Tarot Card for the Day ~ November 1

Knight of Swords

Gawain

 

Okay, everybody!  Up’nat’em!!!  The Knight of Swords is a card of action.  Fiery, passionate action.  So if there’s something you’ve been putting off, today is the day to get started, with gusto!

However, I will also share that this Knight has occasionally been known to leap before he looks, to his later dismay.  And, he has from time to time found himself moving with such great passion that, all unknowing, he oversteps appropriate bounds and blows his own butt up in the process, occasionally taking a few nearby folks along with him.

SO:  Get moving. But check out the terrain thoroughly first.  And double-check that you are acting with integrity, and doing something that is in fact desired by all parties who have a vote.  That way you won’t paint your garage door in record time, but paint it the lavender shade that was discussed while tippling on New Year’s Eve rather than a pale ice gray (you know, the color circled on the paint chip that was left on top of your wallet before you headed to the hardware store, you doofus).

Go after it with fire, but go after it smart, clear and clean!     

Bright Blessings!

Tarot Card for the Day ~ October 31

The Fool

Percivale

 

I couldn’t have come up with a more perfect card for today (Hallowe’en, Samhain) if I had stacked the deck.  These little moments of being beautifully in sync with the Universe are just wonderful, and we all have them.  They are of course a reminder of what life can be like all the time – is meant to be all the time − if we each open to the amazing beings we are and really live that reality.  So BE it!

Okay, back to the card.  The Fool: As I say to my clients, this card does not mean that you are a fool or are inevitably going to be foolish today ~ at least not in the way our culture perceives foolishness.  I call this The Joseph Campbell card.  It’s the card that says, “You.  You.  Yeah, you.  FOLLOW YOUR BLISS.  NOW!  With joy, and hope, and excitement.  NOW!”

So it’s the card that offers you permission to be off on your personal quest.  The important aspect (and for some of us, hard work) is to actually own what our bliss is.  So this is the somewhat rambling response I’ve given to a few clients when they’ve asked. “What the hell does that mean?”

• Start by knowing what your heart’s true desire is. If necessary, take some time to hone your understanding of what that means to you, for today, anyway. 
• Then, no matter how impossible or illogical it may seem (i.e., I’m gonna write a children’s story about an orphan boy who goes to a school for wizards, and it’s going to be so beautifully done it’s going to earn me enough to support myself and my family for the rest of my life.  Like that could ever happen!) take your first single small step on the path that follows your bliss. 
• And see what that leads to. 
• Then take that next step. 
• And see what that leads to.  And so on.

The difference between The Fool and some other Tarot cards that offer permission to follow your own unique path is that The Fool in particular says, “Stay connected to your heart, moment by moment.  Know that your heart may change, and so your direction may change, moment by moment.  But DO NOT allow yourself to think less of yourself, your efforts or your path because of that.  Go where your heart tells you, and you will achieve more than most will ever even hope for.”

This is the card of the Sacred Fool, the Holy Fool.  The one who is open to divine inspiration and honors it by following his or her bliss, harm to none and love for all, always.

Brightest Blessings!

And Blessed Samhain/Happy New Year/ Happy Hallowe’en to all!   

Tarot Card for the Day ~ October 30

The Hermit

Lancelot in Exile

Now, you’d assume a card with a name like The Hermit would be pretty self-evident in its meaning, right?

Well for once, Yes!  In this case, anyway.  I mean, if you’ve been aching for some alone time away from the madding crowd to recuperate, center and get grounded, this is definitely your card of permission to do just that.  So take advantage of the favorable energies and let yourself have the time and space.  It will be valuable and helpful.

When this card shows up in a reading, I’m most likely to tell the client, “Ah, yes. Hermit.  It’s time to go really deep within  the self and do some much needed soul-searching.  Your intent will be to find the pure and beautiful light within yourself, acknowledge it, engage it, and begin bringing it out as a gift and a healing for the world.”  Please see whether you resonate to that aspect of the card today.  If you do, get going!

By the way, this card can also indicate a meeting with a wise person.  So don’t let that possibility slip by if you perceive a likely opportunity*.

Bright Blessings!

