3 of Wands. Struggle and success.

   

The Three of Wands is an interesting card for many reasons. At first glance it is similar to the previous card, the Two of Wands. It has a figure surveying the land with a stave in hand. This card has a different feel to it though.

    I feel a connection to the figure in this card, his mismatched clothing suggests he has travelled far through many different lands to get to the position he is enjoying now. His patchwork cloak suggests this traveller has adopted many differing attitudes and mixed them together. The sufi's would often caper around as fools in patchwork cloaks, similar to the idea of a jester's motley. To the average man, the jester would seem a ridiculous figure garbed in bright and unfamiliar colours. His actions would seem bizarre and nonsensical, yet he would be the only figure in the court who would be able to speak candidly to the King or Queen without fear of reprisal. His role as fool would protect him from repercussions and would often allow him to be party to conversations or knowledge that others would never hear. 

     The traveller in the card though seems as though his destination is in sight. He has climbed to a pinnacle and now looks down upon the next leg of his journey. Before him spreads a golden sea with ships upon it. It is left to the observer to project their own consciousness onto the card as to what the final destination is. For some simply arriving at this point after struggle may signify success and it does, but one that is not fully complete. Complete success is found in the next card, the 4 of Wands. The success enjoyed in this card is transitory at best, it as arriving at the crown of a hill to see the real peak still laying before you. 

     For me the destination is the mountains beyond the sea. How I will get there is the question. Drawing this card has raised some interesting thoughts and feelings in me. It, coupled with recent events in my life have brought forth an interesting aspect of my own consciousness. The idea of struggle and success are relevant to me at this point in my life. I have certainly seen struggle, but it raises the question of whether it needs to be present in every situation. It seems as though I have enjoyed no short cuts in my life. But how much of that is my own doing?

    Zoe said to me that I always take the most difficult route to success and that it is not always necessary to do so. She is right in that and I am hoping this card may offer a key to change that dynamic. In order to better understand this I allowed myself to visualise myself within the card's environs. I found that naturally my expectation would be that I would not find passage on the ships to cross the sea and would end up walking around the edge of the sea to get to my destination or by bartering my labour for a space in the hold. I do understand the need for determination and tenacity, but when my own imagination makes me walk around the sea I understand that something else is going on here.

    I know that when such things have occurred in my life I have hardened my anger and frustration into resolve to push on through. I guess maybe it is the English stiff upper lip that is responsible, the part of me that responds to extreme difficulty by battening down the hatches and carrying on. History is replete with such English stoicism and while somewhat admirable I can't help but feel that that mindset may help perpetuate the problem. The reality I give it my own mind creates the problem in my external reality. 

     This hardened anger and resolve has formed a pattern that has crystallized around my hips as I have literally 'girded my loins' to push on. As a result I have deep tensions in my hip joints. I know I find it difficult to see any other solution than pushing on through the rough stuff. Anyone who has spent time in the UK knows that soldiering on is often taken as something one must do to get by on a daily basis. Shattering this paradigm is proving a little difficult as my usual way of dealing with a difficulty is actually the problem. Even the previous sentence shows how deeply held it is, that I would even view it as difficult. 

        The solution lies in learning to see an easy solution, or seeing the solution as easy. Once this is done then the difficulty in each situation will fall away and I will be able to find shortcuts and simple solutions. Believing that there is an easy solution is the first step, this will stop me "giving up" on a shortcut and resorting to the long arduous path. This will keep me conscious in the situation and prevent me from falling back into unconscious patterns which I am looking to dissolve. I have already build the "character" that hardship imbues one with and any further difficulty begins to look like laziness on my part.

