Tag Archives: Jungian psychology

Attachment Wounds with Self

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Another way to understand the impact of attachment wounds is to look at the relationship you have with yourself. Is there an anxious, avoidant or disorganized wound present between you and you?

Do you avoid yourself by always focusing on the other in relationship? Making them happy, morphing more into the type of person they are, doing what they want to do, being who they need you to be? Are you always the liquid in another’s container? Codependency is one way to understand this dynamic. Experiencing an avoidant attachment wound with yourself adds a layer of awareness. You might feel insecure and unsafe with yourself. You might lack self trust. You may need the other to be your focus in order to feel secure.

If you experience an anxious wound with yourself you might find yourself over analyzing yourself all the time. Analysis paralysis happens because when you put a period at the end of how you feel about yourself in any given situation or relationship, or with what direction you want to take in life (among a million other decisions) it creates too much anxiety and ambivalence is the result over and over again. Or you may find yourself stuck in ambivalence with yourself, unable to tell how you think or feel about yourself or what direction to take.

Whether avoidant or anxious the root is how your sense of self formed by how you were parented under age seven that created ruptures with self love, self worth and a sense of security with yourself.

A disorganized wound with yourself would show up as a mixture of avoiding yourself and being stuck in analysis paralysis, depending on the day or the situation. Sometimes you might bounce from over analyzing yourself to throwing your focus on the other person and what they think. The other could also be society, the world, or the internalized voice of a parental figure.

A secure relationship with yourself looks like trusting yourself, loving yourself unconditionally and feeling worthy just for existing, outside of conditions.

Attachment wounds and styles tend to express on a spectrum. You might be forty percent secure and sixty percent anxious, for example. An attachment wound with yourself might get triggered by a specific person or situation. Becoming aware of how the wound shows up is less equational and more a flexible mix of feeling into your relationship with self while being able to zoom out and analyze yourself.

Healing attachment wounding is a life long journey. It is often said that what gets broken in relationship must be healed in relationship. This also includes the relationship with yourself.

Through a parts work or depth lens, the self has many aspects; the ego, soul, inner child, protectors, archetypes etc. There are many ways to label the parts. This can be a helpful way to heal the psyche. On a scientific level, your neural pathways literally are the sense of self and these pathways can be rewired through parts work and reparenting the inner child. More ancient practices did the same thing when the shaman would give a soul retrieval to the wounded person.

Through a mindfulness lens you can heal through not identifying with thoughts or feelings and building awareness as the witness watching thoughts and feelings pass through the body and mind. And through cognitive behavioral work you can reframe negative narratives about the self and change negative behaviors through conscious choice. These are just a few modalities.

Many paths up the same mountain. I like to use a bouquet of modalities, finding usefulness in all of them. May you find the methods that work best for you as you develop a more secure attachment with yourself.

The Alchemy of Becoming

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This June 25th, 2025 Cancer New Moon conjunct Jupiter is a lunation cycle that amplifies your capacity to trust emotional intelligence as legitimate information. Cancer doesn’t just feel, it attunes to what genuinely sustains life versus what merely appears nourishing. Jupiter’s expansion here means that subtle emotional signals you might have ignored become impossible to dismiss. Jupiter is making the feelings bigger on purpose so that you can attune to your heart’s intuition and wisdom. 

You may find yourself more sensitive to environments, relationships, or commitments that drain your vital energy, even when they look good on paper. This isn’t about reacting and being overly emotional (though that could be the unconscious expression of this energy) but about developing a more sophisticated attunement to what actually serves your wellbeing or the wellbeing of others. Feeling is healing and your feelings are valid and important. See where 4° of Cancer is in your natal chart.


This expansion squares Saturn conjunct Neptune in Aries, creating a paradox that’s both disorienting and essential. Aries is the self-at-center and demands immediate self-assertion, knowing what you want, and taking action. But Saturn applies pressure, limitation, and delay while Neptune confuses your sense of self as it dissolves rigid or outworn concepts of who you are, who you have been, and how you act.

The square of Neptune/Saturn to the New Moon/Jupiter forces you to act from deeper authentic feelings and impulses you may not understand yet mentally, rather than the should-based identity or actions you’ve been accustomed to for many years. You might discover that some of your most cherished ideas about who you are were actually constructs designed to win approval or avoid rejection. Neptune dissolves these false selves while Saturn ensures whatever emerges can withstand reality. See where 1 and 2° Aries is in your chart. 

The Finger of God points this tension toward transformation of self through loss. This is known as a Yod and it is pointing to Pluto, the planet of death and rebirth through rising from the ashes of loss. Yods are mysterious and take time to understand and fulfill. Look where 3°  Pluto is in your chart to see the point of transformation. There may be a loss in your external world or this might be more of an internal sense of loss. The discomfort you feel between caring for others and honoring your self and needs isn’t meant to be resolved through compromise, but through a fundamental reconstruction of how you operate.

Pluto demands that you stop trying to balance opposing forces and instead allow them to synthesize into something entirely new. You’re being asked to become someone who can be deeply feeling, care for others AND unapologetically honor the evolving self, not by switching between modes but by integrating them into a more complex way of being. This transformation might be a pointed event but typically happens through every day situations that make your old patterns impossible to maintain (people pleasing and avoidance to name a few), forcing you to grow.

The tension you’re feeling isn’t something to fix or escape, it’s the exact pressure needed to birth a more authentic version of yourself. Instead of choosing between tending to others’ needs or your own, allow yourself to honor both simultaneously. Notice where you’ve been operating from an either/or mentality, believing you must sacrifice your desires or needs to be loving or abandon care for others to claim your power. The discomfort of holding these seeming opposites is what breaks open old limitations and creates space for a more integrated way of living and loving, aligned with your true self.

New Moon Blessings. 🌑🌹

Full Moon in Sagittarius

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Today’s full moon in Sagittarius isn’t soft. It isn’t gentle. This full moon arrives with truth and a purpose. It wants to take you out of the familiar comfort zone and to sit still long enough in the discomfort to feel into your truth, that felt sense that comes when your soul remembers something your mind has forgotten.

The Sabian symbol is 20 degrees Sagittarius. An image of people cutting ice in winter for summer use. It’s a strange kind of metaphor. Why would anyone do that unless they had foresight about what would be needed in summer? That’s what this moon is revealing. How to prepare for a time you cannot yet see. Can you do something now that only your future self will understand?

This isn’t a moon of trying to manifest ego dreams. It’s a moon of getting in touch with the promise your soul made, that may or may not be aligned with ego’s need for security, pleasure, or validation. The promise made before life’s hard losses. Before the tiredness set in. Before the doubt became everyday noise in your head. It’s the promise of your inner truth.

This full moon cares that you’re listening and wants you to prepare.

The Sagittarius moon always wants to point you toward something larger and more honest within yourself. And this one especially isn’t satisfied with avoidance, half-truths or surface roles. It’s going to burn through the noise, through your outworn identities, through the masks you wear out of habit. That can feel like grief for what is dying. It can also feel like clarity for what is newly birthing. Sometimes both at once. Whether it be personal and internal, about relationships or the collective, who you are becoming and how you show up is changing.