 

* I mean, you COULD call me to set up a reading, after all.  216-371-3433, or nealdragon@aol.com. (And no, this is NOT whoring.  It’s marketing.)

Tarot Card for the Day ~ October 29

Knight of Spears

Bedivere

 Okay, here’s another card for which my interpretation may deviate a bit from the pack, as it were.

I see the Knight of Spears as the card of The Eccentric.  It represents the individual who knows what her or his goal is and what the best path will be to get there − even though it may seem the least likely path, and perhaps even the least useful goal to almost everyone else.  (Imagine being the guy who tried to explain wanting to invent Silly Putty.)

The Knight of Spears will therefore have to put up with a great deal of sage (and mostly useless) advice from everyone else about what to aim for and where to go.  So the Knight will take all that in with grace and “goode humour” − to a point.  Once that point is passed, she or he will simply start down the path anyway.  And if that doesn’t give the “advisor” a hint, she/he will begin nudging the well-meaning obstacle out of the way.  And if that doesn’t work, she/he will walk her noble steed right over the blockage.  And if that doesn’t work, she/he will simply take out a spear and put it through the center of the chest….  You get the idea.

So, today, know your goal and your best path.  Be completely unsurprised if NOBODY else gets it.  Be true to your unique gifts and hopes – to your eccentricity, if you like.  But get going.

Bright Blessings!

Tarot Card for the day ~ October 28

Ace of Spears

The Grail Lance

Remember, Aces in any Tarot deck are cards of a new beginning.  How can you (how do you need to) begin your life anew, today, this moment?  What changes can you begin, even in small ways?  What potentials can you believe in, hope for, reach for and remember?

The Ace of Spears asks that you become clear about something you want, or some goal you want to achieve.  And then today, using strong, clear, non-repressive and non-repressed masculine energy as your model, simply go after it firmly and directly.  Know what you want and pursue it.  But begin today!

Bright blessings!

 

Tarot Card for the Day ~ October 27

Six of Cups

In Ector’s Keeping

As I always say to my clients, “Remember when you were eight years old and summer lasted forever, and all you ever had to fill your mind with was swimming with your friends and loving your dog?”   Well, that’s what the energy of this card is like.

The Six of Cups is a card that bespeaks the beauty and the joy and the innocence and the wisdom of an almost ideal childhood.  So in you work, your connections, your interactions today:

• Look for a quality like that in others.  If you can’t find it, you’re probably not with the right people, at least for today.  So keep on moving till you’re with someone or someones whose energy is like that, and let yourself be happy and comfortable and craetive there.
• Try to find new ways for yourself to be a calm, still, comforting pool in the center of the Monday muddle around you.  Especially give yourself permission to be that way to and for yourself.  Call to mind all that is beautiful, and hopeful, and healing in your world, and keep those things flowing through your mind.  

Also, this is a card that suggests you may have old friends re-enter your life.  Be open to that as a possibility today.

Easy, sweet, nostalgic in a positive way, that’s the theme to get you through this Monday.

Bright blessings!

 

(Hallowe’en tarot reading, anyone?  216-371-3433. nealdragon@aol.com)

Tarot Card for the Day ~ October 26

Four of Swords

Isolt of the White Hands

 

The Four of Swords is a card of respite and recovery.  It asks that you give yourself time and space to rest, recharge, recuperate.  Please be sure to carve out at least a few hours, if not most of the day, to just be at peace, take it easy, do what’s most comfortable and healing as you let the river (and pretty much everything else) flow by. 

Bright blessings!

Tarot Card for the Day ~ October 25

Eight of Shields

Wayland

 

I always tell my clients that Eight of Shields is the card of magical work.  And you can interpret that as magical WORK or MAGICAL work!  (Or both, of course.  But see if one doesn’t resonate more strongly.)