2012 and the new awakening

  My monitor died this morning. It didn't happen with a bang, just an almost inaudible buzzing before the screen went black. It is the latest in a series of electronics that have given up on me in the last year. It seems like the universe is trying to give me a message and up until now I don't think I have been listening. The message isn't that technology is doomed and that we are going back to a medieval subsistence farming paradigm (at least I hope not!), it is more personal than that. I think mostly the universe speaks to us in a personal way, about our lives and what we can do to make things better.
   2012 is already upon us and many of us are looking to see something extra-ordinary happen. Whether it is the collapse of the financial institutions to aliens descending from the skies, I think we are all looking for a change in our lives. 2011 was a pretty crappy year for me and I have high hopes for this year. But it is entirely plausible that when 2013 arrives (as it inevitably will) we will look back and wonder what if anything happened. I for one would like to be someone who can say something profound did happen. If I continue to look outside myself for something to happen in order to change my life then I may well be waiting till 2013 and beyond.  Sure, something may happen on an external level and I do think it is time for a change...but I cannot sit and wait for that to occur.
     A fellow blog writer (http://www.jaimemintun.com/) recently wrote that the changes in 2012 are up to us, that we cannot sit and wait for all our wishes to be delivered to us on a plate. I am starting to see the sense in that idea. If nothing does change globally then at least it will have changed personally and I can look back at 2012 and say in all honesty that 2012 brought a great awakening.
      Luckily my monitor has a three year warranty and the nice gentleman at LG said they would even take care of delivery. It is also possible since my current monitor is discontinued that they will supply me with an improved model. None-the-less my days plan has collapsed. As my mind tried to scrabble for what I could do instead, I saw a spark of insight dancing in my being. The day suddenly seemed filled with new possibility, instead of blasting undead with lightning deep underground in the mythical land of Skyrim I could do a myriad of other things. Sure, I would have to stop work on my latest piece of art and also put off completing a teaching manual I was working on, but this ray of light seemed fleeting and would soon disappear if I let it slip from my grasp.
    Another friend of mine writes a blog on truck driving interspersed with philosophical musings (http://isterlings.blogspot.com/) and he recently asked me to give him my opinion on an article related to healing and the dynamics of healing. The article was very long and complex, but one piece stuck in my mind. It was a section on the base chakra (check out the tab at the top for more info on chakras). The interesting part of this article for me was that it related difficulties in the lower chakra to unconsciousness. That once we liberated this unconsciousness, it could be transformed into apathy (the energy of the chakra above) and so on until it was fully released.
     The cord that this struck was that I tend to get pulled back into unconsciousness, or at least semi-conscious states quite regularly. There are a number of different behaviours and habits I have adopted that bring me back out of higher states and lower my vibration. So in the interest of growth I took that spark of inspiration I felt and created a list of all the behaviours that take drag me into states of either unconsciousness or semi-consciousness. Doing this I realised that I needed to do something about this before I was overcome by another one of these habits. So I composed a list of 7 behaviours and 7 replacement habits I could cultivate in their stead. What I intend to do is to have my own 2012 awakening and do my part for global enlightenment by sticking to this throught 2012. It's kind of a challenge, but I think that is the point!

  Anyway here are the lists:
 Behaviours that create unconscious or semi-conscious states:
 1. Listening to my ipod (this is actually one of the piece of electronics that malfunctioned and no longer allows me to update my song list. I am literally stuck in the past when I listen to it..or at least my song choices from 2008).
  2. Playing Video games. This one is pretty difficult for me as I tend to play them to chill out and really enjoy them, plus I don't wish to martyr my enjoyment on the altar of growth. In order to do this I will not play games I have already finished, have not been waiting for or are for the purpose of killing time (and consciousness).
  3. Watching TV shows online. I don't have a problem with a weekly show, but I have fallen into the habit of watching them to pass the time or to distract me while I work on something else. So, like video games, no repeat show watching or for time or consciousness killing.
  4. Browsing Online. This is anything from forums, articles, flash games to craigslist or other supposed "constructive" uses. Facebook would be here if I liked or spent time here!
   5. Eating badly. For me this is sugary or chocolaty snacks mainly. Although some foods make me sleepy which is the same things as lowering my vibration.
   6. Working in jobs that limit my enjoyment. Not that I have such a job now, but I have a tendency to spend huge swathes of time making money at the expense of joy or growth. Realising that these jobs are not beneficial to my consciousness and it's growth should be enough. Such jobs are one in which I am counting down the hours till I finish or make me feel bad about myself and my life.
   7. Oversleeping or dozing. I tend to sleep long and late and will occasionally use dozing or napping as a way to pass time. This is spending time in unconsciousness in its purest form and if I can cut it back to the simple amount my body needs for rest then I will not be wasting opportunities.

