I’ll be the guest of the charming Kooch Daniels on Kosmic Koffee with Kooch on March 27, 2013 at 1:00 pm! You can go listen via the NuLife Radio page on Blog Talk Radio, or dial in at +1.347.637.3372. We’ll talk about Tarot (of course!), answer questions, and who knows what else!

Talk to you Wednesday!

You are cordially invited to our very first WooFest! on Thursday, March 28, 2013, from 5:00 – 8:00 pm at Mission Alchemy Event Space.

This is a casual, fun event, to celebrate Tarot, oracles, divination, and the great people in our community with whom we share these interests! There’s no cover charge – we want everyone to feel welcome!

Readings will be available from the fabulous Thalassa and Artemis J.

Tarot Media Company will be there, tempting you with all kinds of books, decks, oracles, DVDs, and other divinatory goodies.

We’ll have some treats to share, and space for you to hang out and play with your new toys and spend time with old friends – and make new ones!

Mission Alchemy is at 2601 Mission Street, corner of 22nd Street, in the USBank building. It’s two blocks from 24th Street Mission BART in San Francisco, one block from the Bartlett Garage (there’s also street parking!), and across the street from a couple of Muni lines. Really, it just couldn’t be easier to get here!

See you Thursday!

“Whenever anything negative happens to you, there is a deep lesson concealed within it, although you may not see it at the time.” ~ Eckhart Tolle

With all due respect, Mr. Tolle – bullshit.

Sometimes, negative things happen, and there is no lesson. Things happen beyond our control, out of the blue, beyond our wildest imagination – and it’s just the universal forces in motion. There is no lesson, no higher message – things happen, and sometimes what happens really sucks.

One of my HR colleagues had a sign in her office that read, “What’s great about this?” Whenever an employee came to her with a problem, she’d point to the sign and require them to give an answer before she’d continue the discussion.  If she’d done that to me (I was not an employee there, thank the gods), my response would have been, “What’s great about this is that I realize what an utterly useless way of managing internal issues this is, and I quit so I can work somewhere that isn’t run by idiots.”

Sometimes, there is a lesson.  You drink too much alcohol one night, make an idiot of yourself, get sick, anger your friends, and lose two days to a miserable hangover. The lesson is pretty clear – don’t drink to excess.

Sometimes, there is no lesson.  My mother died in an accident during my last week of classes in my final semester of college.  I took four “Incompletes”, and it took me three months to finish my course week and my honors thesis, in between settling her estate, dealing with the lawsuit against the other driver who caused the accident, and moving myself to California.  What was the lesson there? Be sure to ask your parents to schedule their untimely deaths around your academic obligations and moving schedule?

Apophenia (as defined on Wikipedia: “the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”) can a real problem. How do we know when something is a real pattern, or when we are imposing meaning that isn’t there? (I encourage you to read the entire article – the origin of the term “apophany” in psychiatric research dealing with schizophrenia will keep you up for a night or two.)

The counterpoint experience is “epiphany”, which our friends at Dictionary.com define as “a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something” – seeing based on patterns that are actually present. Yes, we all see things differently, and what is “real” for one person might not be “real” for another. But at the point we wish so hard for something to be “real” – despite our own knowledge that it is not – we have crossed from epiphany to apophany.

As Tarot readers, we look for patterns in the cards. How many Major Arcana cards are in the spread? Court cards? How many of each minor suit? Are there repeating numbers? Repeating symbols?

Someone who has a large number of Major Arcana cards in the spread is probably in or heading for one or more life transitions. Someone with lots of Pentacle cards may be dealing with work or housing issues. Someone with lots of Cups cards probably has relationship work to do, in one form or another. The pattern can help the client focus on the issues and devise creative approaches to managing them.

But sometimes, there is no pattern. The cards are randomly and evenly distributed among the suits. There are no number patterns. There are no repeating symbols. There’s no big epiphany, no flashing neon message – just disparate pieces of information for the client to apply to their life as they are able.

When bad things happen (we lose a job, a valued possession breaks, or someone close to us dies), we feel an emotional void, and we want to ascribe meaning to the event as a way to manage our emotions.  This is a classic left brain coping mechanism – “if I can understand it, I can manage it”.

Sometimes, there is no meaning – our employer decides to cut costs, and we’re laid off; the tectonic plates shift, and a treasured piece of porcelain falls to the floor and smashes; we’re all human, and we will all shuffle off this mortal coil at some point.