There’s no pressure to leap right now. Just to begin to understand where you are headed. Maybe you feel like something is not working the way it used to. Maybe the old forms have dried up and the new ones haven’t shown themselves yet. That’s exactly where this moon wants to find you. Not in the perfection of clarity and strength. But in the rawness of the conflicts and in the honesty of truth that is not giving up.

If you feel discouraged, that’s part of the path. If you feel like you’ve given everything and nothing’s come back yet, this moon sees you. And she knows. She is not asking for proof or a solution. Just your openness and presence. Just the willingness to believe in your true self that wants to create and wants to love even though life hasn’t gone the way you imagined. Even with the wounds and mistakes. Even in the dismantling happening all around us.

Let this full moon remind you that the blossoming of knowing and preparation you’re doing now matters. Preparation might look like setting intentions, taking an honest assessment and reflection on who you are now, where you’ve been and where you’re going. Or it may manifest us something more tangible and clear. Allow your openness and curiosity to explore inwardly or outwardly. Try something new that speaks to your inner truth, no matter how subtle or small.

A Ritual to Work with This Moon:

Write a letter or a list or a sentence of what is within yourself or in your life that you are ready to release and let go of that does not align with your honesty, integrity, or truth anymore. If you need a prompt you can pull a few tarot or oracle cards to ask what it is you need to let go of before writing.

Choose and hold one small special stone, seed or crystal and allow your hands to transmit the newly growing version of who you are becoming or the new version of your inner truth into the object… this can be poetic, fragments, loose ideas, images. It doesn’t have to be a full clear logical picture. Take your time with this, close your eyes, allow your heart to speak.

Light a candle (red or what your intuition tells you).

Burn the paper from the flame of the candle as you say:

“I release the old and outdated with love and gratitude”.

Put the stone, seed or crystal on top of an ice cube that you put in a small container with a lid (use one or as many ice cubes as your intuition tells you) and say:

“Full moon show me the way for my honesty, truth and integrity to root within and into the world. Show me how I need to prepare and bring me your auspicious blessings”.

Jupiter rules this full moon and he wants to bring you those auspicious blessings. He wants to help humanity evolve and prosper, each individual, relationships, families, and the collective.

Once the candle is done burning, close the lid on the ice turning into water with a stone on it and keep it on your altar or in a sacred place for 24 hours. The next day drink the water and keep the stone or seed on your body or on your altar.

The journey may not be simple or easy. This full moon asks you to embrace the challenge and step out of the comfort zone. Trust in your becoming and take the first step onto the invisible bridge, into the new.



What You Bury Doesn’t Disappear

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Whatever you look away from doesn’t vanish, it goes underground.

It slips into the shadow, where everything else you didn’t want to feel or couldn’t safely express has already been exiled. The ignored, the overwhelmed, the denied. And once there, it doesn’t disappear. It joins everything else waiting to be seen, to be felt, to be brought back into the wholeness of who you are.

Feelings. How many difficult feelings have you turned away from because they made you feel guilty, weak, or too exposed? Or maybe you turned away from your feelings simply because they were too painful and inconvenient. Perhaps it was the messaging growing up telling you that to not express feelings is to be strong, neither parent attuning to your feelings as a child.

But feelings don’t dissolve by being avoided. They stay lodged in the body, in the psyche, in the soul. And unless they’re welcomed back, they shape us from the shadows.

Gifts. Yes, even your gifts get exiled. Like being a naturally gifted artist in a family that valued practicality. Or a sensitive, empathic boy growing up in a culture of toxic masculinity. The world doesn’t always know what to do with your magic. And when it doesn’t get received, your brilliance goes into hiding too. Our gifts are specific. They are meant to be nourished, not left to grow mold in the dark.

Wounds. Whether it’s the big ruptures, abuse, neglect, major harm or the slow drip of subtle betrayals that alter the shape of a child’s sense of self, the wounds remain. And if they aren’t brought to the surface for healing, they calcify. The wounds we still carry from past lives come with us into our present life. This is what karma really is, the soul’s unfinished healing, waiting for us in this life.

And even deeper than the personal shadow is the ancestral shadow. This is the ocean floor of the psyche.

This level of the shadow doesn’t just belong to you but to everyone who came before you in the bloodline. The alcoholism, the rage, the abandonment, the silence. The unspoken rules. The buried grief. The patterns that repeat themselves across generations until someone, maybe you, stops and says: no more.

You are not responsible to heal the bloodline but you can offer back to the ancestors what you no longer wish to hold. Whatever healing you do on yourself heals seven generations forward and seven generations back. 

You don’t have to excavate the entire shadow. It’s not about perfection. You can become more aware. And in that awareness, there’s power. You can become more attuned and healing is the result of attunement.

Shadow work isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s quiet, a daily act of turning toward what was once turned away from, with compassion instead of fear. This is how you reclaim yourself, not by fixing what’s broken, but by seeing what was exiled and saying, you belong.

What is an Archetype?

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To understand what an archetype is I first want to explain the structure of the psyche, real simple. This is not hard science so it’s important to understand that when describing the psyche and any invisible structure beyond the five sense, we have to imagine and feel into them, holding the idea of the structure loosely.

The psyche is the entirely of your being beyond the physical form and it is made up of three main parts. Ego, personal shadow and collective shadow. Shadow can also be called subconscious or unconscious.

Ego is the aware you, the conscious self. All the thoughts, feelings, motivations and imaginings you are aware of happening within you is ego.

The personal shadow is a place where all you are unaware of lives. Thoughts, feelings, wounds, gifts, true self aspects all get submerged by ego (whether you are aware of the submerging or not) into the personal shadow and live there growing gnarlier over time. Growing gnarly is real. If you submerge anger it will grow into rage. If you submerge sorrow it will grow into despair. If you submerge your true self it may also grow gnarly in some fashion and turn into a dark personality. (I am using the adjectives dark and light as a metaphor describing actual light and voidness of light).

The dark personality is the personality void of light. Light is awareness, what ego can see. Without awareness and hiding in the personal shadow, a very free spirit true self may grow into a careless rebellious dark personality like Marla from Fight Club as an extreme example. Often the true self gets submerged into the shadow early in life and the dark personality it becomes seizes ego unconsciously and runs the control decks. More on this later.

The collective shadow is the transpersonal part of self. Beyond self. It is where all collective beings live as well as your ancestors. The collective beings are called Archetypes. They have no physical form. Spiritual guides, gods, goddesses, and angels are some versions of archetypes. The archetypes have a sentience and will of their own. They rise up from the collective shadow and express themselves through the personal shadow and ego. This is just how they roll.

The collective shadow is just as much a a part of you as the ego is a part of you. You are just as much a collective being as you are an individual being. To understand this think about how all of life on earth is symbiotic. Life feeds on life. Bacteria needs a host just like archetypes need ego to express their nature.