Rather than just going cold turkey on them all I have also created a list of things I can do to replace the time that becomes available.

  1. Stretching or exercising. I often feel I have little time to do this, but it is simply not true. What happens is I get stuck in an unconscious or semi-conscious pattern.
  2. Un-distracted artwork (or creative endeavor). I like artwork, but the truth of it is I sometimes find it difficult to do so without a form of distraction (which inevitably gets turned off once I really start). Often finding a suitable distraction will take up more time and energy than the actual creation of the artwork!
  3. Meditation. This is simple enough and always beneficial.
  4. Conversation on enlivening topics. I wanted something on the list that wasn't solitary and would help me avoid listening or partaking in gossip or discussion of people's problems.
   5. Body or Energy work. This includes for myself and others.
   6. Productive or constructive work. From writing blogs, to creating value for my products or services that will eventually benefit others. This may include jobs that are growth inducing or learning new skills (languages, instruments, techniques).
   7. New or enjoyable experiences. Whether this is starting a class, going somewhere interesting or new or trying something different. Providing it is dropped if it is not enjoyable or productive.

  Hopefully I can maintain this, but putting it out there means I have to take it a lot more seriously than if I just wrote it in my journal!
  I believe increasing my own consciousness is a good way accelerate the process of global enlightenment and feel good about myself at the same time.

Seeking Joy

  This morning I couldn't help but ponder the way in which we live our lives. I was picking over old memories to understand where a big change had happened in my life. This was the change from a joy-seeking mindset to a pain-avoidance way of living. I think this happened when I was around 7 years old.
    It seems to stand to reason that we should want to live in a way that maximizes our joy, but how many of us do that?
   A few days ago I became involved in a topic of conversation regarding the cell structure of the human body and how each individual cell appears to have a basic form of consciousness. If a cell in our body encounters a foreign or possibly harmful cell then it alerts the rest of the organism to its presence thereby causing white blood cells to be released to combat the invader. The crux of the conversation revolved around how the cell "knew" what a foreign body was given the size and scope of the entire body organism and  what it needed to do in that situation. It stands to reason that the cell has a rudimentary form of consciousness, at least the ability to be able to perceive what is beneficial and what is harmful.
   Thinking back to how we are as children, we are preset to be in this joy seeking mode. Every sensation is a wonderful experience. We taste, we touch, we smell and interact with every object our budding senses can manage. Looking on a newborn or young baby we can see how joyful they are to be experiencing the world this way.
   Occasionally as the child begins to grow they start to encounter situations that are unpleasant or harmful. This creates a shying away in the organism of the body as it seeks to avoid destruction or damage.So it appears there are two drives at work. That of seeking pleasurable sensation and that of avoiding harm.
   I recall when I first encountered homework as a child. For me it was a pleasurable sensation, I got to learn and in exchange I met with praise and encouragement. What more could one want? I used to ask for extra homework and enjoyed completing tasks and being rewarded.
   It was not long before I encountered the pain of not being able to complete it on time and the punishment that came along with this outcome. At this point I feel we are at a crossroads. If our environment allows the rewarding scenario more then the punishment outcome then we are likely to stay within a pleasure seeking and fulfilling mindset. We can be "good" students through either path. Either through the avoidance of punishment or the seeking of encouragement.
   Taking the school analogy further, once this mindset has been established then most of our teachers simply discover which motivational method works best for us and employ it. Half the class is propelled into learning for the joy of learning and the enjoyment of the encouragement they are given and the other half are motivated by the desire to avoid the punishments when they don't meet the standards.
   Given the continuing likelihoods of meeting more ways of suffering harm as adults we tend to all end up at least in some areas of our life seeking the ways to minimise pain. This results in us trying to be as successful as possible within this mindset, the pinnacle of which is the complete avoidance of pain within ones life. We can be 100% successful and this doesn't result in any joy, but simply the avoidance of any negative encounters or harmful situations.
     Going back to the cell, it is possible for the cell to function effectively whichever perspective it may have. If the cell has a joyful perspective it finds pleasure in discovering a foreign body and the resulting completion of a task. The pain avoiding cell tries to minimise the greater pain in the organism and also completes the task.
    When the joyful cell completes its task it is suffused with pleasurable sensations. The pleasurable cell can be 100% successful AND this outcome leads to a joy filled life.
     It stands to reason then that having a joyful mindset is a far more efficient and enjoyable way of living. But how do we get back to this primal joy seeking perspective?
    The answer is to change the way we look at the the world and surrounding environment. Stop considering the ways in which we will suffer or be punished if we fail and start thinking of the joy of succeeding. A 5% success in finding joy is far greater than a 5% avoidance of pain.
   For me, I remember back to that time in my life when I actively sought out ways to maximise my enjoyment and feel that way again. Look at the positive outcome and shoot for that!
   

