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Tag: pittsburgh tarot reader
Decide to balance
In the video, we said that two cards in general can allude to either balance, or a decision. Usually, the decision in question is relatively minor and one of those “six of one and half-dozen of another” all things being equal kind of decisions.
As I give today’s energy a little thought, it still seems that balance is the thread of meaning that carries more energy, but at the same time the idea of “it’s both” steps forward, too.
What about deciding to balance?
Decisions are inseparable from balance. My favorite example is riding a unicycle. The rider is constantly making small adjustments in order to keep the unicycle upright. For those of us who don’t ride unicycles, you can see the adjustments the rider makes with the pedals and the movement of the wheel. The rider has to learn…to know and decide in the moment how to move the pedals in order to keep their balance.
Balance might serve as a good tie-breaker if you have a practical decision to make between two equal seeming things. Of the two, what will make your life more balanced? Little things mean a lot. Small decisions can add up to big effects. Opt for balance in little things to avoid big tipping points later.
Sometimes it really is hard to choose between two eqal things. They are intended to be lighthearted and fun, maybe a little snarky, but a Zombie Cat yes-or-no readings can help you sort out small choices where all things seem equal and bigger connections (like balance) are hard to see. Distance Tarot is my specialty. Order anytime, no appointment needed, HERE
Crackpickles – update
As of today, I’m officially half-vaxxed. To celebrate, tapped into the latest jar of crackpickles. Best batch yet, if I do (not so) humbly say so myself. Sour twang, that fermented fizzy quality, decent crunch.
Am definitly using the bay leaf several recipes suggested. It does seem to help the crunch. I think I was over fermenting them for a while. Now that the weather is warmer, left these at room temperature for 5 days, then another 3 in the ‘fridge. Just so you know.
Definitely crave worthy.
Thanks everyone!
Momento Mori, Vivere Celebramus
YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Big Simplification
Pick a card, any card. Well, any of three. Take your time or choose quickly. It’s your choice – like everything. If you want some extra time to ponder, pause the video then restart to see the reveal.
The weird thing is that I am finally, finally getting a sense of how to dial into these YouTube videos. The intuitive signal is on a completely different wavelength than working with an individual or writing for the blog. Actually, download speed would be a better analogy for how it feels to intuition. If doing a YouTube video is OG dial up, speaking in person is broadband. Typing on a keyboard is cat 5 hardwired cable. The message is the exactly the same. The core, underlying process is the same. It is a subtle difference from my side of the table, but on your side of the table the only difference is how artfully I verbalize your spirit message. Not that you need to know that – but I wanted to give you fair warning. I want to try something and YOUR feedback would be very, very helpful.
I’m thinking that for “YouChoose” posts, I’ll post the video and let it stand on its own. That way, you can choose your card with no potential spoilers on the page below. If anything, I’ll put a general energy, zeitgeist kind of read, like the speckled stones image that returned this week. That image may hint at a longer wave of energy akin in length to the hurricane image from last year (although certainly much different in meaning and tone.)
Once caveat in doing things that way: locality. The general cultural energy impression might be very local. It most likely will be limited to the US, the eastern time zone or possibly my million or so close neighbors here in Allegheny County. I won’t know about that part until we work with this format for a while.
I would like to know what YOU think!
Do you like the YouChoose format at all in any iteration?
Do you like the cards in print under the video or the video alone?
Is there anything else that you want to see in the blog? Tell what content you want to see, and I’ll create it. Easy as that.
Wordless
“In case you haven’t guessed already, I loves me the bullwhips. The meticulous, repetitive, stretching, checking, cutting, lacing; it is deeply meditative.”
Adam Savage, speaking on Mythbusters about whip making.
Intuitive messages are wily things. Sometimes they as clear and as forceful as a frying pan to the face, other times they are cagey and elusive and evolve slowly.