Jung referred to archetypes as collective instincts we inherit the moment we are born and he named his own pantheon of archetypes. The Mother archetype is the instinct to mother within all of us, for example. The only way ego can connect to the archetypal world is to name them and imagine them. Tarot names them, astrology names them, Jung named them, the many cultural pantheons of gods and goddesses named them. Ego names the unseen to understand the unseen.

An archetype, whether seen as a collective instinctual force or a sentient being, has a will of its own that rises up from the collective shadow and into the personal shadow where it acts like a magnet pulling aspects in the personal shadow around it’s gravitational force. You can see this like planets forming a galaxy around a central sun. The sun is the archetype and the planets are the various aspects in the personal shadow. This galaxy is what Jung called a complex because it is made up of shadowed self parts connecting with an archetype to influence the ego. When a self part connects to an archetype it is called “constellating”. This slightly shifts the metaphor to one a constellation instead of a galaxy but it works. Parts of self constellate with the archetypes to influence ego.

The best way to see ego is like a control deck. I think of the deck of the main ship in Star Trek. The controls are constantly being taken by different aspects. All day long. Might be the abandoned inner child constellates with the Venus archetype to influence ego to constantly seduce men to feel worthy and needs to keep having sex to feel loved and avoid feeling empty. Or it might be the shunned inner child constellates with the Fool archetype to influence ego to never abide by any authority and this person can never hold down a job without having a panic attack or feeling trapped. Two examples of how these constellations in the personal shadow can cause a lot of suffering. Can the constellations cause happiness? Yes, it works in all ways.

The psyche is a never ending kaleidoscope of inner aspects taking turns running the control deck. I always ask myself, who is manning the deck? It is always changing.

You can say that all the gods and goddesses from every pantheon, all the planets, stars, and asteroids in astrology, and all major arcana of the tarot any any divination system are archetypes. When understanding astrology know that we aren’t speaking of the actual planet in the sky that is Venus, for example. We are speaking of the spirit that occupies the planetary body. Not all archetypes can be connected to a physical body but some can such as the astrological archetypes because the spirit of planetary bodies are collective.

An archetype is a collective force versus an individual force. Though you could ponder that even the human being is an archetype as each psyche is made up of individual and collective aspects. Jung did say that ego is also an archetype. I have felt into this and fo me it feels true that the “I” witnessing being a me is the Oneness witnessing a kaleidoscope of archetypes constellating a human being named Michelle. If you can feel into this last sentence you know what I mean and if not, don’t try too hard to grasp it.

You can’t really learn this stuff mentally. It won’t work. You’ll just wind up spouting grandiose concepts. To engage with this knowledge you have to feel it. You have to merge with it. The universe is alive. Earth is alive. Everything is alive. Archetypes are living beings constantly connecting with ego and influencing your will, desires, thoughts and choices. You want to connect with these archetypes to learn about them.

To connect with the archetypes is to create rituals, journal, paint, dance, imagine, take journeys, and work with them creatively in any fashion that is most alive for you.

You can use any archetypal system too. Tarot, astrology, Jungian archetypes, etc. The ego names them but they have no names. When you work with the archetypes you begin to have control over them versus them controlling you. And by you, I mean ego, the conscious self. The archetypes are always possessing ego whether you are aware or not.

I will use myself as an example. When I was a young woman and still very unhealed and disconnected from my body, the high priestess archetype came up from the collective shadow.

Suddenly, I had psychic skills and was able to delve deeply into the personal and collective shadow to retrieve whatever information I needed. The high priestess is queen of the unconscious world of wisdom living beneath ego awareness. She never left me and is now the main archetype I work with on the daily. I connect to her as Isis and sometimes Danu or Quan Yin. But back then, when physical life in my body was filled with suffering, she took over. Ego escaped into her. I abandoned my physical life for a psychic life only.

This happens with highly sensitive types who have been through childhood trauma and connect to the high priestess or any spiritual archetype. If ego abandons the physical due to too much trauma and lives too much in the spiritual world through the archetypal possession of a spiritual archetype, imbalance ensues. Ego and body are equally important and needed as much as soul and the invisible realms often labeled as higher realms which implies more important. Not true. All dimensions and aspects of life are of equal value and importance.

The archetype doesn’t care what it’s doing to ego. It will grow and inflate and keep on expressing until ego says no and creates boundaries. You don’t have to be aware this is happening either. A very dark example of this would be a cult leader who thinks he is god incarnate. Actually, the hierophant archetype has taken over the cult leader’s ego without him realizing it and due to his childhood trauma (is there any cult leader that does not come from childhood trauma?) he escapes the ordinary human world and gets swallowed up by the archetype until he believes he is god.

That is an extreme example of the danger of archetypal possession. What happened with my archetypal possession is the high priestess became a sanctuary for me while I needed her to be. Eventually other archetypes rose up to help me incarnate fully into my body (mostly Saturn and Pluto) and the high priestess found her proper place at my round table. I call it my round table but call it anything, your particular crew of archetypes, ancestors and allies that are a part of your psyche and here to help you heal and grow.

I have been merging with the archetypes consciously for many years and it’s become just the way it is now. I find immense comfort in them and sometimes awe. For instance, If I need discipline, I work with Saturn. Or rather, when discipline needs me, Saturn rises. The constant question is, who is visiting me now and why?

The natal chart and tarot deck are my go-to maps to know who is working with me and why. I teach this work and use this work with clients as a depth therapist because of first using it for myself. When working with archetypes life gets easier, you don’t have to do all the work and you can become more fully actualized through them. When you call Saturn or when Saturn calls you, discipline gets easier and you can really engage with it in a new way…unless there’s a complex blocking flow. Healing the complexes essentially set the archetypes free within you. But that’s for another blog.

Reflections on Fear…

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Fear is the inspiration for this blog. Good old human creature fear and how it effects the psyche, the body, and the human experience. My intention for this blog is simply to reflect. I want to honor the process of contemplating, intuiting, and understanding in service of allowing the unconscious to unravel in the moment…

When fear is pushed deeply into the shadow of the psyche, going unfelt and unseen, it manifests as physical ailments. Digestive issues. Constipation if the human body retracts and tries to protect itself. Or diarrhea, the other direction, if the temperament of the creature tends to run more anxious than withholding…

Attachment wounds reveal themselves inwardly as much as outwardly. When we are not securely attached (most of us) we tend toward avoidance or anxiousness, the former being anxious too but withholds/hides/avoids and so it doesn’t seem to present emphatically.

It’s not just how we are raised that determines our attachment style and wounding, it’s the temperament of the body which has everything to do with the multigenerational family system. Avoidance style (the island) or anxiousness style (the wave) may be a pattern running down the DNA line. Digestive issues may run in the family through the female or male bloodline with each creature carrying fear that gets pushed into the shadow.

Feelings have to be felt to be released. Healing is feeling. Must fear be felt to be released?

How hard might it be to feel fear if you are wired to push it into the shadow and present with digestive issues and probably a neurotic mind. Usually when fear is hiding in the shadow the mind is defensive, controlling, and fanatical or extreme in certain ways to compensate for the unseen fear.