The Necessity of Negativity.

   Negativity gets a lot of bad press. There is always someone going on about how bad it is for you.
    I honestly think this needs to stop. At first this may seem like a bad idea...but read on and you may just change your mind...
  Most of us have enough trouble feeling emotions without someone telling you there are certain ones we shouldn't feel.
   The idea that your body produces emotions that are bad for you is rather silly and quite a regressive idea. I too have fallen into this trap over and over again, this is especially true if you decided that you are someone who has decided that goodness is your chosen route.
     We have been told that such emotions as jealousy, anger, hatred, pity, sadness and disgust are all to be avoided as much as possible. Most of the religions are pretty much behind this message, polarising people one way or another. Buddhism for example is quite happy to tell us that ignorance, anger and lust are totally off limits, while suffering is a-okay. Christianity is alright with self-flagellating martydom, sacrifice and poverty, but you can't feel pride, envy or any form of desire relating to something that is not "yours". We get these mixed messages all the time. I picked some of the major religions there, but it is just as endemic in the new age philosophy in which hatred is giving a thorough drubbing along with fear.
    These are totally natural emotions to feel! All of them! There will definitely be periods in your life where you  have to feel them or risk dangerously suppressing them in order to remain OK with which ever philosophy you have chosen for yourself or the way in which you are living your life.
   All these emotions are giving us vital signals about things that are wrong with the way we are living. You feel jealousy that your lover is lusting after another..great! It means that you are getting a signal that things are not going the right way. You feel hatred your boss has fired a great co-worker? Wonderful!..now you can see that there is something up. You feel sad that you are single? Spot on! It is showing you that there are parts of a relationship that make you feel good.
     Now don't take what I have said the wrong way,  what the real message is, is that you should not let these feelings dictate your actions. Feeling hatred for your boss's callousness is all well and good and allows the emotion to pass through you, but throwing him/her out of the window is no good for any one, because face it, they will just hire another.
    What is really important is allowing yourself to really feel these negative emotions, let them up...let them out of whichever part of you that you have been squirreling them away in. Let the anger or the sadness rise up. Yes, you may feel bad for a while, but it is going to leave eventually once it has all come up. Once this is done then you will feel much better and maybe when it is all gone you can see what the real reason is that caused it in the first place. If this is a particularly powerful emotion, you may want to seek professional help in releasing it or finding a safe place to do so.
     This squirreling away of negative emotions is what causes those raw wounds that never heal, because you are not allowing the puss and foulness to leave your body so it is constantly fighting it. Another scratch in the same area and you feel it all over again! This is why we armour ourselves in the places we have been hurt so much. But if you let it out..then you won't need the armour!
    This has been a process for me and I am still learning to be okay with negative emotions surfacing. I let myself be angry for almost a whole year...that was pretty good for me. I now have my fire back. I had to warn people away of course, so I did no un-necessary burning. I recently let myself be okay with self -loathing..so now it doesn't have to slink around like a bad dog and try and avoid my gaze and in return it gave me back my motivation. Today self-pity meekly raised it's hand to be noticed. I don't know what gift it will give to me once I am cool with it, but I am looking forward to my new relationship with it. Maybe tomorrow disgust will wave a slimy tentacle and we can be friends too...
 