We’ve seen this recently as the cards speak in a cascade over the course of the wek. They have been speaking about various aspects of rest & respite. Rest through finding quiet, introspection, and literal physical rest (Four of Swords) rest through a change of perspective (Hanged Man) and today, mental respite through physical activity. Physical activity can be at any level. Some people find a long run the best possible way to clear the mind and ease stress. For me, running IS a stress. Any repetitive activity that doesn’t require a high degree of mental involvement can very much take on the deeply meditative quality that Mr. Savage describes. Putting the neurochemistry and endocrinology of running aside, the key here is the degree of mental involvement, not the cardiovascular involvement. Repetition can be soothing for some people. Mantra & bead meditation is an example, too. Arguably, low key repetitive activity occupies or so-active “monkey mind” enough to allow allow a meditative state to emerge.
Bonus points for doing the thing by yourself. Social behavior, even with one other very close person, engages our mind more than meditation or whatever meditative activity alone, or at least if we are left alone to our thoughts by the people around.
Anything can be a meditative activity. Tai chi is a classic example. But you can add jogging, knitting, and bullwhip making to the list too. Today, maybe this weekend too, is an excellent time to find that physical thing to do that gives rest to mind and spirit.
Today’s Tarot: Hanging Around
In Carl Sagan’s fiction work Contact, Ellie Arroway is a scientist involved with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intellence (which is a real thing.) In it, at one point, she considers not only the vast distances between Earth and other potential homes to intelligent, communicative life, but also the role that time inherently plays. Obviously, it take a heckuva long time, even at the speed of light, for one side of message to get from there to here and vice versa. What if there is also a vast difference in lifespan and local experience of time. A few days to us is a lifetime to a fruit fly, and many generations to a germ. As she was driving she noticed crack or bumps in the road at fairly regular intervals. What if, she wondered, the pulses in a signal came so slowly, so widely spaced that we didn’t even notice the signal, with each blip of the message just being dismissed as an anomaly.
Makes me wonder if the universe isn’t really teeming with intelligent, communicative, technological life but each at such widely disparate time scales, that nobody can connect with anybody so that everybody thinks they are the only ones…but that something for another time.
The same phenomenon can happen when it comes to our interaction with Tarot, or any form of esoteric guidance, even pure intuition. Sometimes the whole idea gradually unspools over days, weeks or months until finally the last piece falls into place. If we miss a piece, the message goes on until finally the “ah-ha” happens.
A single card daily meditation practice is an excellent way to get a feel for this among many other things. Not only do you get a specific read of the energy for that specific day, you can see patterns emerge over the course of days, weeks, even years. My personal example of that is the strong presence of pentacle cards during the first part of the pandemic and the evolving intuitive images of the U.S. map with all the little tornadoes and the hurricane on the horizon that both reflected the overwhelming cultural zeitgeist energies that were so strong during 2019 & 2020.
What say you empaths? Has the cultural and environmental energies stopped ringing your bell quite so hard? I think that is the impetus behind the speckled stone image. Boundaries are firmer, individual concerns are at the fore and the existential political crisis (at least locally here in the US has dropped into the background somewhat.)
Today’s card connects to yesterday’s Four of Swords card which connected to previous readings. There is a continued thread of change & rest themed energies.
The Hanged man connotes stagnation, but this energy hasn’t been hanging around long enough to take on that interpretation. Hanged Man can also mean surrender, changing your way of looking at things – it can take on exactly the wait, don’t push, change what you are doing, rejuvenate, and contemplate energies we’ve been seeing. My hunch is that this kind of energy is going to be around for a while since we’ve seen it in a multi-day pattern like this. Astrology might ascribe this to some planet in retrograde or something. I don’t know anything much about astrology, so I attribute this to a yin phase, a time of quiet, of taking in, minor adjustments. It is a time of plugging in to recharge in whatever metaphoric sense you want to give the phrase.
If there is a message specific to today, I sense “patience.” Not everything unfolds at the pace we want or expect. There are reasons patience is considerd one of the great treasures of Taoism. Just like messages from aliens, life unfolds at its own natural pace, not according to our wishes.