Fear is big. The country is big with fear. The family system is big with fear. The creature if big with fear because living a human existence is scary. We are not given any guarantee of safety, control, or happy endings. People experience undeserved tragedy all the time.

I think about animals that experience tragedy and how they are not conscious of themselves with a cognitive mind so they don’t have the ability to think, “why did this happen to me,” or “I am not good enough” or “this person is bad and I am a victim of evil,” or any such conclusion that only a self aware cognitive mind could come up with through the thinking process.

Fear is not the summation the mind makes. Fear is present in the body and then leaves. In animals, it presents and leaves if the animal gets to live a healthy life but trauma from abuse or neglect will collect just as much in their bodies, proving that the consequences of trauma live in the body first and foremost. The human mind only makes it worse.

The body collects what is not processed and this is a region of the shadow. I am thinking of an abused or neglected doggie living on the street that presents as mean and vicious (the wave) or through slinking and hiding away (the island) if anyone approaches to bring love. The doggie’s body is filled with fear from the trauma of being abused or neglected.

The only way to heal the doggie is exposure therapy to love.. First the doggie must be tricked into being caught (maybe a piece of food in a cage). Next the doggie must slowly be introduced to loving care, allowing her body to slowly release the fear and accept love. This proves that love is the healer of fear.

Humans are the same. Fear collects in the body from trauma, abuse, or maybe there is no abuse/trauma but there is the multigenerational absence of affection, attunement and acknowledgment of being seen, heard, and loved without conditions (the feminine side of the psyche).  Only love can release the fear the body holds.

Not some parlor trick for the mind. Ok, I have a bit of irreverence for certain modalities of therapy I think trick the mind into “feeling better” by changing the chemicals but I don’t think this is healing. I think it is temporal band-aid. I feel true healing is always rooted in the experience of being loved, listened to, and acknowledged.

The feminine aspect of life knows this. Knows that love heals all. And what is love? Love is how we behave. It is not a concept. It is not an ideal. It is how we care for the self, others, and life. How we show up. How we tend to fear. Fear, like with the doggie, will leave the body with love. It just will.

Self love is a start and usually the base of love. Self love releases fear beginning with not listening to self-sabotaging neural pathways, the well worn path, the shitty narrative in the mind that says, “I am not good enough, who do I think I am” etc….or the other direction of, “they are ruining my existence, they are to blame for how I feel,” etc.

Ignoring the sabotaging narrative is key and the base of self love but then what? It is it truly different for everyone. For me, self love is practicing mindfulness so I don’t listen to the narrative of doom, keeping up with my exercise and creativity practices that make me feel balanced, inspired, and confident, and being nurturing and easy on myself.

I truly believe in being easy on the self. Sure, there is a time to face fear with a wand of courage and determination. But back to the doggie, if you push him he will fall apart. If you give him time, patience, understanding and slowly expose him to love and new life, he will heal.

I am somebody who needs to go very easy on myself in order to heal, maybe more so than the average person (is there an average person?) and so I attest to this path as being pertinent in healing because I have been healing with great results over time. I speak from my own lived experience and find that the gentle path brings proven results.

Fear needs to be handled with skill and fear is attachment. We fear because are attached to security, health, love, and success….as we should be. Nothing wrong with being human! Yet in this messed up world with broken bloodlines riddled with too much suffering, we need major skill to bring healing to fear.

Like the doggie, learning to let more love in is an exposure process. Love will dissolve fear but it’s so scary to let love in. Letting love in may feel scarier than the fear. What a paradox.

Unfortunately the doggie cannot respond to humor but I think for humans, humor is a major healing tool for exposing the self to the fear of letting love in.

My god can we laugh at life for a second? I say this with emphasis because my own typical tendency to take life too seriously. You could say it is a privilege to have a light heart…and…it is also temperament. There are those who seem to have a light heart even when enduring the worst of circumstances.

But don’t beat yourself up if you have a heavy heart. I have a fairly heavy heart and I love my heavy heart because it allows me to sit with people in their deepest pain and give love, it allows me to analyze the psyche and discover new territory, it allows me to sit for hours and write about big ideas. I would not want to be romping around like a Pixie but more power to the Pixie.

Honor your temperament is what I am getting at here. You can heal from fear with a heavy or light heart but even heavy hearts can heal from humor. Laughing is vital. Laughing at the self releases the grip of those pesky narratives that shadow the fears.

Life is unsafe. We can create as much safety as possible by living in sheltered homes and communities with organized cultural institutions that allow us to experience more of the light and less of the pain. We can learn to love more so that we don’t have to feel unsafe with each other too.

At the same time, life is unsafe, suffering exists and it always will. People will cause violence and tyranny over others. Nature can wipe out a community in one cataclysm. Illness strikes even the most healthy. The dark side of life is not evil and cannot be eradicated. We can reduce suffering and achieve balance but we cannot be rid of darkness. Dark and light are equal forces of nature.

Fear will rise again and again, Fear is as natural as love.

All this being said, learning how to deal with fear is more pragmatic than trying to get rid of fear forever in the mind by demanding reassurance of continual safety (the wave) or through avoiding fear by living in one safe routined rut forever (the island).

I am all about living a fulfilling life where we get to keep growing and evolving each day and this is rooted in healing.

There is no healing arrival point where all fear is banished. Yet results are real. Healing the psyche brings more peace, love, fulfillment, ease, and all the other desired adjectives that balance out fear that will rise again and again.

I radically accept fear. I radically accept life not being safe. I radically accept the dark and light aspects of being human. I radically accept the patient process, the gentle path, love, and humor as medicine. This is my deepest reflection…

The more there is acceptance around fear the more body can stop expressing fear through digestive problems or other ailments, the more heart can let in love, the more mind can let go of self sabotaging narratives and the more soul or true self can rise out of the shadow and express in this world.

 

 

 

Archetype Talk and Diving into the Fool

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One of the groups I facilitate is taking a transformative healing journey through the major arcana of the tarot, as The Fool, the first archetype out of twenty two that make up the tarot. This morning I feel inspired to write about The Fool and every now and then focus the blogs on these specific archetypes.

An archetype is a sentient collective instinct.

Sentient because the archetypes have a life of their own, independent of the individual, larger than the individual. Transpersonal.

The archetypes live in the collective unconscious. In a shamanic framework this may be known as the underworld. In the indigenous framework, which we all come from as we are all animal creatures of earth, the archetypes are known as gods and goddesses. Indigenous wisdom of life is connected to nature because we are nature and hence, wisdom is connected to the natural world.

The archetypes are just as much a part of nature as a tree or a layer of the earth’s interior. The psyche, individual and collective, is a part of nature not detectable by the five senses but detectable to felt senses experiences on deeper levels. These deeper levels of awareness are not in fashion in today’s religious or atheist black and white cultural narrative, but they are real and exist.

An archetype is a collective instinct because it is an urge we all share in common.

The urge to dive into a new experience with no past or future is the instinct of The Fool. The instinct to mother, create, nurture, and love unconditionally is the The Empress…and so forth. Whether you use the tarot or another archetypal system is does not matter. You can use Jungian, tarot, astrology, pantheons, or channel your own names for the archetypes….it is up to you.