Motivation and Kundalini

 In the previous post Kundalini Surges I had talked about how I had been suffering from the jolting pains of a kriya in my legs and lower torso. A kriya for the uninitiated is a forcing of energy through the energy meridians which has the purpose of clearing out lower vibrational debris in one push. This is similar to a low capactity wire trying to take a higher voltage. It literally burns away the resistance or punches it out of the way. A kriya doesn't have to be painful, but sometimes pain can accompany it, especially if there is a great deal of resistance. The closest example can be when one falls asleep at night and wakes up with a jolt when consciousness returns to the body and you get the feeling you just tripped or fell, although the kriyas occur during wakefulness and often without letting up. This can in some situations be mistaken for nerve damage or sciatica if it occurs in the legs (not that these can't accompany a kriya!).

     Anyway, these kriyas have been with me for a long time and only recently did I get to a point in which I have actually been making significant progress. I found that the jolting actually originated in my sacral area and would cause my legs to jerk spasmodically if I relaxed too much. Nothing really helped, although I did find laying on my side and letting it get on with it for a few hours meant that I would fall into a deeply restful sleep afterwards. Never-the-less it didn't resolve the issue, it just meant it passed through and the tension returned as soon as it got the chance. The actual root issue was not touched and therefore no real healing would occur. Letting it do its thing did give me an acceptance of the process though, which was invaluable as I could start to look at where the root was.

     The breakthrough came a few weeks ago and although there a great number of periphery issues that tied into this(such as my creative block), there has been one major block that needed to go first. A seemingly separate problem actually also found resolution with this too. In order to fully understand the situation, this needs to be discussed. 

     I had previously found it very difficult to motivate myself. Now, this may seem like a common complaint and in many ways this is what stopped me from fully giving it the credence that it deserved. But the best way to describe this was as though every action I wanted to take, I had a resistance to. As if I had to overcome this barrier every time I wished to do something. Now, the barrier to me doing things wasn't particularly tall or hard to bypass, but it did require me to apply my willpower to do so and over the course of a day would become prohibitively costly. This gave people the impression that I was lazy or not really wanting to try hard enough..which actually could not be further from the truth. It was as though I had 100 points of willpower to assign during a day and every action regardless of how hard or easy would require an extra 10 points to begin with. This was outside of the regular cost of the task. On the upside, it has given me quite a heroic level of willpower, the sad thing was that I had to use this to achieve even a standard level of accomplishment. Any particularly difficult task might leave me exhausted and unable to act for a while afterward while I recovered. This lack of motivation only seemed to occur when it came to material or worldly tasks, mental or emotional issues seemed to not be part of this. I had been aware of this difficulty for some time now, but had been clueless as to how to actually resolve the matter. They say that being aware is half the battle, but sometimes it is just the easier half. 

     Another factor has been the financial situation I have found myself in. I had to leave my job for many different reasons and this left my wife Zoe taking the burden of keeping up with the bills and everyday costs. Even though I have been working on things that really needed working on, because of the aforementioned issue it has meant that she had been carrying more than her fair share. When I tried to do more than I could handle, then I would get burned out too and this was not a good situation for us. 