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you”
Neil DeGrasse Tyson via brainyquote.com
Today’s Tarot R & R
Maybe it’s a message for me as much as anyone else. But that’s how these things often work. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? My intent is that the blog will help somebody out there somewhere at some time or another, whenever they happen to see this. At risk of sounding like Prince lyrics, the whole point of Tarot is to help any and all of us get through this thing called life
The Four of Swords ties in to several energies that have already stepped forward lately. I still get a strong mental image of the different color flecks in stones from this weeks interactive reading Speckles. It feels like we are at long last getting a respite from the communal, zeitgeist energies that have so strong for the past year or so. It isn’t so much that we are being asked to stay in our lane and stick to our knitting – but rather the communal energy has disengaged and left us to our own devices. It is almost as if the universe has given us a day off to have a play date with ourselves. We are a collective of individuals. There is beauty in diversity. In a very gentle way, today feels like permission to get down with your bad self in a sense, whatever level of frenetic or zen energy that may be for you.
There is also the idea of lifelong learning (Growing Ogres) It is a mark of excellence in any profession. It seems the best of the best are always learning, evolving, growing new onion layers and letting old ones fall away. That’s what a sabbatical is; an opportunity for professors to study more stuff.
It doesn’t have to be forever. A break in the energetic action is a very different thing from being stuck or stagnant or lazy. It certainly isn’t a sign of failure. In Reiki, the five core precepts (letting go of worry, letting go of anger, working honestly, being grateful, being kind) are focused on the present moment. “Just for today” is a liberating, enabling, empowering thought. Just for today, take the Four of Sword’s advice. Just for today, get some rest. Just for today, give yourself a break and work on something else. “Respite”and “Sabbatical” doesn’t mean be unproductive. You can rest one thing while doing something else. Or not.
“Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted”
John Lennon
Function & Finesse
Throwing a ball isn’t difficult to do.
Almost anyone can do it, one way or the other. Tossing something is a skill we all learn at such a young age, that we almost never give it a second thought. We can throw any little thing and have it land somewhere. If we are going to put the wadded up paper in the garbage can from 6 feet away, it takes a little more thought and focus but is the same basic body mechanics as any throw. Still, it isn’t major league baseball, either.
This is another way of saying one of the things I was rambling in circles about in “Growing Ogres.” Reading Tarot for yourself is easy to do. I can teach you in a 90 minute workshop, or in a short ebook. Doing a single card draw for yourself is the throwing equivalent of tossing your socks in the general direction of the clothes hamper.
Every card you add to a layout increases the level of difficulty. Not only are you dealing with the card’s assigned meaning combined with direct intuitive input, you add each card’s position meaning within the layout PLUS the way that the cards connect to each other to read the layout as a whole (not just a series of card + position meanings). With each added position, with each card increase in a layout’s the complexity increases. I don’t know if increasing exponentially is the right way to describe it, but it’s close. We are still talking about reading for yourself, so we are not talking about landing on Mars. Still, the food for thought from a multi-card layout can be a lot to digest. It’s moving up in difficulty from tossing socks to playing trashcan paperball, to little league, to a full on juggling act where the balls can fall down very easily.
Reading as an amateur at no charge IS an exponential increase in skill from the sock tossin’ DIY daily meditations. We are talking full-on March Madness, college playoff level ball handling. Not only do you have the multiple cards in multiple positions to knit together, you have the added layer of language that falls over the whole thing. It’s one thing to understand a card’s message and symbolism inside our own head for your own self, but it is a whole other enterprise to communicate those things to another person in a way that they can understand.
Reading professionally is playing hard ball with the big boys. When you do that, you are going to the show. Professional is professional whether you are throwing card or throwing balls. You not only have the basic card meaning, your intuitive impressions, they layout position meanings and the interconnection between the cards, when you go pro you have ethics and business practices to consider.
We all have perfectly good intuition. We are all “gifted” psychics. It is as much a matter of learning, practice and technique as throwing a baseball. We can all toss one. Not everyone wants to put in the work to get really good at it. Natural talent can play a part, but I’m not sure how much of a factor it really is. Not everyone has the drive, desire, natural ability, luck and opportunity to be a professional athlete. Or mechanic. Or doctor, or lawyer or therapist or grocery bagger or Tarot reader or professional anything-you-can-name.