The archetypes don’t have names and they live in their own dimension as psychic nature forces that the ego names in order to have a relationship with them.

Depth perspectives in psychology (Jungian and beyond), occult magic, shamanism, astrology, and tarot all narrate the same archetypal forces with different titles, beliefs, and frames of reference. The important thing is to choose what narration and belief fits you the best.

Naming, beliefs, and narration itself is a mental process that helps the ego connect with life. It is a function of being human not an objective solid truth outside of our minds. We get so caught up in the mental narration of beliefs in culture, warring over who is right, needing to be right, craving power, or even just wanting to put your name on a system of thought and get recognition for it…all of that is ego play and nothing more.

Nature cannot be claimed.

Back to The Fool!

I love The Fool because this archetype is free of the past and future. The Fool lives in the present. The Fool literally does not have a past or future.

One of the most literal understandings of The Fool is the fetus being born into the world for the first time. The brand new infant has no memory of the past, no awareness of a future, and no understanding of linear time. The new born does not even know it is different or separate than the external world.

A infant experiences being one with all of life. This is The Fool.

From a more spiritual perspective, the soul dives into the body of the mother but once nestled in, forgets where it came from. This is the first deep dive of the soul. Incarnation. To forget the origin and only know the absolute present is The Fool.

From a healing perspective, The Fool is the instinct to start anew with no preconceived notions, feeling the urge to experience life in a new way, forgetting the hurt, wounds, stories, and the behaviors of the past. In relationships this could herald a fresh new perspective in the relationship you are in, a new relationship, or a returning relationship wanting to start over in a new way. Internally, The Fool invokes the urge to be new inside…and it always starts from within no matter if relationships, jobs, locations, or circumstances are asking for newness in your life.

To experience internal and external life anew the healing has much to do with letting go of what was.

This is not so easy….but that’s the brilliant beauty of the archetypes. They are sentient transpersonal forces that give us help, life, internal shifts, miracles, and ease in the form of an urge inside to express their agenda.

They need us to express their agenda. We need them to express our agenda. It’s a two way street.

If The Fool rises up in your psyche, you will not only feel the urge to begin anew and be only in the present, you will also find it easier to let go of the old because The Fool has got your back.

Caution may also be needed as the archetypes don’t stop, don’t hold back, have no concern for human needs, The Fool will metaphorically or literally throw you off a cliff and cause careless action in the shadow of its urge if you don’t learn how to have good boundaries with its instinctual force.

Part of consciously working with archetypes is understanding each force has a light side and shadow side. A friend recently said that it wasn’t about the coin or black and white taking of sides but life is more like a prism. I love her prism metaphor and paraphrase it here to say that the archetypes contain a prism of urges from destruction to creation and they don’t care about how their force effects humans. This is not because they are devious or malicious, no…it is simply because they are not human and so they are not moral story makers like we are. They simply express with no limitation until the human ego puts up a limitation.

It’s up to the human ego to say yes and no the archetypal urges that rise up in the psyche.

For instance, I often feel The Fool rise up in me to blow up my entire life and move to a different city. I say no to this urge from The Fool unless it fits in with my chosen plans and soul narrative because it would be destructive and careless of me to do this. The Fool rises up in me just as often to chuck my beliefs about myself and relationships so that I don’t become dogmatic or rigid in my thinking. This Fool urge I always embrace to cleanse my psyche.

Consciously working with the archetypes is a wonderful way to connect with the transpersonal and feel supported and loved from within. We are never alone.

Consciously working with the archetypes is a wonderful way to create your life for as much as you are able in this world. It is a wonderful way to connect with nature and your psyche.

There are many tools to connect. As a therapist, I work with clients to connect and consciously work with the archetypes using tarot, ritual, and journeying. I use the same methods on myself on a regular basis. I also take the journey along with the others in my group. We form our crucible and journey together. Each time I journey as The Fool I get to start anew and the journeys get more specific over the years.

You can take this journey too in therapy, in a group, in a class, through watching videos or reading books…it’s up to you. You can use the tarot or Jungian archetypes. You can use a specific pantheon or blend pantheons. You can set up an alter for the archetype you are working with or paint, draw, sing, dance or creatively express it however you wish. I want to stress taking the creative and individualized path because how you connect best is what is most effective.

Is The Fool rising up within you?

 

 

 

Healing in the West, Heart, Connection

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This blog will cover the west, the final direction to discuss in the four directions healing process. Read the blog “The Defeat Story and the Transcending True Self,” and the following direction blogs before reading this one, if you haven’t already.

The west is the heart. Here we heal through connection. The attachment wounds live here and are healed here. In the west we also dive into the deep sea of the psyche to discover and awaken the true self, archetypes, wounds, gifts and all aspects hidden from ego that are asking for acknowledgment. The west is where psychological depth work is helpful to integrate the aspects of self through differentiating them. Uncovering, acknowledging, and expressing all that wants out from the unconscious happens here. This is the direction of the heart. Honoring feelings. Going with the flow of inner wisdom. Being in relationship of all kinds, romantic, therapist, healer, friend, mother, father, sibling, pet, teacher, co-worker, etc. Through being in relationship with others outside the self and aspects within the self, we heal. The heart is purified in the west which is connected to water. Water cleanses and renews. Forgiveness, acceptance, letting go and surrender all happen in the west.

In the therapy world we know that 90% of healing happens through the relationship of therapist and client, not from the skills learned or the narrative developed. True, it is vital to have physiological healing from trauma, anxiety, and stress as the foundation of all healing. After that, different narratives and skills work for different people to initiate healing. Yet healing through connection is the most powerful form of healing, for everybody.

It’s hard to talk about this using logic because it is mysterious as to why outside of the scientific understanding of mirror neurons and other brain development factors understood through the attachment theory lens. Science may show us the physiological foundation of how connection keeps the psyche healthy or corrupts the psyche. Beyond science, you could say that love makes the world go round or that connection is what we are all after and why we are here, underneath it all.

What gets broken in relationship can only be healed in relationship. This is not to say we cannot heal tremendously by healing ourselves in solitude or within. I have healed drastically through connection with self and I believe this is a vital relationship to nourish. At the same time, attachment wounds begin during the early brain development years of childhood and set the psyche up for adulthood. The attachment with the parents, siblings, family and peers is most important for developing into a healthy adult in terms of being able to experience secure attachment.

Secure attachment means that you can experience intimacy and connection with another that feels safe and nourishing. Most people have an attachment wound because most of us were born with some level of dysfunction in childhood. Addiction, abuse, neglect, personality disorders and mental illness, poverty, harshness, and ignorance from family and culture show up on a spectrum for every child.

What you experience as a child is much more intense than how you would experience the same thing as an adult. It’s best not to compare and say things like, “others had it much worse,” even if you are a privileged white male or other form of privilege. Abuse, neglect, addiction, harshness, personality disorders, mental illness, death, physical illness, ignorance, and loss can show up in every category of human. It’s important to take care of yourself without judgement.