Sometimes, it’s just random, and stuff just happens. Sometimes, there is no meaning, no understanding – sometimes, there is only acceptance.

I’ve never seen the movie “Groundhog Day“, but I know the plot summary, which is that, through repetition of a single day in his life, Bill Murray’s character learns to be a better person and to take actions to make the world a better place.

We all have patterns of behavior, speech, feeling, or thinking that are helpful to us – we read Tarot for insight, we meditate for calm, we brush our teeth so we have fresh breath and nice smiles. We also have negative patterns which keep us stuck in unhealthy situations and create distress. Some of these unhealthy patterns may have developed as coping mechanisms which served us temporarily, but now the situation has changed and we have moved on, and the pattern, instead of supporting us, now limits our growth.

At tonight’s San Francisco Tarot Cafe, we did two spreads to help us examine negative patterns, and how to break free of them and create a new, positive pattern to replace the unhealthy behavior.

You can do this with one deck, but it works better with two decks. Use one deck for the first spread, and a different deck for the second spread.

The first spread gives an overview of the negative pattern. Think about the pattern you’re stuck in, shuffle the cards, and lay them out so:

3

1

2

Card 1 represents the pattern itself. What are you stuck in? What is going on?

Card 2 represents what is keeping you stuck in the pattern. Why do you keep repeating this pattern? What purpose did it used to serve that is now a limitation?

Card 3 represent how to break out of the pattern. What energy do you need to help you move forward? What needs to change?

The second spread gives detailed information about breaking free.  Keep card 3 from the first spread out, and lay it to your left. Shuffle your second deck, and draw five cards from it. The cards from the first spread are to the left of cards in the new spread:

From first spread

New cards for second spread

5

4

3

3

1

2

2

1

First, take a look at the cards in the second spread – are any of them the same as any of the cards in the first spread? If so, examine the link between the card’s positions in each spread. Where did the same card repeat? Is it reversed or upright from the first spread? Are the images similar or different?

The cards themselves offer the following insight:

Card 1 represents the changes you need to make in the physical / material world to break free of the old pattern and create a new one. This might be as simple as cleaning your house to remove clutter and dust, or as involved as revamping your eating habits.

Card 2 represents the emotional changes you need to make. What emotions or emotional responses to the situation no longer serve you? Where do you need to grow, what do you need to let go of? It might be an emotional pattern based on a relationship you left long ago, and you no longer need to protect yourself from that person.

Card 3 represents the creative changes needed to move into a new way of being. We’re all creative in our daily lives, even if we don’t engage in what are usually thought of as “creative” activities. How can you bring your creative spirit into your life more so that you can live more fully?

Card 4 represents the intellectual changes needed to move forward. Our thoughts often keep us stuck longer than our emotions do – our heart knows we need to move on, but our mind persists in giving us limiting thoughts which keep us stuck. Alternately, we spend so much time thinking about different possibilities that we develop analysis paralysis and don’t actually *do* anything to create change.

Card 5 represents changes need on the level of soul or spirit. These are often the changes we are first aware of that we need to make, especially if we have some kind of soulful or spiritual practice which allows us to focus on our higher selves. At the same time that we are aware of these needed changes, these can be the hardest changes to make, as they require us to accept a new image of ourselves as strong, capable, and powerful, and sometimes require what feel like drastic steps to create change.  Sometimes, yes, a dramatic change is called for; often, however, the most dramatic changes are on the inner level, not the outer world, and are invisible and unknown to anyone but ourselves.

I used David Palladini‘s Aquarian Tarot for Spread 1, and the fabulous Wildwood Tarot by Mark Ryan, John Matthews, and Will Worthington for Spread 2.  The final card in Spread 2 was the beautiful and haunting card 10, The Wheel.

Their summary of the card tells us exactly what we need to know about living in awareness of our patterns:

“. . . on the human level we are the weavers of our own destiny.   Consciously or unconsciously, we make the patterns and possibilities that mark our path through fate. We wear our fate around us like a cloak, carrying with us all the potential and possibilities that the universe has to offer and, although the seemingly random, chaotic nature of the universe always has the final word, we can affect our own life and that of the world by taking control of our own destiny.  Many believe that fate is set, that all things are predestined no matter what we do in this human reality, but the weaver of the cloak can affect this ever-shifting matrix of potential just by recognizing the pattern and making timely decisions.  We can grasp the web of fate and weave in our own special, personal pattern.”

From The Wildwood Tarot companion book, pp. 56 – 57

I hope these spreads are helpful to you as you weave the tapestry of your life.