So, let’s assume you focus on the first interpretation, magical WORK.  Well then, you need to be engaged in, or actively seeking, employment that is so perfect for you it isn’t like work, it’s like magic.  It’s such a joy to be doing what you’re doing in the way you’re doing it with the people you’re doing it with, you can hardly wait to roll out of bed to get at it Monday morning.  Or every morning, for that matter.  Believe it or not, those kind of careers and positions do actually exist.  I’ve had that experience, even in the corporate world, and it’s wonderful!  If that’s not what you have in your life now:

 

a.)  It’s likely in part because you don’t KNOW what you’d really love to do, or

b.)  You’re unwilling to admit to yourself what it is that you’d really love to do, and/or

c.)  You won’t let yourself believe that you could actually, successfully, happily have that in your life without starving, and so

d.)  You’re not letting yourself hold out for what you’d really love to do, or even

e.)  Go figure out what baby steps would help take you in that direction!

Who cares if you’re too old to be a Mouseketeer?  If that’s what would really light up the universe for you, at least start down the path and see what the job placement elves put at your feet.  But you’ve gotta be honest with yourself about your career ideals first!

Ah, but let’s assume it was the MAGICAL work interpretation that rung your chimes.  Well then, what kind of regular, ongoing personal ritual, or ceremony, or magic are you working in your life to bring about what you want in the world?  To which you might ask, “Such as?”  Well, such as burning the right color candles in the right phases of the moon with the right kind of prayer for financial abundance.  Or getting the Feng Shui of your house in line with your desire to have romance in your life.  Or even making the time every day to use guided meditation/guided imagery CDs to help boost your immune system and help increase your energy.  Your magical work is exactly that: YOUR magical work.  For you it may be prayer, or shamanic journeys, or herbal-infused spellwork, or whatever floats your magical/spiritual boat.  But do it.  DO IT!

And really work with both interpretations together.  Move toward your magical WORK, and let your MAGICAL work help get you there more quickly, and keep you happier, more connected, more fulfilled while you’re on getting there.

It’ll make the world better for you, and everyone and everything.

Bright blessings!

(Tarot reading, anybody?  Call me at 216-371-3433, or email nealdragon@aol.com  .)

White Magic!

White Magic

 

(It’s Called Blessing!)

 

My October 13 post, “Daily Doses of Dark Magic” pulled a number of email comments from clients and friends.  Thanks for letting me know the message was helpful!

 

I planned to do a follow-up post with ways to incorporate “white magic” more and more into our lives and our world.  I probably will on down the road.   

 

But my friend Peg in Rocky River has taken the pressure off by forwarding a wonderful and helpful post. It covers much of what I might have tried to say about the subject in a truly beautiful, poetic and inspiring way.  

 

It’s from the book The Gentle Art of Blessing – Living One’s Spirituality in Everyday Life by Pierre Pradervand.  I must have been under a rock to have missed this before. M. Pradervand (who is French) has very graciously given me permission to post this on the shamanspath blog.

 

So please take a moment to enjoy a warm, healing blessing for yourself (even if you already know this teaching).

 

Brightest blessings!

 

 

 

The Gentle Art of Blessing

\–—˜™–—˜™–—˜™\

 

On awakening, bless this day, for it is already full of unseen good which your blessings will call forth; for to bless is to acknowledge the unlimited good that is embedded in the very texture of the universe and awaiting each and all.

 

On passing people in the street, on the bus, in places of work and play, bless them. The peace of your blessing will accompany them on their way and the aura of its gentle fragrance will be a light to their path. On meeting and talking to people, bless them in their health, their work, their joy, their relationships to God, themselves, and others.

 

Bless them in their abundance, their finances…bless them in every conceivable way, for such blessings not only sow seeds of healing but one day will spring forth as flowers of joy in the waste places of your own life.

 

As you walk, bless the city in which you live, its government and teachers, its nurses and streetsweepers, its children and bankers, its priests and prostitutes.

 

The minute anyone expresses the least aggression or unkindness to you, respond with a blessing: bless them totally, sincerely, joyfully, for such blessings are a shield which protects them from the ignorance of their misdeed, and deflects the arrow that was aimed at you.

 

To bless means to wish, unconditionally, total, unrestricted good for others and events from the deepest wellspring in the innermost chamber of your heart: it means to hallow, to hold in reverence, to behold with utter awe that which is always a gift from the Creator.