Insecure attachment can show up as ambivalent, avoidant, or disorganized. If your parents or care takers, one or more, did not attune to your emotions and show affection and love but gave you structure you could depend on (meals, bedtime, clothing, schooling, shelter, etc) than you are likely to experience avoidant attachment.

If your parents or care takers, one or more, attuned to your emotions and showed affection and love but you had little or uncertain structure to rely upon, you are likely to experience ambivalent attachment.

If your parents or caretakers, one or more, lacked in providing both structure and emotional attunement or if there was abuse, you are likely to experience disorganized attachment.

An instructor of mine used the metaphor of a cup of liquid. The cup is the structure. The liquid is emotional attuning and expression of love an affection. If you had the cup and no liquid you may avoid intimacy and feel uncomfortable around it. If you had the liquid in a cracked cup, you may constantly doubt that you are loved and feel ambivalence all the time, needing constant reassurance and filled with anxiety. If you were abused or received no liquid in a cracked cup, you may avoid intimacy sometimes and other times enter connection with high anxiety and insecurity, doubting and spinning in your mind.

These are tendencies and you may not experience what I am describing here but what I share is based upon scientific research you can look up if you are interested. Attachment theory is what you would want to research to understand more.

Attachment wounds tend to show up mostly in romantic unions because they most mirror the parent child relationship. In a romantic relationship you have the opportunity to heal the attachment wounds of the past. This is done through recognizing how you are projecting mom, dad, brother, sister, uncle, grandfather etc, onto the partner and then pulling back your projection. Once you own your reaction instead of blaming and accusing, you can work through the issues in therapy or with your partner through dialogue and connecting.

Romantic relationships are not meant to be walks into sunsets. That’s all a bunch of brainwash. In fact, real love with a partner only first begins once the projections start falling and you can see the other for who they truly are.

In the beginning, we project our ideal mate onto the partner. This ideal mate lives inside of us as our inner counterpart to the conscious self. Our unconscious self is the ideal mate to our conscious self. In a sense, we all look for ourselves in a partner when we are unable to love past projection. Projection is not bad, it just is and it is how we fall in love. It is how we get into relationships. It’s the honey moon stage. But once the honey moon is over you see your ideal beautiful mate is not the person you believed them to be. Do you still want to love them. Do they still want to love you?

If you both still want to love each other and are willing to own up to your projections and take responsibility for healing through the intimacy, then you move on to the next stage of intimacy.

Many life long couples never do this. Instead, they may always live with not feeling close to their partner and fall into the same roles their parents fell into, repeating history. This work is only for the brave and for those who want to heal, experience deeper intimacy, and true love. By true love, I mean love that is true and not the sunset walk. I mean love that is based upon a commitment to love one another through the storms and once the projections fall for who each other really is. This should not feel like a life sentence in jail. You should enjoy being with your mate. If you don’t, you are not with the right person. If you enjoy each other but hard issues get in the way, you can heal the issues if both are willing.

Some couples have it easier too and just get along or mutually don’t make a big deal out of the conflicts and are not on the path of healing and evolving in a therapeutic way. Other couples love and enjoy each other so much that they are willing to work on their issues that show up intensely in romantic union due to both people being really intense. Sometimes one partner is willing and the other is not. The spectrum always exists and we each have our own relationship karma to experience.

I don’t want this entire blog to be on romantic attachment. I am somebody who has spent very little time in romantic relationships and I have healed my attachment wounds without it because the few times I was in a romantic union, the mate was not willing to work on his stuff or we were not in love or timing was off. I have healed largely through friendships and family relationships.

I know that when the right man is by side, I will experience attachment healing as well but I don’t want to make it the only way. Our culture over-values romantic relationships as the be-all end-all. But for many, they don’t want that form of relationship. Or they want a different version of it. Point being, however you connect with others is valuable and healing in the west happens through connection.

As far as healing through the self goes, this is done through depth work. Discovering you. Within the psyche many aspects of self dwell. Individual aspects and archetypes such as the wounded self, inner child, the protector, the mother, father, shadow, trickster, on and on. If you take the time and effort in therapy or on your own to discover and integrate these inner aspects you will experience deep healing from the attachment wounds of childhood. You will become more whole, balanced, and blossom into your true self.

This work can be done through Jungian and archetypal psychology and you can use astrology, tarot and other maps of the psyche to understand your inner landscape. This work is my favorite and I would place myself in the west, if I had to pick a direction. The work of each direction is equally needed to heal but the west is where I love to play.

The spiritual lessons dwell in the west too. Forgiveness, acceptance, compassion, acceptance, redemption, and tolerance all stem from attachment wound healing and we can also surrender to spirit to heal and learn these soul deep lessons.

Relationship with spirit, in my opinion, is as vital as the parent child attachment. You can translate this transpersonal relationship to meet any belief. If you are atheist, spirit is nature or the larger cosmos. If you are religious, spirit is god or the gods and goddesses. If you are spiritual but not religious spirit may be the universe or the divine, source creation or whatever word works best. This relationship is not metaphorical. We are a small part of a larger force.

There is a ton of proof for how healing occurs when surrendering to a higher power. People in AA know this well. I know this well, as surrendering to the transpersonal has healed me via miracle and also healed alongside me, carrying much of the burden of my human life, helping me out in ways more powerful than any human could provide.

I am probably on the far end of the spectrum and in a smaller category of people who have healed attachment wounds through connection with self and spirit more than with human beings. This being said, you can heal through connection with pets just as much as people. And with nature too. Let’s not box ourselves in. Connection is expansive.

The spiritual lessons are simple to understand in the mind but hard to achieve. Can you accept the injustices that have happened to you? Can you forgive your abuser? Can you have compassion for the short comings of others? Can you have tolerance for those more ignorant than you? I have found in my own life that focusing on soul lessons has brought me the most inner peace and well being.

We cannot control what happens outside of ourselves. Safety is largely an illusion. Back in the day, nature was the attacker. Today, the attackers have grown due to systemic illness in humanity and also, well, nature has a dark side that just is. We are constantly faced with being treated badly, being abused, neglected, becoming ill, getting into accidents, on and on. Life is filled with tension, injustice, power struggles and pain.

Healing in the west from the suffering of the psyche in response to the pain of life is about healing the heart. Forgiveness sets the heart free from karma and rage. Acceptance allows the heart to metabolize and release trauma. Compassion allows the heart to connect with others, as does tolerance. The spiritual lessons are pragmatic in nature, for they allow us to experience more peace, self love, love for others and the big U.

Unconditional love, the lesson of all lessons.

These lessons are tall orders and perhaps why we have spiritual practices, religions, and mystical tools to help us heal, transcend, transform, and grow. Spiritual bypassing is a thing too to be wary of too. For instance, true forgiveness comes from experiencing suffering, anger, sorrow and working your way through empowerment and into acceptance before forgiveness is genuinely felt.