If you can functionally do something, and you are happy with it, by all means do it for yourself. I think it is laudable. I like to make things. I could buy a sweater, but I have the ability to knit one for myself and I don’t mind the wait and less-than-professional result. But on the other hand, I like to listen to music. I probably could functionally learn to make amateur music for myself, but I don’t want to. I want to listen to music made by artists with talent and finesse as well as basic functional skill.
We all have intuition. It is, I believe, a natural function of the human psyche just like throwing a binkie on the floor is a natural function of being a human baby. Using Tarot cards to access that normal intuition is like learning to aim that binkie toss. Time, practice, technique, desire and sprinkle of luck and talent can give the intuitive function a good deal of finesse.
YouChoose Interactive Tarot: Speckles
No pressure.
There is zero big deal here. Pick a card, think about the vibe. If it is helpful, use it. If it isn’t, ignore it. I believe that, at risk of sounding like an old Blondie song, one way or another the message you need will get to you if you let it. It might be through the card you choose here. It might be through the crystal that goes with it. So choose quickly on impulse. Stop the video and think about it…it’s all good. Even if your cue(s) don’t come through this at all, heads up, eyes open. Synchronicity is your friend. Spirit whispers through random coincidence if you listen well.
Blue Kayanite – loyalty, fair communication, throat chakra
Red Jasper – nurturing, endurance, warrior stone, base (sacral) chakra
Rose Quartz – inspires compassion & peace, attracts love & romance, heart chakra
Left: Devil. This isn’t predicting something bad will happen. Many times it is a “heads up” acknowledging the reality of evil in the world. There are people out there doing not-good things. The world doesn’t always have your best interests at heart, protect yourself. But that isn’t the vibe today. Oh no, it’s WAY worse than that. It is about you facing the worst of yourself. Some call this shadow work, coming to terms with parts of your own personality and psyche that make the rest of you uncomfortable. If you choose this card, I suggest researching some Carl Jung. *
Center: Six of Pentacles. Generosity and Reciprocity. The card symbolizes generosity of both money (or other physical resources) and a generosity of spirit. There is also a sense of connection to Queen of Wands energy…you can’t be generous with others if you are tapped out yourself. Curate your resources, your health and your energy. When you feel and are abundant in resources it is easier to give generously, and more importantly, authentically of yourself. Doing something because you should or you have to is far more draining than the same thing given spontaneously without attachment to the should or have to part of it.
Right – Five of Cups. A card of melancholy, mourning and bittersweet endings. This feels oddly targeted. It lends itself the most of the three cards to that individuals connected, individuals within a joined matrix impression (like the stones in the video card) It boarders on that trope “I don’t know who needs to hear this…” This is targeted to those who have had a romantic relationship end recently. The advice is to honor the pain. Acknowledge it and feel it in order to move on to healing it. You don’t have to sweep sad, upsetting things under the rug. You don’t have to pretend hurtful things didn’t happen. Whatever the hurt or loss may be, walk through the hurt and the feelings at your own pace. It may not seem like it now, but a time will come when you can move on, even it is a bittersweet progress. Now the energy moves into a regretful letting go, a realization that it is time to move on. The rose quartz is gentle and loving. It can help heal heartbreak, then help attract new, healthy love when the time is right.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
Carl Jung
Tarot is an excellent tool and method for just the kind of self-discovery that Dr. Jung speaks of here. I’m not a psychologist, but I can help you learn to use Tarot for yourself or give you an individual advice and guidance reading that can help you with your self-discovery, personal enrichment, spiritual expression or heart-healing learning.
* The morning after this post first published, this showed up in my Twitter feed: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/matauryn/2018/04/29/integrating-the-shadow/
I recommend the article along with Mr. Auryn’s book Psychic Witch.
Order distance Tarot readings (my specialty) with no appointment required HERE
Sage Sips / TaoCraft Tarot 
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