 

He who is hallowed by your blessing is set aside, consecrated, holy, whole. To bless is yet to invoke divine care upon, to think or speak gratefully for, to confer happiness upon – although we ourselves are never the bestower, but simply the joyfull witnesses of Life’s abundance.

 

To bless all without discrimination of any sort is the ultimate form of giving, because those you bless will never know from whence came the sudden ray of sun that burst through the clouds of their skies, and you will rarely be a witness to the sunlight in their lives.

 

When something goes completely askew in your day, some unexpected event knocks down your plans and you too also, burst into blessing: for life is teaching you a lesson, and the very event you believe to be unwanted, you yourself called forth, so as to learn the lesson you might balk against were you not to bless it. Trials are blessings in disguise, and hosts of angels follow in their path.

 

To bless is to acknowledge the omnipresent, universal beauty hidden to material eyes; it is to activate that law of attraction which, from the furthest reaches of the universe, will bring into your life exactly what you need to experience and enjoy.

 

When you pass a prison, mentally bless its inmates in their innocence and freedom, their gentleness, pure essence and unconditional forgiveness; for one can only be prisoner of one’s self-image, and a free man can walk unshackled in the courtyard of a jail, just as citizens of countries where freedom reigns can be prisoners when fear lurks in their thoughts.

 

When you pass a hospital, bless its patients in their present wholeness, for even in their suffering, this wholeness awaits in them to be discovered.

 

When your eyes behold a man in tears, or seemingly broken by life, bless him in his vitality and joy: for the material senses present but the inverted image of the ultimate splendor and perfection which only the inner eye beholds.

 

It is impossible to bless and to judge at the same time. So hold constantly as a deep, hallowed, intoned thought that desire to bless, for truly then shall you become a peacemaker, and one day you shall, everywhere, behold the very face of God.

 

And of course, don’t forget to bless the utterly beautiful person YOU are!

 

From the book by Pierre Pradervand: The Gentle Art of Blessing – Living One’s Spirituality in Everyday Life.  Used by the kind permission of M. Pradervand.

 

The book may be ordered through book stores and many sources online.

 

A movie version may be seen at:

http://www.joy-tothe-world.com/Gentle_Art_of_Blessing_Movi.html

 

You are invited to look up the website about the author’s workshops, which take place at 7000 feet in the Swiss Alps (website in French), at: www.life.int.ch  or e-mail: prader@iprolink.ch

 

Tarot Card for the Day ~ October 24

The Tower

Vortigern’s Fortress

 

The Tower card often brings real groans from clients when it turns up. I suppose I can understand that.  In the deck I use, the card shows dragons fighting, destroying a castle, blasting everything in the vicinity.  It certainly looks traumatic.

But that’s not the message I get from The Tower.  To me, this is a card of revelation from within. The card asks that you take a look at your life.  Look past all the stuff and superficialities, whether they are bling or blah, power or plop.  And make yourself really ask, “What are the true foundations of my life?  What do I WANT them to be?  What’s really the bedrock of my existence?  What do I care about?  What’s important?  What’s real?” 

Maybe it’s your desire to create.  Maybe it’s your desire to be able to do hands-on miraculous healing, just like in the Bible.  Maybe it’s your love for your children, or all children.  Maybe it’s a desire to bring harmony to the world through just laws and a humane system that implements them.  Maybe it’s to be just left alone.  Only YOU can answer that for yourself.

And once you’ve answered that, The Tower asks, “So, now that you know your foundation, what do YOU want to build upon it?  How can it be done?”  Maybe it’s a chateau.  Maybe it’s a pagoda.  Maybe it’s a hut in the woods.  Again, only you can determine that.  And your understanding of what to build and how to build it may change over time, or nearly every week.  That’s fine, as long as you know what the foundation is, and why you’re building what you’re building.

So.  Examine.  Determine your foundation.  Decide what you want to build, what you want to do.  And whether it’s to write the next Cat In the Hat or create a cure for HIV, find the first tiny bricks and start building. Today.

No one else can do it the way you will.

Bright blessings!

(Know anyone whose life seems a little crumbly around the edges from time to time?  Share this with them, if you like.)