Spiritual bypassing would be mentally saying you forgive while stuffing all of your painful feelings into the shadow because you judge your own feelings and glom onto spiritual morality to keep you feeling good and safe. This is common and the reason why societies scapegoat groups of people and demonize corrupt leaders. Unless we process our own feelings stuffed into the shadow we will project our feelings onto the other. This is the collective level of connection that needs healing.

I would say healing in the west is the most complex of the directions. I could write on and on about it but feel this blog is already too long. I will end it with mentioning water. Water flows. Water cleanses. Water drowns. Water purifies, Water is our feelings. Our feelings form connection. Connection is why we are all here. Being an individual within the collective, connected to self and the other in harmony, is the healing of the west. This occurs from healing the past and being able to show up with loving awareness in the present. May it be so for us all.

Hope through Tragedy

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Today’s blog is inspired by a friend going through a very difficult time who suggested I write about enduring hope when I requested a topic. This blog is for her and everyone traversing their own version of tragic circumstances.

What is hope?

Hope is an archetype….an archetype called The Star, according to the ancient wisdom of the tarot.

Archetypes are the collective instinctual drives we all share in common and inherit the moment we are born, according to Jung.

Archetypes are the gods and goddesses, according to the ancients and indigenous people.

Whichever way you want to see archetypes, see them as sentient energies that live in their own place and this is the place we all birth from on a soul level. The collective unconscious is our mother birthing the individual psyche. The archetypes are transpersonal helpers, instincts, forces, and beings.  Hope is a goddess, a god, a sentient energy, and a collective instinct.

Hope is the “light when all lights go out” as said in Lord of the Rings when Frodo is trapped by a deadly giant spider and needs the light of hope to literally not die.  Victor Frankl wrote a book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he links feeling hope to the chances of survival for concentration camp victims in Nazi Germany. Could this really be true? Could hope keep us alive?

What we endure as humans is beyond rational comprehension…

From the natural tragedies of break-ups, death of loved ones, illness, and sudden losses of all sorts….to the diseased type of tragedies that stem from multigenerational trauma and systemic oppression such as sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, prejudice, poverty, and mistreatment of humans, animals, and the planet on many levels….human life and tragedy are bound together.

You cannot answer why on a spiritual level without finding a lesson in the darkness. When you endure hope through tragedy you come out the other side of it with more compassion, more liberation, more knowledge, more love, more understanding. This is a truth of human kind.

When you collapse into tragedy with a sense of doom, blame, punishment, despair and resentment you come out the other side more bitter, closed off, abusive to self or others, hateful, and sick. This is also a truth of human kind.

I want to be careful here and say that every feeling needs an outlet. Hope is not turning a frown upside down. It is not putting a positive spin on a terrible situation. Horrible experiences happen. Unfair circumstances happen. Nobody should spiritually bypass the feelings of anger, despair, resentment, rage, and resignation (among many other feelings) by saying, “this tragedy is meant to be because it will make me stronger, wiser, loving, and aware.”

The process is key and the journey is everything. Feelings are like poop and like chemical storms. What happens if you don’t let yourself poo because you tell yourself it is wrong or bad to poo? What happens if you try to stop a raging hurricane? You can’t stop a storm and not letting yourself poo will make you sick.

All feelings need time and space to be honored and felt.  The key to moving feelings out of the body is to not wrap a mental story around the feeling. Feel the resentment when your partner betrays you but don’t tell yourself you are piece of shit and it’s your fault or whatever the story may be. Keep stories off the feelings and use your mind to keep repeating, “I feel resentment” as you find a way to express it.

Express feelings through exercising, making art, acting, singing, venting to a friend, dancing, cooking, cleaning…find your way and let the feeling out purely without a narrative of why and what the feeling means.

I promise you, the feeling will pass as every storm and every bowel movement does. I am being crude on purpose. Negative feelings are crude. They are not elegant and they don’t smell good but they still need to be honored and let out.  If you let your feelings out you won’t spiritually bypass them with answers, solutions, reasons, meaning-making. Even the best of tools can be used for harm.

Karma, which is simply the accumulation of feelings that are not released from the body (due to stories or what the Buddhists call “attachments”), can be turned into a scolding and judgmental concept when you say, “I won’t feel my anger because I don’t want to create karma.” If you don’t want to create karma, feel your feelings fully and let them pass through.

Astrology is a great tool that can also be used the wrong way if you won’t let yourself feel despair by saying something like, “I have a Scorpio eighth house moon so despair is in my chart.” The tiniest bit of reasoning, no matter how true, can shut the actual feeling off.

Many therapeutic modalities do this too. Re-framing, a cognitive-behavioral technique of turning a negative story into a positive story, may shut off a feeling of anger that needs to surface and be released. It is best to first release the feeling and then re-frame the story.

The point I want to make is that all tools in the spiritual-psychological-self-help tool box can be misused. Take positivity for example. Positivity is not about only feeling and thinking positive thoughts. For that secretly judges and scolds negativity and the act of judging and scolding is extremely toxic. True positivity is remembering that all feelings are innocent when felt and expressed purely.

The truth of how the human body works is that honored and expressed feelings leave the body and cause no harm. When feelings collect in shadow they change over time. They putrefy and create bigger uglier monsters that erupt as chronic illness, projections, neurosis, and imbalances of all forms.

When negative feelings are honored and expressed they leave the body and hope has room to enter. Hope needs room to enter. Hope wont bludgeon its way into the heart.

Why some people have an easier time feeling hope while others struggle to feel hope is part mystery and part rational. The mystery roots down into temperaments. We all have a temperament. No need to judge yourself if your temperament is not very hopeful. I am sure you have another archetypal instinct pouring through you in spades.

Every human is a unique finger print of qualities and this is not in our control. The mystery owns our temperament.

Yet even the most hopeless temperament may experience hope because hope is an archetype we all connect with in the collective unconscious or spirit world. Every. Single. One of us.

Sometimes it takes a little work, which leads to the rational understanding part. If you struggle to feel hope due to your temperament, due to struggles internal or external, or due to being pummeled by tragedy all at once…you can do two things to invoke hope.

First, you can stop rejecting your feelings with judgements and make the dedication to feel your feelings without a story wrapped around them. You may get help doing this with a therapist or healer, a friend, or even a pet. Maybe being with spirit in solitude or in nature is helpful.

Feeling your feelings without stories may take a while. Patience is not easy but needed. For most of us have been told by culture, family, or both that negative feelings are bad and wrong and we experience literal cut-off from feelings as a result. Many of us instead find refuge in various addictions and distractions such as drinking, working, working-out, over-analyzing, focusing on others in service, partying, escaping through drugs, eating, shopping, etc.

But it’s every human’s birthright to reconnect to our feelings. Everyone is capable.

Another aspect to check is the story showing up as identity.

Maybe you identify too much with despair, depression, resentment, etc. Identification is when it’s not really despair you are feeling, it’s the story of despair you are telling yourself and have been your whole life.

You can tell the difference between a feeling and a story by seeing if you identify with it. If you identify with being a depressed person, chances are you have cut-off from many feelings due to being stuck in an identity. Feelings of anger and even self-empowerment may be longing to express but cannot get through the depressed story or persona.

