to read a past card, because if you don’t know what’s going on in your past, you won’t know what’s in your present or your future. On that note, I refer back to the quote that stuck with me from Steve Jobs:
”You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
None of us ever truly have a sense of the future, not even us heap big tarot readers. After all, there is always choice. There is always free will. But if we connect our dots from our present to our past, then there is a purpose… a guiding force… that will connect those dots in our future. For our future one day will be our present… and then the next it will be our past. And so on. That trust in the greater led Steve Jobs to do remarkable things with his life.
I am inspired to do remarkable things with my life. I hope you are, too.