     This confluence of forces pushed me into a place I have been many times before and a place I have not particularly enjoyed. I felt powerless and unable to remove myself from the situation which I viewed as untenable and unfair. At this point I began to recognise something in myself that I didn't particularly like the look of. I regularly state that in order to move down the road of self-discovery one must have the courage to face the darker parts of oneself, but this is often harder to put into practice than simply to state.

    I started to see that I supported myself with other people, that through my own inability to stand for whatever reason I was taking advantage, albeit unknowingly of others. This had happened financially and physically  in all quarters of my life, often getting people to take up my slack with chores or tasks. It is a very ugly part of myself to face and one which I am not at all proud of. As soon as I recognised this I was hit with a terrible wave of self-loathing and disgust at my own inability. Why couldn't I get a job? Why would I let someone else take the strain for me? Why was I just so damn weak? 

     I am grateful that I have had the opportunity to practice meditation, since this allowed me to pull my awareness out of this poisonous swamp of negativity and watch it swirl past and through me. As soon as I had opened Pandora's box then this negativity was free to come out and flow into the world at any point I was even reminded of my powerlessness. I realized that it was feeding itself, simply by the sheer fact that I would feel even more disgust at my disgust and so forth. I noticed a pattern within it that it was usual for it to occur later in the evenings, just before I would attempt to sleep. This was usually when the kriyas would be worst. So in evening I would let the feelings flow through me and try not to get attached, to feel that it was the old negative karma leaving my body. That this was the swamp of my inertia was the insight that occurred to me.

      One evening a few nights after the first recognition of this and an hour or so after the feelings had moved through me. I decided to see if I could get to the root of this, I felt weighed down and heavy from all the feelings that had been moving through me and so it was easy for me to slip into a deep reverie. I asked where all this was coming from and I became aware of a triangle shape in my sacral area and memories arose. When I was still very young I recall that I had issue with wetting the bed after an age when it should no longer have been an issue. My memory was of my parents coming to take my sister and I from our beds and to the bathroom. This generally occurred late at night, often before they were going to bed and was as regular as clockwork. I recall a feeling coming up that "I can't do it" and being too young to articulate this sentiment to my parents, along with not wanting to disappoint them. This, I realised was what was re-occurring every time I was attempting to do something that had a material component! I was having to use my willpower to overcome this childhood concern, which had become so deeply embedded that I was unaware of its influence. 

     I recall I moved into Child's pose (a yoga position) and I could literally feel the knot of tension in my sacral bone. I relaxed the area and informed myself that I was an adult and did not need to hold onto this concern, that I was capable of discerning and putting forth my own needs. All of a sudden there was a rush of feeling and energy and a pop from the bones in the area. I understood my body was simply one large circuit, with thoughts or energy passing from my head to my feet. If my energy stayed within my head, or in my emotional body then there was no resistance, but if it need to pass down into materiality...into the world then it was running into the band of resistance around my pelvis.

     With this done, all of a sudden I did not have the barrier to bypass any longer. It is now simple for me to choose what I want to do and to do it... it is immensely liberating. I no longer feel I can't do it. The self loathing still occurs from time to time, but I feel I am still releasing myself from all the constraints and networks I am in, so I am gentle with myself. 

     I also realised that the time in which I suffered from the Kriyas the most was also the same time in the evenings when as I child I would have been taken to use the bathroom. My body was still reacting as a 6 or 7 year old child, waiting for permission or forcing myself when I was not ready.

    It is not an easy practice, but I am grateful for the process. There are times when waves of self-loathing will hit when I see what I have asked of others because of my inability. I am still extricating myself from the deeply held patterns of dependence on others and I do my best to remain compassionate towards myself throughout.  What is most amazing is the lifting of the barrier that had defined so much of my world. On one hand it saddens me because I wonder about all the opportunities I never had the energy to pursue, the relationships that collapsed because of my unconscious lethargy and who I might have been without this restraint. Yet, it also give me hope that I might still become that person and that I will have the energy to meet those opportunities. Before it would not have been possible for me to continue a blog while exercising, keeping in touch with old friends and cultivating new options and for that I am grateful.