Sorting out feelings from the story, starving out the stories, honoring and expressing the feelings is a process. Process is the most important part. Nobody can bypass their own process. For some it is quick, some slow… but for most of us healing moves in a spiral. We make progress then fall backward yet when we do we are a little wiser, a little more aware, a little more loving.

The second thing is you can invoke hope through ceremony and ritual.  The ancients and indigenous were very connected using ritual and ceremony to stay healthy. Arhcetypes such as hope speak to the conscious-self through images, sound, taste, movement, and feeling. The ancients and indigenous also understand that we are literally made of the elements (earth, air, fire, water, ether) and we may call upon them to ground and connect self to earth.

Whether you partake in a more formal ritual, alone or with a group, or whether you express ritual through making art, singing, listening to a song or a sermon…. ritual and ceremony simply means that you intentionally use your creativity, feelings and senses to invoke the archetypes.

It is everyone’s birthright to invoke hope.

Invoking may be as simple as lighting a candle and calling upon hope in meditation. It may be as elaborate as performing a sacred dance on the full moon after calling the directions, elements, angels, ancestors and allies.

Invoking hope may be as simple as singing a song that makes you feel hope. It may be as elaborate as writing a song about hope and performing in a hospice setting to inspire those close to transitioning into death.

You might find the perfect crystal and invoke hope into the crystal, wearing it over your heart each day.

Or perhaps you put your hands around every glass of water you drink and invoke hope into the water.

Hope does not ask for a specific kind of ritual or ceremony. Hope only asks to be acknowledged.

Many leaders have hope moving so powerfully through their hearts that they inspire everyone around them. Martin Luther King Jr comes to mind as a perfect example of this. Hope catches flame. You may not intend to call upon hope but hope finds you anyway.

Sometimes hope enters the body so strongly that it wipes out any blocks in the way and washes you clean. We have all experienced this through listening to song, watching a movie, being moved by a speaker, looking at a sunset, into a loved one’s eyes, or a work of art.

Hope is always available to us no matter how dense the jungle of tragedy, betrayal and injustice we are traversing. May hope find its way into your heart in your darkest night of the soul.

Tarot Card Medicine

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Tarot cards may be used to predict the future and for healing. I have been a reader for about twenty seven years and professionally for about seventeen years and in my own practice, I have witnessed both aspects reveal through the cards. Not all readers use the cards to predict and many do not believe in prediction. I use the cards in service to the healing journey and if psychic predictions come through, I share them and include the sentence, “take this with a grain of salt, ” because I do not want to hold the power of an all seeing/knowing eye.

My intention is to be a very human ally and guide even if I channel psychic messages at times.

The way it works is that I connect with the divine/higher self/true self (whatever word works best for you to describe the transpersonal aspect). I channel messages using the cards as keys that unlock my unconscious to see into the unconscious and life of the client.

Sometimes I will channel a loved one who has passed or a specific soul guide. Sometimes I am given a picture of what is to come, usually in metaphor. The cards have predicted the endings and beginnings of relationships, lives, jobs as well as inner transformations/cycles for myself and clients for so many years that it does not seem like a big deal. Prediction is a very minor aspect of the Tarot’s medicine.

The medicine of Tarot is in their ability to illuminate what is hidden from the ego or conscious self. Many years ago, a Tarot client said to me, “you have uncovered in a half an hour what would have taken months in therapy”. My calling to bridge Tarot reading with therapy was sparked by her words. How often I have said in a reading, “this would be beneficial exploration for therapy.”  My desire is to be a messenger and a guide through the therapeutic journey.

I love using Tarot as a therapist. To be honest, I don’t see too much difference between these two roles. Every Tarot reader I know is a healer but the persona of therapist is more legitimized in our masculine-heavy culture. Although, there are many readers who are not healers in their soul-calling or their training. Point being, for those readers who are healers, the only thing separating them from having therapy clients is largely the way society does not legitimize the tarot reader as a healer. I have served on both sides of this fence and have a strong opinion, hence the diatribe. Back to the Tarot talk…

Tarot reveals different aspects of the unconscious. Archetypes, feelings, personality traits, vows, wounds, soul gifts, and the true self may be dwelling in the ocean deep of the unconscious. The magic of Tarot is when aspects are suddenly revealed to the  conscious self it…just feels right. The illumination feels so good, as if a missing piece has been returned to the whole. The illumination itself is healing. Though more than often, aspects emerge like tangled balls of yarn needing to be sorted out and understood. Family of origin, personality traits, vows, feelings, and multigenerational wounds create complexes and take time to process on a cognitive level.

Awareness and meaning-making is medicine for the conscious self while embodiment and expression is medicine for the unconscious self. What first brings unconscious content into conscious awareness are dreams, projections, triggers, creative expression, “freudian slips”/blurting out without awareness, ceremony/ritual, and images that speak directly to the unconscious, such as Tarot cards.

When aspects emerge from the deep you feel that relieving feeling of something missing that is returning even if it’s incredibly painful. We all crave integration. The great divide between the conscious and unconscious self is unhealthy and we long for wholeness. In therapy the sacred space to release and process what comes up and out is often painful. Just as often, joyful and confident parts emerge from the shadow, starving for the nourishment of conscious integration. Those of us who have over identified with the pain body relegate self-worth, self-love, and happiness into the shadow. Tarot cards illuminate all.

Another wonderful medicine of Tarot is the illuminating of one’s soul karma, purpose, and lessons. From the ego or conscious self’s vantage point, we seek the same basics; belonging, success, security, health and healthy relationships. But the soul does not seek these things. The soul seeks to fulfill its destiny, which is rooted in evolving its character as being spirit embodying as an individual self.

The soul is the meeting of spirit and matter.

For instance, the ego may want to experience success in work and experience suffering when success does not come over and over. But the soul may be wanting to evolve through learning how to let go of worldly success and to surrender to a deeper sense of fulfillment through unconditional love or the divine.

The ego may be attached to success as a way to validate its self worth. The client may come in with the problem of not being able to manifest success in their work life unaware of how their soul longs to feel self-worth through surrender to love. The cards will reveal this. Paradoxically, success in work may suddenly occur once this reversal of energy has taken place.

Everyone is at a different point on the journey with different soul lessons, purpose, callings. Tarot reveals the specifics.

Some people do not want to uncover in one session what might take months otherwise. Some people might not want a guide to tell them what is going on inside of them. For those who do not prefer this but still want to use the cards, I have them read their own cards. You do not need to logically understand the cards to read them. In fact, some of the best readings I’ve received were by those who never looked at a deck in their life.

By looking at any image or set of images, we speak directly with the unconscious. The client may do their own digging and meaning making.

Tarot cards may be used solely to explore the unconscious if the client does not believe in soul lessons, karma and the evolution of ensouled spirit. The cards may or may not be used to predict. They may or may not be used to understand the dynamics of relationships with others and the self. Tarot can be read as effectively by a novice as by an expert because intuition does not require practice to be strong and The Fool can bumble out unconscious wisdom through playfully making a story out of an image, without realizing it.